Incidental threat during visuospatial working memory in adolescent anxiety: an emotional memory-guided saccade task.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Pediatric anxiety disorders are among the most common psychiatric mental illnesses in children and adolescents, and are associated with abnormal cognitive control in emotional, particularly threat, contexts. In a series of studies using eye movement saccade tasks, we reported anxiety-related alterations in the interplay of inhibitory control with incentives, or with emotional distractors. The present study extends these findings to working memory (WM), and queries the interaction of spatial WM with emotional stimuli in pediatric clinical anxiety.

Methods

Participants were 33 children/adolescents diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, and 22 age-matched healthy comparison youths. Participants completed a novel eye movement task, an affective variant of the memory-guid

SUBMITTER: Mueller SC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6309615 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature