Mid-adolescent neurocognitive development of ignoring and attending emotional stimuli

Vetter, Nora C.; Pilhatsch, Maximilian; Weigelt, Sarah; Ripke, Stephan; Smolka, Michael N. · 2015 · DOAJ

DOI: 10.1016/j.dcn.2015.05.001

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Summary

This study investigates the neurocognitive development of emotional attention in mid-adolescence, specifically examining how neural mechanisms for attending to versus ignoring emotional stimuli evolve between ages 14 and 16. The research is motivated by the clinical relevance of adolescence as a critical period for the onset of affective disorders, which are linked to imbalances between prefrontal top-down control systems and subcortical bottom-up emotional processing. While previous studies relied on cross-sectional designs or focused on early adolescence, this longitudinal study aims to characterize the specific developmental trajectories of these attentional networks in a large community-based sample. The researchers employed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to assess 144 healthy adolescents scanned longitudinally at ages 14 and 16. Participants performed a perceptual discrimination task requiring them to judge whether a pair of stimuli was identical while ignoring a second, distractor pair. The design created two primary conditions: attending to emotional stimuli while ignoring abstract ones, and ignoring emotional stimuli while attending to abstract ones. Emotional valence varied across negative, positive, and neutral categories using scenes from the International Affective Picture System. Behavioral data included reaction times and error rates, while fMRI data were analyzed using general linear models to identify age-related changes in brain activation, with specific exploratory analyses of the amygdala. Behavioral results indicated that performance improved with age; 16-year-olds exhibited faster reaction times and lower error rates than 14-year-olds. Neuroimaging analysis revealed that activation in prefrontal regions associated with top-down control, specifically the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), increased significantly from age 14 to 16. In contrast, subcortical regions showed no developmental effects, suggesting stable bottom-up processing. A significant three-way interaction involving age, attention, and emotional valence was observed in the left anterior insula. Post-hoc analyses demonstrated that activation in this region increased with age specifically when participants attended to positive emotions or ignored negative emotions. The amygdala showed no significant developmental changes. The findings suggest that mid-adolescence is characterized by an ongoing maturation of prefrontal top-down resources required for regulating emotional attention, while subcortical bottom-up processing remains stable. The increased activation in the ACC, IFG, and anterior insula indicates that adolescents are developing greater neural capacity to manage emotional distractors and focus attention goal-directedly. This developmental shift in prefrontal engagement may help explain the gradual improvement in emotional regulation and the reduced vulnerability to affective disorders as individuals transition from early to late adolescence.

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