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ABSTRACT: Prior neuroimaging studies support the hypothesis that anticipation, an important component of anxiety, may be mediated by activation within the insular and medial prefrontal cortices including the anterior cingulate cortex. However, there is an insufficient understanding of how affective anticipation differs across anxiety groups in emotional brain loci and networks. We examined 14 anxiety positive (AP) and 14 anxiety normative (AN) individuals completing an affective picture anticipation task during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Brain activation was examined across groups for cued anticipation (to aversive or pleasant stimuli). Both groups showed greater activation in the bilateral anterior insula during cued differential anticipation (i.e., aversive vs. pleasant), and activation on the right was significantly higher in AP compared to AN subjects. Functional connectivity showed that the left anterior insula was involved in a similar network during pleasant anticipation in both groups. The left anterior insula during aversive and the right anterior insula during all anticipation conditions coactivated with a cortical network consisting of frontal and parietal lobes in the AP group to a greater degree. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that anxiety is related to greater anticipatory reactivity in the brain and that there may be functional asymmetries in the brain that interact with psychiatric traits.
Human Brain Mapping 12/2010; 32(11):1836-46. · 5.88 Impact Factor
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ABSTRACT: Resilience, i.e., the ability to cope with stress and adversity, relies heavily on judging adaptively complex situations. Judging facial emotions is a complex process of daily living that is important for evaluating the affective context of uncertain situations, which could be related to the individual's level of resilience. We used a novel experimental paradigm to test the hypothesis that highly resilient individuals show a judgment bias towards positive emotions.
65 non-treatment seeking subjects completed a forced emotional choice task when presented with neutral faces and faces morphed to display a range of emotional intensities across sadness, fear, and happiness.
Overall, neutral faces were judged more often to be sad or fearful than happy. Furthermore, high compared to low resilient individuals showed a bias towards happiness, particularly when judging neutral faces.
This is a cross-sectional study with a non-clinical sample.
These results support the hypothesis that resilient individuals show a bias towards positive emotions when faced with uncertain emotional expressions. This capacity may contribute to their ability to better cope with certain types of difficult situations, especially those that are interpersonal in nature.
Journal of affective disorders 11/2008; 114(1-3):286-93. · 3.76 Impact Factor
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ABSTRACT: The goal of this study was to develop an empirically derived classification system for selective mutism (SM) using parent-report measures of social anxiety, behavior problems, and communication delays. The sample consisted of parents of 130 children (ages 5-12) with SM. Results from latent profile analysis supported a 3-class solution made up of an anxious-mildly oppositional group, an anxious-communication delayed group, and an exclusively anxious group. Follow-up tests indicated significant group differences on measures of SM symptom severity, externalizing problems, and expressive/receptive language abilities. These results suggest that, although social anxiety is typically a prominent feature of SM, children with the disorder are also likely to present with communication delays and/or mild behavior problems.
Journal of Clinical Child & Adolescent Psychology 11/2008; 37(4):770-84. · 1.92 Impact Factor
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ABSTRACT: To evaluate the factor structure, reliability, and validity of the 17-item Selective Mutism Questionnaire (SMQ).
Diagnostic interviews were administered via telephone to 102 parents of children identified with selective mutism (SM) and 43 parents of children without SM from varying U.S. geographic regions. Children were between the ages of 3 and 11 inclusive and comprised 58% girls and 42% boys. SM diagnoses were determined using the Anxiety Disorders Interview Schedule for Children-Parent Version; SM severity was assessed using the 17-item SMQ; and behavioral and affective symptoms were assessed using the Child Behavior Checklist. An exploratory factor analysis was conducted to investigate the dimensionality of the SMQ and a modified parallel analysis procedure was used to confirm exploratory factor analysis results. Internal consistency, construct validity, and incremental validity were also examined.
The exploratory factor analysis yielded a 13-item solution consisting of three factors: social situations outside of school, school situations, and home and family situations. Internal consistency of SMQ factors and total scale ranged from moderate to high. Convergent and incremental validity was also well supported.
Measure structure findings are consistent with the three-factor solution found in a previous psychometric evaluation of the SMQ. Results also suggest that the SMQ provides useful and unique information in the prediction of SM phenomena beyond other child anxiety measures.
Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 09/2008; 47(10):1197-1204. · 4.98 Impact Factor
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ABSTRACT: The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is critically involved not only in affective and anxiety processing, but also in error and conflict monitoring. To investigate how anxiety interacts with processing affective ambiguity, 15 anxious and 15 nonanxious individuals were scanned while performing a validated affective appraisal task, in which the fraction of faces of a particular affect or gender was parametrically controlled to provide various levels of ambiguity. The anxious group showed less ventral and greater dorsal ACC activation during ambiguous affective relative to ambiguous gender stimuli. For anxious individuals, dorsal ACC activation was related to a more biased response. Collectively, these data indicate that anxious individuals activate the dorsal and ventral components of the ACC differently during affective appraisal.
Neuroreport 08/2008; 19(10):1033-7. · 1.66 Impact Factor
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ABSTRACT: To examine the history of lifetime psychiatric disorders in the parents of children with selective mutism (SM) compared to parents of children in a control group.
Seventy parent dyads (n = 140) of children with lifetime SM and 31 parent dyads (n = 62) of children without SM were interviewed with the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV (IV and II) anxiety disorders, mood disorders, avoidant personality disorder, and schizoid personality disorder modules via telephone. Interviewers were blind to proband status. The NEO Personality Inventory was also administered.
Lifetime generalized social phobia was present in 37.0% of SM parents compared to 14.1% of control parents (chi2 = 10.98; p < .001; odds ratio 3.6, 95% confidence interval 1.6-7.9). Avoidant personality disorder was present in 17.5% of the SM parents compared to 4.7% of control parents (chi2 = 6.18; p < .05; odds ratio 4.3, 95% confidence interval 1.3-14.9). The proportion of parents with other psychiatric disorders was not different between groups. SM parents had higher neuroticism and lower openness scores on the NEO Personality Inventory than control parents.
These results support earlier uncontrolled findings of a familial relationship between generalized social phobia and SM.
Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry 12/2007; 46(11):1464-72. · 6.44 Impact Factor
