Neonatal predictors of contextualized emotion processing and risk for anxiety

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PROJECT SUMMARY Depression and anxiety are associated with overlapping dysfunctions in emotion processing, but the etiology is not well understood. Individual differences during infancy in negative temperament—a global measure of a child’s emotional reactivity and regulation tendencies—are associated with increased risk for depression and anxiety. Thus, the emotional dysfunction linked to depression and anxiety appears to begin during early infancy, yet the associated developmental neurobiology is poorly understood. A central barrier to unlocking the developmental neurobiology of emotion dysfunction is we do not know how variation in brain function at birth relates to emotion processing later in infancy, and whether this relation depends on infant temperament. Contextualized emotion processing—processing emotions in the real-world, with competing stimuli and full narrative context—is complex and includes: 1) detection of and attention towards salient stimuli; 2) interpretation and contextualization of this information; and 3) making a behavioral response. Depression and anxiety have been associated with dysfunctions at all three stages, and emerging evidence suggesting that some of these dysfunctions are present at birth. Recent work has found that the variation in newborn brain activation during saliency processing—the first stage of emotion processing—is associated with risk for anxiety. While this links early variation in saliency processing to risk trajectories for anxiety and depression, the developmental sequence is unknown. This study is therefore designed to identify how neonatal brain function is associated with contextualized emotion processing during infancy. This project will add an additional measure to the ongoing Neonatal Predictors of Anxiety Disorders Study (N-PAD; R01MH122389 PI: Sylvester, sponsor), a longitudinal study of mothers and infants. This current grant will substantially increase the impact of the parent grant by adding a video-watching eye-tracking task to the 24-month assessment, allowing us to measure attention to contextualized emotional stimuli. Our central hypothesis is that neonatal activation to salient stimuli (measured with fMRI) predicts attention to contextualized emotional stimuli during infancy (measured with eye tracking), and this relation is strengthened in infants with negative temperaments. Results will provide important insights to how internalizing symptoms emerge across early development. Through this project, the candidate will develop critical expertise in infant neural and behavioral assessments.