# Affective Neuroscience Personality Scale (ANPS) in Children with Internalizing Disorders

## TL;DR

This study uses the Affective Neuroscience Personality Scale (ANPS) to compare emotional systems in children with internalizing disorders and healthy children.

## Contribution

The study extends the use of ANPS to children, providing insights into emotional endophenotypes in internalizing disorders.

## Key findings

- Children with internalizing disorders showed lower SEEKING and PLAY scores and higher ANGER and SADNESS scores.
- Depressed children had lower SEEKING, PLAY, and CARE scores and higher ANGER and SADNESS scores.
- Anxious children had lower SEEKING and PLAY scores and higher FEAR and SADNESS scores.

## Abstract

Background/Objectives: This study of endophenotypes represents a new research approach to overcome the limits of a syndromic model to psychiatric diseases. The Affective Neuroscience Personality Scales (ANPS, 31) is a self-report questionnaire used to facilitate the transition from the syndromic to the endophenotypic model through the assessment of basic emotional systems described by Panksepp (1): SEEKING, PLAY, CARE, FEAR, RAGE, PANIC, and LUST. The ANPS was used with adults, but it may be important to investigate the expression of basic emotional systems in childhood clinical disorders. Methods: The present study compares the ANPS scores of a group of children (n = 71) with internalizing disorders (diagnoses of depression and anxiety) with those of a normative group (n = 208) (8–13 years). Conclusions: We found that the group with internalizing disorders showed significantly lower scores for SEEKING and PLAY and significantly higher scores for ANGER and SADNESS than the control group. Furthermore, depressed children reported significantly lower scores in the SEEKING, PLAY, CARE scales and higher scores in the ANGER and SADNESS scales than healthy children. The children with anxiety disorder had significantly lower scores in the SEEKING and PLAY scales and higher scores in the FEAR and SADNESS scales than control children. No significant effect was found in reference to the age of the children. The results indicate that the ANPS might be a useful instrument to assess the expression of emotional endophenotypes in childhood.