Behavioral and neural stability of attention bias to threat in healthy adolescents.

Considerable translational research on anxiety examines attention bias to threat and the efficacy of attention training in reducing symptoms. Imaging research on the stability of brain functions engaged by attention bias tasks could inform such research. Perturbed fronto-amygdala function consistently arises in attention bias research on adolescent anxiety. The current report examines the stability of the activation and functional connectivity of these regions on the dot-probe task. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) activation and connectivity data were acquired with the dot-probe task in 39 healthy youth (f=18, Mean Age=13.71years, SD=2.31) at two time points, separated by approximately nine weeks. Intraclass-correlations demonstrate good reliability in both neural activation for the ventrolateral PFC and task-specific connectivity for fronto-amygdala circuitry. Behavioral measures showed generally poor test-retest reliability. These findings suggest potential avenues for future brain imaging work by highlighting brain circuitry manifesting stable functioning on the dot-probe attention bias task.

Fear conditioning and extinction in anxious and nonanxious youth and adults: examining a novel developmentally appropriate fear-conditioning task.

BACKGROUND: Fear conditioning and extinction have been implicated in the pathogenesis of anxiety disorders. However, due to ethical and methodological limitations, few studies have examined these learning processes across development, particularly among anxious individuals. The present study examined differences in fear conditioning and extinction in anxious and nonanxious youth and adults using a novel task designed to be more tolerable for children than existing paradigms. METHODS: Twenty-two anxious adults, 15 anxious youth, 30 healthy adults, and 17 healthy youth completed two discriminative fear-conditioning tasks. A well-validated task paired a woman's fearful face with a scream as the unconditioned stimulus. The novel task paired a bell with an aversive alarm as the unconditioned stimulus. Self-reported fear, skin conductance response, and fear-potentiated startle eye blink were measured. RESULTS: Both tasks were well tolerated and elicited fear responses with moderate stability. Anxious youth and adults reported overall greater fear than healthy participants during the tasks, although no group differences occurred in discriminative fear conditioning or extinction, as assessed by self-report or physiology. CONCLUSION: The novel bell-conditioning task is potent in eliciting fear responses but tolerable for pediatric and anxious populations. Our findings are consistent with prior studies that have shown comparable fear learning processes in anxious and nonanxious youth, but dissimilar from studies exhibiting between-group differences in extinction. Given the limited research on fear conditioning in youth, methodological issues and suggestions for future work are discussed.