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Social Stress, Affect, and Neural Function 235stimuli rather than across attention states (Monk et al., 2003). These developmentaldifferences in patterns of attention-modulated activation are consistent with theidea that adults can modify activity in relevant brain structures based on theattentional demands of the task at hand, whereas adolescents, whose neural structuresare still immature, are less capable of such modulation and their patterns ofactivation are instead driven by emotional content.Behavioral findings using this type of task indicate that youth with anxiety disordersor those at high risk for the development of anxiety disorders show differentpatterns of response than do low-risk youth, depending on whether theirattention was directed toward or away from emotional cues associated with theface. In one recent study, for instance, ratings and response times during differentattention sets were compared across adolescent offspring of adults with panicdisorder (PD), major depressive disorders (MDD), or no disorder (Pine et al.,2005a). When attention was focused on participants’ subjectively evaluated fearin response to the facial stimuli, the children of adults with PD reported higherfear levels and were slower to respond than were members of the other two groups.Additionally, those adolescent participants who met criteria for social phobia wereslower than were other participants to rate their own fear levels. They did not,however, report more fear than did their peers.Neural correlates of performance on this type of attention allocation task alsoappear to differ between adolescents with GAD and those without anxiety diagnoses(McClure et al., in press). Specifically, a group of adolescent GAD patients (n = 15)showed significantly greater amygdala activation to fearful faces than did healthyadolescents (n = 20) when attending to their own internal fear states, as contrastedwith attending to a nonemotional facial feature or with passively viewing the facesin the absence of specific attentional instructions. These findings lend support tothe notion that the amygdala activates atypically in youth with GAD, but suggestthat this pattern of pathological amygdala activation is evident only in certainattentional states. In particular, group differences emerged only when attentionwas directed to participants’ subjectively experienced fear. Attention and its interactionwith emotion thus appear to play an important role in shaping the functionaldevelopment of structures within the immature human fear circuit.These studies of attention orientation and allocation exemplify one approach toexamining links among adolescent anxiety disorders, behaviors and cognitions associatedwith the experience of social stress, and neural substrate. This approach isuseful not only for studying the concurrent associations among functioning at multiplelevels, but also for examining change over time. Such research carries considerableimplications for future studies on underlying risk for and prevention andtreatment of anxiety disorders. For example, currently ongoing studies using thetasks described above are focused on possible changes in patterns of behavior andneural activation associated with successful treatment in youth with anxiety disorders.Findings from these studies hold promise for providing a first step toward