Jessica Agnew-Blais

Variability in attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) over the life course

Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) was once considered to be a static, largely childhood-limited condition. However increasingly research has begun to focus on variation in the course of ADHD across the life span, with evidence for trajectories characterised by persistence, remission, and more recently, late-onset and fluctuation. This talk will describe the evidence for these different ADHD courses, as well as consider several open questions about ADHD variability over the life course, including the role of genetic risk, ADHD in older age, and the potential role of hormonal fluctuation in ADHD symptoms.

Eiko Fried

Studying mental health problems as systems, not syndromes

Systems are everywhere: the climate system, the public transport system, the immune system, and the political system. In the last decades, complex systems approaches have enabled considerable advances in explanation and prediction across a range of disciplines, including ecology, meteorology, and medicine. Here I introduce a systems approach to mental health problems, where disorders like depression are conceptualized as emergent states arising from dynamic interactions among bio-psycho-social elements, including affect states. I show that this perspective provides utility for description, prediction, understanding, and treatment. It offers new lenses through which to study mental illness (e.g., attractor states, phase transitions), and new levers to treat them (e.g., early warning signals, novel treatment targets).

Anne-Lise Goddings

Incorporating puberty into studies of neurocognitive development 

Puberty is a critical aspect of adolescent biopsychosocial development that is linked with growth and development in nearly every body system and is central to young people’s experiences of adolescence. In this talk, I will consider the ways in which puberty can be assessed and incorporated into studies of neurocognitive development, highlighting the strengths and limitations of the available methodologies. I will detail key findings from studies using these different methods and discuss the potential future developments to improve the field of puberty-related research in cognitive neuroscience. 

David Lydon-Staley

Fluctuations: A focus on the person, behavior, and multiple levels of analysis

Drawing on three key developmental science frameworks, I will review what we know, and what we might want to know, about fluctuations. Starting with a discussion of existing approaches to quantifying between-person differences in emotion fluctuations, a person-centered framework will be contrasted with variable-centered approaches to highlight the added value we may derive from thinking about people’s emotional lives holistically. Next, inspired by frameworks that conceptualize behavior as the leading edge of adaptation, emerging efforts to quantify and model complex, everyday behaviors and their fluctuations will be overviewed. Finally, with an emphasis on frameworks highlighting the importance of considering multiple levels of analysis when interrogating human experience, efforts to link fluctuations in behavior with fluctuations in brains will be reviewed, with an emphasis on the everyday difficulties investigators face when engaging in this type of work.

Rogier Kievit

Understanding cognitive fluctuations using Dynamic SEM

Individual differences in cognitive abilities are almost universally conceptualized as traits­ – Stable, relatively unchanging properties of individuals. However, this perspective ignores cognitive fluctuations – Short term changes in cognitive performance within persons. I will argue this is an overlooked yet crucial aspect of cognitive performance, with distinct neural and psychological mechanisms. In this talk I will demonstrate how Dynamic SEM can be used to quantify and tease apart distinct components of cognitive variability. I will illustrate these principles through examples focusing on ADHD, the neural mechanisms of variability, day-to-day fluctuations and explore the dimensionality of variability, and survey the future of this often overlooked research topic.

Argyris Stringaris

Emotions: Do they work for psychopathology?

Patrik Vuilleumier

Brain network dynamics and functional components of emotion

Emotions consist of adaptive responses to particular events according to their perceived value for the individual, and trigger multiple changes in perception, memory, or action. Using fMRI across various paradigms, our work investigates how emotional events can influence brain activity and cognitive functions not only during but also subsequent to transient affective responses. We find that emotional episodes lead to sustained changes in brain state over prolonged periods of time following the eliciting events, with predominant impact of midline brain areas implicated in self-reflective processes, as well as other areas implicated in attention, executive control, or social cognition. These effects are modulated by individual traits and personality factors associated with emotion regulation ability or psychopathology. In addition, unlike previous approaches attempting to identify specialized brain circuits engaged by specific emotions (e.g., fear, disgust, etc.), we build on componential theoretical models to delineate distinct networks (or functional components) that can activate in parallel and jointly contribute to the generation of different emotions. These networks encode not only the affective value of events, but also other cognitive dimensions such as novelty, goal, or social significance. Transient synchronization of these component networks during emotional contexts recruits a distributed set of cortico-subcortical structures implicated in self-relevance processing, interoception, and motor programming. Taken together, our findings support an account of emotions as dynamic changes in brain state emerging from embodied and action-oriented processes, which govern adaptive responses to the environment with both short-term and more sustained effects on behavior. 

Delfina Bilello

Relationship between mood and social interactions in adolescent school-based social networks: An RSIENA longitudinal social network study of peer support

Friendships and peer networks are critically important in adolescence and are typically characterised by high levels of reciprocity, closeness, and mutual disclosure. Young people spend a large proportion of their time with peers, including in school, and may rely more on these friendships for emotional and social support. Therefore, it is important to understand how adolescent friendship and peer support impact emotional wellbeing, and conversely how mood and wellbeing shape social interactions. To answer this question, we took a longitudinal social network approach, gathering temporally high-resolution longitudinal data each day for a period of five days from a bounded network of female adolescents in a UK single-sex secondary school (n = 111; age 13-14). Participants completed daily questionnaires of mood and social interactions, including who they hung out with and provided support to. Data analysis using RSIENA focused on the temporal contiguity between mood and social interactions. Preliminary analyses of the data indicate mood homophily, whereby adolescents tend to hang out and have positive interactions with peers experiencing similar mood. This effect was stronger for negative than positive mood. Network of support provision showed a similar effect, whereby adolescents provided support to peers experiencing similar mood. Overall, these findings show evidence that mood shapes interaction patterns in an adolescent school-based social network: individuals gravitate towards emotionally similar peers, and in some cases this provides a context for peer support. Future research should determine the extent to which this support is perceived as mutual, and whether providing and receiving peer support has associated costs or advantages.

Georgia Chronaki

Distraction by Vocal Anger in children with symptoms of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder

Children with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) often present difficulties to recognise anger from other people’s voices. Research has shown enhanced brain activity (N100) to vocal anger, possibly reflecting preattentive hyper-vigilance to vocal anger, in ADHD (Chronaki et al., 2015). In this study we used a novel task to specifically measure the preattentive processing of vocal anger in children with ADHD symptoms. A total of 194 participants (50 adults, 51 adolescents, 93 children) took part in an auditory distraction odd-ball task with emotional voices as oddballs and neutral voices as standard. Reaction times and errors were recorded. Questionnaires measures were used to screen ADHD symptoms. Results showed that, overall, adults were faster than adolescents and children at the task.  Overall, participants were slower to respond to visual targets preceded by angry compared to neutral voices. This effect was found in children and adults but not adolescents. Reaction times to targets preceded by emotional voices were significantly associated with symptoms of inattention and hyperactivity in all age groups. Specifically, participants with higher levels of inattention and hyperactivity were slower to respond to targets preceded by emotional (angry, happy) compared to neutral voices. We are currently analysing data from an Event-Related-Potential study examining the neural correlates of preattentive vocal anger processing in ADHD. We discuss implications of the results for theory and clinical practice, in relation to the role of preattentive (subconcious) emotion processes in psychopathology.

Wiebke Gandhi

Changes and fluctuations in psychological states during exposure to uncontrollable aversion

Chronic pain patients typically perceive little control over their pain – a feeling often associated with depression and anxiety. To understand the development of affective comorbidities in pain patients better, we developed a task, using uncontrollable versus controllable aversives to elicit learned helplessness (experimentally-induced symptoms of depression/anxiety).

In two studies (online, N=393; in-person, N=83) healthy participants were randomly allocated to a control or an uncontrollable stress condition. During the stress task, participants saw ‘Where is Wally?’ scenes, while being exposed to unpleasant sounds (online) or painful shocks (in-person). They were told the stimulation would stop before the end of each trial if they found Wally. Aversive stimulation was rated after each of the 50 trials. While the control group could indeed stop the pain prematurely, this was impossible for the uncontrollable group. Importantly, stimulation input was matched between groups. Before and after the task, participants completed anxiety and affective state questionnaires.

Anxiety and negative affect increased, and positive affect decreased due to uncontrollable, but not controllable stress. Ratings of the aversive stimulation increased over time in both the uncontrollable and controllable stress group. Strikingly, though, the controllable group still fluctuated in pain ratings across trials dependent on their task performance, while the uncontrollable group no longer showed any increases in pain ratings after the 10th trial (probably a sign that learned helplessness was established by then).

Uncontrollable aversion reliably causes symptoms of depression and anxiety. These symptoms are not driven by mere stress exposure, but by the perceived situational uncontrollability. "

Rich Harrison

“I just get used to it”: The reliability of individual differences in pain adaptation and the underlying neural mechanisms

Acute pain serves to warn an organism of risk of potential damage. However, when nociceptive stimulation persists two plausible responses emerge: If no risk of harm is anticipated, habituation may occur. Alternatively, if threat is perceived, pain sensitization is likely. An individual’s adaptation to prolonged pain may provide insight into their ability to preserve resources, and their likelihood of developing chronic pain. Yet, little is known about the stability of these individual differences or their underlying neural mechanisms. Eighty-five participants undertook a repetitive noxious stimulation task across four sessions. Participants completed this task in an MRI scanner, alongside a resting-state scan, and then completed the same task outside the scanner on three separate days. Within-session pain adaptation was quantified by the slope across pain ratings. Intraclass correlations were calculated between slopes across the four sessions. We then investigated the neural dynamics of these individual differences and connectivity analyses were performed on the resulting clusters. Findings indicated that rating slopes were reliable across sessions. Habituation was associated with increasing activity in the anterior hippocampus and amygdala, with sensitization associated with increasing activity in the sensorimotor cortices, over time.  Habituation was associated with higher resting-state connectivity between the hippocampus/amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), and higher connectivity between sensorimotor regions and the hippocampus, amygdala and insula cortex. Our data suggest that pain adaptation may represent a stable phenotypic trait. Furthermore, pain adaptation involves hippocampal-amygdala-vmPFC circuitry and sensorimotor circuitry, suggesting distinct mechanisms of sensory-discrimination and evaluative appraisal underlie a context-appropriate pain response.