Identifiable regional and neural network abnormalities in early childhood anxiety

Although the neural underpinnings of anxiety have been investigated, most research has been confined to adolescence and adulthood, with less of a focus on the early childhood period. Little is known about the role of anticipatory fear processing early childhood, which is a sensitive period for anxiety development. Free-viewing paradigms provide a useful method for investigating brain activation during fear anticipation because they present stimuli in a manner that mirrors the participant's natural environment.

One hundred and fifty-nine, high-risk children (M = 5.93 years; SD = 1.16) (54% female) watched an episode of a children's animated program that relied on anticipatory fear for the main plot line. Parents rated children on anxiety symptoms. Data was analyzed using both general linear modeling (GLM) and independent components analysis (ICA) to determine task-dependent regional and network response to positively and negatively-valenced time-series in the episode.

GLM analyses identified significant positive regional activation in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, middle temporal gyrus, and thalamus that fluctuated during the negative timecourse as a function of anxiety symptoms. Furthermore, ICA analyses revealed diminished network connectivity between (1) the anterior cingulate and raphe nuclei and (2) the right temporoparietal junction, left superior parietal lobule, and lingual gyri as a function of anxiety symptoms.

Our findings point to fractured communication between emotion and sociocognitive processing regions as a function of increased anxiety in early childhood. The findings of this study can point to neural mechanisms present in early anxiety symptomatology before the traditionally defined onset.