Background: Attention biases toward threat are often detected in individuals with anxiety disorders. Threat biases can be measured experimentally through dot-probe paradigms, in which individuals detect a probe following a stimulus pair including a threat. On these tasks, individuals with anxiety tend to detect probes that occur in a location…

This neuroimaging study examines the development of cognitive flexibility using the Change task in a sample of youths and adults. The Change task requires subjects to inhibit a prepotent response and substitute an alternative response, and the task incorporates an algorithm that adjusts task difficulty in response to subject performance. Data from…

Objective: Outcome and family history data differentiate children with severe mood dysregulation (SMD), a syndrome characterized by chronic irritability, from children with "classic" episodic bipolar disorder (BD). Nevertheless, the presence of cognitive inflexibility in SMD and BD highlights the need to delineate neurophysiologic similarities and…

The use of functional magnetic resonance imaging in investigating pediatric anxiety disorders is studied. Functional magnetic resonance imaging can be utilized in demonstrating parallels between the neural architecture of difference in anxiety of humans and the neural architecture of attention-orienting behavior in nonhuman primates or rodents.…

Objective: Deficits in cognitive flexibility and response inhibition have been linked to perturbations in cortico-striatal-thalamic circuitry in adult obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Although similar cognitive deficits have been identified in pediatric OCD, few neuroimaging studies have been conducted to examine its neural correlates in the…

Early-life stress (ES) has been associated with diverse forms of psychopathology. Some investigators suggest that these associations reflect the effects of stress on the neural circuits that support cognitive control. However, very few prior studies have examined the associations between ES, cognitive control, and underlying neural architecture.…

Background: There are, to date, no pre-post onset longitudinal imaging studies of bipolar disorder at any age. We report the first prospective study of cortical brain development in pediatric bipolar illness for 9 male children, visualized before and after illness onset. Method: We contrast this pattern with that observed in a matched group of…