The relationship between youth irritability and neural circuitry related to emotion regulation

Irritability, or a lowered threshold for frustration when a goal is blocked, increases in adolescence and is a robust transdiagnostic risk factor for the development of psychopathology. Emotion regulation strategies, such as cognitive reappraisal, have been thought to mitigate irritability. Given that emotion regulation capacity is neurobiologically instantiated, and adolescence is a period of tremendous neurocognitive and emotional development, clarification of the neural mechanisms underlying the relationship between emotion regulation and irritability in adolescence is critical. Therefore, the current study examined the relationship between youth irritability, measured by the parent-report Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL), and fMRI brain activation during an explicit emotion regulation task in a sample of 91 adolescents aged 11-14 (M/SD = 12.24/0.95). Participants were instructed to either (i) naturally react or (ii) regulate their emotions while viewing images of negative or neutral social scenes in the MRI scanner. Results revealed that youth irritability was negatively related to activation in the right inferior frontal gyrus only when encountering negative stimuli during the react condition. These findings suggest that adolescents with heightened irritability may have difficulty activating top-down control-related brain regions when experiencing negative emotions and not explicitly told to regulate beforehand, whereas their neural regulatory capacity may remain intact if activated before the negative emotional experience. Overall, this study provides insights into the association between youth irritability and emotion regulation during adolescence in a brain region related to top-down control.