Differentiating Anxiety and Depression in Children and Adolescents: Evidence From Event-Related Brain Potentials

Abstract

The current study, which was a reanalysis of previous data, focused on the error-related negativity (ERN)-an event-related potential (ERP) associated with error monitoring-and the feedback negativity (FN)-an ERP associated with reward processing. Two objectives motivated this study: first, to illustrate the relationship between the ERN and anxious symptoms, and the relationship between the FN and depressive symptoms; second, to explore whether the ERN and the FN relate uniquely to anxiety and depression, respectively, in children. EEG was collected from twenty-five 11- to 13-year-old participants (12 female; 23 Caucasian, 1 Asian, 1 of Caucasian and Hispanic ethnicity) during tasks designed to elicit an ERN and an FN. Participants and a parent completed questionnaires assessing the participant's anxious and depressive symptomatology. Increasing anxiety was related to a larger ERN, and increasing depression was related to a smaller FN. Further analysis demonstrated that these relationships remained significant when controlling for the contribution of other variables; that is, the ERN continued to predict anxiety when controlling for the FN and depression, and the FN continued to predict depression when controlling for the ERN and anxiety. Thus, in late childhood and early adolescence, the ERN and the FN appear to relate uniquely to anxious and depressive symptoms, respectively. Although this research is still in early stages, the ERN and the FN have the potential to inform trajectories of risk for anxiety and depression, and could be utilized in clinical settings as cost- and labor-efficient neural biomarkers.

The impact of an unpredictable context and intolerance of uncertainty on the electrocortical response to monetary gains and losses

“…Previous studies have found an attenuated RewP during a gambling task in individuals with high relative to low trait-like anxiety (Gu, Huang, & Luo, 2010;Lange, Leue, & Beauducel, 2012) and obsessive-compulsive symptoms (Simons, 2010). However, one study found that negative emotionality was associated with an enhanced RewP (Santesso et al, 2012) and other studies have found no association between anxiety and the RewP (Bress, Meyer, & Hajcak, 2013). In this study, internalizing symptoms (anxiety, depression, stress, and worry) were not associated with the RewP across either the predictable or unpredictable context.…”

Reward dysfunction in major depression: Multimodal neuroimaging evidence for refining the melancholic phenotype

“…The current study sheds new light on the nature of reward dysfunction in MDD in three ways: First, building upon past ERP research in non-clinical samples (Bress, Meyer, et al, 2013; Bress et al, 2012; Foti & Hajcak, 2009) and replicating a recent report from a clinical sample (W. H. Liu et al, 2014), MDD was associated with reduced reward-related neural activity, as indicated by FN amplitude. Second, we found converging evidence across ERP and fMRI measures, such that FN amplitude and VS activation to reward were correlated within the MDD group.…”

“…Notably, blunted FN amplitude is associated with MDD symptoms in both clinical (W. H. Liu et al, 2014) and nonclinical samples (Bress, Smith, Foti, Klein, & Hajcak, 2012; Foti & Hajcak, 2009), an association which appears to be specific to symptoms of MDD and not anxiety (Bress, Meyer, & Hajcak, 2013). Blunted FN amplitude may represent a neurobiological mechanism of risk for MDD, such that it is more pronounced among individuals with a family history of MDD (Foti, Hajcak, Kotov, & Klein, 2011) and has been shown to prospectively predict first episode onset of MDD over and above other known risk factors (Bress, Foti, Kotov, Klein, & Hajcak, 2013).…”

Considering ERP difference scores as individual difference measures: Issues with subtraction and alternative approaches

“…We emphasize, however, that the conceptual issues apply to all psychophysiological studies that correlate individual difference measures with subtraction-based difference scores-a practice that is actually quite common. For instance, recent studies in emotion often subtract neutral from emotional condition averages to quantify individual differences in emotional reactivity (Angus, Kemkes, Schutter, & Harmon-Jones, 2015;Bress, Meyer, & Hajcak, 2015;Burkhouse, Siegle, Woody, Kudinova, & Gibb, 2015;Hoenen, L€ ubke, & Pause, 2015;Kornilov, Magnuson, Rakhlin, Landi, & Grigorenko, 2015;McTeague, Lang, Laplante, & Bradley, 2011;Meyer, Hajcak, Torpey-Newman, Kujawa, & Klein, 2015;Sylvester, Hudziak, Gaffrey, Barch, & Luby, 2015). Indeed, current recommendations from experts in the field involve "isolating components of interest by creating [subtraction-based] difference waves" (Luck, 2014).…”