Journal
JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF CHILD AND ADOLESCENT PSYCHIATRY
Volume 57, Issue 2, Pages 103-110Publisher
ELSEVIER SCIENCE INC
DOI: 10.1016/j.jaac.2017.11.016
Keywords
behavioral Inhibition; dot probe; anxiety; attention bias modification; fronto-limbic activation
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Funding
- National Institute of Mental Health [BRAINS R01 MH094633]
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Objective: Children with behavioral inhibition, a temperament characterized by biologically based hypervigilance to novelty and social withdrawal, are at high risk for developing anxiety. This study examined the effect of a novel attention training protocol, attention bias modification (ABM), on symptomatic, behavioral, and neural risk markers in children with behavioral inhibition. Method: Nine- to 12-year-old typically developing children identified as having behavioral inhibition (N = 84) were assigned to a 4-session active ABM training (n = 43) or placebo protocol (n = 41) using a double-blinded, randomized, controlled trial approach. Anxiety symptoms (Diagnostic Interview Schedule for Children Fourth Edition), attention bias (AB; measured by a dot-probe task; AB = incongruent reaction time congruent reaction time), and AB-related neural activation (measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging activation for the incongruent > congruent contrast in the dot-probe task) were assessed before and after the training sessions. Results: Results showed that active ABM (n = 40) significantly alleviated participants' symptoms of separation anxiety, but not social anxiety, compared with the placebo task (n = 40); ABM did not modify behavioral AB scores in the dot-probe task; and at the neural level, active ABM (n = 15) significantly decreased amygdala and insula activation and increased activation in the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex compared with placebo (n = 19). Conclusion: These findings provide important evidence for ABM as a potentially effective protective tool for temperamentally at-risk children in a developmental window before the emergence of clinical disorder and open to prevention and intervention.
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