Enhancing emotion-regulation in adolescence: A developmental window of opportunity (360G-Wellcome-209127_Z_17_Z)

Adolescence is an emotionally challenging developmental stage. Adolescents frequently experience negative affect and rapid fluctuations in affective states. Difficulty in regulating these emotions is associated with a range of psychopathology. Successful emotion-regulation relies on executive control, the ability to attend and respond to goal-relevant information, while inhibiting responses to distractors. Executive control and its neural substrates in the frontoparietal network develop rapidly during adolescence. Adolescence then may constitute a period of developmental sensitivity to improve emotion-regulation by training executive control over emotional information. Combining population-based experience sampling (Study A), longitudinal functional and structural neuroimaging (Study B) and training studies (Studies C & D), this project will investigate: the association between executive control over emotional information and affective experience in daily life and how it develops across the lifespan (Study A); the biopsychosocial predictors of variation in adolescent emotion-regulation (Study B); adolescence as a sensitive period for training emotion-regulation; and whether training emotion-regulation has preventative potential in adolescents at-risk for depression. The studies will integrate information across behavioural and neural levels of explanation to advance a fuller understanding of adolescence as a potential sensitive period for emotion-regulation and how this developmental sensitivity can be harnessed to improve emotion-regulation through executive control training.