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Previous studies examined the engagement of specific brain regions associated with attention orientation to angry/threatening faces. The current study used similar methods to document associations between attention bias and maltreatment in children. This sets the stage for studies examining relationships in children among perturbed brain function, psychopathology, attention bias, and maltreatment.

Social development has been the focus of a great deal of neuroscience based research over the past decade. In this review, we focus on providing a framework for understanding how changes in facets of social development may correspond with changes in brain function. We argue that (1) distinct phases of social behavior emerge based on whether the organizing social force is the mother, peer play, peer integration, or romantic intimacy; (2) each phase is marked by a high degree of affect-driven motivation that elicits a distinct response in subcortical structures; (3) activity generated by these structures interacts with circuits in prefrontal cortex that guide executive functions, and occipital and temporal lobe circuits, which generate specific sensory and perceptual social representations. We propose that the direction, magnitude and duration of interaction among these affective, executive, and perceptual systems may relate to distinct sensitive periods across development that contribute to establishing long-term patterns of brain function and behavior.

Objective To understand disorder-unique and common pathophysiology, studies in multiple patient groups with overlapping symptoms are needed. Deficits in emotion processing and hyperarousal symptoms are prominent features of bipolar disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and severe mood dysregulation. The authors compared amygdala response during emotional and nonemotional ratings of neutral faces in youths with these disorders as well as a group of healthy comparison youths. Method Blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) signal in the amygdala was examined in children with bipolar disorder (N=43), ADHD (N=18), and severe mood dysregulation (N=29) and healthy comparison subjects (N=37). During functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), participants attended to emotional and nonemotional aspects of neutral faces. Results While rating subjective fear of neutral faces, youths with ADHD demonstrated left amygdala hyperactivity relative to the other three groups, whereas youths with severe mood dysregulation demonstrated hypoactivity. Conclusions These findings support the role of unique neural correlates in face-emotion processing among youths with bipolar disorder, ADHD, and severe mood dysregulation.

Context Amygdala and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (vlPFC) dysfunction manifests in adolescents with anxiety disorders when they view negatively valenced stimuli in threatening contexts. Such fear-circuitry dysfunction may also manifest when anticipated social evaluation leads socially anxious adolescents to misperceive peers as threatening. Objective To determine whether photographs of negatively evaluated smiling peers viewed during anticipated social evaluation engage the amygdala and vlPFC differentially in adolescents with and without social anxiety. Design Case-control study. Setting Government clinical research institute. Participants Fourteen adolescents with anxiety disorders associated with marked concerns of social evaluation and 14 adolescents without a psychiatric diagnosis matched on sex, age, intelligence quotient, and socioeconomic status. Main Outcome Measures Blood oxygenation level–dependent signal measured with event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging. Before and during neuroimaging scans, participants anticipating social evaluation completed peer- and self-appraisals. Event-related analyses were tailored to participants’ ratings of specific peers. Results Participants classified 40 pictures of same-age peers as ones with whom they did or did not want to engage in a social interaction. Anxious adolescents showed greater amygdala activation than healthy adolescents when anticipating evaluation from peers previously rated as undesired for an interaction. Psychophysiological interaction connectivity analyses also revealed a significant positive association between amygdala and vlPFC activation in anxious vs healthy adolescents in response to these stimuli. Conclusions Anticipating social evaluation from negatively perceived peers modulates amygdala and vlPFC engagement differentially in anxious and healthy adolescents. Amygdala and vlPFC dysfunction manifests in adolescent anxiety disorders in specific contexts of anticipated peer evaluation.

Several lines of evidence implicate the amygdala in face-emotion processing, particularly for fearful facial expressions. Related findings suggest that face-emotion processing engages the amygdala within an interconnected circuitry that can be studied using a functional-connectivity approach. Past work also underscores important functional changes in the amygdala during development. Taken together, prior research on amygdala function and development reveals a need for more work examining developmental changes in the amygdala's response to fearful faces and in amygdala functional connectivity during face processing. The present study used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging to compare 31 adolescents (9-17 years old) and 30 adults (21-40 years old) on activation to fearful faces in the amygdala and other regions implicated in face processing. Moreover, these data were used to compare patterns of amygdala functional connectivity in adolescents and adults. During passive viewing, adolescents demonstrated greater amygdala and fusiform activation to fearful faces than did adults. Functional connectivity analysis revealed stronger connectivity between the amygdala and the hippocampus in adults than in adolescents. Within each group, variability in age did not correlate with amygdala response, and sex-related developmental differences in amygdala response were not found. Eye movement data collected outside of the magnetic resonance imaging scanner using the same task suggested that developmental differences in amygdala activation were not attributable to differences in eye-gaze patterns. Amygdala hyperactivation in response to fearful faces may explain increased vulnerability to affective disorders in adolescence; stronger amygdala-hippocampus connectivity in adults than adolescents may reflect maturation in learning or habituation to facial expressions.

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The temperamental style of behavioral inhibition has been characterized by exaggerated behavioral and neural responses to cues signaling threat. Virtually no work, however, has addressed whether behavioral inhibition may also confer heightened brain activation in response to positively valenced incentives. We used event-related functional MRI (fMRI) and a monetary incentive delay task to examine whether the neural response to incentives is also greater in adolescents characterized as behaviorally inhibited early in life compared with those characterized as non-inhibited. Whereas task performance did not differ between groups, fMRI revealed greater striatal activation to incentives in behaviorally inhibited adolescents than in non-inhibited adolescents. This was regardless of whether the incentive was an anticipated gain or loss. Alteration in neural systems underlying behavior modulated by both negative and positive contingencies may represent a correlate of behavioral inhibition that also underlies vulnerability to various forms of developmental psychopathology.