title: Measurement of Fronto-limbic Activity Using an Emotional Oddball Task in Children with Familial High Risk for Schizophrenia.
abstract: Adolescence is a critical developmental period where the early symptoms of schizophrenia frequently emerge. First-degree relatives of people with schizophrenia who are at familial high risk (FHR) may show similar cognitive and emotional changes. However, the neurological changes underlying the emergence of these symptoms remain unclear. This study sought to identify differences in frontal, striatal, and limbic regions in children and adolescents with FHR using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Groups of 21 children and adolescents at FHR and 21 healthy controls completed an emotional oddball task that relied on selective attention and the suppression of task-irrelevant emotional information. The standard oddball task was modified to include aversive and neutral distractors in order to examine potential group differences in both emotional and executive processing. This task was designed specifically to allow for children and adolescents to complete by keeping the difficulty and emotional image content age-appropriate. Furthermore, we demonstrate a technique for suitable fMRI registration for children and adolescent participants. This paradigm may also be applied in future studies to measure changes in neural activity in other populations with hypothesized developmental changes in executive and emotional processing.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine; Duke-UNC Brain Imaging and Analysis Center, Duke University Medical Center.
authors.forename: Sarah J
authors.initials: SJ
authors.lastname: Hart
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine; Curriculum in Neurobiology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
authors.forename: Joseph J
authors.initials: JJ
authors.lastname: Shaffer
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine; Duke-UNC Brain Imaging and Analysis Center, Duke University Medical Center.
authors.forename: Joshua
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Bizzell
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine; Curriculum in Neurobiology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
authors.forename: Mariko
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Weber
authors.affiliation: Duke-UNC Brain Imaging and Analysis Center, Duke University Medical Center.
authors.forename: Mary A
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: McMahon
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine.
authors.forename: Hongbin
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Gu
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine.
authors.forename: Diana O
authors.initials: DO
authors.lastname: Perkins
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine; Duke-UNC Brain Imaging and Analysis Center, Duke University Medical Center; aysenil_belger@med.unc.edu.
authors.forename: Aysenil
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Belger