1-170 - Threat and safety learning across development:What developmental neuroscience can tell us about fear and anxiety related disorders

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

The ability to distinguish between safe and dangerous cues develops early in life, permitting individuals to react to distinctive stimuli in an adaptive manner. While extensive research charts developmental patterns of human fear in response to intrinsically threatening events, far less research examines developmental aspects of learned fears. One such learning mechanism is associative fear learning, which can be studied in the laboratory using an experimental paradigm known as fear conditioning. Possible differences in fear learning across development can shed light on the developmental trajectory of normative fear and on the etiology of stress-related and anxiety disorders. The current symposium focuses on threat and safety learning processes. Presentations included will demonstrate a multi-level analysis aimed at identifying and quantifying risk for psychopathology. Measures will include genetics, psychophysiology, brain activation and behavior across development and across clinical and non-clinical populations.
Presentation one will include data on fear conditioning and discrimination in children with trauma exposure, focusing on genetic and environmental factors that impact discrimination across development. Presentation two introduces a novel fear learning paradigm using ERPs to measure return of fear and threat-safety discrimination in children. Presentation three examines brain activation during an fMRI extinction recall task with a particular emphasis on skin conductance modulation on brain activation. Presentation four focuses on how cognitive processes that differ across age groups can influence fear learning processes and so too the relationship between these processes and anxiety symptoms

Sub Unit

• Attention, Learning, Memory

Chair

• Tomer Shechner, University of Haifa

Individual Presentations

• Fear-potentiated startle in trauma-exposed children: An early marker of psychopathology during development - Presenting Author: Tanja Jovanovic, Emory University; Dorthie Cross, Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, Emory University School of Medicine; Seth Norrholm, Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, Emory University School of Medicine; Bekh Bradley, Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, Emory University School of Medicine

• Extinction recall among non-anxious children: An event related potentials (ERP) study - Presenting Author: Tomer Shechner, University of Haifa; Einav Gafni, Psychology Department, University of Haifa, Israel; Shani Danon, Psychology Department, University of Haifa, Israel

• Early-childhood shyness predicts neural responses to fear extinction recall in preadolescent youth - Presenting Author: Kalina Michalska, NIMH; Julia Feldman, NIMH; Nathan Fox, 3. Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology, University of Maryland; Daniel Pine, 1. Section on Development and Affective Neuroscience, NIMH

• Age-related differences in attention control and inhibitory learning and their relationship with anxious symptoms in adolescents - Presenting Author: Tom J. Barry, The University of Hong Kong; Helen Baker, Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, UK; Jennifer Lau, Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, UK