The transition from childhood to adolescence is marked by a general decrease in amygdala reactivity and an affect-specific ventral-to-dorsal shift in medial prefrontal recruitment

Abstract

Understanding how and why affective responses change with age is central to characterizing typical and atypical emotional development. Prior work has emphasized the role of the amygdala and prefrontal cortex (PFC), which show age-related changes in function and connectivity. However, developmental neuroimaging research has only recently begun to unpack whether age effects in the amygdala and PFC are specific to affective stimuli or may be found for neutral stimuli as well, a possibility that would support a general, rather than affect-specific, account of amygdala-PFC development. To examine this, 112 individuals ranging from 6–23 years of age viewed aversive and neutral images while undergoing fMRI scanning. Across age, participants reported more negative affect and showed greater amygdala responses for aversive than neutral stimuli. However, children were generally more sensitive to both neutral and aversive stimuli, as indexed by affective reports and amygdala responses. At the same time, the transition from childhood to adolescence was marked by a ventral-to-dorsal shift in medial prefrontal responses to aversive, but not neutral, stimuli. Given the role that dmPFC plays in executive control and higher-level representations of emotion, these results suggest that adolescence is characterized by a shift towards representing emotional events in increasingly cognitive terms.

Combined effects of peer presence, social cues, and rewards on cognitive control in adolescents

“…These changes are evidenced in MRI‐based structural (Achterberg, Peper, van Duijvenvoorde, & Mandl, ; Gogtay et al, ; Sowell, ; Sowell, Thompson, Colin, Jernigan, & Toga, ) and functional connectivity studies (Dosenbach et al, ; Fair et al, ) within and between prefrontal circuits. This protracted development parallels age‐dependent changes in cognitive control in arousing situations (Cohen, Breiner, et al, ; Dreyfuss et al, ; Luna, Paulsen, Padmanabhan, & Geier, ; Silvers et al, ; Somerville et al, ) that continue into the early 20s (Cohen, Breiner, et al, ; Silvers et al, ). Recent evidence suggests that functional connectivity between prefrontal cognitive control and reward circuitry increases from adolescence to adulthood (Duijvenvoorde et al, ; van den Bos et al, ), demonstrating that adolescents may have weaker prefrontal‐reward connectivity compared to older age groups and thus diminished control in the presence of potential rewards.…”

Trauma, PTSD, and the Developing Brain

“…Indeed, negative emotions such as fear and anxiety tend to decrease with age in TD youth, albeit with shifts in content [20]. In the laboratory setting, affective ratings of both neutral and negative images decrease with age in TD youth [21]. Accordingly, TD youth also show increased ability to regulate negative emotion with age.…”

“…Functional MRI studies in TD youth also point to maturation in prefrontal-amygdala circuits which may allow for improved regulation of negative emotion with age. In cross-sectional studies of emotion processing and automatic regulation, amygdala reactivity to negative faces and images decreases with age [21,33–36], and is accompanied by greater structural and functional connectivity between the amygdala and mPFC/rACC [25,33,34,36]. In turn, amygdala-mPFC connectivity appears to partly mediate age-related decreases in normative anxiety [33].…”

The psychobiology of emotional development: The case for examining sociocultural processes

“…Recent work examining emotional changes during development complements these findings by specifically addressing whether age predicts changes in the way children respond to both negative affective and neutral stimuli (Silvers et al, , ). Focusing on the amygdala, implicated in the detection and responding to motivationally salient stimuli such as threats (Monk et al, ), this work documents that youth exhibit heightened emotion reactivity and bilateral amygdala recruitment not only to aversive but also to neutral stimuli, relative to adults.…”

“…Thus, it appears that the amygdala, together with the posterior portion of the insular cortex (Decety & Michalska, ; Decety, Michalska, & Kinzler, ), exerts a stronger influence on emotional processing during development than adulthood (Casey, Jones, & Hare, ), potentially leading children to view emotional and nonemotional stimuli through a valenced lens. Alternatively, age‐related changes in amygdala and insula reflect heightened attention and orientation toward social cues (Silvers et al, , ). Taken together, this work suggests that emotion reactivity attenuates with age and that aversive affective cues are interpreted in increasingly specialized and cognitive ways across development.…”