Abstract
Background
Psychiatric symptoms are commonly comorbid in childhood. The ability to disentangle
unique and shared correlates of comorbid symptoms facilitates personalized medicine.
Cognitive control is implicated broadly in psychopathology, including in pediatric
disorders characterized by anxiety and irritability. To disentangle cognitive control
correlates of anxiety versus irritability, the current study leveraged both cross-sectional
and longitudinal data from early childhood into adolescence.
Methods
For this study, 89 participants were recruited from a large longitudinal research
study on early-life temperament to investigate associations of developmental trajectories
of anxiety and irritability symptoms (from ages 2 to 15) as well as associations of
anxiety and irritability symptoms measured cross-sectionally at age 15 with neural
substrates of conflict and error processing assessed at age 15 using the flanker task.
Results
Results of whole-brain multivariate linear models revealed that anxiety at age 15
was uniquely associated with decreased neural response to conflict across multiple
regions implicated in attentional control and conflict adaptation. Conversely, irritability
at age 15 was uniquely associated with increased neural response to conflict in regions
implicated in response inhibition. Developmental trajectories of anxiety and irritability
interacted in relation to neural responses to both error and conflict.
Conclusions
Our findings suggest that neural correlates of conflict processing may relate uniquely
to anxiety and irritability. Continued cross-symptom research on the neural correlates
of cognitive control could stimulate advances in individualized treatment for anxiety
and irritability during child and adolescent development.
Keywords
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Article info
Publication history
Published online: March 27, 2022
Accepted:
March 15,
2022
Received in revised form:
March 14,
2022
Received:
November 23,
2021
Publication stage
In Press Journal Pre-ProofIdentification
Copyright
Published by Elsevier Inc on behalf of Society of Biological Psychiatry.
