Neurodevelopmental correlates of emotion regulation in adolescence: An accelerated longitudinal study

Adolescence is a period that coincides with a peak in both the onset of psychopathology and a sensitive period for neural development. One transdiagnostic characteristic of psychopathology is impaired emotion regulation (ER), a process with both implicit (automatic) and explicit (voluntary) underpinnings. The current study aims to better understand the normative neurodevelopment of these two components of ER in adolescents.

139 youth (aged 10-20 years) completed ER assessment during fMRI at baseline and one-year follow-up. Implicit and explicit ER were examined using an emotional N-Back and a cognitive reappraisal task, respectively. Linear-mixed effects modeling was used to identify regions of the frontal cortex (Schaefer atlas) and the amygdala and hippocampus (Tian atlas) whose activity was predicted by ER- and age-related variables, covaried for sex, childhood adversity, and psychopathology symptoms.

Regions that displayed change across age were localized to the salience/ventral attention network in the right hemisphere. For implicit ER, mid-insula activity showed changes during early adolescence (∼10 years old), such that activity to negative stimuli increased during this time before plateauing. For explicit ER, the posterior insula, Rolandic Operculum, and paracentral lobule showed linear decreases in activity across the entire age range, where the decrease occurred at a faster rate in response to neutral relative to negative stimuli.

Functional changes in frontal circuits related to emotional attention may encode the development of ER during neurodevelopment. Maturation of these circuits seem to reach completion by mid-adolescence for implicit ER, but explicit ER continues developing across adolescence.