Threat and Attention in Adolescent Anxiety

描述(由申请者提供)：本研究职业奖提交的目标是培训申请者使用神经成像技术来研究儿童精神病理学的注意机制。申请人希望在她目前在气质研究和心理生理学方面的培训的基础上，检查社交恐惧症青少年和有社交恐惧症风险的气质害羞青少年的情感和注意过程。通过这笔赠款提供的培训和指导将使申请者能够作为多学科研究团队的一部分工作，充当发展者和精神病病理学和成像方面的专家之间的“桥梁”。这将使申请者为独立的研究生涯做好准备。目前，人们对情感机制和注意机制之间的功能和结构关系非常感兴趣。越来越多的文献表明，焦虑个体表现出对潜在威胁刺激的注意偏向，这可能在焦虑状态的病因和维持中发挥作用。另一篇文献指出，性格倾向于害羞的儿童患焦虑症的风险更高，尤其是社交恐惧症。在每一篇文献中，工作都暗示了杏仁核和眶前叶皮质(OFC)活动的差异在形成注意偏差和情感体验方面的个体差异。目前在儿童和青少年中解决这些问题的工作很少。这项研究将汇集不同的文献，通过使用面孔评级和注意力任务，追踪社交恐惧症和气质高危青少年情感加工和注意偏差的神经基础，以填补目前的知识空白。这笔培训赠款将利用无序和有风险的受试者群体的存在，开始审查发展中的一个中心问题。也就是说，申请者将使用行为和神经成像测量来检查并可能帮助解释给定共同风险因素的不同发育结果。最近的研究表明，焦虑症在青少年人群中非常普遍，这些障碍的早期出现可能会影响成年后的功能。这项工作，如这项拟议的研究计划，将有助于治疗和预防青少年焦虑的尝试。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The goal of this Research Career Award submission is to train the applicant in the use of neuroimaging technology to study the attentional mechanisms that underlie psychopathology in children. The applicant would like to build on her current training in temperament research and psychophysiology to examine affective and attentional processing in socially phobic adolescents and temperamentally shy adolescents at risk for social phobia. The training and mentoring provided through this grant will allow the applicant to work as part of a multidisciplinary research team, acting as a "bridge" between developmentalists and experts in psychopathology and imaging. This will prepare the applicant for an independent research career. Currently, there is a great deal of interest in the functional and structural relations between affective and attentional mechanisms. A growing literature indicates that anxious individuals show an attentional bias for potentially threatening stimuli, which may play a role in the etiology and maintenance of anxious states. A second literature has noted that children temperamentally predisposed to shyness show an increased risk for anxiety disorders, particularly social phobia. In each literature, work has implicated variations in amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) activity in shaping individual differences in both attentional biases and affective experience. There is currently very little work addressing these issues in children and adolescents. This study will bring together disparate literatures to fill the current knowledge gap by tracing the neural underpinnings of affective processing and attentional bias in both socially phobic and temperamentally at-risk adolescents, using a face rating and attention task. This training grant would take advantage of the presence of both a disordered and at-risk subject population to begin to examine a central question in development. Namely, the applicant will use behavioral and neuroimaging measures to examine and perhaps help explain differing developmental outcomes given shared risk factors. Recent research has shown that anxiety disorders are very prevalent in adolescent populations and that the early appearance of these disorders can affect functioning into adulthood. Work, such as this proposed research program, will help contribute to attempts to treat and prevent anxiety in adolescents.