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.
© 2020 Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health.