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    • Considering developmental aspects children may have had more

    2018-11-14

    Considering developmental aspects, children may have had more difficulties to implement reappraisal as adults, constricting their ability to stay on task during the whole block. Moreover, during childhood, cognitive control-related PFC activity is known to undergo substantial developmental changes (Durston and Casey, 2006; Rubia, 2012). In fact, prior fMRI reappraisal studies in children and adolescents found both enhanced and reduced PFC activity (Lévesque et al., 2004; McRae et al., 2012; Pitskel et al., 2011) and reappraisal-related activity in the left inferior frontal gyrus was reported to increase with age, whereby children aged 10–13 years did not yet show enhanced activity (McRae et al., 2012). Based on these developmental changes, it is conceivable that some results are confounded by analyses across a rather broad age range. Regarding DMOG (3), results indeed showed effective modulation of the neural emotion effect by reappraisal, but they also deviated from expectations. In the case of down-regulation (threat-down), processing of angry (vs. neutral) faces was reduced, in line with hypothesis (3). The localization of this effect in the left dlPFC is consistent with two recent meta-analyses linking the left lateral PFC particularly to the perception of anger (Lindquist et al., 2012; Vytal and Hamann, 2010). So, indeed, processing of angry faces seemed to be down-regulated on a neural level, but this down-regulation was not reflected on a behavioral level by the threat ratings. Considering the effects of up-regulation (threat-up), it was not the difference between angry and neutral faces that was enhanced (as expected and found in adults), but rather the response to neutral faces, which might be explained by developmental aspects. The ability to recognize emotional expressions is still developing in the examined age range and has not yet reached adult levels (Thomas et al., 2007; Johnston et al., 2011). Moreover, children may perceive neutral faces as more ambiguous than emotional faces, as indexed by enhanced amygdala responding (Thomas et al., 2001). Hence, during up-regulation, children may have appraised faces as threatening despite their neutral expression, and thus processing was enhanced. Of course, such a post hoc interpretation requires further validation, especially since threat ratings were rather enhanced for angry faces. In addition to the effects of reappraisal, correlation analyses explored the relationship of neural activity (mean and difference activity) with age and two indexes of emotional adjustment. Correlations of neural activity with age may be interpreted as an approximation of functional neural development (McRae et al., 2012; Pitskel et al., 2011). With increasing age, mean activity was reduced in the visual cortex (Fig. 4, top), which is consistent with age-related decreases in the amplitudes of visual ERPs (Taylor et al., 2004; Kuefner et al., 2010; Sumich et al., 2012). Moreover, an age-related reduction in EEG power was linked to a decrease in gray matter volume (Whitford et al., 2007). Based on these findings, the observed reduction of visual cortical activity with age may be interpreted as an index of neural maturation. Additionally, increasing age was related to increased difference activity in the left ventral temporal cortex (Fig. 5, left). The ventral temporal cortex and specifically the fusiform face area exhibit increasing specialization for faces in both hemispheres during development (Joseph et al., 2011). Based on the observation that the emotion effect occurred in the temporal cortices of both hemispheres in adults (Wessing et al., 2013), it is suggested that the additional recruitment of the left ventral temporal cortex with increasing age reflects increasing regional specialization for the processing of emotion in faces. Correlations of mean activity with day-to-day emotional adjustment were found in strikingly similar visual cortical regions as with age. More precisely, corroborating hypothesis (4), visual cortical activity was reduced with increasingly adaptive emotion regulation (Fig. 4, middle). Moreover, corroborating hypothesis (5), it was enhanced with increasing trait anxiety (Fig. 4, bottom left). This is consistent with previous reappraisal studies in children, showing that specific LPP amplitudes were reduced with more adaptive emotion regulation and enhanced with increasing anxious-depressed symptoms (Dennis and Hajcak, 2009), and that the LPP difference between unpleasant and neutral stimuli was enhanced with higher anxiety and more fearful behavior (DeCicco et al., 2012). Although involving somewhat different indicators of LPP-related neural processing, these results converge in showing that less intense neural responses were associated with better emotional adjustment.