Neural Responsivity to Unexpected Stimuli Moderates a Developmental Pathway to Anxiety: A Community-Sample Replication in Early Infancy and Childhood

Background

Temperamental risk, including negative reactivity (NR) and behavioral inhibition (BI), represents a robust early pathway to anxiety. Neural responsivity to unexpected sensory stimuli, indexed by the mismatch response (MMR), has been shown to moderate associations linking early temperament to later anxiety. This study extends prior work by testing whether MMR measured as early as 4 months, in a community sample, moderate the developmental pathways from NR to BI and from BI to childhood anxiety.