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Abstract Background: Suicide is the second leading cause of death for adolescents in the United States. However, relatively little is known about the forms of atypical neuro-cognitive function that are correlates of suicidal ideation (SI). One form of cognitive/affective function that, when dysfunctional, is associated with SI is emotion regulation. However, very little work has investigated the neural correlates of emotion dysregulation in adolescents with SI. Methods: Participants (N = 111 aged 12-18, 32 females, 31 [27.9%] reporting SI) were recruited shortly after their arrival at a residential care facility where they had been referred for behavioral and mental health problems. Daily reports of SI were collected during the participants’ first 90-days in residential care. Participants were presented with a task-fMRI measure of emotion regulation – the Affective Number Stroop task shortly after recruitment. Participants were divided into two groups matched for age, sex and IQ based on whether they demonstrated SI. Results: Participants who demonstrated SI showed increased recruitment of regions including dorsomedial prefrontal cortex/supplemental motor area and parietal cortex during task (congruent and incongruent) relative to view trials in the context of emotional relative to neutral distracters. Conclusions: Participants with SI showed increased recruitment of regions implicated in executive control during the performance of a task indexing automatic emotion regulation. Such data might suggest a relative inefficiency in the recruitment of these regions in individuals with SI.

Abstract Previous studies examining structural brain correlates of irritability have taken a region-specific approach and have been relatively inconsistent. In a sample of adolescents with and without clinically impairing irritability, the current study examines: (i) cortical volume (CV) in canonical functional networks; (ii) the association between the CV of functional networks and severity of irritability; and (iii) the extent to which IQ mediates the association between structural abnormalities and severity of irritability. Structural MRI and IQ data were collected from 130 adolescents with high irritability (mean age = 15.54±1.83 years, 58 females, self-reported Affective Reactivity Index [ARI] ≥ 4) and 119 adolescents with low irritability (mean age = 15.10±1.93 years, 39 females, self-reported ARI < 4). Subject-specific network-wise CV was estimated after parcellating the whole brain into 17 previously reported functional networks. Our Multivariate Analysis of Covariance (MANCOVA) revealed that adolescents with high irritability had significantly reduced CV of the bilateral control and default-mode networks (p