title: 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-guided saccade task. This task assessed the influence of incidental threat on spatial WM processes during high and low cognitive load.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Healthy but not anxious children/adolescents showed slowed saccade latencies during incidental threat in low-load but not high-load WM conditions. No other group effects emerged on saccade latency or accuracy.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The current data suggest a differential pattern of how emotion interacts with cognitive control in healthy youth relative to anxious youth. These findings extend data from inhibitory processes, reported previously, to spatial WM in pediatric anxiety.
authors.affiliation: Department of Experimental Clinical and Health Psychology, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium; Section on Developmental and Affective Neuroscience (SDAN), National Institute of Mental Health, NIH, Bethesda, Maryland.
authors.forename: Sven C
authors.initials: SC
authors.lastname: Mueller
authors.forename: Tomer
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Shechner
authors.forename: Dana
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Rosen
authors.forename: Eric E
authors.initials: EE
authors.lastname: Nelson
authors.forename: Daniel S
authors.initials: DS
authors.lastname: Pine
authors.forename: Monique
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Ernst
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D001008:Anxiety Disorders / Q000503:physiopathology*; D002648:Child; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D056344:Executive Function / Q000502:physiology*; D005239:Fear / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007266:Inhibition, Psychological; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term / Q000502:physiology*; D012438:Saccades / Q000502:physiology*; D065852:Spatial Memory / Q000502:physiology*
keywords: children/adolescents; cognitive load; cognitive resources; development; emotion; eye movement; saccade