Background: Stressful events due to the coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic are likely to have profound effects on mental health, and validated methods for assessing these experiences and associations with psychopathology are needed. We developed the Pandemic Stress Questionnaire (PSQ) and tested its psychometric properties, characterized experiences in emerging adults, and examined associations with internalizing symptoms. Methods: Emerging adults (N = 450) completed the PSQ and measures of internalizing symptoms and perceived stress through an online platform in May 2020. One month later, 288 participants completed a follow-up questionnaire to assess reliability of the PSQ and longitudinal associations between stress and internalizing symptoms. Results: Results supported the validity/reliability of PSQ total scores and indicated that stressful events were highly prevalent in May, particularly among younger, female, and Black emerging adults. Symptoms of depression and anxiety were high overall, but decreased at the follow-up assessment. Pandemic-related stress was moderately associated with both depression and anxiety at each assessment, but baseline stress did not predict change in symptoms when controlling for baseline symptoms. Conclusions: Results provide empirical evidence that emerging adults are at high risk for depression and anxiety related to the psychosocial effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, and highlight specific types of experiences associated with greatest risk. Further, this study provides support for a questionnaire measure of experiences related to the COVID-19 pandemic that can be applied in future work to advance understanding of risk and resilience in response to stressful events.

Depression appears to be characterized by reduced neural reactivity to receipt of reward. Despite evidence of shared etiologies and high rates of comorbidity between depression and anxiety, this abnormality may be relatively specific to depression. However, it is unclear whether children at risk for depression also exhibit abnormal reward responding, and if so, whether risk for anxiety moderates this association. The feedback negativity (FN) is an event-related potential component sensitive to receipt of rewards versus losses that is reduced in depression. Using a large community sample (N=407) of 9-year old children who had never experienced a depressive episode, we examined whether histories of depression and anxiety in their parents were associated with the FN following monetary rewards and losses. Results indicated that maternal history of depression was associated with a blunted FN in offspring, but only when there was no maternal history of anxiety. In addition, greater severity of maternal depression was associated with greater blunting of the FN in children. No effects of paternal psychopathology were observed. Results suggest that blunted reactivity to rewards versus losses may be a vulnerability marker that is specific to pure depression, but is not evident when there is also familial risk for anxiety. In addition, these findings suggest that abnormal reward responding is evident as early as middle childhood, several years prior to the sharp increase in the prevalence of depression and rapid changes in neural reward circuitry in adolescence.

Background The late positive potential (LPP) is an event-related potential component that indexes selective attention toward motivationally salient information and is sensitive to emotional stimuli. Few studies have examined the LPP in children. Depression has been associated with reduced reactivity to negative and positive emotional stimuli, including reduced LPPs in response to emotional faces. The current study sought to identify the time course and scalp distribution of the LPP in response to emotional faces in young children and to determine whether reduced reactivity is observed among children at risk for depression. Methods Electrocortical reactivity to emotional faces was examined in a large sample of young children and as a function of maternal and paternal depression. Results In the overall sample, emotional faces were associated with increased positivities compared to neutral faces at occipital sites 200–600 ms after stimulus onset and at parietal sites 600–1,000 ms after stimulus onset. Children of mothers with a history of depressive disorders exhibited reduced differentiation in the early occipital LPP for emotional compared to neutral faces. Conclusions Results suggest that children as young as 6 years exhibit LPPs to emotional faces, and patterns of electrocortical reactivity to emotional stimuli may be associated with vulnerability to depressive disorders.

The current study examined behavioral measures and response-locked event-related brain potentials (ERPs) derived from a Go/No-Go task in a large (N = 328) sample of 5- to 7-year-olds in order to better understand the early development of response monitoring and the impact of child age and sex. In particular, the error-related negativity (ERN, defined on both error trials alone and the difference between error and correct trials, or ΔERN), correct response negativity (CRN), and error positivity (Pe) were examined. Overall, the ERN, CRN, and the Pe were spatially and temporally similar to those measured in adults and older children. Even within our narrow age range, older children were faster and more accurate; a more negative ΔERN and a more positive Pe were associated with: increasing age, increased accuracy, and faster reaction times on errors, suggesting these enhanced components reflected more efficient response monitoring of errors over development. Girls were slower and more accurate than boys, although both genders exhibited comparable ERPs. Younger children and girls were characterized by increased posterror slowing, although they did not demonstrate improved posterror accuracy. Posterror slowing was also related to a larger Pe and reduced posterror accuracy. Collectively, these data suggest that posterror slowing may be unrelated to cognitive control and may, like the Pe, reflect an orienting response to errors.

Attentional biases for negative stimuli have been observed in school-age and adolescent children of depressed mothers and may reflect a vulnerability to depression. The direction of these biases and whether they can be identified in early childhood remains unclear. The current study examined attentional biases in 5–7-year-old children of depressed and non-depressed mothers. Following a mood induction, children participated in a dot-probe task assessing biases for sad and happy faces. There was a significant interaction of group and sex: daughters of depressed mothers attended selectively to sad faces, while children of controls and sons of depressed mothers did not exhibit biases. No effects were found for happy stimuli. These findings suggest that attentional biases are discernible in early childhood and may be vulnerability markers for depression. The results also raise the possibility that sex differences in cognitive biases are evident before the emergence of sex differences in the prevalence of depression.

The ability to process and respond to emotional facial expressions is a critical skill for healthy social and emotional development. There has been growing interest in understanding the neural circuitry underlying development of emotional processing, with previous research implicating functional connectivity between amygdala and frontal regions. However, existing work has focused on threatening emotional faces, raising questions regarding the extent to which these developmental patterns are specific to threat or to emotional face processing more broadly. In the current study, we examined age-related changes in brain activity and amygdala functional connectivity during an fMRI emotional face matching task (including angry, fearful and happy faces) in 61 healthy subjects aged 7–25 years. We found age-related decreases in ventral medial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) activity in response to happy faces but not to angry or fearful faces, and an age-related change (shifting from positive to negative correlation) in amygdala-anterior cingulate cortex/medial prefrontal cortex (ACC/mPFC) functional connectivity to all emotional faces. Specifically, positive correlations between amygdala and ACC/mPFC in children changed to negative correlations in adults, which may suggest early emergence of bottom-up amygdala excitatory signaling to ACC/mPFC in children and later development of top-down inhibitory control of ACC/mPFC over amygdala in adults. Age-related changes in amygdala-ACC/mPFC connectivity did not vary for processing of different facial emotions, suggesting changes in amygdala-ACC/mPFC connectivity may underlie development of broad emotional processing, rather than threat-specific processing.

Peer relationships become a major concern in adolescence, yet event-related potential (ERP) measures of reactivity to social feedback in adolescence are limited. In this pilot study, we tested a novel task to elicit reactivity to social feedback in youth. Participants (10–15 years old; 57.9% male; N = 19) played a game that involved exchanging personal information with peers, voting to remove players from the game, and receiving rejection and acceptance feedback from peers. Results indicated that participants modified their voting behavior in response to peer feedback, and rejection feedback was associated with a negativity in the ERP wave compared to acceptance (i.e., the feedback negativity, FN). The FN predicted behavioral patterns, such that participants who showed greater neural reactivity to social feedback were less likely to reject co-players. Preliminary analyses suggest that the task may be a useful measure of individual differences: adolescents higher in social anxiety symptoms were less likely to reject peers and showed an enhanced FN to rejection vs. acceptance feedback, and higher depressive symptoms predicted an increased FN to rejection specifically. Results suggest that the FN elicited by social feedback may be a useful, economical neural measure of social processing across development and in clinical research.

Considering that anxiety disorders frequently begin before adulthood and often result in chronic impairment, it is important to characterize the developmental pathways leading to the onset of clinical anxiety. Identifying neural biomarkers that can predict the onset of anxiety in childhood may increase our understanding of the etiopathogenesis of anxiety, as well as inform intervention and prevention strategies. An event-related potential (ERP), the error-related negativity (ERN) has been proposed as a biomarker of risk for anxiety and has previously been associated with concurrent anxiety in both adults and children. However, no previous study has examined whether the ERN can predict the onset of anxiety disorders. In the current study, ERPs were recorded while 236 healthy children, approximately 6 years of age, performed a Go/No-Go task to measure the ERN. Three years later, children and parents came back to the lab and completed diagnostic interviews regarding anxiety disorder status. Results indicated that enhanced error-related brain activity at age 6 predicted the onset of new anxiety disorders by age 9, even when controlling for baseline anxiety symptoms and maternal history of anxiety. Considering the potential utility of identifying early biomarkers of risk, this is a novel and important extension of previous work.