Disentangling the role of different resting-state neural markers of adolescent behavioral inhibition and social anxiety

One of the most reliable predictors of adolescent social anxiety is the temperamental profile of behavioral inhibition (BI), but there is considerable heterogeneity in this association. Resting-state EEG-based neural markers, namely frontal alpha asymmetry and delta-beta coupling (DBC), hold promise for improving our understanding of the relation between BI and social anxiety symptoms during adolescence. The current study aimed to (1) clarify the relation between these neural markers, BI, and social anxiety and (2) examine the moderating role, individually, of frontal alpha asymmetry and DBC on the BI-social anxiety link. Participants were 97 adolescents (Mage = 14.29 years, SDage = .98; 84.4 % White, 3.1 % Black, 12.5 % multiracial; 54.6 % female) and their parents. Parents reported on adolescent BI and adolescents self-reported social anxiety symptoms. Additionally, adolescents provided EEG data across a 6-minute resting task, from which measures of frontal alpha asymmetry and DBC were derived. Results indicated that stronger DBC was directly associated with higher social anxiety symptoms, but not BI, and did not moderate the association between BI and social anxiety. In contrast, frontal alpha asymmetry was not directly associated with either BI or social anxiety but interacted with BI to predict avoidance and distress to social situations, such that greater relative right activation predicted a stronger BI-social anxiety link. However, this effect did not survive correction for multiple comparisons. Findings suggest that high DBC may mark a general vulnerability for social anxiety symptoms, whereas frontal alpha asymmetry may potentiate the risk for social anxiety symptoms specifically among BI youth.

This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).