Investigating the consistency of threat-related ERP’s among children and adolescents

• In Event: Poster Session 10
  In Poster Session: PS 10 Topic - Developmental Psychopathology

Abstract

Objectives: Neurodevelopmental imbalance models suggest that asynchrony in the maturation of interconnections between brain regions contributes to adolescents being more sensitive to emotionally salient events (e.g., threatening situations) than children. Of concern, heightened responsiveness to threat (sensitivity to threat; ST) is thought to be a precursor to anxiety, a common mental health issue among youth. There are, however, a variety of different situations that youth may find threatening (e.g., receiving negative feedback, making mistakes, viewing angry faces). Research has yet to investigate whether (1) there is consistency in threat sensitivity (i.e., the same participants who are sensitive to making mistakes are also sensitive to receiving negative feedback and seeing an angry face) and (2) whether adolescents, compared to children, are more likely to be consistently sensitive to different threats.

Method: The current study (N= 220, Mage=10.57, SD =1.77) used event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate whether adolescents were more likely than children to have consistent neural threat sensitivity across different EEG tasks. Participants filled out demographic measures and a self-report measure of ST. Participants also completed 3 EEG tasks: (1) a balloon analog risk task, where they received negative feedback, (2) a go/no-go task, where they made mistakes, and (3) a face processing task, where they viewed angry faces. We created four groups based on participants neural activation to threats: Participants with consistently low neural activation on all three tasks – hereafter labeled the low group; participants with low neural activation on two tasks and high neural activation on one task– labeled the LOW_high group; participants with high neural activation on two tasks and a low neural activation on one task – labeled the HIGH_low group; and participants with consistently high neural activation on all three tasks – labeled the high group. 

Results: Among the 196 participants, 13 participants were in the low group (6.63% of the sample), 79 participants were in the LOW_high group (40.30% of the sample), 80 participants were in the HIGH_low group (40.81% of the sample), and 24 participants were in the high group (12.24% of the sample). See Figure 1 for standardized means of the ERP’s across each group. Older participants (adolescents) had greater odds of being in the high group than the low group (OR= 3.30, p= .001). Participants who self-reported greater ST were also more likely to be in the high group compared to the low group and the LOW_high group (OR range: 2.64 - 4.15, p’s< .020).

Conclusions: We identified a group of youth who have consistently high neural activation to threats (12.24% of the sample). In line with neurodevelopmental imbalance models, adolescents were more likely to be in the consistently high group than the consistently low group; thus, adolescents are more likely than children to be consistently sensitive to threats across different situations. Further, individuals who self-report higher ST had greater odds of being in the high group than groups with lower neural activation to threats. Given that high ST may be a precursor for anxiety, identifying youth with consistently high neural activation across different threats may be a way to target individuals at risk for later development of anxiety.

Authors

• Taylor Heffer, Brock University
  Presenting Author

• Teena Willoughby, Brock University
  Non-Presenting Author