Summary: Researchers discovered that anxious individuals utilize a less optimal region of the forebrain when navigating socially challenging situations compared to their non-anxious counterparts. This was determined through brain scans that mapped regions active during simulated social scenarios.
Non-anxious individuals rely on the prefrontal cortex for decisions balancing potential threats and rewards. However, anxious people use a different, less efficient part of the forebrain, leading them to avoid social situations more frequently.
Key Facts:
- Anxious people use a less optimal section of the forebrain during socially complex decisions, as shown by brain scans.
- Non-anxious individuals make decisions involving potential threats and rewards using the prefrontal cortex.
- Anxious people avoid social situations due to the overstimulation of the ‘correct’ section of the forebrain.
Source: Radboud University
When choosing their behavior in socially difficult situations, anxious people use a less suitable section of the forebrain than people who are not anxious. This can be seen in brain scans, as shown by the research of Bob Bramson and Sjoerd Meijer at the Donders Institute of Radboud University.
For example, an anxious and a non-anxious person both run into someone whom they’ve been in love with for quite some time. Both of them find this tense and both would like to ask the person out on a date.
But do you walk up to that person? Or do you pretend not to see them to avoid embarrassment? Whereas the non-anxious person can put aside this emotion and choose behavior that allows them to approach the potential lover, this is much more difficult for an anxious person.
Bramson: “Anxious people use a less suitable section of the forebrain for this control. It’s more difficult for them to choose alternative behavior, so they avoid social situations more often.”
Decisions like this demand a balancing act between a possible threat and a reward, a decision that non-anxious people make in the prefrontal cortex. Researchers at Radboud University have now shown that socially anxious people use a different section in the forebrain for decisions like this.
Brain scans
Bramson and Meijer studied brain scans to see what happens in anxious and non-anxious people in a simulated social situation.
“Our trial subjects were shown happy and angry faces and had to first move a joystick towards the happy face and away from the angry face. At a certain point they had to do the reverse: move towards an angry face and away from a happy face. This demands control over our automatic tendency to avoid negative situations.”
Anxious people proved to perform just as well as non-anxious people in this simple task, but the scans showed that a completely different section of the brain was active.
“In non-anxious people we often see that, during emotional control, a signal is sent from the foremost section of the prefrontal cortex to the motor cortex, the section of the brain that directs your body to act. In anxious people a less efficient section of that foremost section is used.”
Other scans showed that the reason for this is probably because the ‘correct’ section becomes overstimulated in anxious people.
“This could explain why anxious people find it difficult to choose alternative behavior and thus avoid social situations. The disadvantage of this is that they never learn that social situations aren’t as negative as they think.”
Treating anxiety
For the first time, brain scans have now shown that the forebrain of anxious people works differently from that of non-anxious people with regard to control of emotional behavior.
The researchers think that the results could be used to develop new treatments for people with anxiety.
About this anxiety and social neuroscience research news
Author: Thomas Haenen
Source: Radboud University
Contact: Thomas Haenen – Radboud University
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original Research: Open access.
“Anxious individuals shift emotion control from lateral frontal pole to dorsolateral prefrontal cortex” by Bob Bramson et al. Nature Communications
Abstract
Anxious individuals shift emotion control from lateral frontal pole to dorsolateral prefrontal cortex
Anxious individuals consistently fail in controlling emotional behavior, leading to excessive avoidance, a trait that prevents learning through exposure.
Although the origin of this failure is unclear, one candidate system involves control of emotional actions, coordinated through lateral frontopolar cortex (FPl) via amygdala and sensorimotor connections.
Using structural, functional, and neurochemical evidence, we show how FPl-based emotional action control fails in highly-anxious individuals.
Their FPl is overexcitable, as indexed by GABA/glutamate ratio at rest, and receives stronger amygdalofugal projections than non-anxious male participants. Yet, high-anxious individuals fail to recruit FPl during emotional action control, relying instead on dorsolateral and medial prefrontal areas.
This functional anatomical shift is proportional to FPl excitability and amygdalofugal projections strength.
The findings characterize circuit-level vulnerabilities in anxious individuals, showing that even mild emotional challenges can saturate FPl neural range, leading to a neural bottleneck in the control of emotional action tendencies.
