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Psychiatric symptoms are commonly comorbid in childhood. The ability to disentangle unique and shared correlates of comorbid symptoms facilitates personalized medicine. Cognitive control is implicated broadly in psychopathology, including in pediatric disorders characterized by anxiety and irritability. To disentangle cognitive control correlates of anxiety versus irritability, the current study leveraged both cross-sectional and longitudinal data from early childhood into adolescence.For this study, 89 participants were recruited from a large longitudinal research study on early-life temperament to investigate associations of developmental trajectories of anxiety and irritability symptoms (from ages 2 to 15) as well as associations of anxiety and irritability symptoms measured cross-sectionally at age 15 with neural substrates of conflict and error processing assessed at age 15 using the flanker task.Results of whole-brain multivariate linear models revealed that anxiety at age 15 was uniquely associated with decreased neural response to conflict across multiple regions implicated in attentional control and conflict adaptation. Conversely, irritability at age 15 was uniquely associated with increased neural response to conflict in regions implicated in response inhibition. Developmental trajectories of anxiety and irritability interacted in relation to neural responses to both error and conflict.Our findings suggest that neural correlates of conflict processing may relate uniquely to anxiety and irritability. Continued cross-symptom research on the neural correlates of cognitive control could stimulate advances in individualized treatment for anxiety and irritability during child and adolescent development.

Irritability, characterized by anger in response to frustration, is normative in childhood. While children typically show a decline in irritability from toddlerhood to school age, elevated irritability throughout childhood may predict later psychopathology. The current study (n = 78) examined associations between trajectories of irritability in early childhood (ages 2–7) and irritability in adolescence (age 12) and tested whether these associations are moderated by parenting behaviors. Results indicate that negative emotion socialization moderated trajectories of irritability – relative to children with low stable irritability, children who exhibited high stable irritability in early childhood and who had parents that exhibited greater negative emotion socialization behaviors had higher irritability in adolescence. Further, negative parental control behavior moderated trajectories of irritability – relative to children with low stable irritability, children who had high decreasing irritability in early childhood and who had parents who exhibited greater negative control behaviors had higher irritability in adolescence. In contrast, positive emotion socialization and control behaviors did not moderate the relations between early childhood irritability and later irritability in adolescence. These results suggest that both irritability in early childhood and negative parenting behaviors may jointly influence irritability in adolescence. The current study underscores the significance of negative parenting behaviors and could inform treatment.