2026 Theses Doctoral

Neurobehavioral mechanisms of affective memory schema development

Vannucci, Anna

Affective schemas, which are higher-order memory structure that organize the emotional and interpersonal regularities of experience, are thought to play a central role in emotional development by shaping how children form expectations, interpret new situations, and regulate behavior. Yet, despite their presumed importance, how affective schemas are learned, what representations they contain, and how they are instantiated in the developing brain remains largely unknown.

This dissertation addresses these questions using experimental, longitudinal, and neuroimaging approaches across childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. In Chapter 1, a longitudinal sample of 160 children completed assessments of early caregiving history and attachment security, followed by a narrative false-memory paradigm to probe the content of affective attachment schema representations.

In Chapter 2, 93 adolescents viewed abstract attachment-themed animations, and intersubject correlation quantified how neural responses aligned when processing attachment schema cues in relation to early caregiving experiences. In Chapter 3, three laboratory paradigms with 181 young adults examined how novel affective schemas are acquired, updated, and used for emotional inferences.

Findings suggest that affective schemas reflect early caregiving experiences yet remain malleable, are represented in distributed cortical-subcortical networks that support emotional meaning-making, and follow identifiable principles of emotional learning and memory at higher levels of abstraction. Together, these studies advance a neurodevelopmental framework in which affective schemas emerge through abstraction from early caregiving, are continuously updated with new experiences, and organize emotional meaning-making across development.