Anxiety disorders are one of the most prevalent forms of psychiatric disorder, and have an extremely negative impact on quality of life. These disorders currently rank in the top ten contributors to global disability, and thus also represent a huge economic burden for society. Critically, anxiety disorders often have an early onset and are chronic, with childhood and adolescence having been identified as the core period of developmental risk. If left untreated, anxiety in this period can lead to academic, social, and emotional difficulties, as well as substance abuse and long-term mental health problems. Therefore, to help design more effective treatments and early interventions for children and adolescents, expanding our knowledge and understanding of how and why anxiety disorders may develop early on in life, and why certain individuals are more at risk than others, is crucial.
Accordingly, the aim of this project is to investigate the cognitive mechanisms through which anxiety may emerge and be maintained during childhood and adolescence, as well as the neural bases of this and how early social experience may increase the risk for anxiety. More specifically, the main objectives are to address the following questions using a macaque model of early social adversity: 1) how do differences in early social experience influence the development of an attention bias to threat (ABT), hypothesized to play an important role in the early emergence of anxiety, across childhood and adolescence; 2) how does ABT relate to anxiety across this period; and 3) how might development of the amygdala, a brain region implicated in fear learning and anxiety, and its connectivity with prefrontal cortex modulate this development? This requires a multimodal approach (neuroimaging, behavioural, and observational techniques), and incorporating interdisciplinary insights from developmental and clinical psychology, and developmental cognitive neuroscience.
Results from the project so far have shown that exposure to early social adversity is related to greater ABT during the childhood period, which in turn, is related to more anxiety. Findings have also shown that early social adversity is related to differences in both structural and functional connectivity of the amygdala across childhood and adolescence.
