Neural Activity during an Emotional Go-NoGo Task in Youth At-Risk for Serious Mental Illness in the PROCAN Study
Poster B40, Tuesday, October%209, 11:30%20am%20-%201:00%20pm, Essex%20Ballroom
Paul Metzak1, Rowen Nyman1, Glenda MacQueen1, Benjamin Goldstein2,3, JianLi Wang4,5, Sidney Kennedy6,7,8,9, Signe Bray1,10,11,12, Catherine Lebel1,10,11,12, Stefanie Hassel1, Jean Addington1; 1Hotchkiss Brain Institute, Department of Psychiatry, University of Calgary, 2Centre for Youth Bipolar Disorder, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, 3Departments of Psychiatry and Pharmacology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, 4Work & Mental health Research Unit, Institute of Mental Health Research, University of Ottawa, 5School of Epidemiology and Public Health, Faculty of Medicine, University of Ottawa, 6Department of Psychiatry, University Health Network & St. Michael's Hospital, 7Arthur Sommer Rotenberg Chair in Suicide and Depression Studies, St. Michael’s Hospital, 8Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute, St. Michael’s Hospital, 9Krembil Research Institute, University Health Network, 10Department of Radiology, University of Calgary, 11Alberta Children’s Hospital Research Institute, 12Child & Adolescent Imaging Research (CAIR) Program
Some patient groups struggle with inhibition in emotional situations. This can be assessed experimentally with the emotional version of the Go-NoGo task. The classic Go-NoGo task has been used to test behavioural inhibition in humans and animals for decades. This task involves creating a prepotent response tendency that must be inhibited in response to a rarely presented NoGo stimulus. The emotional version of the task uses affect-laden stimuli in order to assess both behavioural inhibition, as well as the emotional modulation of this inhibition. Although this task has been widely used in studies with participants with mood disorders, the changes in emotion processing and inhibition involved in these illnesses likely predate diagnosis. The Canadian Psychiatric Risk & Outcome (PROCAN) study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to assess the changes in neural function in a large cohort of youth at various stages of risk for serious mental illness (SMI). These stages included healthy controls (HC), non-help seeking youth with risk factors (Stage 0), distressed youth with early mood and anxiety symptoms (Stage 1a), and youth with subthreshold psychotic symptoms (Stage 1b). Neural activity involved in inhibiting prepotent responses and their interaction with stimulus emotion will be assessed in light of the current mood symptoms of the participants, as these mood symptoms are predicted to moderate the relationship between impulsivity and emotional regulation in this task.
Topic Area: Neuroimaging