UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT CHICAGO
Department of Psychiatry
Fifth Annual Research Forum – Extravaganza 2014
POSTER TITLE
Effects of Depressive Symptoms and Developmental Changes on Electrocortical
Reactivity to Emotional Faces in Youth Anxiety Disorders
DISEASE/KEY
WORDS:
Anxiety, depression, development, event-related potentials
AUTHORS:
Autumn Kujawa, M.A.
K. Luan Phan, M.D.
MENTEE
CATEGORY:
Psychology Intern
RESEARCH MENTOR:
Luan Phan
BACKGROUND:
METHODS:
RESULTS:
There has been growing interest in identifying core neural dimensions that
contribute to mood and anxiety disorders across development. Despite high
comorbidity between depression and anxiety, these disorders may be
associated with relatively distinct patterns of emotional processing. For
example, anxiety has consistently been associated with attention biases
toward threatening faces, while depression has been linked with blunted
responding to emotional faces. Event-related potential (ERP) measures may
be useful biomarkers of internalizing disorders, as they are relatively
inexpensive and easy to administer across development. In particular, the late
positive potential (LPP) is an ERP component that reflects sustained
processing of emotional information and appears to be impaired in both
depression and anxiety. However, most of this work has focused on adults,
and has not systematically examined unique effects of depressive and anxiety
symptoms.
In the current study, we measured the LPP in response to emotional faces
(angry, fearful, happy) and shapes among a sample of youth (age 7-19) with
current anxiety disorders (n=54) and no history of psychopathology (n=38).
We evaluated group differences, as well as effects of self-reported depressive
symptoms and age on the LPP to emotional faces.
Youth with anxiety disorders exhibited enhanced LPPs to angry and fearful
faces compared to healthy controls, and higher depressive symptoms were
associated with reduced LPPs to angry faces across both groups. Older youth
exhibited smaller LPPs to all emotional faces.
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT CHICAGO
Department of Psychiatry
CONCLUSIONS:
Results suggest that anxiety disorders in youth are characterized by enhanced
attention towards and reactivity to social threat. Importantly, however,
depressive symptoms were associated with blunted reactivity to threatening
faces. Despite high comorbidity between these conditions, anxiety and
depressive symptoms appear to be associated with distinct effects on the LPP
in youth, raising the need for assessment and targeted intervention to
address core dimensions underlying symptoms. In addition, these results
highlight the importance of accounting for symptoms of depression and
anxiety, as well as developmental changes, when examining biomarkers.