Emotion Regulation across Adolescence: Behavioural Age-Related Differences and Brain Structure Correlates

Abstract

Background. Affective states frequently influences human beings on a daily basis, and hthe ability to regulate emotions is imperative to human adaptation in a social environments. Successful emotion regulation depends on brain structural correlates and is thus expected to improve over the course of normal development from childhood into adulthood. Objectives. The first aim of the current study was to characterize age-related differences in emotion regulation across adolescence. Our second aim was to investigate the associations between emotion regulation in the context of fear and brain structural correlates. Method. To assess age-related differences in behavioural emotion regulation, 68 participants aged 8-26 years performed an Emotional Go/Nogo task with photographs of fearful, happy and neutral emotional expressions as stimuli. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data was collected and analyzed to estimate vertex-wise cortical thickness, as well as volumes of subcortical structures of interest, specifically bilateral volumes of the amygdalae and ventral striatum. Associations between emotion regulation in the context of fear and brain structure correlates were then analyzed. Results. Our results indicated age-related changes in emotion regulation, reflected by improved performance on all task accuracy measures across adolescence. Our analyses of the MRI data suggested associations between emotion regulation in the context of fear, the left superior and middle temporal gyri, and volumes of the left and right amygdalae. When corrected for multiple comparisons by an adjusted Bonferroni procedure, none of the associations remained significant. Conclusion. Our results were in line with predictions of overall improvement in, and prolonged development of, emotion regulation across adolescence on a behavioural level, as would be predicted in a young and healthy sample. Cortical and subcortical regions are implicated as important for emotion regulation but we were not able to make a conclusion based on our results