Anxiety and depression increase in prevalence during the teenage years. Adolescence is considered a sensitive period for the development of internalizing disorders, due in part to the dramatic changes in body, brain, and behaviour that occur at this time. Shifting interactions between limbic and executive function networks during adolescence may underlie maladaptive processing of positive and negative stimuli. For instance, typically-developing youth typically show enhanced amygdala and reduced prefrontal response to emotional stimuli. In contrast, youth with anxiety and depression show heightened activation to negative or threatening stimuli in both regions, and reduced amygdala response to positive stimuli. These neural patterns translate to heightened processing of threat cues, but reduced response to reward—both of which are hallmarks of anxiety and depression. Alterations in social information processing in the brain may have effects on behaviour and associated psychosocial well-being. Early intervention to ameliorate deficits in social information processing may be effective in preventing the long-term consequences of pediatric affective disorders.
