Emotion process deficits in children with ODD and their associations with different dimensions of ODD symptoms: a fNIRS study
Emotion process deficits in children with ODD and their associations with different dimensions of ODD symptoms: a fNIRS study
A Brain Latam 2026 Commentary:
Before we read about emotion, let’s feel how emotion starts: place both feet on the floor, unclench your jaw, and notice whether your breathing is high in the chest or lower in the belly. That simple scan already hints at the paper’s core idea: “emotion” is not only a story—there are measurable differences in how the nervous system processes and regulates emotional signals, even when outward behavior looks similar.
The researcher’s question
The study asks a focused, clinically relevant question: Do children diagnosed with Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD) show neural deficits in key emotion processes—and do different kinds of deficits link to different dimensions of ODD symptoms?
Importantly, the authors don’t treat ODD as one single thing. They separate symptoms into two dimensions that many models emphasize:
Affective symptoms (irritability, anger, temper)
Behavioral symptoms (arguing, defying, annoying, spiteful, blaming)
Their deeper hypothesis is “dual-path”: emotion recognition deficits might connect more to affective symptoms, while emotion regulation deficits might connect more to behavioral symptoms.
How the experimental design tries to answer it
They recruited 72 children (35 with ODD and 37 typically developing controls), recruited from primary schools in Beijing, and measured prefrontal activity with fNIRS while children performed two tasks—one for recognition and one for regulation.
To make the “field diagnosis” more rigorous, ODD status required meeting DSM-5 criteria, with nominations from mothers and teachers, and confirmation by an experienced clinician who also ruled out other comorbid mental disorders via structured interviews.
Now, let’s embody the two tasks (this is the BrainLatam move: knowledge that lands in the body, not only in the head).
1) Emotion Recognition (ERC): reading the social signal
Imagine you’re a child in a quiet lab, wearing fNIRS sensors across the forehead. On the screen, faces appear—especially negative emotions like anger and fear—and you must choose which emotion it is.
Try it for 5 seconds right now: picture a clearly angry face. Notice whether your shoulders lift, your jaw tightens, or your attention narrows. In BrainLatam terms, that’s a fast Eu Tensional forming: a learned body-state that organizes attention and readiness for action.
2) Emotion Regulation (ERG): cognitive reappraisal under load
Now imagine the second task: you see negative images, and sometimes you’re asked to reappraise—to reinterpret the meaning so the feeling becomes less intense (without pretending it’s “nice”). Other times you simply watch and respond naturally.
Try a short reappraisal in your own body: imagine a distressing image, then tell yourself (gently) “this is a picture; it will pass; I can look from a wider view.” Notice: does your breath widen and your face soften (a drift toward Zone 2)—or does your body resist and tighten (a drift toward Zone 3)?
That “resistance vs openness” is exactly why the paper focuses on the prefrontal cortex, where cognitive control and appraisal processes are often recruited during regulation attempts.
What they measured and what they found
Here’s the striking pattern: behavior looked similar, brain signals did not. The study reports no significant between-group differences in behavioral performance, yet the typically developing group showed significant prefrontal activation during recognition and regulation, while the ODD group did not show comparable activation in those regions.
Specifically, in the typically developing group, fNIRS showed activation in prefrontal areas including the right middle frontal gyrus (MFG) and subregions of the superior frontal gyrus (medial and dorsal parts) for emotion recognition, and right dorsal SFG for emotion regulation—patterns not observed in the ODD group.
Then comes the paper’s main “mapping” move: path analysis linking neural patterns to symptom dimensions. The authors report that:
Neural deficits in emotion recognition (notably linked to medial SFG) predict affective symptoms (irritability/anger/temper).
Neural deficits in emotion regulation (notably linked to dorsal SFG) predict behavioral symptoms (arguing/defying, etc.
In plain BrainLatam language: there may be two different bottlenecks—one more about knowing/feeling what emotion is happening, another more about steering emotion once it’s happening—and each bottleneck expresses itself as a different “style” of difficulty in everyday life.
Why “normal behavior” in the lab doesn’t cancel neural differences
The authors offer an interpretation that matters for real-world belonging: lab tasks are structured and predictable, which can allow children to “perform normally” even if the underlying neural process is less robust. In daily life—ambiguous social cues, sudden conflict, unpredictable environments—those neural differences may become more visible.
This fits a Zones lens: a calm lab can hold a child closer to Zone 1 (task-focused functioning) and prevent spiraling into Zone 3 (threat-lock). The real world often does the opposite.
The natural bridge: belonging, “TMJ,” and DREX Cidadão (without dogma)
Notice how the paper quietly teaches a political-neurophysiological lesson: context regulates the body, and the body regulates the mind. If a child’s baseline environment is scarcity-heavy, conflict-saturated, or humiliating, the nervous system is pushed toward rigid readiness. In that state, “belonging” often collapses into dogma or enemy-making (Zone 3), because threat demands certainty.
From this mechanism, the BrainLatam bridge to DREX Cidadão becomes natural (not a bolt-on): if a society protects the living citizen-cell—reducing chronic metabolic threat—then more people (including families) have a real chance to operate in Zone 2, where reappraisal and flexible recognition are more available. That kind of “TMJ / we’re together” doesn’t require surrendering critical sense, and it doesn’t require a shared enemy to feel united. It’s belonging as religare: connection that regulates rather than captures.
One caution: this is a research finding about group patterns, not a tool for labeling any individual child. It’s most useful as a map of processes and contexts, not as a moral verdict.
