Poster #17 - Effects of Emotional Context on Cognitive Control from Adolescence through Adulthood

• In Event: 2-110 - Poster Session 07
  In Poster Session: PS 07 Section - Biological Processes: Neuroscience and Genetics

Integrative Statement

Introduction: Mood disorders often emerge during adolescence, indicating important maturational changes in brain regions supporting emotional processing at this time (Paus, Keshavan, & Giedd, 2008; Jennifer H. Pfeifer et al., 2011). Previous studies suggest that during adolescence, emotion may have a distinct influence on brain function, including effects on engaging cognitive control (Hardin et al., 2009). Many of these studies have examined effects of emotional stimuli within individual task trials. However, in reality, emotion is experienced as a state, which may have unique effects through development. Here, we were interested in probing changes from mid-adolescence to adulthood of emotional state on cognitive control by examining changes in connectivity between the amygdala, a primary hub for emotional processing, and cortical regions known to support cognitive control. Thus, we used an affective inhibitory control fMRI task and resting state fMRI to probe the developmental effects of emotional state interacting with the inhibitory aspect of cognitive control.

Methods: 50 participants (age range: 14-31 years, 25 females) completed a standard antisaccade (AS) fMRI task in a 3T scanner. Most trials included a positive, negative, or neutral sound, except for control trials which were silent. All subjects also completed a 5-minute resting state scan in the same session. Outside of the scanner, subjects completed valence and arousal ratings of all sounds that played during the task. fMRI data were preprocessed using a pipeline including slice time correction, motion correction, skill stripping, wavelet despiking, field map unwarping, warping to standard MNI space, and smoothing using a 4 mm FWHM Gaussian kernel. Resting state data additionally underwent bandpass filtering and global signal regression. To obtain background connectivity data, task-related effects were estimated and then removed using multiple linear regression. All analyses were conducted with sex as a covariate of no interest.

Results: Arousal and valence ratings indicated that adults perceived negative as more “arousing” than adolescents while other trial types were perceived similarly across age. As expected, reaction time (RT) of correct AS responses decreased with age when averaging across trial types. When considering age-related changes in RT by trial type, results showed age-related RT decreases in positive and silent trials but not negative and neutral ones. Background connectivity reflecting emotional context revealed age-related increases between a bilateral amygdala seed and the precuneus, frontal pole, and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. In contrast, resting state connectivity (no emotional context) analyses revealed no significant age-related changes in amygdala connectivity with these brain regions.

Conclusion: Results indicate that the influence of emotional context on cognitive control does not change from mid-adolescence to adulthood. However, while baseline connectivity (as demonstrated by resting state) between amygdala and frontoparietal regions does not change from mid-adolescence to adulthood, these connections within an emotional context become more strongly coupled through this transition, possibly due to greater arousal associated with negative trials in adulthood.

Authors

• Orma Ravindranath, University of Pittsburgh
  Presenting Author

• Sarah J. Ordaz, Stanford University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Aarthi Padmanabhan, Stanford University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Maria Jalbrzikowski, University of Pittsburgh
  Non-Presenting Author

• Finnegan Calabro, University of Pittsburgh, Departments of Psychiatry, Laboratory of Neurocognitive Development, The Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition
  Non-Presenting Author

• Beatriz Luna, University of Pittsburgh, Departments of Psychiatry and Psychology, Laboratory of Neurocognitive Development, The Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition
  Non-Presenting Author