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- Filippi, Courtney A., et al.
(författare)
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Developmental Changes in the Association Between Cognitive Control and Anxiety
- 2022
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Ingår i: Child Psychiatry and Human Development. - : Springer Nature. - 0009-398X .- 1573-3327. ; 53:3, s. 599-609
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Anxiety has been associated with reliance on reactive (stimulus-driven/reflexive) control strategies in response to conflict. However, this conclusion rests primarily on indirect evidence. Few studies utilize tasks that dissociate the use of reactive ('just in time') vs. proactive (anticipatory/preparatory) cognitive control strategies in response to conflict, and none examine children diagnosed with anxiety. The current study utilizes the AX-CPT, which dissociates these two types of cognitive control, to examine cognitive control in youth (ages 8-18) with and without an anxiety diagnosis (n = 56). Results illustrate that planful behavior, consistent with using a proactive strategy, varies by both age and anxiety symptoms. Young children (ages 8-12 years) with high anxiety exhibit significantly less planful behavior than similarly-aged children with low anxiety. These findings highlight the importance of considering how maturation influences relations between anxiety and performance on cognitive-control tasks and have implications for understanding the pathophysiology of anxiety in children.
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| 2. |
- Roberson-Nay, Roxann, et al.
(författare)
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Longitudinal Stability of Genetic and Environmental Influences on Irritability : From Childhood to Young Adulthood
- 2015
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Ingår i: American Journal of Psychiatry. - Arlington, USA : American Psychiatric Association Publishing. - 0002-953X .- 1535-7228. ; 172:7, s. 657-664
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Objective: Little is known about genetic influences on juvenile irritability and whether such influences are developmentally stable and/or dynamic. This study examined the temporal pattern of genetic and environmental effects on irritability using data from a prospective, four-wave longitudinal twin study.Method: Parents and their twin children (N=2,620 children) from the Swedish Twin Study of Child and Adolescent Development reported on the children's irritability, defined using a previously identified scale from the Child Behavior Checklist.Results: Genetic effects differed across the sexes, with males exhibiting increasing heritability from early childhood through young adulthood and females exhibiting decreasing heritability. Genetic innovation was also more prominent in males than in females, with new genetic risk factors affecting irritability in early and late adolescence for males. Shared environment was not a primary influence on irritability for males or females. Unique, nonshared environmental factors suggested strong effects early for males followed by an attenuating influence, whereas unique environmental factors were relatively stable for females.Conclusions: Genetic effects on irritability are developmentally dynamic from middle childhood through young adulthood, with males and females displaying differing patterns. As males age, genetic influences on irritability increase while nonshared environmental influences weaken. Genetic contributions are quite strong in females early in life but decline in importance with age. In girls, nonshared environmental influences are fairly stable throughout development.
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| 3. |
- Smith, Ashley R., et al.
(författare)
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Emotional distractors and attentional control in anxious youth : eye tracking and fMRI data
- 2021
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Ingår i: Cognition & Emotion. - : Taylor & Francis. - 0269-9931 .- 1464-0600. ; 35:1, s. 110-128
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Attentional control theory suggests that high cognitive demands impair the flexible deployment of attention control in anxious adults, particularly when paired with external threats. Extending this work to pediatric anxiety, we report two studies utilising eye tracking (Study 1) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (Study 2). Both studies use a visual search paradigm to examine anxiety-related differences in the impact of threat on attentional control at varying levels of task difficulty. In Study 1, youth ages 8-18 years (N = 109), completed the paradigm during eye tracking. Results indicated that youth with more severe anxiety took longer to fixate on and identify the target, specifically on difficult trials, compared to youth with less anxiety. However, no anxiety-related effects of emotional distraction (faces) emerged. In Study 2, a separate cohort of 8-18-year-olds (N = 72) completed a similar paradigm during fMRI. Behaviourally, youth with more severe anxiety were slower to respond on searches following non-threatening, compared to threatening, distractors, but this effect did not vary by task difficulty. The same interaction emerged in the neuroimaging analysis in the superior parietal lobule and precentral gyrus-more severe anxiety was associated with greater brain response following non-threatening distractors. Theoretical implications of these inconsistent findings are discussed.
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