Emergence of Trait Anxiety and its Associations with Developing Neural Circuitry During the First Year of Nonhuman Primate Life

Extreme levels of trait anxiety in childhood confer a marked risk to develop anxiety disorders and other stress-related psychopathology later in life. In primates and humans, individual differences in trait-like expression of anxiety responses to potential threats are innate and, while emerging early in life, take time to mature postnatally due to ongoing development of stress-related neural circuity. We aim to characterize the trajectories of individual differences in trait anxiety using a longitudinally followed cohort of 35 monkeys during their 1st year of life, each with 5 timepoints of mild stress exposure (30 minutes of No-Eye-Contact from the Human Intruder Paradigm) and 5 timepoints of resting state fMRI. These data describe the developmental trajectories of threat-related behavioral and physiological responses, along with the age-related changes in resting state stress-related neural circuitry. Using these unique datasets, we further explore the relationship between developing prefrontal-limbic functional connectivity and the emergence of trait anxiety.