Attentional, temperamental, and physiological process underlying anxiety in preschoolers with ASD

患有自闭症谱系障碍 (ASD) 的学龄前儿童焦虑的注意力、气质和生理过程

• 批准号: 9217354
• 负责人: KATARZYNA CHAWARSKA
• 金额: $ 83.69万
• 依托单位: YALE UNIVERSITY
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2017
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2017-03-01 至 2022-01-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/9217354
• 关键词: 2 year old; 4 year old; Address; Affective; Age; Anger; Anxiety; Anxiety Disorders; Attention; Autistic Disorder; Behavioral; Categories; Child; Child Development; Childhood; Classification; Clinical; Clinical Markers; Comorbidity; Consequentialism; Data; Development; Developmental Delay Disorders; Diagnosis; Diagnostic; Emotional; Etiology; Evaluation; Eye; Face; Fright; Heterogeneity; Impairment; Individual; Intellectual functioning disability; Intervention; Investigation; Knowledge; Learning; Life; Longitudinal Studies; Maintenance; Maps; Measures; Mediation; Mediator of activation protein; Methods; Modeling; National Institute of Mental Health; Nature; Neurocognitive; Neurosciences; Nursery Schools; Outcome; Pathway interactions; Phenotype; Phenotypic Sex; Physiological; Physiological Processes; Play; Preventive treatment; Quality of life; Reaction Time; Research Domain Criteria; Risk; Risk Factors; Role; School-Age Population; Severities; Sex Distribution; Social Interaction; Stimulus; Strategic Planning; Subgroup; Symptoms; System; Temperament; Testing; Time; United States National Institutes of Health; Variant; Work; anxiety symptoms; attentional bias; autism spectrum disorder; base; biomarker identification; clinical phenotype; cognitive development; design; developmental disease; disability; early childhood; emotion regulation; in vivo; indexing; infancy; innovation; meetings; multidisciplinary; multimodality; negative affect; neurobehavioral; novel; relating to nervous system; response; screening; social; social anxiety; treatment response; vigilance

Project Summary Anxiety disorders are highly prevalent in childhood and are associated with substantial impairment and disability. Symptoms of anxiety are widespread in preschoolers with ASD, limiting their learning and social interaction opportunities above and beyond difficulties related to core autism symptoms. Our preliminary work suggests that temperamental precursors of anxiety are already elevated in the second year of life in ASD. However, knowledge about the mechanisms underlying the emergence of anxiety symptoms in ASD remains limited. This project will experimentally quantify attentional, affective, behavioral, physiological, and temperamental factors associated with anxiety in 4-year-olds with ASD (n=160), other developmental disorders and concerns (ATYP, n=80), and typical development (TYP, n=80). We will investigate the associations between affective attentional biases to threat (ABT) and emotional-regulatory functions as well as the hypothesized, but relatively unexplored, role of these features in emerging anxiety in ASD. ABT represents a rapid attentional response to threat that is evidenced by longer latencies required to decouple attention from threatening stimuli. ABT is among the best-replicated neurobehavioral markers of clinical and subclinical anxiety. Decreasing this bias lowers anxiety symptoms in school-age children, implicating ABT in maintenance of anxiety. Give that attentional system has been implicated in ASD, ABT offers an unexplored but highly innovative and generative framework for investigating mechanisms underlying the emergence of anxiety in very young children with ASD. The key questions in this proposal are: (1) Are children with ASD more biased toward or away from threat than other 4-year-olds? (2) Is ABT associated with anxiety severity in 4-year-olds with and without ASD? (3) What role do the facets of ABT play in the emergence of anxiety symptoms from 2 to 4 years? (4) Given the heterogeneity of anxiety expression in early childhood, can we identify homogeneous subgroups based on neurobehavioral and physiological measures across diagnostic categories that will inform about unique underlying mechanisms and novel treatment targets or strategies? To answer these questions, we will evaluate anxiety-related aspects of attention in response to threat using an eye-tracking attention disengagement task developed and tested in our lab. We will also examine in vivo reactivity to threat at affective, attentional, and physiological levels. Combining these multimodal indices of response to threat will allow for quantification of anxiety-related features in an unparalleled manner and evaluation of each feature's unique contributions to clinical phenotypes, at the time when anxiety symptoms first become apparent. By focusing our investigation on 4-year-olds we aim to identify, essential from a translational standpoint, the early “developmental tethers” that bias children's development toward maladaptive pathways. Furthermore, identifying subgroups based on neurocognitive attentional and physiological responses may contribute to the development of a neuroscience-based approach to classification of anxiety disorders in preschoolers.

项目概要 焦虑症在儿童时期非常普遍，并与严重的损害和 残疾。患有自闭症谱系障碍 (ASD) 的学龄前儿童普遍存在焦虑症状，限制了他们的学习和社交 超越与自闭症核心症状相关的困难的互动机会。我们的前期工作 表明焦虑的气质前兆在自闭症谱系障碍患者出生的第二年就已经升高。 然而，关于自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）焦虑症状出现的机制的了解仍然存在。 有限的。该项目将通过实验量化注意力、情感、行为、生理和 与 4 岁自闭症谱系障碍 (ASD) 儿童 (n=160) 和其他发育障碍患者的焦虑相关的气质因素 和关注点（ATYP，n=80），以及典型发展（TYP，n=80）。我们将调查协会 对威胁的情感注意偏差（ABT）和情绪调节功能之间以及 这些特征在自闭症谱系障碍中出现的焦虑中的作用是假设的，但相对尚未探索。 ABT代表的是 对威胁的快速注意力反应，这可以通过将注意力与威胁脱钩所需的较长延迟来证明 威胁性刺激。 ABT 是临床和亚临床复制性最好的神经行为标志物之一 焦虑。减少这种偏见可以降低学龄儿童的焦虑症状，这意味着 ABT 在维持中的作用 的焦虑。鉴于注意力系统与自闭症谱系障碍有关，ABT 提供了一种未经探索但高度有效的方法。 用于调查焦虑出现机制的创新和生成框架 患有自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）的幼儿。该提案的关键问题是：（1）患有自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）的儿童是否更有偏见？ 与其他 4 岁儿童相比，他们更倾向于还是更远离威胁？ (2) ABT与4岁儿童的焦虑严重程度相关吗 有和没有 ASD？ (3) ABT 的各个方面在 2 焦虑症状的出现中发挥什么作用 到4年？ (4)考虑到幼儿期焦虑表达的异质性，我们能否识别出同质的焦虑表达？ 基于跨诊断类别的神经行为和生理测量的亚组，这些亚组将提供信息 关于独特的潜在机制和新颖的治疗目标或策略？为了回答这些问题， 我们将使用眼球追踪注意力来评估应对威胁时注意力的焦虑相关方面 脱离任务是在我们的实验室开发和测试的。我们还将检查体内对威胁的反应性 情感、注意力和生理水平。结合这些威胁响应的多模式指数将 允许以无与伦比的方式量化与焦虑相关的特征并评估每个特征的 在焦虑症状首次显现时，对临床表型有独特的贡献。经过 我们的调查重点是 4 岁儿童，我们的目标是确定从转化的角度来看至关重要的早期儿童 “发展束缚”使儿童的发展偏向适应不良的道路。此外， 根据神经认知、注意力和生理反应识别亚组可能有助于 开发基于神经科学的学龄前儿童焦虑症分类方法。