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The relationship between anxiety and neuropsychological functioning has attracted much attention in the literature over the past two decades. Though significant progress has been made in understanding the cognitive correlates of anxiety disorders, many questions still remain, particularly in child and adolescent populations. The following chapters examine the relationship between youth anxiety and neuropsychological functioning in three ways: Paper 1 examines the relationship between anxiety and executive functioning difficulties in a sample of youth seeking treatment for anxiety. Specifically, the study sought to clarify which executive functioning domains were most strongly associated with anxiety, and which anxiety subtypes were most linked to executive dysfunction. Self-reported anxiety and executive functioning data from 102 youth (ages 8-18) and/or their parents were examined via bivariate Pearson correlation and stepwise regression modeling. Consistent with hypotheses, results indicated that youth with elevated anxiety experience specific difficulties with daily tasks involving the capacity to “shift,” or flexibly adapt thoughts and behaviors to meet changing task demands, compared to other executive functions. Paper 2 explores the effects of state anxiety on neuropsychological test performance, relative to a youth’s performance when not in acutely anxiety provoking circumstances. In this pilot study, we investigated the relationship between youth state anxiety, trait anxiety, and neuropsychological test performance in youth before and after an anxiety manipulation. Fourteen youth were recruited from an outpatient anxiety treatment center and from the surrounding community. After baseline neuropsychological screening, youth were randomly assigned to either an anxiety induction or a matched control condition, and then re-tested on similar neuropsychological measures. Contrary to our hypotheses, we found a positive relationship between state/trait anxiety and neuropsychological test performance in youth. Results are limited by a small sample size and little variability in state anxiety. Paper 3 is a clinically oriented commentary on how clinicians can identify and respond to test anxiety in youth undergoing neuropsychological testing using evidence-based techniques. This paper describes factors that contribute to test anxiety in children and adolescents, the signs and symptoms of elevated anxiety in testing contexts, and offers brief strategies practitioners may use to address youth anxiety during neuropsychological tests.

BACKGROUND: Obesity is a serious health condition that also a risk factor for socio-emotional challenges and medical problems. Preliminary evidence suggests obesity may also be associated with difficulty in accurately identifying emotions, particularly negative emotions. In addition, poor emotion recognition has been linked to weaker executive functioning skills, which is a common challenge in obesity. The direct relationship between body mass index (BMI) and emotion recognition is poorly understood in young adults and warrants further exploration. HYPOTHESES: We predicted that 1) after controlling for sociodemographic, clinical, and executive functioning variables and that 2) BMI would be negatively associated with emotion recognition accuracy for negative emotions (i.e., anger, sadness, and fear) but not positive emotions. METHODS: Using a subset of the Human Connectome Project dataset (N=799), we conducted a hierarchal linear regression (HLR) to test the relationship between overall emotion recognition and the following predictors, adding in steps: 1) sociodemographic and clinical variables, 2) executive functioning variables, and 3) BMI. RESULTS: Contrary to our hypotheses, BMI was not significantly associated with overall emotion recognition accuracy. Instead, Hispanic ethnicity, greater cognitive flexibility (Dimensional Change Card Sort task), and larger working memory (List Sorting Working Memory Test) was associated with better overall emotion recognition accuracy. Similarly, these same dimensions, as well as being female, was associated with better negative emotion recognition accuracy. / Psychology

The topic of exposure to childhood adversity has comprehensively been explored, and the effects of childhood trauma can undoubtedly impact a person on a lifelong continuum, still, investigation is unceasingly conducted. Much research has yet to be done when considering early adversity's outcomes on various stages throughout life and just how reoccurring consequences from early trauma may impair regulatory abilities and executive functioning beyond childhood. Research objective is to discover how early adversity influences later executive functions in conjunction to heuristics and the effects of hypervigilance in a college student populace. This study aims to examine the several variable differences from internal beliefs to external actions when considering the discrepancies between those with adversity to those without, and what factors may play a key role in harboring resilience through a quantitative experimental study. The importance of creating awareness for those impacted by early adversity is vital for building advocacy within society. The proposed study can potentially provide knowledge towards issues related to the influence of early adversity in Adulthood. Parallel to analyzing how early adversity impacts later life, examining student populations can provide findings that help depict in what ways the related factors influence trajectory both in academia and personal development and what role education may play.

Few studies exist examining the relationship between self-reported stress and cognitive function in healthy nonpsychiatric older adults, and even less studies have examined whether high levels of self-reported stress accelerate the cognitive decline found in normal late-aging populations. A group of older nonpsychiatric adults, ages 54 years and above, were asked to complete three measures assessing their self-perceived stress over the past month, past year, and their lifetime. Sixty-one adults between the ages of 54 and 88 (52% female) participated in a second phase in which neuropsychological tasks were administered to assess three cognitive domains; memory, learning, and executive functioning. A hierarchical regression examined each of the three domain scores to explore whether self-perceived acute and chronic stress, after covaring for state anxiety, was related to neuropsychological performance. No statistically significant regressions were found, which was predicted for the learning domain, but contrary to the hypotheses for the memory and executive functioning domain. The potential influence of age in this study was explored in a series of ANOVAs examining the interactions between the three stress measures with state anxiety and age on the three cognitive domains. A statistically significant interaction was found between age and perceived lifetime stress when examining the memory domain score. In the young-old participants an increase in stress showed a non-significant relationship with a decrease in memory performance, while in the older-old participants the opposite non-significant tendency was found. The current study also partially replicated an earlier report of a relationship between an increase in recent self-reported stress and a decrease in performance on a specific divided attention task, and extended this finding to include older adults. While the majority of the study's hypotheses were not supported, these preliminary findings provide the field with interesting areas to explore in future studies.

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Executive functioning (EF) problems may serve as vulnerability or maintenance factors for Binge-Eating Disorder (BED). However, it is unclear if EF problems observed in BED are related to overweight status or BED status. The current study extends this literature by examining EF in overweight-BED (n=32), normal-weight BED (n=23), overweight healthy controls (n=48), and normal-weight healthy controls (n=48). Participants were administered an EF battery which utilized tests from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) toolkit and Delis-Kaplan Executive Function System (D-KEFS). After controlling for years of education and minority status, overweight individuals with and without BED performed more poorly than normal-weight individuals with and without BED on a task of cognitive flexibility (p < 0.01) requiring generativity and speed and on psychomotor performance tasks (p < 0.01). Normal-weight and overweight BED performed worse on working memory tasks compared to normal-weight healthy controls (p = 0.04). Unexpectedly, normal-weight BED individuals out-performed all other groups on an inhibitory control task (ps < 0.01). No significant differences were found between the four groups on tasks of planning. Our findings support a link between poorer working memory performance and BED status. Additionally, overweight status is associated with poorer psychomotor performance and cognitive inflexibility. Replication of the finding that normal-weight BED is associated with enhanced inhibitory control is needed. / Psychology