Externalising disorders, such as attention deficiency/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) and conduct disorders (CD), and internalising disorders, such as anxiety and depression, are common serious mental health disorders in adolescents, and could have long lasting negative impacts on the studies, life and future development of the affected patients.

The international collaboration research “Neurobehavioural characterisation and stratification of reinforcement-related behaviour” was published today, 20^thApril2020 on Nature Human Behaviour. The study was led by Young Principal Investigator Tianye Jia from the Institute of Science and Technology of Brain-inspired Intelligence (ISTBI) of Fudan University and Professor Gunter Schumann from Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience (IoPPN) of King’s College London, who characterised externalising and internalising behaviours of 2000 14-year-old adolescents from the European IMAGEN cohort using functional brain activations during reinforcement-related cognitive processes, such as reward processing, inhibitory control and social-emotional regulation. The researchers observed significant correlations and modulation of reward anticipation and motor inhibition networks in externalising symptoms, and identifiedneuralstratification markers that differentiate these behaviours, which could further account for clinically observed comorbidity. For example, while hyperactivity and impulsivity are traditionally

Background:

Reinforcement-related cognitive processes, such as reward processing, inhibitory control and social-emotional regulation are critical components of externalising (e.g. ADHD, ODD and CD) and internalising (e.g. anxiety and depression) behaviours. However, it is unclear to what extent the deficit in each of these processes contributes to individual behavioural symptoms, how their neural substrates give rise to distinct behavioural outcomes, and if neural activation profiles across different reinforcement-related processes might differentiate individual behaviours.

The research team first used ‘weighted voxel co-activation network analysis’ (WVCNA) to investigate the similarity of voxel-level co-activation patterns of 2000 14-year-old adolescents from the European IMAGEN cohort, and identified data-driven