Date of Award

2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Psychology

First Advisor

Robert Althoff

Abstract

Previous research found that emotion dysregulation, like other childhood psychopathologies, is associated with structural brain changes in neural gray matter volume. However, emotion dysregulation can be observed in relation to attention, aggression, anxiety and depression. The goal of the current study is to examine grey matter volume in childhood emotion dysregulation (DP) in comparison to childhood Anxiety/Depression (AD), childhood Attention Problems (AP) and childhood Aggressive Behaviors (AB) using data from 10,117 children aged 9-10 in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) sample. We used a bifactor model to extract a general factor (DP) capturing shared variance across the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) and specific factors (AP, AB and AB) that capture specific variance not shared with the general factor, thus isolating unique aspects of dysregulation. Follow up analyses also examined gray matter volume correlated to AP, AD and AB not extracted using the bifactor model. Using the bifactor model, significant differences in cortical thinning emerged only for the general dysregulation factor and not for AP, AD, and AB when the general factor was included. By contrast, there were significant associations for attention and aggression problems observed when those constructs were not extracted using the bifactor model. This suggests that some of the cortical volume differences observed in attention problems and aggressive behavior are best explained by their associated emotion dysregulation at age 9-10.

Language

en

Number of Pages

109 p.

Available for download on Thursday, April 18, 2030

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