A preliminary study of the neural mechanisms of frustration in pediatric bipolar disorder using magnetoencephalography

Abstract

Background-Irritability is prevalent and impairing in pediatric bipolar disorder (BD) but has been minimally studied using neuroimaging techniques. We used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to study theta band oscillations in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) during frustration in BD youth. ACC theta power is associated with attention to emotional stimuli, and the ACC may mediate responses to frustrating stimuli.

Brain functional domains inform therapeutic interventions in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and pediatric bipolar disorder

“…Using the same affective Posner task, a magnetoencephalography study by Rich et al . showed altered magnetoencephalography patterns of activity in right ACC and bilateral parietal lobe, related to frustration-inducing negative feedback [36]. Similar results were obtained by Dickstein et al .…”

“…In line with the proposed concept of either emotionally-driven or cognitively-driven impulsivity, one aspect that is gaining confirmation experimentally is that in PBD, impairment in reward-related learning [20,35,36] may be due to abnormal reactions to punishment or negative contingencies, with emotional over-reactivity (i.e., frustration and irritability), leading to diminished ability to attend to task-related processes and inhibit interfering affective or cognitive processes [20,36]. On the contrary, in ADHD, reward-related learning is within normal range as long as positive and negative contingencies are administered consistently and without delays [8,9,105,106], possibly because of altered reward anticipation and delay aversion [11] accompanied by poor working memory, performance monitoring and inhibitory function for goal maintenance [59,67,71].…”

“…We hypothesize that emotional impulsivity results from subcortical overactivity of the amygdala and ventral striatum, associated with reduced emotion regulatory function of the VLPFC, VMPFC and vACC. Moreover, because of the research evidence on worsening of affect dysregulation in PBD with negative valence stimuli [81,87,88] or negative contingencies such as punishment or loss of expected reward [20,36], we predict that over-reactivity in limbic and ventral striatal regions will be worse in the presence of perceived or experienced negative emotions, such as anger, frustration and fear, that may be elicited by negative contingencies. By contrast, based on previous literature [8,11,13,40,57–60,110] we hypothesize that in ADHD, impulsivity would be predominantly modulated by poor attentional, inhibitory and regulatory function in the dorsal frontostriatal system, with reduced capacity of DLPFC and dACC to attend to and evaluate reward-related contingencies and to regulate amygdala and ventral striatum activity elicited by these contingencies.…”

Emotion in bipolar I disorder: Implications for functional and symptom outcomes.

“…One prominent model integrates these findings with a large body of work on at-risk individuals to indicate that heightened positive affectivity may be core to the etiology of BD (Gruber, 2011a). Other findings, however, suggest that this could be part of a broader profile of emotional reactivity, in that researchers have also observed greater reactivity among those with BD to both success and failure experiences (Pavlova, Uher, Dennington, Wright, & Donaldson, 2011; Gruber, Harvey, & Johnson, 2009; Rich et al, 2010). …”

The Twin Study of Negative Valence Emotional Constructs

“…The Affective Posner 2 (AP2) task was adapted from a task used in previous studies (Deveney et al, 2013; Rich et al, 2010). It is designed to elicit feelings of frustration in pediatric samples with a particular focus on studying irritability in children.…”