Responding to threat: Associations between neural reactivity to and behavioral avoidance of threat in pediatric anxiety.

BACKGROUND: Despite broad recognition of the central role of avoidance in anxiety, a lack of specificity in its operationalization has hindered progress in understanding this clinically significant construct. The current study uses a multimodal approach to investigate how specific measures of avoidance relate to neural reactivity to threat in youth with anxiety disorders. METHODS: Children with anxiety disorders (ages 6-12 years; n = 65 for primary analyses) completed laboratory task- and clinician-based measures of avoidance, as well as a functional magnetic resonance imaging task probing neural reactivity to threat. Primary analyses examined the ventral anterior insula (vAI), amygdala, and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). RESULTS: Significant but distinct patterns of association with task- versus clinician-based measures of avoidance emerged. Clinician-rated avoidance was negatively associated with right and left vAI reactivity to threat, whereas laboratory-based avoidance was positively associated with right vAI reactivity to threat. Moreover, left vAI-right amygdala and bilateral vmPFC-right amygdala functional connectivity were negatively associated with clinician-rated avoidance but not laboratory-based avoidance. LIMITATIONS: These results should be considered in the context of the restricted range of our treatment-seeking sample, which limits the ability to draw conclusions about these associations across children with a broader range of symptomatology. In addition, the limited racial and ethnic diversity of our sample may limit the generalizability of findings. CONCLUSION: These findings mark an important step towards bridging neural findings and behavioral patterns using a multimodal approach. Advancing understanding of behavioral avoidance in pediatric anxiety may guide future treatment optimization by identifying individual-specific targets for treatment.

Affective language spreads between anxious children and their mothers during a challenging puzzle task.

Humans influence each other's emotions. The spread of emotion is well documented across behavioral, psychophysiological, and neuroscientific levels of analysis, but might this influence also be evident in language (e.g., are people more likely to use emotion words after hearing someone else use them)? The current study tests whether mothers and children influence each other's use of affective language. From 2018 to 2020, children aged 6-12 who met diagnostic criteria for anxiety disorders and their mothers (N = 93 dyads) completed a challenging puzzle task while being video recorded. Analyses of transcriptions revealed that mothers and children indeed influenced each other's language. Bidirectional influence was observed for use of negative affect words: Mothers were more likely to use negative affect words if their child had just used negative affect words (over and above mothers' own language on their previous turn), and children were similarly influenced by mother affect word use. A similar bidirectional relation emerged for linguistic distance, a measure related to effective emotion regulation and mental health. However, the significance of the child-to-mother direction of influence for these two variables varied depending on correction threshold and should thus be verified in future research. Nonetheless, these findings extend understanding of emotional influence by showing turn-by-turn relations between the use of affective language. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Encoding focus does not affect recollection of action memories: Event related potential (ERP) and modeling evidence.

Prior work using word stimuli has uncovered evidence that encoding focus (i.e., self-focus or other-focus) alters non-diagnostic recollection and the putative ERP correlate of recollection (i.e., the Late Positive Component or LPC; Leynes and Mok, 2017, Brain & Cognition). The present study examined the generality of these effects by testing memory for actions. Participants viewed videos of either a male actor or female actor completing simple actions (e.g., Ride the Elevator; Climb the Stairs). Participants judged how much fun it would be to personally perform the action under the self-focus encoding condition, whereas they rated how much fun the actor had while performing the action in the other-focus encoding condition. At test, participants made source judgments regarding who (i.e., male or female) performed the action. Self- and other-focus encoding had similar effects on all behavioral measures including parameters from Dual Process Signal Detection and Unequal Variance Signal Detection models. Experiment 2 recorded brain activity (event-related potentials) and found that self- and other-focus encoding produced similar recognition and LPC amplitudes. These results suggest that encoding focus did not affect the amount of non-diagnostic recollection because both action types promoted strong recollection. Such results are additional evidence that action memory creates more complex traces as compared with typical lab-based stimuli (i.e., pictures or words) and identifies an important boundary condition for encoding focus effects on recollection.