Altered Neuronal Responses During an Affective Stroop Task in Adolescents With Conduct Disorder

Abstract

Conduct disorder (CD) is a psychiatric disorder of childhood and adolescence which has been linked to deficient emotion processing and regulation. The behavioral and neuronal correlates targeting the interaction of emotion processing and response inhibition are still under investigation. Whole-brain event-related fMRI was applied during an affective Stroop task in 39 adolescents with CD and 39 typically developing adolescents (TD). Participants were presented with an emotional stimulus (negative/neutral) followed by a Stroop task with varying cognitive load (congruent/incongruent/blank trials). fMRI analysis included standard preprocessing, region of interest analyses (amygdala, insula, ventromedial prefrontal cortex) and whole-brain analyses based on a 2(group) × 2(emotion) × 3(task) full-factorial ANOVA. Adolescents with CD made significantly more errors, while reaction times did not significantly differ compared to TD. Additionally, we observed a lack of downregulation of left amygdala activity in response to incongruent trials and increased anterior insula activity for CD relative to TD during affective Stroop task processing [cluster-level family-wise error-corrected (p < 0.05)]. Even though no three-way interaction (group × emotion × task) interaction was detected, the findings presented still provide evidence for altered neuronal underpinnings of the interaction of emotion processing and response inhibition in CD. Moreover, our results may corroborate previous evidence of emotion dysregulation as a core dysfunction in CD. Future studies shall focus on investigating the interaction of emotion processing and response inhibition in CD subgroups (e.g., variations in callous-unemotional traits, impulsivity, or anxiety).

Atypical Dorsolateral Prefrontal Activity in Female Adolescents With Conduct Disorder During Effortful Emotion Regulation

“…Some of the behavioral characteristics seen in individuals with CD may be explained by deficient recruitment of cognitive control regions (i.e., dlPFC and angular gyrus). Reduced prefrontal activity in CD has previously also been associated with implicit forms of emotion regulation 60, 61.…”

Beyond family‐level adversities: Exploring the developmental timing of neighborhood disadvantage effects on the brain

“…Following preprocessing, the ART software package (http://www.nitrc.org/projects/artifact_detect) identified motion outliers (>2 mm movement or 3.5° rotation); outlier volumes were individually regressed out of the participant's individual model, and participants were removed if >20% of the volumes were classified as motion outliers. Similar thresholds for detecting movement have been used in several recent task‐based fMRI studies from independent laboratories (Fehlbaum et al., 2018; Oppenheimer et al., 2020). The number of outlier volumes was not correlated with participant race/ethnicity, or family income or neighborhood disadvantage at any developmental stage (all p s > .05).…”

“…After preprocessing, the Artifact Detection Tools (ART) software package (http://www.nitrc.org/projects/artifact_detect/) was used to detect global mean intensity and translation or rotational motion outliers (>4.5 SD from the mean global brain activation, >2 mm movement, or 2° translation in any direction) within each participant's data. Similar thresholds for detecting movement have been used in several recent task‐based fMRI studies from independent laboratories (Aboud, Barquero, & Cutting, 2018; Fehlbaum et al., 2018; Oppenheimer et al., 2020). The number of outlier volumes was not correlated with participant race/ethnicity, or family income, or neighborhood disadvantage at any developmental stage (all p s > .05).…”

“…Blood oxygenation level-dependent functional images were acquired on a GE MR750 3T scanner with an eight-channel head coil (Fehlbaum et al, 2018;Oppenheimer et al, 2020). The number of outlier volumes was not correlated with participant race/ethnicity, or family income or neighborhood disadvantage at any developmental stage (all ps > .05).…”

Cognitive Training for Very High Risk Incarcerated Adolescent Males

“…High levels of these callous-unemotional (CU) and conduct-disorder (CD) traits in adolescence are associated with life-course persistent antisocial behavior (5)(6)(7). It is now also well-established that persistent violent and antisocial behavior is associated with a range of neurocognitive abnormalities (8)(9)(10)(11)(12)(13)(14)(15)(16)(17)(18)(19)(20)(21)(22).…”