Neural Responses to Peer Rejection in Anxious Adolescents: Contributions from the Amygdala-Hippocampal Complex.

Peer rejection powerfully predicts adolescent anxiety. While cognitive differences influence anxious responses to social feedback, little is known about neural contributions. Twelve anxious and 12 age-, gender- and IQ-matched, psychiatrically-healthy adolescents received 'not interested' and 'interested' feedback from unknown peers during a Chatroom task administered in a neuroimaging scanner.

Responses to conflict and cooperation in adolescents with anxiety and mood disorders.

This study examined patterns of behavioral and emotional responses to conflict and cooperation in adolescents with anxiety/mood disorders and healthy peers. We compared performance on and emotional responses to the Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) game, an economic exchange task involving conflict and cooperation, between adolescents with anxiety/depressive disorders (A/D) (N=21) and healthy comparisons (n = 29). Participants were deceived to believe their co-player (a pre-programmed computer algorithm) was another study participant.

Abnormal attention modulation of fear circuit function in pediatric generalized anxiety disorder.

Context: Considerable work implicates abnormal neural activation and disrupted attention to facial-threat cues in adult anxiety disorders. However, in pediatric anxiety, no research has examined attention modulation of neural response to threat cues.

Objective: To determine whether attention modulates amygdala and cortical responses to facial-threat cues differentially in adolescents with generalized anxiety disorder and in healthy adolescents.