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Background and Objectives: Negative cognitive emotion regulation (ER) strategies are particularly important within the framework of anxiety problems amongst youths and how they cope with stressful events. The aim of this study was to examine the associations between both negative and positive ER style and cardiac regulation under stressful conditions.Design: Eighty-nine adolescents (M = 13.31 years, SD = 0.68, 44.94% girls) were exposed to a socially relevant stress induction protocol.Methods: Participants' emotion regulation strategies were assessed and their cardiac function was recorded.Results: A negative ER style predicted heart rate (HR) entropy at the stressful stage after controlling for anxiety scores. In addition, heart rate variability reactivity and recovery and HR entropy recovery were larger (p < .05) in the low negative ER style group (n = 16) than in the high negative ER style group (n = 23).Conclusions: Results suggest that individuals with a highly negative ER style have diminished autonomic flexibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background and Objectives: Diminished heart rate variability has been found to be associated with high anxiety symptomatology. Since adolescence is the period of onset for many anxiety disorders, this study aimed to determine sex- and anxiety-related differences in heart rate variability and complexity in adolescents.Methods: We created four groups according to sex and anxiety symptomatology: high-anxiety girls (n = 24) and boys (n = 25), and low-anxiety girls (n = 22) and boys (n = 24) and recorded their cardiac function while they performed regular school activities. A series of two-way (sex and anxiety) MANOVAs were performed on time domain variability, frequency domain variability, and non-linear complexity.Results: We obtained no multivariate interaction effects between sex and anxiety, but highly anxious participants had lower heart rate variability than the low-anxiety group. Regarding sex, girls showed lower heart rate variability and complexity than boys.Conclusions: The results suggest that adolescent girls have a less flexible cardiac system that could be a marker of the girls' vulnerability to developing anxiety disorders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attentional network functioning in emotionally neutral conditions and self-reported attentional control (AC) were analysed as predictors of the tendency to engage in dysfunctional emotion regulation strategies. Diminished attentional orienting predicted an increased tendency to engage in brooding rumination, and enhanced alertness predicted a greater chance of suppression, beyond trait anxiety and self-reported AC, which were not predictive of either rumination or suppression. This is the first study to show that some forms of dysfunctional emotion regulation are related to the attentional network functioning in emotionally neutral conditions. Results are discussed in relation to regulatory temperament and anxiety-related attentional biases literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anxiety sensitivity (AS) is recognized as an early risk factor for the development of anxiety disorders. This study evaluates whether a brief school-based selective prevention program reduces AS and anxious and depressive symptoms in children and youth. Participants scoring high in AS but without any current psychopathological disorder were selected from a sample of 613 individuals (61% female, 11-17 years old) and randomly assigned to the prevention program (n=47) or to a waiting-list control (WLC) (n=45) group. A normal control (NC) group (n=53) was also included. After treatment, a significant decrease in AS and in anxiety and depressive symptoms were observed in both prevention and WLC groups. Differences between experimental conditions only emerged, partially, at six-month follow-up (FU) with the prevention group (PG) exhibiting significantly lower AS (p<.05), and equalling NCs. Although the magnitude of change in the PG is comparable to that reported in previous studies with longer and more complex prevention programs, a parallel reduction in the WLCs suggests that the observed decrease in the short term could be mostly time-linked. Despite this, our results encourage research into brief preventive interventions at an individual level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]