Neural responding during uncertain threat anticipation in pediatric anxiety.

Excessive fear responses to uncertain threat are a key feature of anxiety disorders (ADs), though most mechanistic work considers adults. As ADs onset in childhood and confer risk for later psychopathology, we sought to identify conditions of uncertain threat that distinguish 8-17-year-old youth with AD (n = 19) from those without AD (n = 33), and assess test-retest reliability of such responses in a companion sample of healthy adults across three sites (n = 19). In an adapted uncertainty of threat paradigm, visual cues parametrically signaled threat of aversive stimuli (fear faces) in 25 % increments (0 %, 25 %, 50 %, 100 %), while participants underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

Social relevance modulates multivariate neural representations of threat generalization in children and adults.

Few studies have examined threat generalization across development and no developmental studies have compared the generalization of social versus nonsocial threat, making it difficult to identify contextual factors that contribute to threat learning across development. The present study assessed youth and adults' multivoxel neural representations of social versus nonsocial threat stimuli. Twenty adults (M  = 25.

A meta-analysis of the association between adolescent social media use and depressive symptoms.

Background: The association of adolescent social media use with mental health symptoms, especially depression, has recently attracted a great deal of interest in public media as well as the scientific community. Some studies have cited statistically significant associations between adolescent social media use and depression and have proposed that parents must regulate their adolescents' social media use in order to protect their mental health.

Method: In order to rigorously assess the size of the effect that has been reported in the current scientific literature, we conducted a meta-analysis of studies that measured the association between social media use specifically and depressive symptoms amongst early- to mid- adolescents (11-18 years-old).

Presentation and validation of the DuckEES child and adolescent dynamic facial expressions stimulus set.

The stimulus sets presently used to study emotion processing are primarily static pictures of individuals (primarily adults) making emotional facial expressions. However, the dynamic, stereotyped movements associated with emotional expressions contain rich information missing from static pictures, such as the difference between happiness and pride. We created a set of 1.