
Barbara L ThompsonMichigan State University | MSU · Department of Pediatrics and Human Development
Barbara L Thompson
PhD
About
40
Publications
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Introduction
Additional affiliations
August 1993 - April 1997
July 2009 - July 2011
May 2003 - June 2009
Publications
Publications (40)
In this chapter, we focus on the neurobiology of intellectual and developmental disabilities. We first approach the topic by providing the reader with a broad understanding of neurobiology and neurodevelopment. While it is well known that the cellular and molecular components underlying development are complex and tedious, so too are the complex ci...
Date Presented 03/21/24
This study investigated associations between caregiver and infant behaviors from 2 to 18 months and child engagement at 24 months. Caregiver child-oriented behaviors should be considered during intervention to promote child engagement in co-occupation.
Primary Author and Speaker: Cristin M. Holland
Contributing Authors: John...
Early childhood adversity increases risk for negative lifelong impacts on health and wellbeing. Identifying the risk factors and the associated biological adaptations early in life is critical to develop scalable early screening tools and interventions. Currently, there are limited, reliable early childhood adversity measures that can be deployed p...
Date Presented 04/21/2023
This study explored observed sensory hypo- and hyperreactivity in infants ages 2 to 18 months during play with their mothers. Infants demonstrated increases in hyporeactivity and decreases in hyperreactivity across five ages from 2 to 18 months.
Primary Author and Speaker: Cristin M. Holland
Contributing Authors: John Side...
Infants demonstrate rapid development across the first years of life, which underlies increased human interactions that promote social-emotional development. In particular, gaze, affect, and object exploration are early indicators of engagement and show rapid changes in the first year of life. However, current understanding on developmental traject...
Development of attention systems is essential for both cognitive and social behavior maturation. Visual behavior has been used to assess development of these attention systems. Yet, given its importance, there is a notable lack of literature detailing successful methods and procedures for using eye-tracking in early infancy to assess oculomotor and...
Attentional biases to threat‐related stimuli, such as fearful and angry facial expressions, are important to survival and emerge early in development. Infants demonstrate an attentional bias to fearful facial expressions by 5–7 months of age and an attentional bias toward anger by 3 years of age that are modulated by experiential factors. In a long...
Objective: To generate a cumulative early risk score for the perinatal maternal environment and examine the association of the maternal cumulative risk score with infant development and maternal and infant oxidative stress.
Study Design: This was a two-center longitudinal study of mother-infant dyads born >36 weeks’ gestation. Maternal demographic...
Aims
There is limited research on the type and quantity of actions (activities) occupational therapy practitioners utilize when providing sensory integration treatment to children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD).
Methods
A coding scheme identifying specific aspects of sensory integration treatment was developed and used to analyze 34 videos o...
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by disruptions in social communication and behavioral flexibility. Both genetic and environmental factors contribute to ASD risk. Epidemiologic studies indicate that roadway vehicle exhaust and in utero exposure to diesel particulate matter (DPM) are associated with ASD....
Objective
In this exploratory longitudinal study we assessed cognitive development in a community sample of infants born into predominantly low-income families from two different urban sites, to identify family and community factors that may associate with outcomes by 1 year of age.
Method
Infant-mother dyads (n = 109) were recruited in Boston and...
Objective:
Social-emotional processing is key to daily interactions and routines, yet a challenging construct to quantify. Measuring social and emotional processing in young children, children with language impairments, or non-verbal children, presents additional challenges. This study addresses a pressing need for tools to probe internal response...
Importance
Variation in child responses to adversity creates a clinical challenge to identify children most resilient or susceptible to later risk for disturbances in cognition and health. Advances in establishing scalable biomarkers can lead to early identification and mechanistic understanding of the association of early adversity with neurodevel...
Date Presented 4/20/2018
This study explored relationships between child and therapist behaviors during sensory integration therapy. Data reveal strong correlations between behaviors children improved in and specific therapist activities, which can guide sensory integration therapy for young clients with autism to improve child outcomes.
Primary Au...
Date Presented 4/20/2018
Videotaped play between novel adults and preschool-age children was analyzed using grounded theory and descriptive methods. The data generated a process of co-constructing play that involves concepts of bid, alignment, and threats. Dynamic enactment of the process resulted in four synchrony types.
Primary Author and Speaker...
Date Presented 4/7/2016
Coding sensory integration (SI) sessions using Observer XT (Noldus) revealed changes in both sensory and autism-relevant behaviors in children with autism spectrum disorder receiving SI. This study provides an exhaustive list of behaviors analyzed and new insight into behaviors sensitive to change during intervention session...
Background:
Our laboratory discovered that the gene encoding the receptor tyrosine kinase, MET, contributes to autism risk. Expression of MET is reduced in human postmortem temporal lobe in autism and Rett Syndrome. Subsequent studies revealed a role for MET in human and mouse functional and structural cortical connectivity. To further understand...
Affective processing, known to influence attention, motivation, and emotional regulation is poorly understood in young children, especially for those with neurodevelopmental disorders characterized by language impairments. Here we faithfully adapt a well-established animal paradigm used for affective processing, conditioned place preference (CPP) f...
Date Presented 4/16/2015
Conditioned place preference (CPP) is used to probe differences in reward, motivation, and aversion in children. This is the first attempt to establish CPP in children, and it will help us to understand social and affective processing in children with and without neurodevelopmental disorders.
Chromodomain helicase DNA-binding protein 8 (CHD8) was identified as a leading autism spectrum disorder (ASD) candidate gene by whole-exome sequencing and subsequent targeted-sequencing studies. De novo loss-of-function mutations were identified in 12 individuals with ASD and zero controls, accounting for a highly significant association. Small int...
Candidate risk genes for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have been identified, but the challenge of determining their contribution to pathogenesis remains. We previously identified two ASD risk genes encoding the receptor tyrosine kinase MET and the urokinase plasminogen activator receptor (PLAUR), which is thought to modulate availability of the ME...
Human cognitive and social-emotional behaviors are heterogeneous, underscoring the challenges in modeling pathogenesis in disorders of neurodevelopmental origin in which these domains are dysfunctional. In general, animal models for these disorders are built to emulate our understanding of the clinical diagnosis, with mixed results. We suggest the...
Gestational cocaine exposure in a rabbit model leads to a persistent increase in parvalbumin immunoreactive cells and processes, reduces dopamine D1 receptor coupling to Gsalpha by means of improper trafficking of the receptor, changes pyramidal neuron morphology, and disrupts cognitive function. Here, experiments investigated whether changes in pa...
From its initial inception as a mainstream hypothesis (Weinberger, 1987), how neurodevelopmental perturbations can lead to adult-onset psychiatric disorders has remained perplexing. With this current report by Niwa et al. and recent studies by other laboratories, the phenomenon has been demystified, and it appears that transient ontogenetic challen...
The effects of prenatal exposure to drugs on brain development are complex and are modulated by the timing, dose and route of drug exposure. It is difficult to assess these effects in clinical cohorts as these are beset with problems such as multiple exposures and difficulties in documenting use patterns. This can lead to misinterpretation of resea...
The formation and function of the mammalian cerebral cortex relies on the complex interplay of a variety of genetic and environmental factors through protracted periods of gestational and postnatal development. Biogenic amine systems are important neuromodulators, both in the adult nervous system, and during critical epochs of brain development. Ab...
Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) is sensitive to structural ordering in brain tissue particularly in the white matter tracts. Diffusion anisotropy changes with disease and also with neural development. We used high-resolution DTI of fixed rabbit brains to study developmental changes in regional diffusion anisotropy and white matter fiber tract develo...
Prenatal cocaine exposure in a rabbit intravenous model has revealed selective disruption of brain development and pharmacological responsiveness. We therefore examined the pharmacokinetic properties of cocaine in this model. Dutch-belted rabbits were surgically implanted with a catheter in the carotid artery, allowed to recover, and then injected...
The lateral, basal, and central nuclei of the amygdala are part of a circuitry that instantiates many fear and anxious behaviors. One line of support indicates that immediate-early gene (IEG) expression (e.g., c-fos and egr-1 (zif268)) is increased in these nuclei following fear conditioning. Other research finds that anxiogenic drugs working throu...
Our laboratory has previously characterized a rabbit model of gestational cocaine exposure in which permanent alterations in neuronal morphology, cell signaling and psychostimulant-induced behavior are observed. The cellular and molecular neuroadaptations produced by prenatal cocaine occur in brain regions involved in executive function and attenti...
Research has demonstrated that immediate-early genes/inducible transcriptional factors (e.g., c-fos, egr-1) are increased in amygdala nuclei (lateral, basal and central nuclei) known to be involved in fear conditioning, footshock stress and novelty. Although these data suggest that expression of inducible transcriptional factors are involved in fea...
The present study examined the effects of glucocorticoid administration on emotional memory and on corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH) mRNA expression in the central nucleus of the amygdala (CeA) and the paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus (PVN). This was tested by administering repeated corticosterone (CORT) within a contextual fear cond...
This article highlights four issues about the neurobiology of emotions: adaptation vs. dysfunction, peripheral and central representations of emotion, the regulation of the internal milieu, and whether emotions are cognitive. It is argued that the emotions evolved to play diverse adaptive roles and are biologically vital sources of information proc...
We and others have demonstrated that rats deficient in an essential amino acid (EAA) will consume sufficient quantities of the lacking nutrient to produce repletion when it is made available in solution. In the current series of experiments, we made rats deficient in lysine (LYS) by limiting the level of this EAA in the diet. We then examined licki...
The effects of intracerebroventricular injection of thyrotropine-releasing hormone (TRH) on acoustic startle, conditioned fear and active avoidance were examined in rats. Acoustic startle was significantly depressed by 12.5 microg TRH, while increasing motor activity. In a fear-potentiated startle paradigm, 12.5 microg TRH reduced the overall start...
This chapter discusses the neurobehavioral system approach in rats to study the molecular biology of fear. The chapter presents three examples of a neurobehavioral system approach to the study of gene expression in contextual fear conditioning, innate fear of a predator odor, and exaggerated contextually conditioned fear. All of the examples use a...
Sclafani, A., B. Thompson, and J. C. Smith. The rat’s acceptance and preference for sucrose, maltodextrin, and saccharin solutions and mixtures. Physiol Behav 63(4) 499–503, 1998. Prior work indicates that rats prefer a mixture of sucrose and maltodextrin to either carbohydrate alone. The present experiment examined whether a sucrose + maltodextrin...
Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Delaware, 2003. Principal faculty advisor: Jeffrey B. Rosen, Dept. of Psychology. Includes bibliographical references. Microfilm. s