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Differences in neural response to extinction recall in young adults with or without history of behavioral inhibition
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 May 2017
Abstract
Behavioral inhibition (BI) is a temperament identified in early childhood that is associated with risk for anxiety disorders, yet only about half of behaviorally inhibited children manifest anxiety later in life. We compared brain function and behavior during extinction recall in a sample of nonanxious young adults characterized in childhood with BI (n = 22) or with no BI (n = 28). Three weeks after undergoing fear conditioning and extinction, participants completed a functional magnetic resonance imaging extinction recall task assessing memory and threat differentiation for conditioned stimuli. While self-report and psychophysiological measures of differential conditioning and extinction were similar across groups, BI-related differences in brain function emerged during extinction recall. Childhood BI was associated with greater activation in subgenual anterior cingulate cortex in response to cues signaling safety. This pattern of results may reflect neural correlates that promote resilience against anxiety in a temperamentally at-risk population.
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017
Footnotes
This research was supported in part by the Intramural Research Program of the National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health. The first author (T.S.) is supported by Marie Curie Career Integration Grant PCIG13-GA-2013-618534 and Israel Science Foundation Grant 1377/14. The last author (J.C.B.) was supported by K99/R00 MH091183. All authors report no conflict of interests.
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