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Attenuated neural reactivity to happy faces is associated with rule breaking and social problems in anxious youth

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Abstract

Pediatric anxiety is associated with comorbid externalizing behaviors and social problems, and these associations may be related to altered emotion processing. The late positive potential (LPP), an event-related potential component, is a neural marker of emotion processing, and there is evidence that anxious youth exhibits enhanced LPPs to threatening signals. It is unknown, however, if differences in the LPP are related to externalizing behaviors and social problems co-occurring with anxiety and if these associations are driven by altered processing of threatening (angry or fearful faces) or rewarding (happy faces) socio-emotional signals. Thus, in the present study, we examined, in a sample of 39 anxious youth, the association between LPPs, following socio-emotional signals and externalizing behaviors and social problems. Results indicated an association between attenuated LPPs in response to happy faces and greater rule-breaking and social problems. These findings suggest that differences in positive socio-emotional signal processing are related to heterogeneity in pediatric anxiety and that LPPs are a sensitive index of such heterogeneity.

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Notes

  1. The regression model was re-estimated without anxiety severity in the model, given that we did not observe meaningful bivariate correlation coefficients among anxiety severity and the other variables of interest. The results remained largely the same, for the omnibus model F(2, 38) = 5.554, p = 0.008, ηp2 = 0.226 and for LPPs predicting rule-breaking (p = 0.022, ηp2 = 0.13) and social problems (p = 0.003, ηp2 = 0.20).

  2. Independent samples t-tests indicated an age difference between the low and high social problems groups, with younger youth exhibiting more social problems (p < 0.001). Chi square tests indicated that social problems groups did not differ on gender (p = 0.07). Independent samples t-tests indicated that rule-breaking groups did not differ on age (p = 0.865) and chi square tests indicated that rule-breaking groups did not differ on gender (p = 0.62).

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Acknowledgments

This study was supported by the National Institutes of Health (R01MH086517 to KLP and CSM). AK is supported by a training grant from the National Institutes of Health (T32MH067631 to Mark Rasenick).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychiatry, University of Illinois at Chicago, 1747 W. Roosevelt Rd., Rm. 277, Chicago, IL, 60612, USA

    Nora Bunford, Autumn Kujawa & K. Luan Phan

  2. Department of Psychology, Ohio University, Athens, OH, 45701, USA

    Nora Bunford

  3. Department of Psychiatry, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, 48109, USA

    James E. Swain, Kate D. Fitzgerald & Christopher S. Monk

  4. Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, 48109, USA

    James E. Swain & Christopher S. Monk

  5. Departments of Psychology and Anatomy & Cell Biology, and Graduate Program in Neuroscience, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL, 6012, USA

    K. Luan Phan

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  1. Nora Bunford
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Correspondence to Nora Bunford.

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Bunford, N., Kujawa, A., Swain, J.E. et al. Attenuated neural reactivity to happy faces is associated with rule breaking and social problems in anxious youth. Eur Child Adolesc Psychiatry 26, 215–230 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00787-016-0883-9

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