Bunford Nora, Kujawa Autumn, Swain James E, Fitzgerald Kate D, Monk Christopher S, Phan K Luan
Department of Psychiatry, University of Illinois at Chicago, 1747 W. Roosevelt Rd., Rm. 277, Chicago, IL, 60612, USA.
Department of Psychology, Ohio University, Athens, OH, 45701, USA.
Eur Child Adolesc Psychiatry. 2017 Feb;26(2):215-230. doi: 10.1007/s00787-016-0883-9. Epub 2016 Jun 24.
Pediatric anxiety is associated with comorbid externalizing behaviors and social problems, and these associations may be related to altered emotion processing. The late positive potential (LPP), an event-related potential component, is a neural marker of emotion processing, and there is evidence that anxious youth exhibits enhanced LPPs to threatening signals. It is unknown, however, if differences in the LPP are related to externalizing behaviors and social problems co-occurring with anxiety and if these associations are driven by altered processing of threatening (angry or fearful faces) or rewarding (happy faces) socio-emotional signals. Thus, in the present study, we examined, in a sample of 39 anxious youth, the association between LPPs, following socio-emotional signals and externalizing behaviors and social problems. Results indicated an association between attenuated LPPs in response to happy faces and greater rule-breaking and social problems. These findings suggest that differences in positive socio-emotional signal processing are related to heterogeneity in pediatric anxiety and that LPPs are a sensitive index of such heterogeneity.
儿童焦虑与共病的外化行为和社会问题相关，并且这些关联可能与情绪加工改变有关。晚期正电位（LPP）是一种事件相关电位成分，是情绪加工的神经标志物，有证据表明焦虑的青少年对威胁信号表现出增强的LPP。然而，尚不清楚LPP的差异是否与伴随焦虑出现的外化行为和社会问题有关，以及这些关联是否由对威胁性（愤怒或恐惧面孔）或奖励性（快乐面孔）社会情感信号的加工改变所驱动。因此，在本研究中，我们在39名焦虑青少年样本中，考察了社会情感信号后的LPP与外化行为和社会问题之间的关联。结果表明，对快乐面孔的LPP减弱与更多的违规行为和社会问题之间存在关联。这些发现表明，积极社会情感信号加工的差异与儿童焦虑的异质性有关，并且LPP是这种异质性的一个敏感指标。
