Altered brain activity in antisocial teenagers

May 28, 2019

Science Daily/University of Zurich

Teenage girls with problematic social behavior display reduced brain activity and weaker connectivity between the brain regions implicated in emotion regulation. The findings of an international study carried out by researchers from the University of Zurich and others now offer a neurobiological explanation for the difficulties some girls have in controlling their emotions, and provide indications for possible therapy approaches.

Becoming a teenager means going through a variety of physical and behavioral changes in the context of heightened emotionality. For everyday social functioning, as well as for personal physical and mental well-being, it is important that teenagers are able to recognize, process and control these emotions. For young people who are diagnosed with conduct disorder, this process is difficult, and may lead to antisocial or aggressive reactions that clearly lie outside the age-appropriate norms, e.g. swearing, hitting, stealing and lying. An international team of researchers from Switzerland, Germany and England have been able to demonstrate using functional magnetic resonance imaging that these behavioral difficulties are reflected in the brain activity.

Neural explanation for social deficits

The study involved almost 60 female teenagers aged between 15 and 18 who were asked to try to actively regulate their emotions while the researchers measured their brain activity. Half of the group had previously been diagnosed with conduct disorder, while the other half showed typical social development for their age. In the girls with problematic social behavior, less activity was seen in the prefrontal and temporal cortex, where the brain regions responsible for cognitive control processes are located. In addition, these regions were less connected to other brain regions relevant for emotion processing and cognitive control.

"Our results offer the first neural explanation for deficits in emotion regulation in teenage girls," says first author Professor Nora Raschle of the University of Zurich. "The difference in the neural activities between the two test groups could indicate fundamental differences in emotion regulation. However, it could also be due to delayed brain development in participants with conduct disorders."

Indications for therapy

Treatment for young people diagnosed with conduct disorders may target several levels: Helping them to recognize, process and express their emotions, as well as learning emotion regulation skills. "Our findings indicate that an increased focus on emotion regulation skills may be beneficial," says Raschle. Future studies will also look at the efficacy of specific therapy programs: "We will investigate cognitive-behavioral intervention programs that aim to enhance emotion regulation in girls with conduct disorder and see whether brain function and behavior may change accordingly," explains last author Christina Stadler of the Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Center in Basel.

It has not yet been investigated whether male teenagers with conduct disorder show similar brain activity during emotion regulation. According to the authors, there are several indicators that the neural characteristics of conduct disorders may be gender-specific. "However, most studies -- unlike ours -- focus on young men, for which reason the neuro-biological understanding established up to now is mainly related to males," says Raschle.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/05/190528095235.htm

How teens deal with stress may affect their blood pressure, immune system

December 13, 2018

Science Daily/Penn State

Most teens get stressed out by their families from time to time, but whether they bottle those emotions up or put a positive spin on things may affect certain processes in the body, including blood pressure and how immune cells respond to bacterial invaders, according to researchers.

The researchers explored whether the strategies adolescents used to deal with chronic family stress affected various metabolic and immune processes in the body. Strategies could include cognitive reappraisal -- trying to think of the stressor in a more positive way -- and suppression, or inhibiting the expression of emotions in reaction to a stressor.

The team found that when faced with greater chronic family stress, teens who used cognitive reappraisal had better metabolic measures, like blood pressure and waist-to-hip ratio. Teens who were more likely to use suppression tended to have more inflammation when their immune cells were exposed to a bacterial stimulus in the lab, even in the presence of anti-inflammatory signals.

Hannah Schreier, assistant professor of biobehavioral health at Penn State, said the results suggest that the coping skills teens develop by the time they are adolescents have the potential to impact their health later in life.

"These changes are not something that will detrimentally impact anyone's health within a week or two, but that over years or decades could make a difference," Schreier said. "That may be how small changes in metabolic or inflammatory outcomes may become associated with poorer health or a greater chance of developing a chronic disease later in life."

Emily Jones, graduate student in biobehavioral health at Penn State, said the results -- recently published in Psychosomatic Medicine -- help therapists and counselors better work with children and adolescents who live in stressful environments.

"Exposure to chronic stress doesn't always lead to poorer health outcomes, in part because of differences among people," Jones said. "As our study findings suggest, there may be ways to help someone be more resilient in the face of stress by encouraging certain emotion regulation strategies. For children in stressful living situations, we can't always stop the stressors from happening, but we may be able to help youth deal with that stress."

Although previous research has linked chronic stress during childhood with such conditions as depression, autoimmune disorders and cardiovascular disease, the researchers said less is known about why some people under chronic stress develop these conditions while others do not. While it was thought that emotional regulation may play a role, the researchers were not sure exactly how.

To better explore how different ways of regulating emotions can affect different aspects of physical health, the researchers gathered data from 261 adolescents between the ages of 13 and 16 years.

The researchers interviewed the participants about the relationships and chronic stress within their families, as well as measured the participants' waist-to-hip ratios and blood pressure. The adolescents also completed questionnaires about how they regulated their emotions.

To measure immune function, the researchers took blood samples from each participant and exposed the blood to a bacterial stimulus -- both with and without the anti-inflammatory substance hydrocortisone -- to see how the immune cells would respond.

The researchers found that under conditions of greater chronic family stress, the immune cells of adolescents who were more likely to use suppression also tended to produce more pro-inflammatory cytokines, molecules that signal to other cells that there is a threat present and that the body's immune system needs to kick into gear.

The cells of these teens produced more cytokines even in the presence of hydrocortisone, an anti-inflammatory substance that usually tells the body to slow down on producing cytokines.

"Cytokines are like messengers that communicate to the rest of the body that added support is needed," Jones said. "So when you have a high level of these pro-inflammatory cytokines, even in the presence of anti-inflammatory messages from cortisol, it may suggest that your body is mounting an excessive inflammatory response, more so than necessary. It suggests that the immune system may not be functioning as it should be."

Meanwhile, the researchers found that adolescents who tended to use cognitive reappraisal while under more family stress had smaller waist-to-hip ratios -- a measurement used as an indicator of health and chronic disease risk -- and lower blood pressure.

"While we would have to follow up with more studies, the results could lend support to the idea that reappraising a situation during times of stress could be beneficial," Jones said. "For a mild stressor, this could be as simple as reframing a bad situation by thinking about it as a challenge or an opportunity for growth."

The researchers added that opportunities for future studies could include looking at the effects of emotion regulation strategies on these metabolic and immune measures over time to tease apart how the family environment shapes emotion regulation, how emotion regulation may itself influence stress exposure, and how chronic family stress and emotion regulation together can affect chronic disease risk in the long run.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/12/181213131236.htm