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Schematic presentation of anxiety-related functional systems and brain structures. The arrows indicate the neural projections between two brain regions. The pathological interactions of the six critical regions in the anxiety network bring about functional abnormality for patients with anxiety disorders. Amyg, Amygdala; BNST, Bed nucleus of the stria terminalis; Hipp, Hippocampus; Hyp, Hypothalamus; PFC, Prefrontal cortex; Str, Striatum.
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Adolescence is the peak period for the incidence of anxiety disorders. Recent findings have revealed the immaturity of neural networks underlying emotional regulation in this population. Brain vulnerability to anxiety in adolescence is related to the unsynchronised development of anxiety-relevant brain functional systems. However, our current knowl...
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Context 1
... on the mentioned associations, we assume that psychopathological symptoms of anxiety disorders in adolescence may be underlain with abnormalities in brain structures relevant to cognitive control, fear conditioning, uncertainty anticipation, motivational processing and stress regulation. Figure 1 summarises previous findings regarding the deficits of neural networks underlying anxiety disorders, characterised by the five components. We will further review the findings relevant to these components in the following subsections. ...
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Citations
... Moreover, anxiety is also one of the biggest causes of the burden of illness and disability experienced by adolescents . The anxiety experienced by adolescents occurs because the brain tissue that supports the function of adolescents' emotional regulation systems is not yet mature (Xie et al., 2021). ...
Adolescents are a group of individuals who are vulnerable to experiencing anxiety due to various factors that influence them. Anxiety that occurs in adolescents has several negative impacts on physique, psychology, and self-development of adolescents. If this anxiety is not overcome, it will evoke other symptoms and disorders that are more serious. Because of many negative impacts that arise when adolescents experience anxiety, an intervention is needed to overcome it, one of which can be done with mindfulness. This research uses a systematic literature review method using Publish or Perish software to collect articles from several sources such as Google Scholar, Research Gate, SINTA, DOAJ and Scopus. The keywords used are “mindfulness”, “anxiety”, “kecemasan”, “remaja”, “adolescents” and “teenage”. Based on these keywords, more than 500 articles published in 2019-2024 were found. Next, the researcher used 16 articles that were closely related to this research with a total of samples of 6.034. The research results show that mindfulness has proven effective in overcoming adolescents’ anxiety and there is a negative relationship between mindfulness and anxiety that adolescents who have high mindfulness will have low anxiety and vice versa. There are several programs of mindfulness intervention that can be carried out by adolescents, ranging from formal to informal practices that can be practiced when doing daily activities according to needs, situations and conditions.
... 31 Within this study, we identified greater anxiety-like behavior in adolescents, when compared to adults. As adolescence encompasses a sensitive period of development for the microbiome, 28 as well as the PFC, amygdala, and hypothalamus, 32 it is often associated with the onset of anxiety disorders, 33 which in turn, greatly impairs social functioning. 34 Conversely, the adult PFC and microbiome are considerably more stable, 35 which may explain our age-specific findings. ...
Although aging, repeat mild traumatic brain injury (RmTBI), and microbiome modifications independently change social behavior, there has been no investigation into their cumulative effects on social behavior and neuroplasticity within the prefrontal cortex. Therefore, we examined how microbiome depletion prior to RmTBI affected social behavior and neuroplasticity in adolescent and adult rats. Play, temperament analysis, elevated plus maze, and the hot/cold plate assessed socio-emotional function. Analyses of perineuronal nets (PNNs) and parvalbumin (PV) interneurons was completed. Social-emotional deficits were more pronounced in adults, with microbiome depletion attenuating social behavior deficits associated with RmTBI in both age groups. Microbiome depletion increased branch length and PNN arborization within the PFC but decreased the overall number of PNNs. Adults and males were more vulnerable to RmTBI. Interestingly, microbiome depletion may have attenuated the changes to neuroplasticity and subsequent social deficits, suggesting that the microbiome is a viable, but age-specific, target for RmTBI therapeutics.
... These everyday stressors can have severe negative impacts on their health, such as their mental well-being, brain development and academic performance (e.g. 4,10,12,14). Furthermore, different stressors can have a negative impact on the sleep and emotions of adolescents (13,15). ...
Background: The number of adolescents reporting that they are stressed has more than doubled among both boys and girls. Most focus is usually given to girls because they typically report not only higher levels of stress but also feel stressed more frequently than do boys. However, studies have confirmed that boys’ experience of stressors was the same, implying that the genders are equally prone to experiencing stress. Although male and female adolescents appear to experience stress in a similar way, how they cope with these stressors might differ. This study focuses on boys’ experiences of stress and how they cope with it.
Method: Eight focus groups were conducted with 39 adolescent boys aged 12–19 years enrolled in four schools in southern Sweden. The data was analysed inductively with conventional content analysis.
Results: The analysis resulted in three categories: Stress perception – time as a key factor, Identifying stressors and levels of stress, and Silent struggles and distractions. The boys had experienced considerable stress in their lives, despite their limited understanding of the concept. Their coping skills were limited to engaging in sports or distracting themselves from the stressors while social support from peers, school staff, or family was generally discarded.
Conclusions: Adolescent boys might need assistance in identifying stress and clearly voicing their specific concerns. They should also be provided with spaces that are free from stigmatization and judgement. Parents, teachers, and school nurses should be equipped with the appropriate tools and education on how to discuss stress and mental health in general with adolescent boys to prevent possible negative long-term consequences for both their physical and mental health.
... As depicted in Figs. 2-5, the multivariate neurostructural pattern behind these transdiagnostic subgroup classifications comprised fronto-parieto-limbic regions previously linked to anxiety and its associated demographic (that is, sex) and clinical (that is, severity or medication use) characteristics 6,9,[42][43][44][45][46] . Analysis https://doi.org/10.1038/s44220-023-00173-2 ...
Neuroanatomical findings on youth anxiety disorders are notoriously difficult to replicate, small in effect size and have limited clinical relevance. These concerns have prompted a paradigm shift toward highly powered (that is, big data) individual-level inferences, which are data driven, transdiagnostic and neurobiologically informed. Here we built and validated supervised neuroanatomical machine learning models for individual-level inferences, using a case–control design and the largest known neuroimaging database on youth anxiety disorders: the ENIGMA-Anxiety Consortium (N = 3,343; age = 10–25 years; global sites = 32). Modest, yet robust, brain- based classifications were achieved for specific anxiety disorders (panic disorder), but also transdiagnostically for all anxiety disorders when patients were subgrouped according to their sex, medication status and symptom severity (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve, 0.59–0.63). Classifications were driven by neuroanatomical features (cortical thickness, cortical surface area and subcortical volumes) in fronto- striato-limbic and temporoparietal regions. This benchmark study within a large, heterogeneous and multisite sample of youth with anxiety disorders reveals that only modest classification performances can be realistically achieved with machine learning using neuroanatomical data.
... Currently, anxiety is a prevalent mental disorder in the adolescent population that is going through a period of self-exploration and development, in which the transition between childhood and adulthood can lead to the development of anxiety disorders that are associated with a decrease in neuropsychological performance, attention and memory (19,20) . In adolescence, the pressures of the external environment, the hormonal changes of puberty, restructure the central neural system, which may trigger developmental abnormalities and may mediate the onset and progression of anxiety disorders (21) . In adolescents, the most common disorders are generalized anxiety disorders (GAD), separation anxiety and social anxiety disorder (SAD), seen by primary care professionals (PCP's) (21) . ...
... In adolescence, the pressures of the external environment, the hormonal changes of puberty, restructure the central neural system, which may trigger developmental abnormalities and may mediate the onset and progression of anxiety disorders (21) . In adolescents, the most common disorders are generalized anxiety disorders (GAD), separation anxiety and social anxiety disorder (SAD), seen by primary care professionals (PCP's) (21) . ...
... Information from approaches to brain functioning in adolescence suggests that the emotional control system tends to be underactive, the fear conditioning system is immature, and the reward and stress response systems are hypersensitive. Thus the functional connectivity between the striatum, the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex is strengthened, while the connectivity between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala weakens (21) . It was noted that adolescents have impaired planning skills, also indicating that all cognitive functions related to planning are impaired in the presence of fear (19) . ...
Enquadramento: Apesar das evidências científicas sobre os benefícios da atividade física (AF), as relações entre AF, Qualidade de vida (QV), depressão, ansiedade e stress em adolescentes ainda são inconclusivas. Objetivos: O objetivo deste estudo foi apresentar os benefícios da AF e sua relação com a QV, depressão, ansiedade e estresse em adolescentes. Métodos: Trata-se de uma revisão de literatura referente aos anos de 2013 a 2023, com artigos em inglês, espanhol e português, provenientes de três bases de dados: PubMed, SciELO e Web of Science. Resultados: foram selecionados 55 artigos para esta revisão, sendo 08 sobre QV, 14 sobre depressão, 05 sobre ansiedade, 05 sobre estresse e 23 sobre AF. Conclusão:Em geral, os adolescentes que praticam AF com intensidade moderada a vigorosa diariamente apresentam melhor qualidade de vida e apresentam menos sintomas de transtornos mentais como depressão, ansiedade e estresse. Neste estudo foram aplicados fatores relacionados à QV, ansiedade e estresse. Em relação à depressão e à AF, apesar do aumento de pesquisas, os estudos sobre esses temas relacionados aos adolescentes ainda são incipientes.
... The amygdala is a limbic structure deep within the temporal lobe that is involved in processing emotions and regulating behavioral and physiological responses to stressors (Kennedy et al., 2007;Bryant et al., 2008). Amygdala hyperactivity has been observed in several functional neuroimaging studies investigating anxiety disorders (Xie et al., 2021). Together with the hypothalamus and ventral striatum, the amygdala is implicated in mood disorders, including depression and anxiety, and in substance abuse (Medina et al., 2023). ...
Introduction:
There is an increasing evidence supporting the hypothesis that traumatic experiences during early developmental periods might be associated with psychopathology later in life. Maternal deprivation (MD) in rodents has been proposed as an animal model for certain aspects of neuropsychiatric disorders.
Methods:
To determine whether early-life stress leads to changes in GABAergic, inhibitory interneurons in the limbic system structures, specifically the amygdala and nucleus accumbens, 9-day-old Wistar rats were exposed to a 24 h MD. On postnatal day 60 (P60), the rats were sacrificed for morphometric analysis and their brains were compared to the control group.
Results:
Results show that MD affect GABAergic interneurons, leading to the decrease in density and size of the calcium-binding proteins parvalbumin-, calbindin-, and calretinin-expressing interneurons in the amygdala and nucleus accumbens.
Discussion:
This study indicates that early stress in life leads to changes in the number and morphology of the GABAergic, inhibitory interneurons in the amygdala and nucleus accumbens, most probably due to the loss of neurons during postnatal development and it further contributes to understanding the effects of maternal deprivation on brain development.
... Evidence suggest that excessive video gaming, especially playing games that contain violence, is associated with an alteration in frontolimbic and subcortical regions of the brain that are connected to emotion regulation (60)(61)(62). This alteration occurred with responses to emotional stimuli that are exaggerated in the amygdala and known to be associated with symptoms of anxiety and depression (63)(64)(65). ...
Background
Evidence examining the longitudinal associations between different types of screen behaviours and mental health among adolescents is limited. The present study examined the association between five types of screen behaviours and symptoms of anxiety and depression one year later. This study also assessed how changes in screen time were associated with changes in anxiety and depressive symptoms and whether the observed relationships were moderated by sex.
Methods
Longitudinal data of 17,174 students in grades 9–12 (53.5% females; mean age: 15.1 ± 0.9 years) attending high schools in Canada from two waves (year 6: 2017/18, year 7: 2018/19) of the COMPASS study were analyzed. Leisure screen time and mental health measures were self-reported. To test if the associations between screen time and anxiety, and depression vary by sex, two-way interactions were examined for sex. Analyses accounted for school clustering, race/ethnicity, sex, age, income, body mass index z-score, and previous year anxiety and depression symptoms.
Results
There were significant longitudinal associations between time spent on each type of screen and subsequent anxiety and depression symptoms. The strength of the associations varied by type of screen behaviour. Interaction analysis indicated a sex difference for television viewing and anxiety and depression symptoms, and internet surfing and anxiety symptoms. A dose-response relationship was observed between phone talking and anxiety symptoms. Beta estimates indicated that an increase in screen duration was associated with a further increase in anxiety and depression symptoms.
Conclusion
Higher screen time was longitudinally associated with higher anxiety and depression symptoms at one-year follow-up in adolescents. Time-change associations between screen usage and depressive and anxiety symptoms were observed. Also, associations differed based on sex and screen type, whereby greater increases in screen use predicted greater emotional distress. Findings from this prospective analysis suggest that screen time is an important determinant of anxiety and depressive symptoms among adolescents. Future studies are recommended to help inform programs promoting screen time reduction with a goal to enhance adolescents’ mental health.
... The current findings indicate that increased perceived threat can be transmitted indirectly by peers. At the same time, children in middle childhood and early adolescence have underdeveloped cognitive control (for a review see Xie et al., 2021), and the combination of these factors may explain trajectories of increasing anxiety across this age range. Recent models (see Carlton et al., 2020) suggest negative social experiences may modify the reward value of social experiences; that is, immature emotion systems may develop dopamine-related motivational deficits for social reward, "down-rating" social experiences that have earned negative associations. ...
Two experiments investigated perceived and physiological changes in anxiety in children (7–11 years; N = 222; 98 female) in a performance situation after they observed another child in a similar situation with a negative or neutral outcome. The sample's London, United Kingdom, school catchment areas ranged from low to high socioeconomic statuses with 31% to 49% of children from ethnic minority backgrounds. In Study 1, participants watched one of two films of a child playing a simple musical instrument (a kazoo). In one film, an audience of peers responds negatively to the performance. In the other film, the audience response was neutral. Participants were then filmed playing the instrument themselves and measures of perceived and actual heart rate were taken along with individual differences in trait social anxiety, anxiety sensitivity, and effortful control. To better understand findings from Study 1, Study 2 replicated Study 1 but added a manipulation check and measures of effortful control and self-reported anxiety. Multiple regression analyses found watching a negative performance film, compared with a neutral one, was associated with a blunted heart rate response for children with low effortful control (Study 1 and 2). These findings suggest that children who are low in effortful control may disengage during performance tasks if the situation's social threat is elevated. Hierarchical regression analyses found that, compared to the neutral film, the negative performance film elevated children's self-report anxiety (Study 2). Overall, the findings indicated that anxiety in performance situations can be elevated after observing peers’ negative experiences.
... First, higher anxiety was associated with higher amygdala activation in younger but not older adults. Such finding in young adults has been consistently described across functional studies in both adolescents (33)(34)(35) and younger adults (35,36) with anxiety disorders. Anxiety disorders have been typically associated with dysregulation, particularly through an over-activation, of the amygdala in response to the presentation of emotional stimuli, compared to individuals with low anxiety symptoms [see metaanalysis by Etkin and Wager (20)]. ...
... First, higher anxiety was associated with higher amygdala activation in younger but not older adults. Such finding in young adults has been consistently described across functional studies in both adolescents (33)(34)(35) and younger adults (35,36) with anxiety disorders. Anxiety disorders have been typically associated with dysregulation, particularly through an over-activation, of the amygdala in response to the presentation of emotional stimuli, compared to individuals with low anxiety symptoms [see metaanalysis by Etkin and Wager (20)]. ...
Introduction
Healthy aging is typically associated with cognitive decline and lower negative affect. Previous studies have reported a significant and opposite role of the amygdala in relation to cognitive and affective processing in early adulthood. However, it remains unclear how aging impacts such relationships.
Methods
Seventy-seven healthy participants including 40 young (mean age = 26.1 years) and 37 older (mean age = 61.8 years) adults completed a functional MRI Affective Stroop (AS) paradigm, a cognitive battery, and the state-trait anxiety inventory. The AS fMRI paradigm included “task trials,” where participants saw a positively, negatively or neutrally valenced distractor image, followed by a numerical display, followed by another distractor image. We extracted signal in both amygdalas during the AS Task and compared it across all conditions and age group. We further conducted moderation analyses to investigate the impact of aging on the relationship between amygdala activation and anxiety or cognitive variables, respectively.
Results
At the behavioral level, older participants showed lower trait anxiety than the younger adults (p = 0.002). While overall slower during the AS task, older adults achieved comparable accuracy during the AS task, relative to the younger adults. At the brain level, we revealed a significant interaction between age group and trial types in amygdala activation (F = 4.9, p = 0.03), with the older group showing stronger activation during the most complex trials compared to the passive view trials. We further found that age significantly modulated the relationship between anxiety and the left amygdala activation during negative stimuli, where the younger adults showed a positive association while the older adults showed a negative association. Age also significantly modulated the relationship between verbal fluency and left amygdala activation during incongruent versus view trials, with the younger adults showing a negative association and the older adults showing a positive association.
Discussion
The current study suggests that the role of the amygdala on both emotional processing and cognitive traits changes between early and late adulthood.
... From childhood to adulthood, brain structures and functions undergo a dramatic change (Konrad et al., 2013), which represents the plasticity and consolidation of neural circuits underlying social-affective experience (Haller et al., 2015). Our previous review has highlighted that there are specific characteristics of the neural circuitry in adolescents with anxiety disorders compared to those in adult patients (Xie et al., 2021). For example, in response to unexpected positive feedback, adults with social anxiety disorders showed more prefrontal-striatal functional connectivity than healthy controls (Manning et al., 2015), but this functional connectivity appeared to be reduced in adolescents with social anxiety (Jarcho et al., 2015). ...
Background:
Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is a prevalent and impairing mental disorder among children and adolescents. The bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST) plays a critical role in anxiety disorders, including valence surveillance and hypervigilance for potential threats. However, the role of BNST and its related functional network in children and adolescents with SAD has not been fully investigated. This study examined the aberration of BNST's functional connectivity and its age dependence in adolescents with SAD.
Methods:
Using a sample of 75 SAD patients and 75 healthy controls (HCs) children aged 9-18 years old, we delineated the group-by-age interaction of BNST-seeded functional connectivity (FC) during resting state and movie-watching. The relationships between BNST-seeded FC and clinical scores were also examined.
Results:
During movie viewing, the FC between the right BNST and the left amygdala, bilateral posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), bilateral superior temporal cortex, and right pericalcarine cortex showed a diagnostic group-by-age interaction. Compared to HCs, SAD patients showed a significant enhancement of the above FC at younger ages. Meanwhile, they showed an age-dependent decrease in FC between the right BNST and left amygdala. Furthermore, for SAD patients, FC between the right BNST and left amygdala during movie viewing was positively correlated with separation anxiety scores.
Conclusions:
The right BNST plays an essential role in the aberrant brain functioning in children and adolescents with SAD. The atypicality of BNST's FC has remarkable age dependence in SAD, suggesting an association of SAD with neurodevelopmental traits.
