Childhood threat exposure and poor emotional awareness predict neural correlates of emotion regulation in adolescent girls.

Résumé

Increasing evidence suggests that early life adversity characterized by threat disrupts amygdala connectivity to the prefrontal cortex, a neural circuit integral to adaptive emotional functioning. Yet, few empirical studies have investigated how adversity predicts amygdala connectivity while participants intentionally try to downregulate their emotions. Here, we examined (a) associations between dimensions of adversity (i.e., threat and deprivation) and amygdala connectivity during a cognitive reappraisal task and (b) whether threat exposure interacts with emotional awareness-a capacity that facilitates emotion regulation-to predict amygdala connectivity. We conducted secondary analyses of neuroimaging data from 125 adolescent females aged 9-17 years old ( = 12.77 years, = 1.94 years). Whole-brain activation analyses revealed that greater threat exposure predicted less activation of the anterior cingulate gyrus during cognitive reappraisal. Amygdala connectivity during reappraisal did not vary as a function of threat or deprivation exposure; however, threat exposure interacted with low emotional awareness to predict coupling between the amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex during emotion regulation. Specifically, youth with relatively high threat exposure and poorer emotional awareness exhibited the strongest amygdala-ventromedial prefrontal cortex connectivity. The results of this interaction were similar after adjusting for co-occurring deprivation exposure. In contrast, deprivation exposure, when controlling for threat, was unrelated to neural activation and amygdala connectivity during reappraisal. These findings contribute to the growing evidence that threat exposure is uniquely associated with neural correlates of emotion functioning and suggest that poor emotional awareness may exacerbate threat-related differences in neural systems underlying effortful emotion regulation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).