Developmental Change in the Neurophysiological Correlates of Self-Regulation in High- and Low-Emotion Conditions

One of the most important tasks of childhood is learning to self-regulate in the presence of negative emotions. Until recently, almost no research has examined the neurophysiological correlates of emotional self-regulation as it develops over childhood and adolescence. We were interested in plotting a fine-grained developmental profile of the neural underpinnings of self-regulation, in the context of negative emotion, for 7- to 14-year-old children. We predicted that children would recruit less cortical activation with age in the service of self-regulation, reflecting increased neural efficiency with development. We also predicted that children would recruit more cortical activation with increased negative emotion, possibly reflecting greater demand on cortical resources. We administered a Go No-Go task with an emotion induction block and we measured the amplitude of the N2, an event related potential associated with inhibitory control, as it varied with block and with age. Furthermore, we estimated activation for a ventral prefrontal region of interest (ROI; suggestive of orbital frontal, ventromedial prefrontal, or rostral anterior cingulate activation) and a dorsomedial prefrontal ROI (suggestive of dorsal anterior cingulate activation) frequently modeled as cortical generators underlying the N2. Results revealed a marginal decrease in mediofrontal scalp activation, but a more pronounced decrease in activation of the ventromedial prefrontal ROI, with age. There were no age-related changes in dorsomedial prefrontal ROI activation. Lastly, as predicted, we found increased ventral prefrontal ROI activation during the negative emotion induction, possibly reflecting greater recruitment of frontocortical resources underlying emotion regulation, but developmental change in this activation was no different than for the other conditions. Thus, both self-regulation in general and emotion regulation in particular recruited less cortical activation with age, suggesting more efficient cortical mechanisms of response inhibition.