Bader Chaarani

Bader Chaarani
University of Vermont | UVM · Department of Psychiatry

Ph.D.

About

82
Publications
23,698
Reads
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Introduction
I'm a research professor at the University of Vermont since 2017, and a co-investigator in the ABCD study, the largest neuroimaging project in the US. My research mainly aims to identify neurobiological risk factors underlying substance use, behavior and mental health problems. My areas of expertise include analyzing large multimodal datasets using state-of-the-art techniques. Currently exploring how screen time in general and videogaming in particular are associated with neurocognition.
Additional affiliations
August 2017 - present
University of Vermont
Position
  • Professor (Assistant)
October 2014 - July 2017
University of Vermont
Position
  • Fellow
September 2013 - October 2013
Centre Hospitalier Universitaire d'Amiens
Position
  • Teaching

Publications

Publications (82)
Article
Full-text available
Research using the Stop Signal Task employing an adaptive algorithm to accommodate individual differences often report inferior performance on the task in individuals with ADHD, OCD, and substance use disorders compared to non‐clinical controls. Furthermore, individuals with deficits in inhibitory control tend to show reduced neural activity in key...
Article
Full-text available
Background: Studying the neural consequences of tobacco smoking during adolescence, including those associated with early light use, may inform the mechanisms that underlie the transition from initial use to nicotine dependence in adulthood. However, only a few studies in adolescents have appeared and those available include small samples. In addit...
Article
Objective Irritable mood, a common and impairing symptom in psychopathology, has been proposed to underlie the developmental link between oppositional problems in youth and depression in adulthood. Here, we examined the neural correlates of adolescent irritability in IMAGEN, a sample of 2024 14-year-adolescents from five European countries. Method...
Article
Full-text available
A full list of affiliations appears at the end of the paper. T he ABCD Study ® aims to characterize adolescent development and evaluate many influences that might shape developmental trajectories. While numerous factors are plausibly associated with neurodevelopment (for example, nutrition, sleep, exercise, head injuries and substance use), we have...
Article
Full-text available
Importance Although most research has linked video gaming to subsequent increases in aggressive behavior in children after accounting for prior aggression, findings have been divided with respect to video gaming’s association with cognitive skills. Objective To examine the association between video gaming and cognition in children using data from...
Article
Study Objectives Early exposure to mature content is linked to high-risk behaviors. This study aims to prospectively investigate how sleep and sensation-seeking behaviors influence the consumption of mature video games and R-rated movies in early adolescents. A secondary analysis examines the bidirectional relationships between sleep patterns and m...
Preprint
Full-text available
Neural variability, or variation in brain signals, facilitates dynamic brain responses to ongoing demands. This flexibility is important during development from childhood to young adulthood, a period characterized by rapid changes in experience. However, little is known about how variability in the engagement of recurring brain states changes durin...
Article
Importance: Alcohol misuse in adolescence is a leading cause of disability and mortality in youth and is associated with higher risk for alcohol use disorder. Brain mechanisms underlying risk of alcohol misuse may inform prevention and intervention efforts. Objective: To identify neuromarkers of alcohol misuse using a data-driven approach, with...
Article
Full-text available
Smoking of cigarettes among young adolescents is a pressing public health issue. However, the neural mechanisms underlying smoking initiation and sustenance during adolescence, especially the potential causal interactions between altered brain development and smoking behaviour, remain elusive. Here, using large longitudinal adolescence imaging gene...
Article
Purpose: In youth, gender nonconformity (GNC; gender expression that differs from stereotypes based on assigned sex at birth) is associated with a higher likelihood of peer and caregiver victimization and rejection. However, few studies have examined the relationship between GNC, overall family conflict, perceptions of school environment, and emot...
Article
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IntroductionStressful childhood experiences are associated with unique brain activity patterns during emotional processing. Specifically, pediatric stress is linked to activation in the insulae, superior temporal and parahippocampal gyri, and the amygdalae, as well as differential activation in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex when viewing emot...
Article
Conduct-related behavioral problems are among the most common psychiatric conditions diagnosed during adolescence. However, few studies have examined the association between conduct problems and cerebral cortical development. Herein, we characterize the association between age-related cerebral cortical change and conduct problems in a large longitu...
Article
Full-text available
The stop-signal task (SST) is one of the most common fMRI tasks of response inhibition, and its performance measure, the stop-signal reaction-time (SSRT), is broadly used as a measure of cognitive control processes. The neurobiology underlying individual or clinical differences in response inhibition remain unclear, consistent with the general patt...
Article
Full-text available
The neurobiological bases of the association between development and psychopathology remain poorly understood. Here, we identify a shared spatial pattern of cortical thickness (CT) in normative development and several psychiatric and neurological disorders. Principal component analysis (PCA) was applied to CT of 68 regions in the Desikan-Killiany a...
Article
Full-text available
This paper responds to a recent critique by Bissett and colleagues of the fMRI Stop task used in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development℠ Study (ABCD Study®). The critique focuses primarily on a task design feature related to race model assumptions (i.e., that the Go and Stop processes are fully independent). In response, we note that the race m...
Article
Full-text available
Mixed findings exist in studies comparing brain responses to reward in adolescents and adults. Here we examined the trajectories of brain response, functional connectivity and task-modulated network properties during reward processing with a large-sample longitudinal design. Participants from the IMAGEN study performed a Monetary Incentive Delay ta...
Article
Full-text available
The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study® is a 10-year longitudinal study of children recruited at ages 9 and 10. A battery of neuroimaging tasks are administered biennially to track neurodevelopment and identify individual differences in brain function. This study reports activation patterns from functional MRI (fMRI) tasks complete...
Article
Background The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development ™ Study (ABCD StudyⓇ) is an open-science, multi-site, prospective, longitudinal study following over 11,800 9- and 10-year-old youth into early adulthood. The ABCD Study aims to prospectively examine the impact of substance use (SU) on neurocognitive and health outcomes. Although SU initiation t...
Article
Full-text available
Importance Animal studies have shown that the adolescent brain is sensitive to disruptions in endocannabinoid signaling, resulting in altered neurodevelopment and lasting behavioral effects. However, few studies have investigated ties between cannabis use and adolescent brain development in humans. Objective To examine the degree to which magnetic...
Article
The current study quantified sex differences in psychopathology among 9 and 10-year-olds, examined sex differences among those with clinically elevated symptoms and investigated if puberty moderates the relationship between sex and psychopathology. Data were obtained from the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development (ABCD)® Study's NDA data relea...
Article
Importance Incidental findings (IFs) are unexpected abnormalities discovered during imaging and can range from normal anatomic variants to findings requiring urgent medical intervention. In the case of brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), reliable data about the prevalence and significance of IFs in the general population are limited, making it...
Article
Full-text available
Multimodal neuroimaging assessments were utilized to identify generalizable brain correlates of current body mass index (BMI) and predictors of pathological weight gain (i.e., beyond normative development) one year later. Multimodal data from children enrolled in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study® at 9-to-10-years-old, consisted of s...
Article
Exposure to maltreatment during childhood is associated with structural changes throughout the brain. However, the structural differences that are most strongly associated with maltreatment remain unclear given the limited number of whole-brain studies. The present study used machine learning to identify if and how brain structure distinguished you...
Article
Full-text available
Aim To examine individual variability between perceived physical features and hormones of pubertal maturation in 9–10-year-old children as a function of sociodemographic characteristics. Methods Cross-sectional metrics of puberty were utilized from the baseline assessment of the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study—a multi-site samp...
Article
Full-text available
Attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder is associated with numerous neurocognitive deficits, including poor working memory and difficulty inhibiting undesirable behaviors that cause academic and behavioral problems in children. Prior work has attempted to determine how these differences are instantiated in the structure and function of the brain,...
Article
Derailment of inhibitory control (IC) underlies numerous psychiatric and behavioral disorders, many of which emerge during adolescence. Identifying reliable predictive biomarkers that place the adolescents at elevated risk for future IC deficits can help guide early interventions, yet the scarcity of longitudinal research has hindered the progress....
Article
Despite its central role in revealing the neurobiological mechanisms of behavior, neuroimaging research faces the challenge of producing reliable biomarkers for cognitive processes and clinical outcomes. Statistically significant brain regions, identified by mass univariate statistical models commonly used in neuroimaging studies, explain minimal p...
Article
Full-text available
Chronic peer victimization has long-term impacts on mental health; however, the biological mediators of this adverse relationship are unknown. We sought to determine whether adolescent brain development is involved in mediating the effect of peer victimization on psychopathology. We included participants (n = 682) from the longitudinal IMAGEN study...
Article
Full-text available
RationaleThe amygdala is a key brain structure to study in relation to cannabis use as reflected by its high-density of cannabinoid receptors and functional reactivity to processes relevant to drug use. Previously, we identified a correlation between cannabis use in early adolescence and amygdala hyper-reactivity to angry faces (Spechler et al. 201...
Article
Objective: It is unclear whether deviations in brain and behavioral development, that may underpin elevated substance use during adolescence, are predispositions for or are consequences of substance use initiation. Here, we examine behavioral and neuroimaging indices at early and mid-adolescence in drug naïve youth to identify possible predisposin...
Preprint
Full-text available
Attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder is associated with numerous neurocognitive deficits including poor working memory and difficulty inhibiting undesirable behaviors that cause academic and behavioral problems in children. Prior work has attempted to determine how these differences are instantiated in the structure and function of the brain, b...
Preprint
This paper responds to a recent critique by Bissett and colleagues (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.08.084707v1) of the fMRI Stop task being used in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study. The critique focuses primarily on a design feature of the task that the authors contend might lead to a violation of race model...
Article
The default mode network (DMN) and dorsal attention network (DAN) demonstrate an intrinsic "anticorrelation" in healthy adults, which is thought to represent the functional segregation between internally and externally directed thought. Reduced segregation of these networks has been proposed as a mechanism for cognitive deficits that occurs in many...
Article
Full-text available
Background There are known associations between mental health symptoms and transgender identity among adults. Whether this relationship extends to early adolescents and to gender domains other than identity is unclear. This study measured dimensions of gender in a large, diverse, sample of youth, and examined associations between diverse gender exp...
Article
Significance The influence of socioeconomic status (SES) inequalities on brain and cognitive development is a hotly debated topic. However, previous studies have not considered that genetic factors overlap with SES. Here we show that SES and EduYears-PGS (a score from thousands of genetic markers for educational attainment) have independent associa...
Article
Importance Alcohol abuse correlates with gray matter development in adolescents, but the directionality of this association remains unknown. Objective To investigate the directionality of the association between gray matter development and increase in frequency of drunkenness among adolescents. Design, Setting, and Participants This cohort study...
Preprint
Full-text available
The default mode network (DMN) and dorsal attention network (DAN) demonstrate an intrinsic “anticorrelation” in healthy adults, which is thought to represent the functional segregation between internally and externally directed thought. Deficits in the segregation of these networks have been proposed as a mechanism for cognitive deficits that occur...
Article
Importance A total of 25.7 million children in the United States are classified as overweight or obese. Obesity is associated with deficits in executive function, which may contribute to poor dietary decision-making. Less is known about the associations between being overweight or obese and brain development. Objective To examine whether body mass...
Preprint
Full-text available
Genetic factors and socioeconomic (SES) inequalities play a large role in educational attainment, and both have been associated with variations in brain structure and cognition. However, genetics and SES are correlated, and no prior study has assessed their neural associations independently. Here we used polygenic score for educational attainment (...
Article
Full-text available
In structural neuroimaging studies, reduced cerebral cortical thickness in orbital and ventromedial prefrontal regions is frequently interpreted as reflecting an impaired ability to downregulate neuronal activity in the amygdalae. Unfortunately, little research has been conducted in order to test this conjecture. We examine the extent to which amyg...
Data
Scatter plot of quadratic association. Scatter plot depicting quadratic association between residualized average thickness of right vmPFC cluster (adjusted for age, total brain volume, sex, site, handedness, Performance IQ, Verbal IQ, SES and pubertal development) and angry minus neutral face contrast value (mean value for left and right amygdalae)...
Article
Few studies have investigated the link between putative biomarkers of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptomatology and genetic risk for ADHD. To address this, we investigate the degree to which ADHD symptomatology is associated with white matter microstructure and cerebral cortical thickness in a large population-based sample of a...
Article
Objective: To characterize the structural and functional neurobiology of a large group of adolescents exhibiting a behaviorally and emotionally dysregulated phenotype. Method: Adolescents aged 14 years from the IMAGEN study were investigated. Latent class analysis (LCA) on the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) was used to identify a...
Article
Full-text available
Rates of cannabis use among adolescents are high, and are increasing concurrent with changes in the legal status of marijuana and societal attitudes regarding its use. Recreational cannabis use is understudied, especially in the adolescent period when neural maturation may make users particularly vulnerable to the effects of Δ-9-tetrahydrocannabino...
Article
Objective:: Although lower brain volume has been routinely observed in individuals with substance dependence compared with nondependent control subjects, the brain regions exhibiting lower volume have not been consistent across studies. In addition, it is not clear whether a common set of regions are involved in substance dependence regardless of...
Article
Full-text available
Cannabis use initiated during adolescence might precipitate negative consequences in adulthood. Thus, predicting adolescent cannabis use prior to any exposure will inform the etiology of substance abuse by disentangling predictors from consequences of use. In this prediction study, data were drawn from the IMAGEN sample, a longitudinal study of ado...
Article
Introduction: Research on cigarette smokers suggests cognitive and behavioral impairments. However, much remains unclear how the functional neurobiology of smokers is influenced by nicotine state. Therefore, we sought to determine which state, be it acute nicotine abstinence or satiety, would yield the most robust differences compared to non-smoke...
Article
Full-text available
The ABCD study is recruiting and following the brain development and health of over 10,000 9-10 year olds through adolescence. The imaging component of the study was developed by the ABCD Data Analysis and Informatics Center (DAIC) and the ABCD Imaging Acquisition Workgroup. Imaging methods and assessments were selected, optimized and harmonized ac...
Article
Youths with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder symptomatology often exhibit residual inattention and/or hyperactivity in adulthood; however, this is not true for all individuals. We recently reported that dimensional, multi-informant ratings of hyperactive/inattentive symptoms are associated with ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) structu...
Article
Full-text available
Impulsivity, a multifaceted behavioral hallmark of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), strongly influences addiction vulnerability and other psychiatric disorders that incur enormous medical and societal burdens yet the neurobiological underpinnings linking impulsivity to disease remain poorly understood. Here we report the critical ro...
Chapter
This chapter focuses on inhibitory control, largely operationalised as response inhibition, and its contribution to substance abuse, and highlights results from two classic tasks of response inhibition: the stop-signal task, and the go/no-go task. It discusses the relationship between response inhibition and substance abuse disorders as studied wit...
Article
BACKGROUND: Neuroimaging studies of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) have most commonly reported volumetric abnormalities in the basal ganglia, cerebellum, and prefrontal cortices. Few studies have examined the relationship between ADHD symptomatology and brain structure in population-based samples. Herein, we investigate the relatio...
Chapter
Historically, neuroscientific research into addiction has emphasized affective and reinforcement mechanisms as the essential elements underlying the pursuit of drugs, their abuse, and difficulties associated with abstinence. However, research over the last decade or so has shown that cognitive control systems, associated largely but not exclusively...
Article
Full-text available
Background: Individual differences in impulsivity and early adversity are known to be strong predictors of adolescent antisocial behavior. However, the neurobiological bases of impulsivity and their relation to antisocial behavior and adversity are poorly understood. Methods: Impulsivity was estimated with a temporal discounting task. Voxel-base...
Article
Cannabis use in adolescence may be characterized by differences in the neural basis of affective processing. In this study, we used an fMRI affective face processing task to compare a large group (n = 70) of 14-year olds with a history of cannabis use to a group (n = 70) of never-using controls matched on numerous characteristics including IQ, SES,...
Article
Full-text available
Since the sample size of a typical neuroimaging study lacks sufficient statistical power to explore unknown genomic associations with brain phenotypes, several international genetic imaging consortia have been organized in recent years to pool data across sites. The challenges and achievements of these consortia are considered here with the goal of...