Page 134 - Like me, or else... - Michelle Achterberg

Chapter 5
Brain-Behavior associations
To investigate brain-behavior associations we added noise blast duration as a factor to the previously tested models. We found a significant main effect of noise blast duration on AI and DLPFC activation (Table S5). These findings indicated that increased AI activation was associated with longer noise blast (B=1.11e-04), whereas increased DLPFC activation was associated with shorter noise blast (B= - 3.57e-05). The IFG and MPFC did not show significant brain-behavior associations. The condition ˟ noise blast interaction effects on brain activation in the ROIs were not significant (see Table S5).
Exploratory analyses
Whole brain analyses on social evaluation processing
To prevent that specific effects were overlooked by due to a relatively small sample size in the reference group, we performed exploratory whole brain analyses at wave 2 including the VIPP-SD group, the control group and the reference group (n=360). Results from the whole brain contrasts for wave 2 (children ages 9-11-years see Figure S3, Table S6) resulted in similar patterns of neural activation as was previously observed at wave 1 (children aged 7-9 years, Achterberg et al., 2018,) and in a different sample of adults (Achterberg et al., 2016). These results are described in more detail in the supplement materials.
Brain-behavior analyses on aggression following negative feedback
We conducted a whole brain regression analysis at wave 2 for receiving negative feedback (contrast Negative vs Neutral), with the difference in noise blast duration after negative and neutral feedback as a regressor (ΔNegNeut W2, see section 2.6.2.). Consistent with our hypothesis, we observed a negative association between behavioral aggression and activation in the bilateral DLPFC (Figure 4a, Table 2). Visualization of the effect (Figure 4b) showed that an increase in DLPFC activation after negative feedback (relative to neutral feedback) resulted in less subsequent behavioral aggression.
To test whether children who showed larger increases in DLPFC activity over time also showed less behavioral aggression over time, we included the data points at wave 1 to the analysis. Note that for this analysis we only included participants who had behavioral and brain data available at two waves (n=293). For these participants, we calculated the relation between the change in DLPFC activation (ΔNegNeut brain, see section 2.6.3.) in whole-brain DLPFC ROI (Figure 4a) and the change in noise blast duration (ΔNegNeut behavior, see section 2.6.3). We found a significant negative association (r=-.16, p=.005), indicating that children who showed the largest increase in DLPFC activation across childhood also showed the largest decrease in behavioral aggression across childhood (Figure 4c).
132