Responding to threat: Associations between neural reactivity to and behavioral avoidance of threat in pediatric anxiety.

Background: Despite broad recognition of the central role of avoidance in anxiety, a lack of specificity in its operationalization has hindered progress in understanding this clinically significant construct. The current study uses a multimodal approach to investigate how specific measures of avoidance relate to neural reactivity to threat in youth with anxiety disorders.

Methods: Children with anxiety disorders (ages 6-12 years; n = 65 for primary analyses) completed laboratory task- and clinician-based measures of avoidance, as well as a functional magnetic resonance imaging task probing neural reactivity to threat.

Affective language spreads between anxious children and their mothers during a challenging puzzle task.

Humans influence each other's emotions. The spread of emotion is well documented across behavioral, psychophysiological, and neuroscientific levels of analysis, but might this influence also be evident in language (e.g.

Encoding focus does not affect recollection of action memories: Event related potential (ERP) and modeling evidence.

Prior work using word stimuli has uncovered evidence that encoding focus (i.e., self-focus or other-focus) alters non-diagnostic recollection and the putative ERP correlate of recollection (i.