Nora Raschle 

Title

Emotion regulation and resilience in the developing brain: Insights across health and neuropsychiatry  

Abstract

Emotion regulation, or the ability to manage the intensity, duration, and experience of emotional responses, is crucial for healthy socioemotional development. It relies on the functional integrity of corticolimbic brain networks, which mature throughout childhood and adolescence. Disruptions in these networks are linked to neuropsychiatric disorders, including conduct disorder (CD), characterized by severe antisocial and aggressive behaviors.

This presentation examines the neural underpinnings of emotion regulation in both healthy and neuropsychiatric populations, with a focus on CD. I will explore how environmental influences, such as early childhood experiences and parenting, shape the development of emotion regulatory brain networks. Neuroimaging studies reveal atypical prefrontal activity during emotion regulation in individuals with CD, which relates to symptom severity and predicts treatment outcomes.

Notably, cognitive behavioral interventions targeting emotion recognition and regulation show promise in restoring behavior and brain function, particularly for those with stronger pre-treatment activation in regulatory regions. Additionally, novel intergenerational investigations of corticolimbic tracts in parent-child dyads will be reviewed, highlighting their potential to inform about risk and resilience in the developing brain. Overall, these findings underscore the importance of understanding emotion regulation within the context of risk and resilience, across generations, with implications for preventive and therapeutic approaches.  

Biography

Prof. Dr. Nora Maria Raschle’s background is in developmental cognitive and affective neuroscience. After completing her master studies at the University of Zurich, Prof. Raschle conducted her doctoral studies at the Laboratories of Cognitive Neuroscience and Children’s Hospital in Boston (USA). She defended her PhD thesis with the topic „Investigating neuronal and behavioral premarkers of developmental dyslexia prior to reading onset“ in 2011 at the University in Zurich and continued as a postdoctoral researcher at Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston.

Starting in 2013, Prof. Raschle worked as a senior research scientist and neuroimaging group leader at the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry of the Psychiatric University Hospital Basel and University of Basel in Switzerland. Her work to date has focused on the investigation of typical and atypical brain development, with a particular focus on the early detection and characterization of developmental and mental health disorders through the use of structural and functional neuroimaging. 

https://www.jacobscenter.uzh.ch/en/research/developmental_neuroscience/team/raschle.html