Neural Reactivity to Emotional Stimuli in Children With and Without a History of Self-Injurious Thoughts and Behaviors

Suicide is a significant public health concern and a leading cause of death for children in the United States. As such, there is a growing need to identify correlates of self-injurious thoughts and behaviors in youth, particularly potentially modifiable factors that could be targeted by interventions. One potential factor is neural reactivity to emotional stimuli. Prior research has suggested that the late positive potential (LPP), an event-related potential (ERP) component that indexes this reactivity, may be blunted in adults with a history of suicidality (i.e., ideation and/or suicidal behaviors). These findings have been interpreted in the context of cognitive models of risk, which focus on blunted reactivity to emotional stimuli broadly or to positive stimuli specifically (with perhaps heightened reactivity to negative stimuli). The goal of this study was to determine whether blunted patterns of neural reactivity toward emotional stimuli are observed in children with a history of self-injurious thoughts and behaviors (SITBs) and whether this may differ across emotional contexts (afraid, happy, sad) and intensities (low, medium, high). The study focused on 7-11-year-old children (50.51% girls, 62.63% non-Hispanic White) with (n = 16) and without (n = 83) a history of SITBs. LPP amplitudes were indexed during a Morphed Faces task, in which stimuli displaying a variety of emotional expressions (afraid, happy, and sad) were morphed to display low, medium, and high levels of each emotion. The strongest between-group difference was observed for medium-intensity positive emotional stimuli, with children with SITBs showing blunted responses. These findings provide some support for the positive attenuation hypothesis and suggest that blunted LPP response to ambiguous positive emotional stimuli may be useful as a marker of risk and potential target for intervention.