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Updated: Jan 27, 2026

Reducing State Anxiety Using Working Memory Maintenance
Published on: July 19, 2017
Chronic harsh parenting and anxiety associations with fear circuitry function in healthy adolescents: A preliminary
Valérie La Buissonnière-Ariza1, Jean R Séguin2, Marouane Nassim3
1Menninger Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Baylor College of Medicine, USA.
Abstract:
Previous studies have reported altered fear circuitry function during fear conditioning in highly anxious individuals and in adults with a history of severe childhood adversity; less is known regarding younger populations and more common forms of adversity. We investigated fear circuitry functioning in healthy youths with histories of high (HH) or low (LH) chronic harsh parenting and high (HA) or low (LA) anxiety levels. 84 youths aged 13-16 performed an fMRI fear conditioning task. HH displayed decreased selective medial temporal lobe deactivations to CS+> CS- relative to LH. In addition, we found less amygdala-insula connectivity in HH vs LH. Interestingly, we observed distinct patterns of anxiety differences in amygdala-rostral ACC connectivity and subjective fear ratings depending on harsh parenting levels, suggesting a history of harsh parenting is linked with unique neural and behavioral anxious manifestations, which are different from anxiety manifestations in a context of low adversity.
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