The contribution of childhood negative emotionality and cognitive control to anxiety-linked neural dysregulation of emotion in adolescence

Adolescence has been identified as a period of heightened emotional reactivity, which is reflected in greater activation in emotion-processing regions of the brain in adolescents relative to children and adults. While elevated emotional reactivity and poor emotion regulation are thought to contribute to the rise in rates of internalizing psychopathology, including anxiety, during adolescence, little research has examined factors predicting individual differences in the neural regulation of emotion that can explain why only a subset of adolescents develop anxiety. The present study examined the contribution of childhood negative emotionality (NE) and cognitive control (CC) to neural processing of emotion in adolescence. A sample of 44 girls (M age = 15.5; SD = .35) were selected from a longitudinal study that included self, parent, and teacher report of NE and CC between 2nd and 7th grades. Following 9th grade, girls completed an emotion regulation functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) task. We assessed neural dysregulation of emotion by examining functional connectivity between the amygdala and right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (rVLPFC) during emotion regulation and found that NE predicted a less mature pattern of positive amygdala-rVLPFC connectivity while CC predicted a more mature pattern of negative amygdala-rVLPFC connectivity. Additionally, we found an interaction between NE and CC, such that NE predicted emotion dysregulation only at low levels of CC. Neural dysregulation of emotion was associated with anxiety symptoms across the following nine months. These findings identify important individual differences in the development of emotion dysregulation that contribute to risk for anxiety in adolescence