Children’s Pre-Scanning State Anxiety and Resting-State Functional Connectivity in Salience and Default Mode Networks: A Cross-Site Study

Introduction: Even though resting-state functional connectivity (rs-FC) is conceptualized asmeasuring ‘intrinsic connectivity’, in-scanner experiences undoubtedly influence rs-FC. Themajority of work on anxiety and rs-FC does not consider the subjective state of the participantduring the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) procedure. Heightened anxiety before an MRI(i.e., pre-scanning state anxiety), common in diverse samples, may be uniquely associated withindividual differences in brain activity. The current study assessed associations betweenpre-scanning state anxiety and rs-FC within and between the default mode network (DMN) andsalience network in a community sample of Latina girls (8-13 years) and a companion sample ofmixed treatment-seeking and healthy youth (8-18 years) of predominantly white background. Methods: A constrained network-based statistical approach calculated the average ofun-thresholded correlation coefficients from edge-level partial Spearman correlations to producenetwork-level measures. Statistics were compared against a null distribution based on averagedcorrelations from edge-level permutations to assess significance. Our hypothesis testing used athreshold of p < .05, which was then Bonferroni corrected (p < .00139). Results: We observed significant reductions in rs-FC within the DMN (r = -.32, p < .00139) as afunction of pre-scanning state anxiety in the community sample, but this did not replicate in ourcompanion sample. Discussion: Pre-scanning state anxiety is associated with rs-FC within the DMN, but onlyamong a community sample with elevated trait anxiety. This suggests that individual differencesin MRI scanning experiences may be associated with brain activity, but sample characteristicsshould be considered, and replication is needed. Keywords: pediatric anxiety, resting-state functional connectivity, default mode network,salience network, community samples