Biased Attentional Processing for Negative Emotion and Youth Internalizing Psychopathology: The Role of Attentional Control Deficits

Biased attention for salient negative emotional stimuli is a proposed cognitive mechanism of internalizing disorders, namely depression and anxiety. Previous studies have demonstrated biases in bottom-up, stimulus-driven attentional systems, as well as top-down, goal-oriented attentional systems, in the context of negative emotion. However, the underlying cognitive mechanisms that drive these biases, such as attentional control deficits, are not well understood. Furthermore, given the high degree of conceptual and empirical overlap between depression and anxiety, it is unclear how biased attention might relate to constructs common across both disorders, such as general distress, versus what is specific to each disorder. The current study utilized an emotional adaptation of the Antisaccade Task with eye-tracking to precisely and accurately tease apart components of attentional control, including inhibition and shifting, in the context of social threat (i.e., anger) in a community sample of youth and young adults (ages 13-22; N = 80). Findings show that difficulty inhibiting attention for social threat is associated with symptoms of general distress, which are shared across depression and anxiety, as well as symptoms of physiological hyperarousal that are specific to anxiety. Overall, findings further clarify what specific components of attentional control deficits underlie biased attentional processing, a well-established cognitive mechanism of internalizing disorders

Associations among Negative Parenting, Attention Bias to Anger, and Social Anxiety among Youth

Theories of affective learning suggest that early experiences contribute to emotional disorders by influencing the development of processing biases for negative emotional stimuli. Although studies show that physically abused children preferentially attend to angry faces, it is unclear whether youth exposed to more typical aspects of negative parenting would exhibit the same type of bias. The current studies extend previous research by linking observed negative parenting styles (e.g. authoritarian) and behaviors (e.g. criticism and negative affect) to attention bias for angry faces in both a psychiatrically enriched (ages 11–17 years; N = 60) and a general community (ages 9–15 years; N = 75) sample of youth. In addition, the association between observed negative parenting (e.g. authoritarian style and negative affect) and youth social anxiety was mediated by attention bias for angry faces in the general community sample. Overall, findings provide preliminary support for theories of affective learning and risk for psychopathology among youth

Comprehensive genomic characterization of head and neck squamous cell carcinomas

The Cancer Genome Atlas profiled 279 head and neck squamous cell carcinomas (HNSCCs) to provide a comprehensive landscape of somatic genomic alterations. Here we show that human-papillomavirus-associated tumours are dominated by helical domain mutations of the oncogene PIK3CA, novel alterations involving loss of TRAF3, and amplification of the cell cycle gene E2F1. Smoking-related HNSCCs demonstrate near universal loss-of-function TP53 mutations and CDKN2A inactivation with frequent copy number alterations including amplification of 3q26/28 and 11q13/22. A subgroup of oral cavity tumours with favourable clinical outcomes displayed infrequent copy number alterations in conjunction with activating mutations of HRAS or PIK3CA, coupled with inactivating mutations of CASP8, NOTCH1 and TP53. Other distinct subgroups contained loss-of-function alterations of the chromatin modifier NSD1, WNT pathway genes AJUBA and FAT1, and activation of oxidative stress factor NFE2L2, mainly in laryngeal tumours. Therapeutic candidate alterations were identified in most HNSCCsclose9