A longitudinal study of emotion regulation and anxiety in middle childhood: Associations with frontal EEG asymmetry in early childhood

Abstract

We investigated whether brain electrical activity during early childhood was associated with anxiety symptoms and emotion regulation during a stressful situation during middle childhood. Frontal electroencephalogram (EEG) asymmetries were measured during baseline and during a cognitive control task at 4 1/2 years. Anxiety and emotion regulation were assessed during a stressful situation at age 9 (speech task), along with measures of heart rate (HR) and heart rate variability (HRV). Questionnaires were also used to assess anxiety and emotion regulation at age 9. Results from this longitudinal study indicated that children who exhibited right frontal asymmetry in early childhood experienced more physiological arousal (increased HR, decreased HRV) during the speech task at age 9 and less ability to regulate their emotions as reported by their parents. Findings are discussed in light of the associations between temperament and development of anxiety disorders.

The Problem of Patient Heterogeneity and Lack of Proper Training in a Study of EEG Neurofeedback in Children

“…The current work includes patients with ADHD) with comorbid oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), anxiety, and learning disorders. Thus, approximately 39% of this study population may not have received proper training with known protocols utilized for treatment of ADHD, anxiety, ODD, or learning disorders; 12-14 such protocols with differential features to address these particular syndromes, [15][16][17] with or without comorbid ADHD, would be different from the SMR/theta protocols used in this study. These differences in protocols undoubtedly contributed to the lack of significantly different findings between groups and should have been considered in the differential grouping and analyses of the study data.…”

“…19 Therefore we hypothesize that this classification system may have produced effects on the outcome of the study. [15][16][17] Further, data for 14 (8 neurofeedback and 6 placebo) of the total 41 patients had previously been analyzed and reported. As we have noted in this letter, there are standardized protocols that have worked well with ADHD across studies, 18,19 and may have added to the quality of the article.…”

Physiological and self-report responses of parents of children with autism spectrum disorder to children crying

“…The IBI was used to be an indicator in the literature, considering several fields such as emotional concordance (Butler, Gross, & Barnard, 2014), empathy (Oliveira-Silva & Gonçalves, 2011), emotion regulation (Hannesdóttir, Doxie, Ann Bell, Ollendick, & Wolfe, 2010) and infant calming responses (Esposito, Yoshida, et al, 2013 Guided by an extensive literature showing that cry episodes belonging to children with ASD are perceived as more aversive and elicit more negative feelings compared to cry episodes of TD children, we developed two main hypotheses. We expected that parents of children with ASD can discriminate cry episodes belonging to children with ASD cry from cry episodes of TD children, based on higher stress, arousal and negative valence.…”

A Pervasive Approach to EEG‐Based Depression Detection

“…Thus, as an objective physiological method to obtain data, EEG was proposed as a nonintrusive approach to study cognitive behavior [18][19][20] and other illness symptoms, such as insomnia [21][22][23], epilepsy [24][25][26], and sleep disorder [27]. EEG has also been used in the diagnosis of mental disorders, such as anxiety [28][29][30], psychosis [31][32][33][34], and depression [35][36][37][38]. In addition, depression as a mental disorder with clinical manifestations such as significant depression and slow thinking is always accompanied by abnormal brain activity and obvious emotional alternation.…”

“…The frequency of the EEG signal can be divided into 5 wave-bands: delta wave (<4 Hz), which normally appears in an adult's slow-wave sleep; theta wave (4-8 Hz), which is usually found when someone is sleepy; alpha wave (8-14 Hz), which is normally detected when someone is relaxed; beta wave (14)(15)(16)(17)(18)(19)(20)(21)(22)(23)(24)(25)(26)(27)(28)(29)(30), which commonly appears when someone is actively thinking; and gamma wave , which could appear during meditation. The EEG signals undergo changes in the amplitude as well as frequency, while different mental tasks are performed [39][40][41][42].…”