Neurally Targeted Interventions to Reduce Early Childhood Anxiety

Clinically significant anxiety affects up to 20% of preschool-aged children and often fails to respond to currently available treatments. Emerging science suggests that increasing brain capacity for "effortful control" (EC) may help anxious children to regulate emotion and behavior to improve outcomes. Thus, in the proposed study, children will be trained on EC tasks (including selective attention, response inhibition, etc.) to increase capacity for effortful control (EC) over fear behaviors. To determine whether EC training improves brain capacity to regulate fear, investigators will assess neurophysiological and behavioral indices of effortful control and fear reactivity before and after this training.