Early Neurobehavioral Marker of Anxiety: Linking Threat Bias & Real World Emotion

University Of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Linked publications, trials & patents

Abstract

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Anxiety disorders are highly prevalent in childhood and often lead to costly and harmful developmental outcomes, including adult-onset mood disorders, substance use, and social impairment. The early identification of clinical risk could have a positive impact on children's quality of life and long-term benefits associated with the modification of at-risk developmental trajectories. Consistent with the NIMH Research Domain Criteria Project (RDoC) objective to classify psychopathology by basic dimensions of functioning, the proposed study investigates the clinical implications of alterations in children's responses to threat (a dimension of the Negative Valence system) during a period when rates of anxiety begin to increase. The candidate's long-term career objective is to improve the early detection and treatment of problematic anxiety by using a developmental cognitive affective neuroscience framework to better understand how disturbances in neurocognitive mechanisms underlying children's responses to threat (e.g., attention bias toward threat-related information) interact with social factors and how this interplay contributes to alterations in children's real-world emotion regulation behaviors. The candidate's immediate focus is to investigate behavioral and neurophysiological indices of threat bias components as potential markers of clinical risk for anxiety in young school-aged children. Using an innovative, multi-method approach capable of revealing the real-world significance of a laboratory-identified marker, the study focuses on the implications of alterations in children's attention to threat. Specifically, te study will investigate relations between temporally-sensitive measures of threat bias components obtained from the lab with ratings of child anxiety symptoms and ecologically-sensitive measures of children's ability to regulate real- world negative emotion. Data will be acquired from 104 children who show a range of anxiety symptoms (N = 52 children with impairing levels of anxiety). Findings from the proposed study could have significant clinical utility, specifically, identifying potential neurobehavioral risk markers and improving treatments by directly targeting specific attention mechanisms that mediate anxious symptomatology and/or maladaptive emotion regulation. The study will also examine the influence of parental socialization of emotion on associations between child threat bias and emotion regulation behaviors, providing information about an important treatment target for child interventions. The K01 Award will position the candidate to achieve these study objectives, setting the stage for a research career that integrates developmental and cognitive affective neuroscience approaches to study the brain/real-world behavior associations that underpin anxiety-related developmental trajectories. The candidate's background includes specialized training in child clinical psychology, emotional and social development, behavioral assessment of emotion regulation processes, and a broad exposure to the basics of developmental affective neuroscience. To most effectively bridge developmental affective neuroscience with ecologically-sensitive approaches for understanding (a) the cognitive and behavioral mediators of neurobiological risk for anxiety-related pathology and (b) incorporating important social factors in etiological and treatment models of child anxiety, the candidate seeks to deepen and extend her training to include: 1) a more intricate understanding of the brain-behavior relations that underlie emotion regulation processes, particularly as they relate to the path physiology of anxiety disorders, 2) advanced training in EEG/ERP methods, with an emphasis on approaches for studying the temporal dynamics of cognitive control processes 3) design of ecologically-sensitive methods for assessing young children's real-world emotion regulation behaviors, and 4) statistical toots for integrating time series data across units of analysis (neurophysiology and behavioral) and contexts (laboratory and children's natural social environments). The University Of Pittsburgh School Of Medicine is an outstanding environment in which to engage in the interdisciplinary training required to achieve these goals. The candidate's mentors-Jennifer Silk, Greg Siegle, and Cecile Ladouceur-have combined expertise in cognitive/affective neuroscience and ecologically-sensitive methodology for studying emotion regulation processes that are implicated in pediatric mood/anxiety disorders. In addition to their individual productivity and commitment to the training of developmental cognitive affective scientists, this team has also collaborated on large-scale, interdisciplinary projects for advancing the scientific understanding and treatment of child psychopathology.