An fMRI Study Examining Inhibition and Threat Vigilance Among Adolescents with Severe Worry

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Severe worry is a common psychiatric phenomenon that increases in prevalence during adolescence and affects multiple aspects of emotion and cognition, including executive function. Inhibition, one domain of executive function, is the ability to suppress particular thoughts or actions in the pursuit of goals and is thought to be mediated by coordinated activity across a network of prefrontal cortical regions. Individuals with severe worry are often hypervigilant for threat, a process which may compete for cognitive resources and contribute to deficits in inhibitory control; these mediating brain processes, however, are poorly understood. In this study, we have thus far examined a sample of 50 adolescents, ages 13 to 18, with varying degrees of worry, as measured by the Penn State Worry Questionnaire (PSWQ‐C) (Chorpita et al., 1997). We collect fMRI data from each participant, utilizing a mixed block/event‐related design and go/no‐go paradigm to examine behavioral inhibition under conditions of threat (i.e., unpredictable aversive sound) and non‐threat (i.e., no chance of aversive stimuli). Under conditions of threat, we hypothesize that individuals with severe worry will show less effective inhibitory control during no‐go trials and, therefore, demonstrate lower task performance when compared to low worriers. Task performance, or sensitivity index, is measured by the variable d’, which accounts for a participant's normalized task accuracy (hit rate) and false alarm rate. Additionally, we hypothesize that individuals with severe worry will demonstrate greater activation in brain regions related to inhibition and threat vigilance, including, the anterior cingulate, ventrolateral and dorsolateral prefrontal cortices, and limbic regions like the amygdala and insula. Preliminary results of these findings will be presented, as well as the role of these variables in the origination and maintenance of severe adolescent worry.This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2018 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.