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Positive associations have been found between cortical thickness and measures of parasympathetic cardiac control (e.g., respiratory sinus arrhythmia, RSA) in adults, which may indicate mechanistic integration between neural and physiological indicators of stress regulation. However, it is unknown when in development this brain–body association arises and whether the direction of association and neuroanatomical localization vary across development. To investigate this, we collected structural magnetic resonance imaging and resting‐state respiratory sinus arrhythmia data from children in middle childhood (N = 62, Mage = 10.09, range: 8.28–12.14 years). Whole‐brain and exploratory ROI analyses revealed positive associations between RSA and cortical thickness in four frontal and parietal clusters in the left hemisphere and one cluster in the right. Exploratory ROI analyses revealed a similar positive association between cortical thickness and RSA, with two regions surviving multiple comparison correction, including the inferior frontal orbital gyrus and the Sylvian fissure. Prior work has identified these cortical areas as part of the central autonomic network that supports integrative regulation of stress response (e.g., autonomic, endocrine, and behavioral) and emotional expression. Our results suggest that the association between cortical thickness and resting RSA is present in middle childhood and is similar to the associations seen during adulthood. Future studies should investigate associations between RSA and cortical thickness among young children and adolescents. Positive correlations have been found between cortical thickness and parasympathetic nervous system functioning in adults. We show that these correlations between neural and physiological markers of emotional health may already be established during middle childhood, suggesting potential mechanistic pathways underlying emotional health development during middle childhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ability to monitor performance during a goal‐directed behavior differs among children and adults in ways that can be measured with several tasks and techniques. As well, recent work has shown that individual differences in error monitoring moderate temperamental risk for anxiety and that this moderation changes with age. We investigated age differences in neural responses linked to performance monitoring using a multimodal approach. The approach combined functional MRI and source localization of event‐related potentials (ERPs) in 12‐year‐old, 15‐year‐old, and adult participants. Neural generators of two components related to performance and error monitoring, the N2 and ERN, lay within specific areas of fMRI clusters. Whereas correlates of the N2 component appeared similar across age groups, age‐related differences manifested in the location of the generators of the ERN component. The dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) was the predominant source location for the 12‐year‐old group; this area manifested posteriorly for the 15‐year‐old and adult groups. A fMRI‐based ROI analysis confirmed this pattern of activity. These results suggest that changes in the underlying neural mechanisms are related to developmental changes in performance monitoring. Our research shows that developmental differences occur in neural responses during performance monitoring, with more posterior brain areas showing activation in adults and anterior regions in 12‐ and 15‐year‐old subjects. The fMRI cluster of results showed large activation in the ACC across ages. Source localization of ERP responses identified the ACC as the generator of the N2 ERP in all age groups, whereas generators of the ERN component revealed that the ACC is active during error monitoring in adolescence, whereas more posterior areas (PCC) are active in adults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Bucharest Early Intervention Project is the first randomized controlled trial of foster care as an alternative to institutional care. The authors synthesized data from nearly 20 years of assessments of the trial to determine the overall intervention effect size across time points and developmental domains. The goal was to quantify the overall effect of the foster care intervention on children's outcomes and examine sources of variation in this effect, including domain, age, and sex assigned at birth. An intent-to-treat approach was used to examine the causal effects of the randomized controlled trial for 136 children residing in institutions in Bucharest, Romania (baseline age, 6–31 months) who were randomly assigned to either foster care (N=68) or care as usual (N=68). At ages 30, 42, and 54 months and 8, 12, and 16–18 years, children were assessed for IQ, physical growth, brain electrical activity (EEG), and symptoms of five types of psychopathology. Participants provided 7,088 observations across follow-up waves. Children assigned to foster care had better cognitive and physical outcomes and less severe psychopathology than did those who received care as usual. The magnitude of these effect sizes remained stable across development. The foster care intervention most influenced IQ and disorders of attachment/social relatedness. Young children benefit from placement in families after institutional care. The benefits of foster care for previously institutionalized children were remarkably stable across development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Behavioral Inhibition is a temperament identified in the first years of life that enhances the risk for development of anxiety during late childhood and adolescence. Amongst children characterized with this temperament, only around 40 percent go on to develop anxiety disorders, meaning that more than half of these children do not. Over the past 20 years, research has documented within‐child and socio‐contextual factors that support differing developmental pathways. This review provides a historical perspective on the research documenting the origins of this temperament, its biological correlates, and the factors that enhance or mitigate risk for development of anxiety. We review as well, research findings from two longitudinal cohorts that have identified moderators of behavioral inhibition in understanding pathways to anxiety. Research on these moderators has led us to develop the Detection and Dual Control (DDC) framework to understand differing developmental trajectories among behaviorally inhibited children. In this review, we use this framework to explain why and how specific cognitive and socio‐contextual factors influence differential pathways to anxiety versus resilience. Read the Commentary on this article at doi: 10.1111/jcpp.13771. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A variety of childhood experiences can lead to anxious/depressed (A/D) symptoms. The aim of the present study was to explore the brain morphological (cortical thickness and surface area) correlates of A/D symptoms and the extent to which these phenotypes vary depending on the quality of the parenting context in which children develop. Structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans were acquired on 45 children with Child Protective Services (CPS) involvement due to risk of not receiving adequate care (high-risk group) and 25 children without CPS involvement (low-risk group) (rangeage = 8.08–12.14; M age = 10.05) to assess cortical thickness (CT) and cortical surface area (SA). A/D symptoms were measured using the Child Behavioral Checklist. The association between A/D symptoms and CT, but not SA, differed by risk status such that high-risk children showed decreasing CT as A/D scores increased, whereas low-risk children showed increasing CT as A/D scores increased. This interaction was specific to CT in prefrontal, frontal, temporal, and parietal cortical regions. The groups had marginally different A/D scores, in the direction of higher risk being associated with lower A/D scores. Results suggest that CT correlates of A/D symptoms are differentially shaped by the quality of early caregiving experiences and should be distinguished between high- and low-risk children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Data on the neurodevelopmental and associated behavioral effects of light to moderate in utero alcohol exposure are limited. This retrospective investigation tested for associations between reported maternal prenatal alcohol use and psychological, behavioral, and neurodevelopmental outcomes in substance-naive youths.Methods: Participants were 9,719 youths (ages 9.0 to 10.9 years) from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study. Based on parental reports, 2,518 (25.9%) had been exposed to alcohol in utero. Generalized additive mixed models and multilevel cross-sectional and longitudinal mediation models were used to test whether prenatal alcohol exposure was associated with psychological, behavioral, and cognitive outcomes, and whether differences in brain structure and resting-state functional connectivity partially explained these associations at baseline and 1-year follow-up, after controlling for possible confounding factors.Results: Prenatal alcohol exposure of any severity was associated with greater psychopathology, attention deficits, and impulsiveness, with some effects showing a dose-dependent response. Children with prenatal alcohol exposure, compared with those without, displayed greater cerebral and regional volume and greater regional surface area. Resting-state functional connectivity was largely unaltered in children with in utero exposure. Some of the psychological and behavioral outcomes at baseline and at the 1-year follow-up were partially explained by differences in brain structure among youths who had been exposed to alcohol in utero.Conclusions: Any alcohol use during pregnancy is associated with subtle yet significant psychological and behavioral effects in children. Women should continue to be advised to abstain from alcohol consumption from conception throughout pregnancy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Early adversity is correlated with increased risk for negative outcomes, including psychopathology and atypical neurodevelopment. The authors aimed to test the causal impact of an early parenting intervention (Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-Up; ABC) on children's neural processing of parent cues and on psychosocial functioning in a longitudinal randomized clinical trial.Methods: Participants (N=68, mean age, 10.0 years [SD=0.8 years]) were 46 high-risk children whose parents were randomly assigned to receive either the ABC intervention (N=22) or a control intervention (N=24) while the children were infants, in addition to a comparison sample of low-risk children (N=22). During functional MRI scanning, children viewed pictures of their own mothers and of a stranger.Results: Children in the ABC condition showed greater maternal cue-related activation than children in the control condition in clusters of brain regions, including the precuneus, the cingulate gyrus, and the hippocampus, regions commonly associated with social cognition. Additionally, greater activity in these regions was associated with fewer total behavior problems. There was an indirect effect of early intervention on middle childhood psychosocial functioning mediated through increased activity in brain regions in response to maternal cues.Conclusions: These results suggest that early parenting intervention (in this case the ABC intervention) can enhance brain regions supporting children's social cognitive development. In addition, the findings highlight these brain effects as a possible neural pathway through which ABC may prevent future behavior problems among high-risk children, yielding psychosocial benefits that endure through at least middle childhood without the need to intervene with the child directly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human social decision-making is significantly modulated by previous decision outcomes. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), we examined whether ERP components evoked by outcome feedback could serve as electrophysiological indices to examine the influence of current outcome evaluation on subsequent cooperative or aggressive decision-making. Thirty-four adult volunteers participated in a social game task, in which they were asked to choose between cooperation and aggression with an opponent player.Conventionally-averaged ERPs and temporospatial principal components analysis (PCA) factors were tested for their associations with subsequent decision-making. Results revealed that a central-parietal late positive potential (LPP) and central-parietal PCA factor approximating the classic LPP were related to changes of decision-making strategies on subsequent trials; however, the effect was significant only when the opponent selected 'cooperate' in the initial trial. The decision to cooperate in subsequent trials induced a larger LPP relative to the decision to aggress following opponent cooperation in the initial trial. Furthermore, we found that larger LPP amplitudes for an opponent's cooperative decision on the initial trial were associated with a higher probability of choosing cooperation on the subsequent trial. The results suggest that the amplitude of the central-parietal LPP is an electrophysiological index of the influence of initial outcome on subsequent social decision-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Past studies utilizing cognitive control tasks have noted that trials following errors are characterized by slowed reaction time. Despite the assumption long held by researchers that this slowing is compensatory (in the service of post‐error performance recovery), studies consistently show that post‐error trials are no more accurate than post‐correct trials. As a result, it has recently been proposed that post‐error slowing (PES) is merely part of an orienting response that serves no task‐relevant cognitive control purpose. Frontal midline theta (FMθ) oscillations represent another potential compensatory mechanism serving cognitive control processes, yet past studies relying on ERPs have failed to find an association between FMθ and post‐error accuracy. The present study investigated the potentially adaptive role of PES and FMθ oscillations during a flanker task using trial‐by‐trial comparisons. Results indicated that error‐related FMθ oscillations signal the need for enhanced top‐down cognitive control and that PES supports cognitive control by providing the added time needed to achieve greater confidence in judgment. Overall, findings provide convergent evidence that both error‐related FMθ and PES predict performance recovery following errors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the brain correlates of decisionmaking and outcome evaluation of generalized trust (i.e. trust in unfamiliar social agents)--a core component of social capital which facilitates civic cooperation and economic exchange. We measured 18 (9male) Chinese participants' event-related potentials while they played the role of the trustor in a one-shot trust game with unspecified social agents (trustees) allegedly selected from a large representative sample. At the decisionmaking phase, greater N2 amplitudes were found for trustors' distrusting decisions compared to trusting decisions, which may reflect greater cognitive control exerted to distrust. Source localization identified the precentral gyrus as one possible neuronal generator of this N2 component. At the outcome evaluation phase, principal components analysis revealed that the so called feedback-related negativity was in fact driven by a reward positivity, which was greater in response to gain feedback compared to loss feedback. This reduced reward positivity following loss feedbackmay indicate that the absence of reward for trusting decisions was unexpected by the trustor. In addition, we found preliminary evidence suggesting that the decisionmaking processesmay differ between high trustors and low trustors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose Of Review: To examine the most recent published evidence (2016-2019) regarding the treatment of adolescent substance use disorders and to provide an update on evidence-based strategies, adjunctive interventions, and methods to improve currently established treatment approaches.Recent Findings: Recent evidence suggests that psychosocial treatments such as family-based therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, and multicomponent approaches remain the most effective methods of treatment; however, innovative ways of improving these treatment strategies may include digital and culturally based interventions. New advances in adjunctive treatments such as pharmacotherapy, exercise, mindfulness, and recovery-oriented educational centers may have some clinical utility. Well-established psychosocial interventions remain the primary modality of treatment. Promising new adjunctive treatments and improvements in our currently established treatments may yield significant improvements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early adversity such as maltreatment is associated with increased risk for psychopathology and atypical neurological development in children. The present study examined associations between depressive symptoms and error‐related brain activity (the error‐related negativity, or ERN) among children involved with Child Protective Services (CPS) and among comparison children. Results indicate that the relation between depressive symptoms and ERN amplitude depends on CPS involvement, such that depressive symptoms were associated with blunted ERNs only for CPS‐referred children. The present study can inform future research investigating the mechanisms by which experiences of adversity affect the association between symptoms and error‐related brain activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]