A longitudinal study investigating trajectories of sensitivity to threat over time and their association with alpha asymmetry among children and adolescents

Exploring EEG resting state as a function of boredom proneness in pre-adolescents and adolescents

Boredom is a prominent experience commonly reported in school settings and associated with poor academic achievement. Little is known, however, about the age-related trajectory of boredom. Here we examined self-reported ratings of boredom in a cross-sectional sample of 8 to 15-year olds (n = 185) as a function of resting state EEG. Results indicated that reports of boredom in school rose as a function of age. Resting state EEG showed a decrease in theta power with age perhaps reflective of increased control. While no effects were evident in beta and alpha bands, we did observe an interaction between boredom and age for frontal asymmetry such that for those higher in boredom, the asymmetry increased with age. Finally, for theta to beta ratios there were main effects of age (i.e., a decrease in theta/beta ratio with age) and boredom such that those higher in boredom had higher theta/beta ratios over frontal and central brain areas. The results are discussed in the context of prior work on school-related boredom and provide several important avenues for further research.

Fearful temperament in middle childhood predicts adolescent attention bias and anxiety symptoms: The moderating role of frontal EEG asymmetry

The current study provided first analyses of the moderating effect of baseline-to-task frontal EEG asymmetry on the associations between 9-year fearful temperament and adolescent attention bias to threat as well as anxiety symptoms. Participants include a community sample of 122 children (60 boys, 62 girls; Mage = 14.66 years; Range = 11.82-18.13 years). Baseline-to-task frontal EEG asymmetry at age 9 moderated the relation between fearful temperament at age 9 and adolescent anxiety symptoms. Specifically, fearful temperament predicted adolescent anxiety symptoms when children showed greater right activation from baseline to an executive function task, but not greater left activation. Baseline-to-task frontal EEG asymmetry moderated the association between fearful temperament and sustained (i.e., stimulus onset asynchrony is 1250 ms) but not automatic attention bias (i.e., stimulus onset asynchrony is 500 ms). Children with greater left frontal activation from baseline to task more efficiently direct attention away from threat. Adolescent automatic attention bias to threat was related to concurrent anxiety symptoms. These findings illustrate the importance of considering frontal EEG asymmetry to shape how fearful children process threat and to influence their behavioral problems.

Individual differences in frontal alpha asymmetry moderate the relationship between acute stress responsivity and state and trait anxiety in adolescents

Stress is a risk factor in the development and maintenance of psychopathology, particularly anxiety. Despite theory suggesting differences in stress responsivity may explain heterogeneity in anxiety, findings remain contradictory. This may be due to failure to account for individuals' neurobiological states and outdated methodologic analyses which confound conceptually and biologically distinct stress response pathways. In 145 adolescents, this study examined whether individual differences in neural activation underlying motivational states, indexed by resting frontal alpha asymmetry (FAA) before and after the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST), moderate the relationship between stress responsivity (measured by cortisol) and anxiety. Adolescents with rightward FAA activation (indexed by changes in resting FAA pre-to-post TSST) and high trait anxiety showed blunted cortisol reactivities while those with leftward FAA activation and high state anxiety showed prolonged cortisol recoveries. Our work reveals individual differences in vulnerability to psychosocial stressors and is the first study to show that FAA activation moderates the relationships between anxiety and distinct phases of the stress response in adolescents.

Developmental differences in description-based versus experience-based decision making under risk in children

The willingness to take a risk is shaped by temperaments and cognitive abilities, both of which develop rapidly during childhood. In the adult developmental literature, a distinction is drawn between description-based tasks, which provide explicit choice-reward information, and experience-based tasks, which require decisions from past experience, each emphasizing different cognitive demands. Although developmental trends have been investigated for both types of decisions, few studies have compared description-based and experience-based decision making in the same sample of children. In the current study, children (N = 112; 5-9 years of age) completed both description-based and experience-based decision tasks tailored for use with young children. Child temperament was reported by the children's primary teacher. Behavioral measures suggested that the willingness to take a risk in a description-based task increased with age, whereas it decreased in an experience-based task. However, computational modeling alongside further inspection of the behavioral data suggested that these opposite developmental trends across the two types of tasks both were associated with related capacities: older (vs. younger) children's higher sensitivity to experienced losses and higher outcome sensitivity to described rewards and losses. From the temperamental characteristics, higher attentional focusing was linked with a higher learning rate on the experience-based task and a bias to accept gambles in the gain domain on the description-based task. Our findings demonstrate the importance of comparing children's behavior across qualitatively different tasks rather than studying a single behavior in isolation.