Delta-Beta Coupling and the Anxiety-Related Attention Bias in Anxious Youth

• In Event: 3-035 - Rising From the Ashes? Paradigm Shifts in the Study of Attention Biases in Adolescent Anxiety

Integrative Statement

Deficits in emotion regulation (ER), the ability to modulate emotional responses, are related to psychological vulnerabilities throughout the lifespan. Specifically, during adolescence, a period of peak anxiety onset, compromised inhibitory control, and rapid neurodevelopment (Casey, et al., 2008), poor ER may contribute to the emergence and maintenance of anxiety disorders. One proposed aspect of ER, affect-biased attention (Todd et al., 2017), can manifest as exaggerated attention to threat, or the anxiety-related attention bias (AB). AB is driven by disruptions in threat detection and attentional control, processes regulated by limbic and prefrontal areas, respectively (Roy, Dennis, & Masia-Warner, 2015). An emerging index of functional coherence of limbic-cortical circuitry is resting-state delta-beta coupling (DBC; e.g. Knyazev, 2007; Phelps, Brooker, & Buss, 2017; Putman, 2011). In adults, low DBC is related to poor attentional control (Morillas-Romero, et al., 2015) and higher anxiety (Putman, 2011; Velikova et al., 2010). Further, low DBC has been linked to greater disruptions in response inhibition induced by threat-related words (Putman et al.; 2012), indicating that low DBC may reflect an impairment in top-down restraint of bottom-up attentional disruption by threat. This study is among the first to investigate DBC in relation to AB in anxious adolescents (N = 17; 11 females). We hypothesized that low DBC would be related to greater anxiety symptoms and AB toward threat, indicating a deficit in attention control and related ER processes. Seventeen (10 female) anxious 13-to-15-year-olds (M = 14.10, SD = 0.60) completed an 8-minute baseline task while EEG was recorded. DBC was quantified as log-transformed power densities at delta (1-3 Hz) and beta (13-30 Hz) bands, averaged across frontal (F3/Fz/F4), central (C3/Cz/C4), and parietal (P3/Pz/P4) sites. Adolescents completed a dot-probe task in which threat and neutral faces appeared simultaneously, followed by a target probe replacing one face. AB scores were computed by subtracting reaction times to neutral minus threat. To examine DBC in relation to anxiety symptoms, difference scores were computed by taking the absolute value of z-transformed delta and beta power densities, with values closer to zero indicating greater DBC. Linear regressions were conducted: 1st step: AB score; 2nd step: DBC; DV: parent-reported anxiety. Low DBC, regardless of AB pattern, predicted higher parent-reported social anxiety [β = -.66; t(17) = 3.20, p = .006; Figure 1]. Next, participants were grouped based on AB scores (negative scores = bias away, positive scores = bias toward threat). Following previous DBC studies (e.g., Putman, 2011), group differences were examined by conducting bivariate correlations between delta and beta bands, separately for each AB group. A Fisher r-to-z transformation was then used to test whether DBC significantly differed between groups. Participants with a bias toward threat showed no DBC (r = -.66, p = .16), while those with a bias away showed high DBC (r = .69, p = .018, z = 2.42, p = .016; Figure 2). These findings provide evidence for the use of resting state DBC as an index of ER in adolescents that is linked to AB and anxiety symptoms.

Authors

• Sarah Myruski, NYU Lagone Medical Center
  Presenting Author

• Tracy Dennis-Tiwary, Hunter College, The City University of New York
  Non-Presenting Author