Developmental pathways to social anxiety and irritability: The role of the ERN

Abstract

Early behaviors that differentiate later biomarkers for psychopathology can guide preventive efforts while also facilitating pathophysiological research. We tested whether error-related negativity (ERN) moderates the link between early behavior and later psychopathology in two early childhood phenotypes: behavioral inhibition and irritability. From ages 2 to 7 years, children (n = 291) were assessed longitudinally for behavioral inhibition (BI) and irritability. Behavioral inhibition was assessed via maternal report and behavioral responses to novelty. Childhood irritability was assessed using the Child Behavior Checklist. At age 12, an electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded while children performed a flanker task to measure ERN, a neural indicator of error monitoring. Clinical assessments of anxiety and irritability were conducted using questionnaires (i.e., Screen for Child Anxiety Related Disorders and Affective Reactivity Index) and clinical interviews. Error monitoring interacted with early BI and early irritability to predict later psychopathology. Among children with high BI, an enhanced ERN predicted greater social anxiety at age 12. In contrast, children with high childhood irritability and blunted ERN predicted greater irritability at age 12. This converges with previous work and provides novel insight into the specificity of pathways associated with psychopathology.

Deliberative Choice Strategies in Youths: Relevance to Transdiagnostic Anxiety Symptoms

“…Individuals with elevated anxiety tend to exhibit more cautious behavior when making decisions both naturalistically and on cognitive tasks. This is consistent with hypersensitivity to errors, decreased risk taking, and increased avoidance seen in both pediatric (Filippi et al, 2020;White et al, 2017) and adult samples (Ladouceur et al, 2000;Miu et al, 2008). This may further reflect altered processing of uncertainty and ambiguity (Grupe & Nitschke, 2013;Hartley & Phelps, 2012;Moser et al, 2013;Paulus, 2007).…”

Developmental Changes in the Association Between Cognitive Control and Anxiety

“…Blue highlighted line indicates the ages at which the relation between anxiety and d'prime is significant, red highlighted line indicates ages where this association is not significant. Black bar indicates range of observed ages (i.e., age [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18]. See Supplement for figure illustrating the raw data and linear fit when age bins are created using mean ± 1 standard deviation could impair children's ability to recognize the relevance of preparatory cue-based contextual information pertinent to upcoming probes.…”

“…However, at present, few studies utilize tasks that dissociate the use of reactive vs. proactive cognitive control strategies in response to conflict, and none examine children diagnosed with anxiety. The current study utilizes the AX-CPT, a cognitive control task which dissociates reactive and proactive control, to examine cognitive control in youth (age [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18] with and without an anxiety diagnosis (n = 56). While treatment-seeking anxious and healthy children were recruited, anxiety was operationalized dimensionally using the Screen for Child Anxiety Related Emotional Disorders (SCARED).…”

“…This is particularly important in young children, who manifest immature cognitive control. To address these gaps, the current study examines performance on the AX-Continuous Performance Task (AX-CPT [6]), a task which dissociates reactive and proactive control, in children (ages [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18] with and without anxiety disorders.…”

“…However, few studies of anxiety dissociate proactive and reactive control. While several relevant studies examine control processes during conflict [4,[7][8][9][10][11], these studies typically rely on assessments, such as the Flanker or Go-NoGo task, which measure reactive control. In their standard forms, such tasks require participants to respond to stimuli in the absence of pre-stimulus information that can facilitate planful responding.…”