Preschool negative emotionality predicts activity and connectivity of the fusiform face area and amygdala in later childhood

Abstract

Negative emotionality (NE) refers to individual differences in the propensity to experience and react with negative emotions and is associated with increased risk of psychological disorder. However, research on the neural bases of NE has focused almost exclusively on amygdala activity during emotional face processing. This study broadened this framework by examining the relationship between observed NE in early childhood and subsequent neural responses to emotional faces in both the amygdala and the fusiform face area (FFA) in a late childhood/early adolescent sample. Measures of NE were obtained from children at age 3 using laboratory observations, and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data were collected when these children were between the ages of 9 and 12 while performing a visual stimulus identity matching task with houses and emotional faces as stimuli. Multiple regression analyses revealed that higher NE at age 3 is associated with significantly greater activation in the left amygdala and left FFA but lower functional connectivity between these two regions during the face conditions. These findings suggest that those with higher early NE have subsequent alterations in both activity and connectivity within an extended network during face processing.

Emotional Expressivity in Toddlers With Autism Spectrum Disorder

“…All trials with a score of 2 were excluded from the analyses (3.75%). Consistent with prior research, 46 intensity of valence-matched facial and vocal expressions were significantly intercorrelated in all groups, with correlations ranging from 0.44 to 0.77 (all p < .001). Thus, we computed composite raw scores for overall intensity of fear, anger, and joy responses across the facial and vocal channels for each trial.…”

Dispositional negativity, cognition, and anxiety disorders: An integrative translational neuroscience framework

“…Brain imaging studies provide compelling evidence that adults and youth with a more negative disposition are prone to increased or prolonged activity in the dorsal-posterior amygdala (Figure 2). This has been observed both at ‘rest’ (i.e., in the absence of an explicit task) and in response to novelty, negative emotional faces, unpleasant images, and conditioned threat cues (CS+) (e.g., Coombs, Loggia, Greve, & Holt, 2014; Gaffrey, Barch, & Luby, 2016; Kann, O’Rawe, Huang, Klein, & Leung, 2017; Shackman et al, 2016c; Sjouwerman et al, 2017; Stout, Shackman, Pedersen, Miskovich, & Larson, 2017). For example, Kaczkurkin and colleagues used a large peri-adolescent youth dataset ( N = 875) to show that adolescent women are marked by a more negative disposition, on average, compared to adolescent men (consistent with other large-scales studies; Shackman et al, 2016c) and that this sex difference reflects elevated ‘resting’ perfusion in the dorsal amygdala ( female-vs.-male → resting amygdala activity → disposition ) (Kaczkurkin et al, 2016b).…”

The Stony Brook Temperament Study: Early Antecedents and Pathways to Emotional Disorders

“…We found that higher negative emotionality in early childhood was associated with significantly greater activations in the left amygdala and left fusiform face area during emotional and neutral face conditions relative to the house condition, and with lower functional connectivity between these two regions during the face conditions (24). Thus, observations of children’s emotional reactivity as early as age 3 apparently predict their neural reactivity to emotionally relevant stimuli in late childhood.…”