Pediatric Anxiety Disorders: Insights From Basic Neuroscience, Development, and Clinical Research

Challenges confronting research on mental illness might be met by integrating data across basic neuroscience, development, and clinical research. Pediatric anxiety disorders represent one of the few areas where sufficient progress exists to provide a foundation for such integration. This special issue of Biological Psychiatry describes neuroscientific, developmental, and clinical discoveries illuminating a path that could initiate a paradigm shift. These discoveries involve research on defensive behaviors; these are behaviors that are deployed when organisms confront perceived dangers. These discoveries also involve research on regulatory behaviors; these are behaviors deployed to modulate the initial defensive response based on previous experiences, current goals, and context. Defensive and regulatory behaviors are considered throughout the special issue as they relate to brain function across species and clinical expression in people at distinct ages.