fMRI Paradigms and Approaches
- Cognitive control and emotion regulation are domains of high clinical relevance to adolescent mental disorders, but neither are unitary processes. Cognitive control processes include manipulation of information (e.g., in working memory), task management (e.g., switching or multi-tasking), and response inhibition or selection. These processes engage different sub-regions of prefrontal cortex, involve different functional connectivity, and develop at different rates
- Interactions of age with condition and patterns of activation are better indicators of developmental change than are main effects involving age-related differences in levels of activation.
- Negative attentional biases may contribute to depression, but the inability to regulate or repair sad moods is more germane to the sustained negative affect that is a cardinal symptom of depression.
- Findings from fMRI paradigms with control subjects that involved sad mood induction followed by a mood repair manipulation — the recall of positive memories — suggested the involvement of the parahippocampal gyrus in the elaboration of sad mood and the subgenual anterior cingulate gyrus in the repair of sad mood.
- fMRI studies of adolescents at risk for depression by virtue of their family histories suggest aberrant amygdalar activations not seen in controls. Relationships to stress reactivity and genotype may be important.
- Interpretive value will be enhanced when information from fMRI is integrated with other biological and behavioral data.
