Threat and Attention in Adolescent Anxiety

描述（由申请人提供）：本研究职业奖提交的目标是培训申请人使用神经成像技术来研究儿童精神病理学的注意力机制。申请人希望以她目前在气质研究和心理生理学方面的培训为基础，研究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力处理。通过该补助金提供的培训和指导将使申请人能够作为多学科研究团队的一部分工作，作为发展学家与精神病理学和成像专家之间的“桥梁”。这将为申请人的独立研究生涯做好准备。目前，人们对情感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，焦虑个体对潜在的威胁性刺激表现出注意偏向，这可能在焦虑状态的病因和维持中发挥作用。第二篇文献指出，性格倾向于害羞的儿童患焦虑症的风险增加，特别是社交恐惧症。在每一个文献中，工作都涉及杏仁核和眶额皮质（OFC）活动的变化，在形成注意力偏差和情感体验的个体差异。目前，在儿童和青少年中解决这些问题的工作很少。本研究将汇集不同的文献，以填补目前的知识空白，通过跟踪的神经基础的情感处理和注意力偏差在社交恐惧症和气质的风险青少年，使用面孔评级和注意力任务。这种培训补助金将利用一个混乱和危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，申请人将使用行为和神经影像学措施来检查，并可能帮助解释不同的发展结果，鉴于共同的风险因素。最近的研究表明，焦虑症在青少年人群中非常普遍，这些疾病的早期出现可能会影响成年后的功能。工作，如这项拟议的研究计划，将有助于努力治疗和预防青少年焦虑。

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.