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Cognitive control with and without enhanced positive affective demands
Rodriguez-Thompson, A. M., Miller, A. B., Wade, M., Meyer, K. N., Machlin, L., Bonar, A., Patel, K. K., Giletta, M., Hastings, P. D., Nock, M. K., Rudolph, K. D., Slavich, G. M., Prinstein, M. J., & Sheridan, M. A. (2024). Neural correlates of the p factor in adolescence: Cognitive control with and without enhanced positive affective demands. Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging, 9(1), 30-40. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bpsc.2023.03.012
BACKGROUND: Recent research has aimed to characterize processes underlying general liability toward psychopathology, termed p-factor. Given previous research linking p-factor with difficulties in both executive functioning and affective regulation, the present study investigated non-affective and positive affective inhibition in the context of a sustained attention/inhibition paradigm in adolescents exhibiting mild-to-severe psychopathology.
METHOD: Functional magnetic imaging data were collected during an integrated reward conditioning and Go/No-Go task in 138 adolescents assigned female at birth. We modeled p-factor using hierarchical confirmatory factor analysis. Positive affective inhibition was measured by examining responses to No-Go stimuli with a history of reward conditioning. We examined associations between p-factor scores and neural function and behavioral performance.
RESULTS: Consistent with non-affective executive function as a primary risk factor, p-factor scores were associated with worse behavioral performance and hypoactivation in the left superior frontal gyrus and middle frontal gyrus during response initiation (Go trials). P-factor scores were additionally associated with increased error-related signaling in the temporal cortex during incorrect No-Go trials.
CONCLUSIONS: During adolescence, a period characterized by heightened risk for emergent psychopathology, we observed unique associations between p-factor scores and neural and behavioral indexes of response initiation, which relies primarily on sustained attention. These findings suggest that shared variation in mental disorder categories is characterized in part by sustained attention deficits. While we did not find evidence that p-factor was associated with inhibition in this study, this observation is consistent with our hypothesis that p-factor would be related to non-affective control processes.