A remote, computerized training program eases anxiety in children
Researchers first to explore relationship between anxiety, inhibitory control and EEG measures in preadolescents
2021-03-09
(Press-News.org) Anxiety levels in the United States are rising sharply and have especially intensified in younger populations. According to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, anxiety disorders affect 31.9 percent of children ages 13 to 18 years old. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, children and adolescents have experienced unprecedented interruptions to their daily lives and it is expected that these disruptions may precipitate mental illness, including anxiety, depression, and/or stress related symptoms.
Traditional anxiety and depression treatments include cognitive behavioral therapy and psychiatric medications, which are somewhat successful in alleviating symptoms in adults. However, they have yielded some mixed results in children. Therefore, discovering appropriate means for reducing childhood anxiety and depression that are both affordable and accessible is paramount.
Using a computerized and completely remote training program, researchers from Florida Atlantic University's Charles E. Schmidt College of Science have found a way to alleviate negative emotions in preadolescent children. They examined the relationship between anxiety, inhibitory control, and resting-state electroencephalography (EEG) in a critical age-range for social and emotional development (ages 8 to 12 years old). Inhibitory control is the ability to willfully withhold or suppress a thought, action or feeling. Without it, people would act purely on impulses or on old habits of action and thought.
Results of the study published in the journal, Applied Neuropsychology: Child, reveal that computerized inhibitory training helps to mitigate negative emotions in preadolescent children. EEG results also provide evidence of frontal alpha asymmetry shifting to the left after children completed an emotional version of the training. At the baseline time point, there was further indication to support the link between inhibitory control dysfunction and anxiety/depression. Decreased inhibitory control performance predicted higher levels of anxiety and depression, signifying that inhibitory impairments could be a risk factor for the development of these conditions in children.
Prior research has focused on adults and has only used self-report measures to operationalize anxiety and depressive symptoms. This novel study expands upon research investigating cognitive and neurological mechanisms involved in childhood anxiety and depression. In addition, it includes an objective outcome measure (resting-state EEG) to enable more succinct conclusions about training efficacy.
"In the current social climate of the world, internalizing conditions like anxiety and depression are becoming increasingly common in children and adolescents. Meanwhile, the availability and accessibility of computer and tablet technology also has rapidly increased," said Nathaniel Shanok, lead author and a recent Ph.D. graduate of FAU's Department of Psychology, who received an award from the American Psychological Society in 2020 for this research. "Providing computerized cognitive training programs to children can be a highly beneficial use of this technology for improving not only academic performance, but as seen in our study, psychological and emotional functioning during a challenging time period of development."
Participants in the study were assigned to four weeks of either an emotional inhibitory control training program, a neutral inhibitory control training program, or a waitlisted control, and were tested using cognitive, emotional and EEG measures. Researchers evaluated the effects of the four-week, 16-session computerized inhibitory control training program using three tasks (go/no-go, flanker, and Stroop). The training program utilized for the study is gFocus from IQ Mindware and was created by Mark Ashton Smith, Ph.D.
Researchers found that inhibitory control accuracy was significantly and negatively related to anxiety as well as depression. Emotional and neutral training conditions led to significant reductions in anxiety, depression, and negative affect relative to the waitlist group, with the emotional training condition showing the largest reductions in anxiety and negative affect. These two conditions showed comparable improvements in inhibitory control accuracy relative to the waitlist, with greater increases observed in the neutral training condition.
"Given the predominately adverse influence of anxiety on social, psychological and cognitive functioning; early prevention, management and quality treatment plans are critical research areas to explore," said Nancy Aaron Jones, Ph.D., co-author, an associate professor, and director of the FAU WAVES Emotion Laboratory in the Department of Psychology, Charles E. Schmidt College of Science, and a member of the FAU Brain Institute. "Advancements in technology have made it possible to train certain cognitive abilities using child-friendly applications or games that can be easily accessed from a home computer. Devising computerized training programs, which target underlying cognitive characteristics related to anxiety is a promising method for attenuating symptoms and risk in children."
INFORMATION:
Anxiety involves strong cognitive and emotional influences, which are both explicit (obsessive thought processes and ruminations) as well as implicit (negative processing bias and reduced cognitive control). Inhibitory control impairment is believed to be a cognitive mediator of anxiety through both explicit and implicit mechanisms. The explicit theory of generalized anxiety disorder explains that the manifestation of anxiety occurs in part due to the inability of individuals to effectively recognize unrealistic or overly critical thinking patterns (thoughts) and suppress them.
Study co-authors are Kelsey Melzer; Colin Frank; and Victoria Lugo; behavioral sciences, FAU's Charles E. Schmidt College of Science.
Jones and the research team continue to explore anxiety in the FAU WAVES Emotion Laboratory, which is focused on understanding the factors that contribute to the development of socio-emotional wellness during infancy and childhood. Funded in part by the National Institute of Mental Health of the National Institutes of Health, research in the laboratory is designed to explore and understand the contributors to optimal infant and child development.
- FAU -
About Florida Atlantic University:
Florida Atlantic University, established in 1961, officially opened its doors in 1964 as the fifth public university in Florida. Today, the University serves more than 30,000 undergraduate and graduate students across six campuses located along the southeast Florida coast. In recent years, the University has doubled its research expenditures and outpaced its peers in student achievement rates. Through the coexistence of access and excellence, FAU embodies an innovative model where traditional achievement gaps vanish. FAU is designated a Hispanic-serving institution, ranked as a top public university by U.S. News & World Report and a High Research Activity institution by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. For more information, visit http://www.fau.edu.
[Attachments] See images for this press release:
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2021-03-09
A critical ingredient for auroras exists much higher in space than previously thought, according to new research in the journal Scientific Reports. The dazzling light displays in the polar night skies require an electric accelerator to propel charged particles down through the atmosphere. Scientists at Nagoya University and colleagues in Japan, Taiwan and the US have found that it exists beyond 30,000 kilometres above the Earth's surface - offering insight not just about Earth, but other planets as well.
The story of aurora formation begins with supersonic plasma propelled from the Sun into space as high-speed, charged particles. When these charged particles get close to Earth, they are ...
2021-03-09
Scientists at the University of Virginia School of Medicine have developed a tool to monitor communications within the brain in a way never before possible, and it has already offered an explanation for why Alzheimer's drugs have limited effectiveness and why patients get much worse after going off of them.
The researchers expect their new method will have tremendous impact on our understanding of depression, sleep disorders, autism, neurological diseases and major psychiatric conditions. It will speed scientific research into the workings of the brain, they say, and facilitate the development of new treatments.
"We can now 'see' how brain cells communicate in sharp detail in both the healthy and diseased brains," said lead researcher J. Julius Zhu, PhD, of UVA's Department ...
2021-03-09
(LOS ANGELES) - Recent advances in technology have opened many possibilities for using wearable and implantable sensors to monitor various indicators of patient health. Wearable pressure sensors are designed to respond to very small changes in bodily pressure, so that physical functions such as pulse rate, blood pressure, breathing rates and even subtle changes in vocal cord vibrations can be monitored in real time with a high degree of sensitivity.
Such responses occur when a substance in the sensor "gates," or allows selected pressure signals to pass to a transistor, which then conducts and amplifies these signals for detection. A recent type of transistor, organic electrochemical transistors ...
2021-03-09
Visual sensation begins at the retina, which is the neural tissue located at the back of eyeballs. It has been known that the retina detects light using photoreceptors which are light-sensitive nerve cells.In case of retinal degenerative diseases such as retinitis pigmentosa and age-related macular degeneration, those light sensing neurons are gradually damaged, leading to a profound vision loss. At this moment, no cure is available for the abovementioned ailments. But, microelectronic retinal prostheses can create artificial vision by electrically stimulating remaining retinal neurons although the prosthetic vision is still far removed from normal vision.
To further improve the quality of prosthetic artificial vision, Dr. Maesoon ...
2021-03-09
A staple for many, chickpeas are a rich source of vitamins, minerals, and fiber and offer many health benefits, such as improving digestion and reducing the risk of ailments including heart disease and cancer. However, chickpeas possess a rather narrow genetic diversity and are susceptible to Ascochyta blight, a devastating disease that can cause a yield loss of up to 100 percent. In Australia alone, this disease costs an average of $4.8 million annually.
To help curtail the impact of Ascochyta blight, plant pathologists in Western Australia have turned to wild relatives of the ...
2021-03-09
In the spring of 2020, the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic appeared to coincide with the tree pollen season in the northern hemisphere. These observations prompted an international team of researchers to conduct an extensive investigation: The scientists wanted to know whether there is a demonstrable link between airborne pollen concentrations and SARS-CoV-2 infection rates.
Pollen is a significant environmental factor influencing infection rates
Under the leadership of first author Athanasios Damialis, the team at the Chair of Environmental Medicine at TUM collected data on airborne pollen concentrations, weather conditions and SARS-CoV-2 infections - taking into consideration the variation of infection rates from ...
2021-03-09
Depending on the topic, people's attitudes can change from moment to moment or last a lifetime. The factors that make one opinion long-lasting and another ephemeral, however, are not always clear.
Past studies have demonstrated that opinions based on hard facts and data can remain constant over time, but new research published in the journal Psychological Science reveals that attitudes based on feelings and emotions can also stand the test of time. This research has implications for both predicting whose attitudes are fixed versus fleeting and how to nudge people to form more long-lasting opinions.
"We have ...
2021-03-09
Washington, March 9, 2021--A comprehensive meta-analysis of prior research has found, overall, that children ages 1 to 8 were less likely to understand picture books when they read the digital, versus print, version. However, when digital picture books contain the right enhancements that reinforce the story content, they outperform their print counterparts. The results were published today in Review of Educational Research, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Educational Research Association.
Authors Natalia Kucirkova at the University of Stavanger in Norway and The Open University in the United Kingdom, and May Irene Furenes and Adriana G. Bus at the University of Stavanger, analyzed the results of 39 studies that included a total 1,812 children between the ages of 1 and 8. For their ...
2021-03-09
PHILADELPHIA-- Head injury in the United States is common, END ...
2021-03-09
Imagine using stem cells from your bone marrow to grow a piece of bone tissue in the lab, after which medical doctors explore which drugs have the desired effect on your bones. In this way, a tailor-made treatment plan would be made for everyone, with the best approach being clear in advance. Personalized medicine at its best.
That vision of the future is no longer science fiction now that researchers from Eindhoven University of Technology and Radboud university medical center have actually realized the first part: growing a lifelike piece of bone tissue from human stem cells. It is the first organoid of bone, a simplified version of the original, the researchers report today in the journal Advanced Functional Materials.
Coherent picture
"With ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] A remote, computerized training program eases anxiety in children
Researchers first to explore relationship between anxiety, inhibitory control and EEG measures in preadolescents
