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  • A-1210477 What is more contrary to hypothesis mean activity

    2018-11-14

    What is more, contrary to hypothesis (5), mean activity was also negatively correlated with trait anxiety in the superior PFC (Fig. 4, bottom right). So, trait anxiety was negatively correlated with prefrontal and positively with visual cortical activity. Consistently, in adolescents suffering from anxiety disorders, symptom severity was negatively correlated with prefrontal and positively with amygdala activity (Pine et al., 2008) and, during emotional processing, the superior PFC was inversely connected with the amygdala (Blair et al., 2007). The amygdala is proposed to assess the motivational relevance of stimuli and to evoke enhanced processing thereof in the visual A-1210477 (Lang and Bradley, 2010). Reduced prefrontal inhibition, and thus enhanced activity of the amygdala, may have evoked enhanced visual cortical activity during emotional processing. Therefore, the present inverse correlations may reflect reduced prefrontal inhibition of the amygdala in more anxious children. Finally, difference activity was reduced during more adaptive emotion regulation in the left dlPFC (Fig. 5, right). This fits with the assumption that this region mediates anger processing, which is reduced during down-regulation. A reduced differentiation of expressions in this region may indicate a more effective reduction of angry face processing during down-regulation in adaptively regulating children. However, the present correlations reflect difference activity across all instruction conditions, so adaptively regulating children might also show less difference activity in this region in general. Taken together, correlation analyses confirmed that neural activity is reduced with more adaptive day-to-day emotion regulation (regarding both mean and difference activity) and enhanced with increasing trait anxiety (regarding mean activity), in line with hypotheses (4) and (5). Trait anxiety was furthermore associated with reduced mean activity in the superior PFC, possibly indicating reduced prefrontal inhibition. Moreover, correlation analyses show an intriguing overlap with age-related changes, as visual cortical activity was reduced with both increasing age and better emotional adjustment. Given that emotion regulation and trait anxiety were uncorrelated with age and in light of the hypothesis that reduced visual cortical activity reflects neural maturation, the present results suggest that children who reported better emotional adjustment showed an age-independent advance in neural maturation. Specific methodical limitations are worth consideration. First, the minimum norm solution used here allows the localization of superficial cortical sources only, which is inferior to fMRI guided source localizations. However, MEG-based source localization offers a high time resolution and, with application of distributed source modeling, a fairly good assignment of LPP-related cortical sources to larger cortical structures, which allows filling the gap between existing fMRI (high spatial but minimal temporal resolution) and ERP findings without application of source modeling (high temporal but low spatial resolution). Compared to EEG, MEG source modeling is far less vulnerable to inaccurate estimates of geometry and conductivity properties of the head, which is – with respect to rapid age dependent changes of these – specifically relevant for studies with children (Lew et al., 2013). Last but not least, MEG is a completely non-invasive, non-radiative, silent and easily tolerated method with short set-up times and thus perfectly suited for the investigation of children. Nevertheless, the usage of realistic head models based on structural MRI scans could improve the quality of source localizations especially at regions such as the orbitofrontal cortex where a spherical shell model is a less good approximation of the human head compared to the fronto-parietal regions targeted here (Steinsträter et al., 2010). Finally, the experimental set-up deviates from prior studies in using emotional faces and a block design. This procedure reduces comparability with studies using emotional scenes. Moreover, imagination of the given situations across a whole block may have been challenging for children, which may have contributed to the fact that not all of the expected results were obtained. However, the experimental set-up was chosen as developmentally appropriate for the whole age range examined. Facial expressions, as compared to the commonly used emotional scenes, evoke less strong emotional responses (Britton et al., 2006), which makes them easily tolerable for children. Facial expressions are also less physically and semantically diverse than emotional scenes, providing good comparability across emotion categories and ages. Moreover, the present design allowed for the presentation of many stimuli within a short time, improving both tolerability and signal-to-noise-ratio.