Anxiety may alter the role of fronto-striatal circuitry in adolescent risky decision-making.

Background: Anxiety disorders often emerge in adolescence and are associated with risk aversion. Risk aversion conflicts with the typical adolescent approach-motivated phenotype and can interfere with learning and contribute to symptom maintenance.

Methods: We investigated the neural and behavioral correlates of risk avoidance in a diverse sample of adolescents (N = 137; M = 11.3; 34.3 % white, 22.1 % Latino, 20 % Asian, 14.3 % Black, 9.3 % Mixed Race) as they completed a task involving risky decision-making and response inhibition during fMRI. Voluntary cautious choice was compared to successful response inhibition to isolate the neural systems underlying the decision to avoid a risk and identify their relation to risk-taking and anxiety in adolescents.

Results: Anxious adolescents self-reported more avoidance but demonstrated normative risk-taking on the laboratory task. Interestingly, they responded quickly during response inhibition but took longer to decide in the face of risk. All youth showed widespread recruitment of decision-making and salience network regions when deciding to avoid risk. The neural mechanisms driving avoidance differed based on anxiety such that left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) activation was linked to risk avoidance in adolescents with low anxiety and risk-taking in anxious adolescents, while striatal connectivity was linked to risk avoidance in anxious adolescents and risk-taking in those with low anxiety.

Limitations: This work is cross-sectional and therefore cannot speak to causality or directionality of effects.

Conclusions: These results suggest that the neural mechanisms contributing to adolescent risk-taking may function to promote avoidance in anxious youth, increasing vulnerability to maladaptive avoidance and further anxiety development.