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Neural Sociometrics: Toward Early Screening of Infant Psychosocial and Brain Health to Improve Lifelong Mental Well-Being

V. Leong

Published 2022 in Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences

ABSTRACT

Infant development depends on warm, responsive social interactions that richly stimulate the senses, acting through multiple pathways to orchestrate healthy maturation of the neonatal brain, mind, and body. Conversely, adverse early experiences seed vulnerabilities for poor cognition and emotional instability. Although we routinely measure many aspects of infant physical health (hearing, weight), no clinical tools currently exist to measure early psychosocial health and brain development. Here, neural sociometrics (real-time multi-sensor imaging of adult–infant social interactive behavior and neurophysiology) is discussed as one possible precision measurement framework. Early psychosocial health screening, paired with precision therapeutics, could fundamentally alter a child's development trajectory toward lifelong mental well-being and productivity. Further, population-level measurements of social brain health could forecast mental capital growth (and deficits) for entire communities and generations. This article calls for the prioritized development of early scalable diagnostic instruments to reveal the status of infant mental wellbeing and brain health.

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