Emotion-specific amygdala habituation in treatment-referred young adults with antisocial histories: links with internalizing and externalizing symptoms and future recidivism

Background Habituation reduces the salience of repeated socio-emotional cues like facial expressions once they become familiar, predictable, or no longer relevant. To clarify whether variation in amygdala habituation to repeated emotional faces is associated with psychological symptoms and persistent antisocial behavior, the current study examined whether internalizing and externalizing symptoms, and their interaction, were related to amygdala habituation in treatment-referred young adults with antisocial histories, and whether habituation predicted future recidivism. Methods For this purpose, ninety-eight treatment-referred young adults (18-27) with a history of antisocial behavior performed an emotional face-matching fMRI task presenting fearful, angry, sad, happy and neutral faces. Habituation was operationalized as the change in amygdala activation from the first to the second half of the task for each emotional face condition. Internalizing and externalizing symptoms were measured with the Adult Self-Report. Recidivism was obtained from Dutch national judicial records (median follow-up 2.5 years post-scan). Results Amygdala habituation differed by emotional expression in the treatment-referred youth, with the strongest habituation for happy faces and relatively weaker habituation for negative and neutral expressions. However, within this group, individual differences in habituation were not associated with internalizing symptoms, externalizing symptoms, their interaction or recidivism. Additional analyses comparing treatment-referred youth with healthy controls indicated that treatment-referred young adults showed reduced habituation to fearful faces compared to controls. Conclusion Taken together, these findings suggest that amygdala habituation may help identify emotion-specific neural processing differences between treatment-referred young adults and controls, but is not associated with dimensional symptom heterogeneity or future recidivism within treatment-referred young adults.