Emotion Processing in Children and Adolescents with Anxiety Disorders and Typically Developing Youth.

Abstract

Understanding the typical development of neural circuitry involved in emotion processing has the potential to inform our understanding of the atypical development of this circuitry in populations such as pediatric anxiety disorder patients, and vice versa. The aim of this dissertation is to examine cross-sectional changes with age in prefrontal cortex-amygdala circuitry in typically developing children and adolescents and how functioning of this circuitry is altered in pediatric anxiety disorder patients. The first chapter reviews what is currently known about changes occurring in prefrontal cortex-amygdala circuitry across childhood and adolescence and discusses how knowledge of the development of neural circuitry can help link developmental influences such as genes and environment to outcomes of interest such as symptoms and disorders. The following three chapters provide original research examining this circuitry and its role in emotion processing in typical and atypical child and adolescent populations. In the second chapter, I examine the relation between prefrontal cortex-amygdala structural connectivity and function in typically developing youth. The third chapter aims to further elucidate abnormalities in amygdala function in pediatric anxiety disorder patients. In the fourth chapter, I examine prefrontal cortex function in pediatric anxiety disorder patients during a task that manipulates attention to emotional stimuli. In the fifth chapter, I discuss how this original research informs a model of the typical and atypical development of prefrontal cortex-amygdala circuitry across childhood and adolescence and how this model can be applied in future research to generate novel approaches to examining the development and treatment of anxiety disorders.PHDPsychologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/100073/1/jrswartz_1.pd