Schedule of Events | Symposia

Greater neural dissimilarity between emotional stimuli in early visual areas is associated with symptoms of psychopathology in adolescents

Poster Session D - Monday, March 31, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Yen-Chu Lin¹ (ylin@barnard.edu), Qingyang Meng¹, Hailey Kopp¹, May Conley², Lena Skalaban³, Estée Rubien-Thomas², Richard Watts⁴, Dylan Gee², Arielle Baskin-Sommers², BJ Casey¹; ¹Barnard College, ²Yale University, ³Temple University, ⁴University of Canterbury

Adolescence is a period of heightened risk for psychopathology. Recent studies suggest shared neural correlates across mental disorders, particularly in frontolimbic networks involved in emotional processes. However, the visual network—crucial for extracting and processing sensory and emotional information—has been less of a focus in these studies. Here, using a transdiagnostic approach, we focus on visual pathways and investigate how individuals with psychopathology represent and differentiate between emotional categories. We utilized imaging and questionnaire data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development StudySM Release 4.0 (11-12 year-old; n=4953 after quality control). Symptoms of psychopathology were based on the Child Behavior Checklist total problem scores. Participants performed an emotional n-back working memory task with three emotional categories (happy, fearful, and neutral faces) with high and low memory loads. Representational similarity analysis was used to examine dissimilarities in neural representations of emotional face categories in the visual network and its subregions. The associations between dissimilarity, levels of psychopathology, and task performance were tested using linear models. The analysis of neural representations of emotional face categories showed greater dissimilarities in individuals with more symptoms of psychopathology in the visual network. Behaviorally, we also found that greater dissimilarities in emotional categories was associated with diminished working memory performance. Moreover, the primary visual cortex exhibited the most robust patterns of dissimilarities between categories. Together, our results suggest distinct patterns of emotional information processing in early visual areas in adolescents with more symptoms of psychopathology, illustrating the importance of the visual network in psychopathology studies.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Development & aging