Developmental Changes in the Association Between Cognitive Control and Anxiety

Courtney A. Filippi,Ellen Leibenluft,Daniel S. Pine,Nathan A. Fox,Sonya V. Troller-Renfree,Sara Haas,Sanjana Ravi,Anni Subar

doi:10.1007/s10578-021-01150-5

Abstract

Anxiety has been associated with reliance on reactive (stimulus-driven/reflexive) control strategies in response to conflict. However, this conclusion rests primarily on indirect evidence. Few studies utilize tasks that dissociate the use of reactive (‘just in time’) vs. proactive (anticipatory/preparatory) cognitive control strategies in response to conflict, and none examine children diagnosed with anxiety. The current study utilizes the AX-CPT, which dissociates these two types of cognitive control, to examine cognitive control in youth (ages 8–18) with and without an anxiety diagnosis (n = 56). Results illustrate that planful behavior, consistent with using a proactive strategy, varies by both age and anxiety symptoms. Young children (ages 8–12 years) with high anxiety exhibit significantly less planful behavior than similarly-aged children with low anxiety. These findings highlight the importance of considering how maturation influences relations between anxiety and performance on cognitive-control tasks and have implications for understanding the pathophysiology of anxiety in children.

Highlights

Anxiety may impact one’s ability to control their behavior [1,2,3,4]
The current study reports the first data on AX-CPT performance in anxious and non-anxious children
Our findings suggest that these effects could be marked for young children with high anxiety

Summary

Introduction

Anxiety may impact one’s ability to control their behavior [1,2,3,4]. This could be due to differences in cognitive control abilities—anxious individuals exhibit worse working memory, inhibition, and shifting abilities when compared to non-anxious individuals [4]. Worse performance on cognitive control tasks has been thought to reflect anxious individuals’ greater reliance on reactive control [1, 2], i.e., control instantiated reflexively, ‘just in time’, or in response to a stimulus (e.g., finishing a class assignment as the teacher is collecting it). More research in this area is needed since relatively few studies on associations between cognitive control and anxiety utilize tasks that dissociate reactive and proactive control Differentiating these cognitive control strategies is critical for uncovering the precise nature of cognitive control impairments in anxiety.

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Conclusion