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. 2021 Jun;62(6):771-779.
doi: 10.1111/jcpp.13319. Epub 2020 Sep 16.

Individual dynamics of delta-beta coupling: using a multilevel framework to examine inter- and intraindividual differences in relation to social anxiety and behavioral inhibition

Berenice Anaya  1 , Alicia M Vallorani  1 , Koraly Pérez-Edgar  1
Affiliations

Individual dynamics of delta-beta coupling: using a multilevel framework to examine inter- and intraindividual differences in relation to social anxiety and behavioral inhibition

Berenice Anaya et al. J Child Psychol Psychiatry. 2021 Jun.

Abstract

Background: Variation in EEG-derived delta-beta coupling has recently emerged as a potential neural marker of emotion regulation, providing a novel and noninvasive method for assessing a risk factor for anxiety. However, our understanding of delta-beta coupling has been limited to group-level comparisons, which provide limited information about an individual's neural dynamics.

Methods: The present study used multilevel modeling to map second-by-second coupling patterns between delta and beta power. Specifically, we examined how inter- and intraindividual delta-beta coupling patterns changed as a function of social anxiety symptoms and temperamental behavioral inhibition (BI).

Results: We found that stronger inter- and intraindividual delta-beta coupling were both associated with social anxiety. In contrast, the high-BI group showed weaker coupling relative to the non-BI group, a pattern that did not emerge when analyzing continuous scores of BI.

Conclusions: In characterizing inter- and intraindividual coupling across the sample, we illustrate the utility of examining neural processes across levels of analysis in relation to psychopathology to create multilevel assessments of functioning and risk.

Keywords: Delta-beta coupling; behavioral inhibition; intraindividual variability; social anxiety.

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Conflict of interest statement

Conflict of interest statement: No conflicts declared.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Model-predicted intraindividual delta–beta coupling for each participant as a function of participants′ average coupling scores. Black line indicates the sample-level delta–beta coupling
Figure 2
Figure 2
Regions of significance analyses showing the region of social anxiety scores at which intraindividual coupling is significant (purple) versus non-significant (green)
Figure 3
Figure 3
Simple-slope analyses showing differences in the slope of interindividual delta–beta coupling for high (+1SD, SCARED = 7.67), average (SCARED = 3.98), and low (SCARED = 0.27) social anxiety participants
Figure 4
Figure 4
Raw second-by-second delta and beta power for a BI and a BN participant and their average coupling scores
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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