Neurobehavioral Bases of Emotion Regulation and Dysregulation in Adolescence

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This Center seeks support for a major program of highly interdisciplinary research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that uses an affective neuroscience perspective to further our understanding of the underlying neural and behavioral bases of risk for anxiety and mood disorders (internalizing disorders), with a specific focus on the adolescent period. Adolescence is a period of extraordinarily increased risk for these disorders and it is also a period during which dramatic maturational and experience-induced alterations in brain function and structure take place. Moreover, epidemiological evidence indicates a 2-3 fold increased risk in adulthood for these disorders if an individual had a diagnosis as an adolescent. Through a highly integrated and collaborative program of research in non-human primates and humans that involves five PI's all on the faculty at UW-Madison, this Center will produce novel new data over the next five years on the brain mechanisms and behavioral, endocrine and autonomic correlates of individual differences in emotion regulation and emotional reactivity. A major focus will be on early life predictors of adolescent brain circuits that underlie the regulation of emotion and abnormalities in these circuits in individuals vulnerable to internalizing disorders. The research strategies will also permit the examination of relations between early diatheses and later vulnerability in adolescence since longitudinal data are available in both human cohorts. In the non-human cohort, an explicit manipulation of early stress will be performed. The Center will also provide new strategies for parsing the heterogeneity of anxiety and mood disorders using profiles of brain function and structure. Each of the PIs involved in this Center have a long history of collaboration. There are many two, three and four way collaborations among the PIs. All have published with at least one other PI and many have published with many of the Center PIs. Each of the projects involves the collaborative involvement of all of the PIs. This overall program of work is critically dependent upon this entire team and the scope of the work and the multiple levels of analysis would only be possible within a Center. This team is highly experienced, has a demonstrated record of working well together, has been extraordinarily productive in the past, and promises to produce novel insights about the neural and behavioral bases of adolescent internalizing disorders that will directly inform diagnosis and treatment.