Family Accommodation in Anxious Irritable and Anxious Nonirritable Youth.

Family accommodation is a significant contributor to the maintenance and course of youth anxiety. There is also high co-occurrence of anxiety and irritability in youth. Research is lacking, however, on the influence of irritability in the association between anxiety and family accommodation, including among youth with clinically diagnosed anxiety disorders. We therefore examined this issue in a sample of clinic-referred anxious irritable and anxious nonirritable youth. Youth (N = 645, Mage = 9.86 years, SD = 2.92) and their parents completed diagnostic interviews and questionnaires assessing youth anxiety, irritability, and family accommodation. Based on both youth and parent ratings, family accommodation was significantly and positively associated with youth anxiety and irritability. Anxious irritable youth rated family accommodation significantly higher than anxious nonirritable youth. In addition, youth self-rated irritability levels significantly moderated the association between their anxiety and family accommodation. No moderation effect was found for the parent ratings. Based on the youth ratings, our overall findings show that parents of anxious irritable youth are more accommodating of their children's anxiety, compared with parents of anxious nonirritable youth. Anxiety levels also predict family accommodation more strongly in youth with lower levels of irritability. Our findings provide novel insights about accommodation behaviors in families of anxious irritable youth and suggest its potential utility as a treatment target when working with anxious irritable youth.

Catch the drift: Depressive symptoms track neural response during more efficient decision-making for negative self-referents.

Background: Adolescence is a time of heightened risk for developing depression and also a critical period for the development and integration of self-identity. Despite this, the relation between the neurophysiological correlates of self-referential processing and major depressive symptoms in youth is not well understood. Here, we leverage computational modeling of the self-referential encoding task (SRET) to identify behavioral moderators of the association between the posterior late positive potential (LPP), an event-related potential associated with emotion regulation, and youth self-reported symptoms of depression. Specifically, within a drift-diffusion framework, we evaluated whether the association between the posterior LPP and youth symptoms of major depression was moderated by drift rate, a parameter reflecting processing efficiency during self-evaluative decisions. Methods: A sample of 106 adolescents, aged 12 to 17 (53% male; Mage = 14.49, SD = 1.70), completed the SRET with concurrent high-density electroencephalography and self-report measures of depression and anxiety. Results: Findings indicated a significant moderation: for youth showing greater processing efficiency (drift rate) when responding to negative compared to positive words, larger posterior LPPs predicted greater depressive symptom severity. Limitations: We relied on a community sample and our study was cross-sectional in nature. Future longitudinal work with clinically depressed youth would be beneficial. Conclusions: Our results suggest a neurobehavioral model of adolescent depression wherein efficient processing of negative information co-occurs with increased demands on affective self-regulation. Our findings also have clinical relevance; youth's neurophysiological response (posterior LPP) and performance during the SRET may serve as a novel target for tracking treatment-related changes in one's self-identity.