Experience‐Dependent Affective Learning and Risk for Psychopathology in Children

The influence of childhood affective experiences across development may be understood in terms of preparedness to learn about emotion, combined with general immaturity and neuro-plasticity of perceptual systems. Early in development, processing resources are relatively immature and limited in capacity, thereby constraining how much information the young child can absorb. But it is clear that learning about emotions proceeds swiftly in nearly all children, suggesting biological preparedness to track associations between certain stimuli and outcomes. It is proposed here that limited processing capacity, in tandem with dispositions to filter or select key privileged stimuli in the environment, facilitates adaptive, rapid, affective learning. The developmental organization of affective systems is contingent upon those features of input that are most learnable, such as signals that are particularly salient, frequent, or predictable. Therefore, plasticity confers risk for maladaptation in that children's learning will be based upon these prominent features of the environment, however aberrant.