Abstract
ABSTRACT Developmental changes in the brain networks involved in emotion regulation are thought to contribute to vulnerability to mental health problems during adolescence. Executive control is often viewed as allowing top-down regulation of emotional responses. However, while associations between executive control and mental health are commonly observed in both clinical and non-clinical populations, the direction of these associations remains unclear. Low, or immature, cognitive control could limit emotion regulation. Reversely, high emotionality could impede cognitive functioning. The scarcity of longitudinal studies testing for bi-directional effects, particularly in adolescence, has made it difficult to draw conclusions. This study analysed data from 1,445 participants of a longitudinal cohort in a cross-lagged panel design to understand bi-directional longitudinal associations between executive function and emotional behaviours across adolescence. Executive function was assessed using experimental working memory and inhibitory control tasks, emotional behaviours through parental report of internalising and externalising behaviours. Cross-sectional associations were replicated. Controlling for cross-sectional associations, early executive functions were not found to predict later emotional behaviours. Instead, early emotional behaviours predicted later executive function, with the strongest link observed between early externalising and later working memory. These results suggest that emotional well-being may affect the maturation of executive function during adolescence.
Highlights
Many mental health conditions have an age of onset during adolescence (Giedd et al, 2008; Rapee et al, 2019), coinciding with substantial changes occurring in brain areas governing cognitive control and emotional reactivity (Crone & Dahl, 2012)
During adolescence there are structural (Gogtay et al, 2004; Mills et al, 2016; Zhou et al, 2015) and functional (Crone & Dahl, 2012) changes in the frontal-parietal executive networks, structural (Goddings et al, 2014) and functional (Hare et al, 2008) changes in subcortical areas processing emotional stimuli, as well as changes in patterns of connectivity between these networks during emotional regulation (Casey et al, 2019). These changes are thought to lead to increased emotional reactivity during adolescence (e.g. Hare et al, 2008), before the emergence of mature emotional regulation supported by topdown connectivity (i) within the prefrontal cortex and (ii) from the prefrontal cortex to the ventral striatum and amygdala (Casey et al, 2019)
The present study demonstrated that executive functions and internalising and externalising behaviours showed significant cross-sectional correlations during early adolescence, replicating previous findings
Summary
Many mental health conditions have an age of onset during adolescence (Giedd et al, 2008; Rapee et al, 2019), coinciding with substantial changes occurring in brain areas governing cognitive control and emotional reactivity (Crone & Dahl, 2012). For example the updating component of working memory associates more closely with obsessive-compulsive disorder than the other measures, inhibitory control more closely with behavioural disinhibition, and shifting with post-traumatic stress disorder (Snyder et al, 2015; Young et al, 2009) This has led to the proposal of both unity, represented by the “common EF” factor, and diversity, with evidence of unique variance in shifting and updating, and more mixed results of inhibition (Friedman & Miyake, 2017; Karr et al, 2018; Miyake & Friedman, 2012).
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