Behavioral inhibition and dual mechanisms of anxiety risk: Disentangling neural correlates of proactive and reactive control

Abstract

Background Behavioral inhibition (BI) is a temperament style characterized by heightened reactivity and negative affect in response to novel people and situations, and it predicts anxiety problems later in life. However, not all BI children develop anxiety problems, and mounting evidence suggests that how one manages their cognitive resources (cognitive control) influences anxiety risk. The present study tests whether more (proactive control) or less (reactive control) planful cognitive strategies moderate relations between early BI and later anxiety. Methods Participants included 112 adolescents (55% female; Mage = 15.4 years) whose temperament was assessed during toddlerhood. In adolescence, participants completed an AX Continuous Performance Test while electroencephalography was recorded to disentangle neural activity related to proactive (cue‐locked P3b) and reactive (probe‐locked N2) control. Results Greater BI was associated with greater total anxiety scores only among adolescents with smaller ΔP3bs and larger ΔN2s—a pattern consistent with decreased reliance on proactive strategies and increased reliance on reactive strategies. Additionally, a larger ΔP3b was associated with greater total anxiety scores; however, this effect was largely explained by the fact that females tended to have larger ΔP3bs and greater anxiety than males. Conclusions Early BI relates to risk for later anxiety specifically among adolescents who rely less on proactive strategies and more on reactive control strategies. Thus, cognitive control strategy moderates the association between developmental context (i.e., temperament) and later anxiety. The present study is the first to characterize how proactive and reactive control uniquely relate to pathways toward anxiety risk.

Behavioural inhibition and early neural processing of happy and angry faces interact to predict anxiety: a longitudinal ERP study

“…Finally, although P1 angry and happy biases interacted with linear time to predict anxiety (as discussed above), no direct bivariate correlations between ERP amplitudes and anxiety or BI were found. An effect of emotion was found for P1 amplitude, with amplitude to happy and angry faces higher than amplitude to neutral faces, replicating recent research in young children (e.g ( Valadez et al, 2021 ). No effect of emotion was found for P2 or N2, which again is relatively consistent with previous findings, although research in this area with preschool-aged children is scarce ( Bar-Haim et al, 2005 , Kanske et al, 2011 ).…”

“…Therefore, for high BI children, anxiety risk appears to be lowest when children require relatively little effort to implement planful control processes. This interpretation is necessarily speculative, but the results clearly indicate that, even in young children, attentional control processes are important moderators of anxiety risk in the context of high BI, which is nicely consistent with the latest theory and research with older children ( Fox et al, 2021 , Troller-Renfree et al, 2019 , Valadez et al, 2021 , White et al, 2011 ).…”

Annual Research Review: Developmental pathways linking early behavioral inhibition to later anxiety

“…Valadez et al. (2021) examined ERPs drawn from EEG data that were simultaneously collected during the 15‐year administration of the AX‐CPT. Using separate cue‐ and probe‐locked ERPs, they found that BI was associated with anxiety only among youth who tended not to differentiate between cues during the earlier cue period (indicating a less proactive strategy) but instead differentiated between them during the later probe period (indicating a more reactive strategy).…”

Executive Functioning Constructs in Anxiety, Obsessive–Compulsive, Post-Traumatic Stress, and Related Disorders

“…Likewise, a recent study identified a subgroup of children for whom enhanced inhibition ability coincided with higher anxiety symptoms after accounting for prefrontal cortex-amygdala connectivity [ 84 ]. Similarly, greater trait and social anxiety corresponded with enhanced cognitive control capacities among youths after adjusting for their electroencephalography (EEG) brainwave patterns and temperament [ 85 ]. Also, the overgeneralized control model hypothesizes that some subgroups of individuals might show negative or non-linear (e.g., inverted U-shaped) connections between EF and anxiety constructs across time [ 27 , 86 ].…”