Heightened adolescent emotional reactivity in the brain is associated with lower future distress tolerance and higher depressive symptoms.

Distress tolerance, the ability to persist while experiencing negative psychological states, is essential for regulating emotions and is a transdiagnostic risk/resiliency trait for multiple psychopathologies. Studying distress tolerance during adolescence, a period when emotion regulation is still developing, may help identify early risk and/or protective factors. This study included 40 participants (mean scan age = 17.5 years) and using an emotional Go-NoGo functional magnetic resonance imaging task and voxel-wise regression analysis, examined the association between brain response during emotional face processing and future distress tolerance (two ± 0.5 years), controlling for sex assigned at birth, age, and time between visits. Post-hoc analyses tested the mediating role of distress tolerance on the emotional reactivity and depressive symptom relationship. Whole-brain analysis showed greater inferior occipital gyrus activation was associated with less distress tolerance at follow-up. The mediating role of distress tolerance demonstrated a trend-level indirect effect. Findings suggest that individuals who allocate greater visual resources to emotionally salient information tend to exhibit greater challenges in tolerating distress. Distress tolerance may help to link emotional reactivity neurobiology to future depressive symptoms. Building distress tolerance through emotion regulation strategies may be an appropriate strategy for decreasing depressive symptoms.

Left hemispheric contributions to temporal perception: a resting electroencephalographic study.

Beta brain wave frequencies, theta brain wave frequencies, and interhemispheric transfer rates were investigated in individuals to explore components of time perception. Research suggests that the left hemisphere is highly involved in attention and language, which are important components of temporal processing mechanisms. Resting state electroencephalography was used to evaluate the relationship between right and left hemispheric brain wave frequencies and performance on a duration-discrimination task and an interhemispheric transfer rate task. A stepwise multiple regression was used to investigate the absolute spectral power of right minus left hemispheric activation for each frequency (alpha, beta, gamma, theta) at each of eight paired electrode locations onto d' data for a temporal discrimination task. Higher absolute spectral power in parietal and temporal left electrodes was predictive of better performance on the duration-discrimination task. Right-to-left interhemispheric transfer approached a significant correlation with performance on the duration-discrimination task. Our results indicate that sensitivity on a temporal task is positively correlated with beta and theta brain wave frequencies, and negatively correlated with right-to-left interhemispheric transfer rates. The current study provides support for a left hemispheric advantage for temporal processing; this provides further explanation of temporal processing mechanisms and where deficits may occur in clinical populations.