Neural Processing of Fearful Faces: Effects of Anxiety are Gated by Perceptual Capacity Limitations

Multiple faces of anxiety: a frontal lobe perspective

Marked dysregulation of the human prefrontal cortex (PFC) and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) characterises a variety of anxiety disorders, and its amelioration is a key feature of treatment success. Overall treatment response, however, is highly variable, and about a third of patients are resistant to treatment. In this review we hypothesise that a major contributor to this variation in treatment response are the multiple faces of anxiety induced by distinct forms of frontal cortex dysregulation. Comparison of findings from humans and non-human primates reveals marked similarity in the functional organisation of threat regulation across the frontal lobes. This organisation is discussed in relation to the 'predatory imminence continuum' model of threat and the differential engagement of executive functions at the core of both emotion generation and regulation strategies.

Normalization of Fronto-Parietal Activation by Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy in Unmedicated Pediatric Patients With Anxiety Disorders

OBJECTIVE

Anxiety disorders are prevalent among youths and are often highly impairing. Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) is an effective first-line treatment. The authors investigated the brain mechanisms associated with symptom change following CBT.

METHODS

Unmedicated youths diagnosed with an anxiety disorder underwent 12 weeks of CBT as part of two randomized clinical trials testing the efficacy of adjunctive computerized cognitive training. Across both trials, participants completed a threat-processing task during functional MRI before and after treatment. Age-matched healthy comparison youths completed two scans over the same time span. The mean age of the samples was 13.20 years (SD=2.68); 41% were male (youths with anxiety disorders, N=69; healthy comparison youths, N=62). An additional sample including youths at temperamental risk for anxiety (N=87; mean age, 10.51 years [SD=0.43]; 41% male) was utilized to test the stability of anxiety-related neural differences in the absence of treatment. Whole-brain regional activation changes (thresholded at p<0.001) were examined using task-based blood-oxygen-level-dependent response.

RESULTS

Before treatment, patients with an anxiety disorder exhibited altered activation in fronto-parietal attention networks and limbic regions relative to healthy comparison children across all task conditions. Fronto-parietal hyperactivation normalized over the course of treatment, whereas limbic responses remained elevated after treatment. In the at-risk sample, overlapping clusters emerged between regions showing stable associations with anxiety over time and regions showing treatment-related changes.

CONCLUSIONS

Activation in fronto-parietal networks may normalize after CBT in unmedicated pediatric anxiety patients. Limbic regions may be less amenable to acute CBT effects. Findings from the at-risk sample suggest that treatment-related changes may not be attributed solely to the passage of time.

Trait and State Anxiety Effects on Mismatch Negativity and Sensory Gating Event-Related Potentials

We used the auditory roving oddball to investigate whether individual differences in self-reported anxiety influence event-related potential (ERP) activity related to sensory gating and mismatch negativity (MMN). The state-trait anxiety inventory (STAI) was used to assess the effects of anxiety on the ERPs for auditory change detection and information filtering in a sample of thirty-six healthy participants. The roving oddball paradigm involves presentation of stimulus trains of auditory tones with certain frequencies followed by trains of tones with different frequencies. Enhanced negative mid-latency response (130-230 ms post-stimulus) was marked at the deviant (first tone) and the standard (six or more repetitions) tone at Fz, indicating successful mismatch negativity (MMN). In turn, the first and second tone in a stimulus train were subject to sensory gating at the Cz electrode site as a response to the second stimulus was suppressed at an earlier latency (40-80 ms). We used partial correlations and analyses of covariance to investigate the influence of state and trait anxiety on these two processes. Higher trait anxiety exhibited enhanced MMN amplitude (more negative) (F(1,33) = 14.259, p = 6.323 × 10-6, ηp2 = 0.302), whereas state anxiety reduced sensory gating (F(1,30) = 13.117, p = 0.001, ηp2 = 0.304). Our findings suggest that high trait-anxious participants demonstrate hypervigilant change detection to deviant tones that appear more salient, whereas increased state anxiety associates with failure to filter out irrelevant stimuli.

Playback of rat 22-kHz ultrasonic vocalizations as a translational assay of negative affective states: An analysis of evoked behavior and brain activity

The subjective nature of human emotions makes them uniquely challenging to investigate in preclinical models. While behavioral assays in rodents aim to evaluate affect (i.e., anxiety, hypervigilance), they often lack ethological validity. Playback of negatively valenced 22-kHz ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs) in rats shows promise as a translational tool to investigate affective processing. Much like how human facial expressions can communicate internal states, rats emit 22-kHz USVs that similarly convey negative affective states to conspecifics indicating possible threat. 22-kHz USV playback elicits avoidance and hypervigilant behaviors, and recruit brain regions comparable to those seen in human brains evoked by viewing fearful faces. Indeed, 22-kHz playback alters neural activity in brain regions associated with negative valence systems (i.e., amygdala, bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, periaqueductal gray) alongside increases in behaviors typically associated with anxiety. Here, we present evidence from the literature that supports leveraging 22-kHz USV playback in rat preclinical models to obtain clinically relevant and translational findings to identify the neural underpinnings of affective processing and neuropathological dysfunction.

The effects of left prefrontal stimulation on selective attention and emotional reactivity for positive and negative information

Transcranial direct current stimulation targeting lateral prefrontal areas may attenuate attentional vigilance for negative content and reduce emotional reactivity. However, little research to date has examined how such stimulation may affect attention towards and emotional reactivity to positive emotional content. The aim of this study was to examine whether anodal tDCS targeting the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex would affect attentional bias towards either or both negative and positive content, and similarly, how it would impact emotional reactivity to negative and positive emotional content among healthy individuals. Unselected participants (N = 101) were recruited (Mage = 22.57, SD = 5.60; 66.33% female) and allocated to either an active or sham tDCS condition. Attentional bias was measured using an eye-tracking task involving negative-neutral and positive-neutral image pairs, followed by an emotional reactivity assessment task involving negative and positive video content (self-report and heart rate variability). Results showed no evidence that tDCS influenced attentional patterns towards either positive or negative information, nor was there evidence that tDCS influenced self-reported anxious mood or physiological arousal. However, participants in the active tDCS condition reported higher positive mood in response to both the positive and negative videos compared to those in the sham condition and also higher arousal in response to positive content and lower arousal in response to negative content, with those in the sham tDCS condition showing the reverse pattern of effects. As such, tDCS effects on emotional reactivity to positive and negative content were restricted to self-report measures.

Fearful temperament in middle childhood predicts adolescent attention bias and anxiety symptoms: The moderating role of frontal EEG asymmetry

The current study provided first analyses of the moderating effect of baseline-to-task frontal EEG asymmetry on the associations between 9-year fearful temperament and adolescent attention bias to threat as well as anxiety symptoms. Participants include a community sample of 122 children (60 boys, 62 girls; Mage = 14.66 years; Range = 11.82-18.13 years). Baseline-to-task frontal EEG asymmetry at age 9 moderated the relation between fearful temperament at age 9 and adolescent anxiety symptoms. Specifically, fearful temperament predicted adolescent anxiety symptoms when children showed greater right activation from baseline to an executive function task, but not greater left activation. Baseline-to-task frontal EEG asymmetry moderated the association between fearful temperament and sustained (i.e., stimulus onset asynchrony is 1250 ms) but not automatic attention bias (i.e., stimulus onset asynchrony is 500 ms). Children with greater left frontal activation from baseline to task more efficiently direct attention away from threat. Adolescent automatic attention bias to threat was related to concurrent anxiety symptoms. These findings illustrate the importance of considering frontal EEG asymmetry to shape how fearful children process threat and to influence their behavioral problems.

Trait-Anxious People Take Longer to Search for Happy Faces in the Presence of Neutral and Fearful Distractors

A large body of evidence suggests that processing of affective information is typically disrupted in anxiety. It has also been hypothesized that anxious individuals are less able to evaluate contextual cues and to respond in an adaptive way to stress. In the present study, 25 participants (16 females; 9 males) scoring high (scores of 45 or above) and 26 participants (13 females; 13 males) scoring low (scores of 35 and below) on a standardized measure of trait anxiety performed an emotion search task to investigate attentional biases when the task provides an explicit emotional context. An emotional context was set in each block by asking participants to look as quickly as possible at a face expressing a specific emotion, while eye movements were being recorded. On each trial, two faces appeared, one of them expressing the target emotion and the other one expressing a distractor emotion. High trait-anxious participants showed slower response times (time to look at the instructed emotion), regardless of the affective context, compared to the control group. Additionally, we found slower responses to happy faces (positive context) in the anxious group in the presence of neutral and fearful distractors. Cognitive control may therefore be disrupted in anxiety, as anxious people take longer to process (search for) happy faces, presumably because attentional resources are drawn by neutral and fearful distractors. Those differences were not observed in a simple reaction times task, which suggests that attentional biases, and not differential processing of low-level facial features, are responsible for those differences.

Cognitive Avoidance Is Associated with Decreased Brain Responsiveness to Threat Distractors under High Perceptual Load

Cognitive coping strategies to deal with anxiety-provoking events have an impact on mental and physical health. Dispositional vigilance is characterized by an increased analysis of the threatening environment, whereas cognitive avoidance comprises strategies to inhibit threat processing. To date, functional neuroimaging studies on the neural underpinnings of these coping styles are scarce and have revealed discrepant findings. In the present study, we examined automatic brain responsiveness as a function of coping styles using functional magnetic resonance imaging. We administered a perceptual load paradigm with contemptuous and fearful faces as distractor stimuli in a sample of N = 43 healthy participants. The Mainz Coping Inventory was used to assess cognitive avoidance and vigilance. An association of cognitive avoidance with reduced contempt and fear processing under high perceptual load was observed in a widespread network including the amygdala, thalamus, cingulate gyrus, insula, and frontal, parietal, temporal, and occipital areas. Our findings indicate that the dispositional tendency to divert one's attention away from distressing stimuli is a valuable predictor of diminished automatic neural responses to threat in several cortical and subcortical areas. A reduced processing in brain regions involved in emotion perception and attention might indicate a potential threat resilience associated with cognitive avoidance.

Potentiated early neural responses to fearful faces are not driven by specific face parts

Prioritized processing of fearful compared to neutral faces is reflected in increased amplitudes of components of the event-related potential (ERP). It is unknown whether specific face parts drive these modulations. Here, we investigated the contributions of face parts on ERPs to task-irrelevant fearful and neutral faces using an ERP-dependent facial decoding technique and a large sample of participants (N = 83). Classical ERP analyses showed typical and robust increases of N170 and EPN amplitudes by fearful relative to neutral faces. Facial decoding further showed that the absolute amplitude of these components, as well as the P1, was driven by the low-frequency contrast of specific face parts. However, the difference between fearful and neutral faces was not driven by any specific face part, as supported by Bayesian statistics. Furthermore, there were no correlations between trait anxiety and main effects or interactions. These results suggest that increased N170 and EPN amplitudes to task-irrelevant fearful compared to neutral faces are not driven by specific facial regions but represent a holistic face processing effect.

Think again: the role of reappraisal in reducing negative valence bias

Stimuli such as surprised faces are ambiguous in that they are associated with both positive and negative outcomes. Interestingly, people differ reliably in whether they evaluate these and other ambiguous stimuli as positive or negative, and we have argued that a positive evaluation relies in part on a biasing of the appraisal processes via reappraisal. To further test this idea, we conducted two studies to evaluate whether increasing the cognitive accessibility of reappraisal through a brief emotion regulation task would lead to an increase in positive evaluations of ambiguity. Supporting this prediction, we demonstrated that cuing reappraisal, but not in three other forms of emotion regulation (Study 1a-d; n = 120), increased positive evaluations of ambiguous faces. In a sign of robustness, we also found that the effect of reappraisal generalised from ambiguous faces to ambiguous scenes (Study 2; n = 34). Collectively, these findings suggest that reappraisal may play a key role in determining responses to ambiguous stimuli. We discuss these findings in the context of affective flexibility, and suggest that valence bias (i.e. the tendency to evaluate ambiguity more positively or negatively) represents a novel approach to measuring implicit emotion regulation.

General deficits of attentional inhibition in high trait anxiety: ERP evidence

Behavioral evidence shows that individuals with high trait anxiety tend to be distracted by irrelevant stimulation not only for threat-related stimuli but also for non-emotional neutral stimuli. These findings suggest that there may be a general deficit of attentional control in trait anxiety. However, the neural mechanism underlying the anxiety-related deficit in attentional control, especially inhibition function, is still unclear. Here, we examined the attentional processing of the non-emotional neutral distractor on 66 young adults with different levels of trait anxiety, using the ERP indices of attentional selection (N2pc) and top-down inhibition (Pd) in a search task with geometric stimuli. We found that the distractor-evoked N2pc amplitude did not vary with anxiety levels, but increased anxiety was associated with smaller Pds (i.e. worse inhibition). Besides, delayed attentional selection of targets was associated with higher anxiety levels. These correlations of trait anxiety remained significant even after controlling for state anxiety, and state anxiety did not affect the attentional processing of distractors and targets, suggesting that trait anxiety, not current anxiety, affects attentional function. Our findings clarify the mechanism underlying the general attentional deficits in trait anxiety, e.g. reduced distractor inhibition and delayed target selection.

Non-conscious processing of fear faces: a function of the implicit self-concept of anxiety

BACKGROUND

Trait anxiety refers to a stable tendency to experience fears and worries across many situations. High trait anxiety is a vulnerability factor for the development of psychopathologies. Self-reported trait anxiety appears to be associated with an automatic processing advantage for threat-related information. Self-report measures assess aspects of the explicit self-concept of anxiety. Indirect measures can tap into the implicit self-concept of anxiety.

METHODS

We examined automatic brain responsiveness to non-conscious threat as a function of trait anxiety using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Besides a self-report instrument, we administered the Implicit Association Test (IAT) to assess anxiety. We used a gender-decision paradigm presenting brief (17 ms) and backward-masked facial expressions depicting disgust and fear.

RESULTS

Explicit trait anxiety was not associated with brain responsiveness to non-conscious threat. However, a relation of the implicit self-concept of anxiety with masked fear processing in the thalamus, precentral gyrus, and lateral prefrontal cortex was observed.

CONCLUSIONS

We provide evidence that a measure of the implicit self-concept of anxiety is a valuable predictor of automatic neural responses to threat in cortical and subcortical areas. Hence, implicit anxiety measures could be a useful addition to explicit instruments. Our data support the notion that the thalamus may constitute an important neural substrate in biased non-conscious processing in anxiety.

The importance of awareness in face processing: A critical review of interocular suppression studies

Human faces convey essential information for understanding others' mental states and intentions. The importance of faces in social interaction has prompted suggestions that some relevant facial features such as configural information, emotional expression, and gaze direction may promote preferential access to awareness. This evidence has predominantly come from interocular suppression studies, with the most common method being the Breaking Continuous Flash Suppression (bCFS) procedure, which measures the time it takes different stimuli to overcome interocular suppression. However, the procedures employed in such studies suffer from multiple methodological limitations. For example, they are unable to disentangle detection from identification processes, their results may be confounded by participants' response bias and decision criteria, they typically use small stimulus sets, and some of their results attributed to detecting high-level facial features (e.g., emotional expression) may be confounded by differences in low-level visual features (e.g., contrast, spatial frequency). In this article, we review the evidence from the bCFS procedure on whether relevant facial features promote access to awareness, discuss the main limitations of this very popular method, and propose strategies to address these issues.

Reduction of anticipatory brain activity in anxious people and regulatory effect of response-related feedback

Elevated anxiety levels degrade task performance, likely because of cognitive function reduction in the frontoparietal brain network. This study aimed to test whether anxiety could impact the frontal cortex anticipatory brain functions and to investigate the possible beneficial effect of response-related feedback on task performance. The electroencephalographic activity was recorded while participants performed two Go/No-go tasks: one with response-related feedback on errors (feedback task) and one task without feedback (standard task). We first tested whether anxiety levels could be associated with pre-stimulus ERP components such as the prefrontal negativity (pN), linked with top-down attentional control, and the Bereitschaftspotential (BP), related to motor preparation. Then, we assessed whether feedback could affect anxious people's brain preparation, reducing the state of uncertainty and improving performance. Results showed that the pN was almost absent and the BP was lower during a standard task in the high anxiety than in the low anxiety group. In the feedback task, these components increased in the high anxious, becoming comparable to the low anxious. Behavioral results showed that false alarms in the high anxiety group were larger than in the low anxiety group during the standard task but became comparable in the feedback task. Similarly, response time in the high anxiety group was slower in the standard task than in the feedback task, and high anxious people were faster in the feedback task than in the standard one. This study contributes to clarifying neural correlates of anxiety, showing brain activity reductions related to action preparation in frontal areas. In addition, response-related feedback tasks could be used to normalize task performance in high anxious people.

The relationship between aesthetic preferences of people for ceramic tile design and neural responses: An event-related potential study

Introduction

The aesthetic preferences of people can determine the success of a design and are often closely related to design features. The discovery of designs that match user preferences can provide a reference for designers. Ceramic tiles are widely used in environmental design; however, little attention has been paid to the aesthetic preferences of people for tiles. This study aimed to explore the relationship between aesthetic preferences for tile design and neural responses.

Materials and methods

In this study, two groups of tiles with different preference levels were randomly presented to 16 participants, and their electroencephalograms were recorded. The mean amplitudes of event-related potentials were analyzed by ANOVA.

Results

The results showed that: (1) the aesthetic preferences of people for tiles could modulate brain activity; (2) tiles that people liked triggered higher N100 amplitudes; and (3) tiles that people disliked triggered higher P200 and late positive potential (LPP) amplitudes.

Discussion

These results suggest that N100, P200, and LPP are significantly related to the aesthetic preferences of people for ceramic tiles. The difference in N100 and P200 amplitudes indicates that participants developed aesthetic perceptions of the tiles in the early and middle stages of vision and formed different attention allocations to tiles with varying levels of aesthetic preference; in the middle and late stages of visual processing, the difference in the LPP amplitude indicates that the impression of people for tiles is further deepened in the later stage, forming a top-down emotion-driven evaluation. Exploring the relationship between the aesthetic preferences of people and neural responses is significant in establishing objective aesthetic judgment indicators for tiles and understanding the process of aesthetic cognition. This study provides relevant information for quantitative aesthetic assessments of environmental design, interior design, and marketing involving ceramic tiles.

Young female participants show blunted placebo effects associated with blunted responses to a cue predicting a safe stimulus in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex

Discrimination of cues predicting non-nociceptive/nociceptive stimuli is essential for predicting whether a non-painful or painful stimulus will be administered and for eliciting placebo/nocebo (pain reduction/pain enhancement) effects. Dysfunction of the neural system involved in placebo effects has been implicated in the pathology of chronic pain, while female sex is one of the important risk factors for development of chronic pain in young adults. The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dl-PFC) is suggested to be involved in placebo effects and is sensitive to sex and age. In this study, to examine the neural mechanisms by which sex and age alter placebo and nocebo effects, we analyzed cerebral hemodynamic activities in the dl-PFC in different sex and age groups during a differential conditioning task. During the training session, two different sounds were followed by low- and high-intensity electrical shocks. In the following recording session, electrical shocks, the intensity of which was mismatched to the sounds, were occasionally administered to elicit placebo and nocebo effects. In young female participants, both placebo effects and hemodynamic responses to the conditioned sounds in the right dl-PFC were significantly lower than those in elderly female participants, while there were no age differences in male participants. The hemodynamic responses to the sound paired with the safe stimulus in the right dl-PFC were significantly correlated with placebo effects, except in the young female group. These results suggest that blunted placebo effects in the young female participants are ascribed to blunted responses to the sound associated with the safe stimulus in the right dl-PFC, and that sex- and age-related factors may alter the responsiveness of the right dl-PFC to associative cues predicting a safe stimulus.

State and Trait Anxiety Share Common Network Topological Mechanisms of Human Brain

Anxiety is a future-oriented unpleasant and negative mental state induced by distant and potential threats. It could be subdivided into momentary state anxiety and stable trait anxiety, which play a complex and combined role in our mental and physical health. However, no studies have systematically investigated whether these two different dimensions of anxiety share a common or distinct topological mechanism of human brain network. In this study, we used macroscale human brain morphological similarity network and functional connectivity network as well as their spatial and temporal variations to explore the topological properties of state and trait anxiety. Our results showed that state and trait anxiety were both negatively correlated with the coefficient of variation of nodal efficiency in the left frontal eyes field of volume network; state and trait anxiety were both positively correlated with the median and mode of pagerank centrality distribution in the right insula for both static and dynamic functional networks. In summary, our study confirmed that state and trait anxiety shared common human brain network topological mechanisms in the insula and the frontal eyes field, which were involved in preliminary cognitive processing stage of anxiety. Our study also demonstrated that the common brain network topological mechanisms had high spatiotemporal robustness and would enhance our understanding of human brain temporal and spatial organization.

Anterior cingulate cortex activation during attentional control as a transdiagnostic marker of psychotherapy response: a randomized clinical trial

Anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) response during attentional control in the context of task-irrelevant emotional faces is a promising biomarker of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) outcome in patients with social anxiety disorder (SAD). However, it is unclear whether this biomarker extends to major depressive disorder (MDD) and is specific to CBT outcome. In the current study, 72 unmedicated patients with SAD (n = 39) or MDD (n = 33) completed a validated emotional interference paradigm during functional magnetic resonance imaging before treatment. Participants viewed letter strings superimposed on task-irrelevant threat and neutral faces under low perceptual load (high interference) and high perceptual load (low interference). Biomarkers comprised anatomy-based rostral ACC (rACC) and dorsal ACC (dACC) response to task-irrelevant threat (>neutral) faces under low and high perceptual load. Patients were randomly assigned to 12 weeks of CBT or supportive therapy (ST) (ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT03175068). Clinician-administered measures of social anxiety and depression severity were obtained at baseline and every 2 weeks throughout treatment (7 assessments total) by an assessor blinded to the treatment arm. A composite symptom severity score was submitted to latent growth curve models. Results showed more baseline rACC activity to task-irrelevant threat>neutral faces under low, but not high, perceptual load predicted steeper trajectories of symptom improvement throughout CBT or ST. Post-hoc analyses indicated this effect was driven by subgenual ACC (sgACC) activation. Findings indicate ACC activity during attentional control may be a transdiagnostic neural predictor of general psychotherapy outcome.

The Computational and Neural Substrates of Ambiguity Avoidance in Anxiety

Theoretical accounts have linked anxiety to intolerance of ambiguity. However, this relationship has not been well operationalized empirically. Here, we used computational and neuro-imaging methods to characterize anxiety-related differences in aversive decision-making under ambiguity and associated patterns of cortical activity. Adult human participants chose between two urns on each trial. The ratio of tokens ('O's and 'X's) in each urn determined probability of electrical stimulation receipt. A number above each urn indicated the magnitude of stimulation that would be received if a shock was delivered. On ambiguous trials, one of the two urns had tokens occluded. By varying the number of tokens occluded, we manipulated the extent of missing information. At higher levels of missing information, there is greater second order uncertainty, i.e., more uncertainty as to the probability of pulling a given type of token from the urn. Adult human participants demonstrated avoidance of ambiguous options which increased with level of missing information. Extent of 'information-level dependent' ambiguity aversion was significantly positively correlated with trait anxiety. Activity in both the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and inferior frontal sulcus during the decision-making period increased as a function of missing information. Greater engagement of these regions, on high missing information trials, was observed when participants went on to select the ambiguous option; this was especially apparent in high trait anxious individuals. These findings are consistent with individuals vulnerable to anxiety requiring greater activation of frontal regions supporting rational decision-making to overcome a predisposition to engage in ambiguity avoidance at high levels of missing information.

Fearful facial expressions reduce inhibition levels in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in subjects with specific phobia

BACKGROUND

Specific phobias have the highest prevalence among anxiety disorders. Cognitive control involving the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) is crucial for coping abilities in anxiety disorders. However, there is little research on the DLPFC in specific phobia.

METHODS

Using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), we investigated the TMS-evoked potential component N100 in the DLPFC at rest and while watching emotional expressions. The TMS-evoked N100 provides a parameter for gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA)-B-mediated cortical inhibition. Twenty-two drug-free subjects with specific phobia (21 females and 1 male) were compared with 26 control subjects (23 females and 3 males) regarding N100 in the DLPFC at rest and during an emotional 1-back task with fearful, angry, and neutral facial expressions.

RESULTS

At rest, we found reduced N100 amplitudes in the specific phobia compared with the control group. Furthermore, the specific phobia group showed a further reduction in N100 amplitude when memorizing fearful compared with neutral facial expressions.

CONCLUSION

There appears to be a decrease in GABA-B-mediated inhibition in the DLPFC in subjects with a specific phobia at rest. This decrease was more pronounced under emotional activation by exposure to fearful facial expressions, pointing towards additional state effects of emotional processing on inhibitory function in the DLPFC.

Anterior cingulate cortex activity during attentional control corresponds with rumination in depression and social anxiety

Rumination and worry are transdiagnostic perseverative cognitions that have overlapping and distinct characteristics. While the mechanisms of perseverative cognitions remain incomplete, limited data indicate anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) as it relates to top-down functions contributes to perseverative cognitions in internalizing conditions. The current study extends this work in patients with major depression (n = 39) or social anxiety (n = 42). During fMRI, participants viewed images comprising letter strings superimposed on task-irrelevant threatening or neutral faces. To moderate task difficulty, there was a low perceptual load condition where the target letter was in a string of identical letters and high load condition with the target letter in a mixed letter string increasing task difficulty. Regions of interest (ROI) comprised dorsal ACC and rostral ACC. Bilateral amygdala was also examined. Results showed diagnostic groups had similar levels of rumination and worry. Exploratory hierarchical regression analysis comprising clinical measures, task performance, and the 4 ROIs revealed significantly less dorsal ACC engagement during low (vs. high) load to task-irrelevant faces corresponded with more rumination, but not worry, regardless of diagnostic status. However, the ACC finding did not survive Bonferroni correction. Preliminary results suggest dorsal ACC response during attentional control may serve as a transdiagnostic mechanism of rumination.

The Implicit Aesthetic Preference for Mobile Marketing Interface Layout-An ERP Study

Businesses and scholars have been trying to improve marketing effect by optimizing mobile marketing interfaces aesthetically as users browse freely and aimlessly through mobile marketing interfaces. Although the layout is an important design factor that affects interface aesthetics, whether it can trigger customer's aesthetic preferences in mobile marketing remains unexplored. To address this issue, we employ an empirical methodology of event-related potentials (EPR) in this study from the perspective of cognitive neuroscience and psychology. Subjects are presented with a series of mobile marketing interface images of different layouts with identical marketing content. Their EEG waves were recorded as they were required to distinguish a target stimulus from the others. After the experiment, each of the subjects chose five stimuli interfaces they like and five they dislike. By analyzing the ERP data derived from the EEG data and the behavioral data, we find significant differences between the disliked interfaces and the other interfaces in the ERP component of P2 from the frontal-central area in the 200–400 ms post-stimulus onset time window and LPP from both the frontal-central and parietal-occipital area in the 400–600 ms time window. The results support the hypothesis that humans do make rapid implicit aesthetic preferences for interface layouts and suggest that even under a free browsing context like the mobile marketing context, interface layouts that raise high emotional arousal can still attract more user attention and induce users' implicit aesthetic preference.

Distinct and interacting impacts of trait anxiety and a state anxiety manipulation on attentional switching

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES

According to the Attentional Control Theory, individuals with high levels of anxiety often shift their attention inefficiently due to increased effort to meet task demands. However, literature on the effects of anxiety on shifting performance is discrepant. This study examined the impacts of trait and state anxiety on attentional shifting and whether worry or depression explained variance in shifting.

DESIGN AND METHODS

One-hundred thirty-eight undergraduate psychology students were randomized to the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) or control TSST. Subjects completed measures of state/trait anxiety, worry, and depression and a computerized attention task. Statistical analyses included linear mixed modelling (LMM), t-tests, and ANOVAs.

RESULTS

Results revealed significant effects of state and trait anxiety and worry, but not depression. Type (location/direction) and presentation (switch/repeat) of trials also affected response times. Trait anxiety significantly related to trial presentation but did not interact with trial type. State anxiety did not significantly relate to either trial index. State and trait anxiety significantly impacted overall response time. Results revealed variations in cognitive flexibility, but no interactions between state and trait anxiety in predicting task switching.

CONCLUSION

These findings are discussed in the context of Attentional Control Theory and relevant empirical research.

Faces are not always special for attention: Effects of response-relevance and identity

Research over the past 25 years indicates that stimulus processing is diminished when attention is engaged in a perceptually demanding task of high 'perceptual load'. These results have generalized across a variety of stimulus categories, but a controversy evolved over the question of whether perception of distractor faces (or other categories of perceptual expertise) can proceed irrespective of the level of perceptual load in the attended task. Here we identify task-relevance, and in particular identity-relevance, as a potentially important factor in explaining prior inconsistencies. In four experiments, we tested whether perceptual load in an attended letter or word task modulates the processing of famous face distractors, while varying their task-relevance. Distractor interference effects on task RTs was reduced by perceptual load not only when the faces were entirely task-irrelevant, but also when the face gender was task relevant, within a name gender classification response-competition task, using famous female or male distractor faces. However, when the identity associated with the famous faces was primed by the task using their names, as in prior demonstrations that face distractors are immune to the effects of perceptual load, we were able to replicate these prior findings. Our findings demonstrate a role for identity-priming by the relevant task in determining attentional capture by faces under high perceptual load. Our results also highlight the importance of considering even relatively subtle forms of task-relevance in selective attention research.

Neural mechanisms and predictors of SSRI and CBT treatment of anxiety: A randomized trial focused on emotion and cognitive processing

Anxiety disorders (ADs) are common and difficult to treat. While research suggests ADs are characterized by an imbalance between bottom-up and top-down attention processes and that effective treatments work by correcting this dysfunction, there is insufficient data to explain how and for whom treatments work. The late positive potential (LPP), an event-related potential reflecting elaborative processing of motivationally salient stimuli, is sensitive to both bottom-up and top-down processes. The present study examines the LPP in healthy controls (HC) and patients with ADs under low and high working memory (WM) load to assess its utility as a predictor and index of symptom reduction in patients who underwent cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) treatment. The LPP when viewing negative and neutral distractor images and WM performance were assessed in 96 participants (40 HC, 32 CBT, 24 SSRI) during a letter recall task at Week 0 and in a subset of the study sample (23 CBT, 16 SSRI) at Week 12. Patients were randomly assigned to twelve weeks of CBT or SSRI treatment. Participants completed self-reported symptom measures at each time point. Greater Week 0 LPP to negative images under low WM load predicted greater symptom reduction in the SSRI, but not the CBT, group. Regression analyses examining the LPP to negative images as an index of symptom reduction revealed a smaller decrease in the LPP to negative images under low WM load was associated with less anxiety reduction across treatment modalities. Findings suggest the LPP during low WM load may serve as a cost-effective predictor and index of treatment outcome in ADs. Clinical Trials Registration: ClinicalTrials.gov (Identifier: NCT01903447).

Questioning the role of amygdala and insula in an attentional capture by emotional stimuli task

Our senses are constantly monitoring the environment for emotionally salient stimuli that are potentially relevant for survival. Because of our limited cognitive resources, emotionally salient distractors prolong reaction times (RTs) as compared to neutral distractors. In addition, many studies have reported fMRI blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) activation of both the amygdala and the anterior insula for similar valence contrasts. However, a direct correlation of trail-by-trial BOLD activity with RTs has not been shown, yet, which would be a crucial piece of evidence to relate the two observations. To investigate the role of the above two regions in the context of emotional distractor effects, we study here the correlation between BOLD activity and RTs for a simple attentional capture by emotional stimuli (ACES) choice reaction time task using a general linear subject-level model with a parametric RT regressor. We found significant regression coefficients in the anterior insula, supplementary motor cortex, medial precentral regions, sensory-motor areas and others, but not in the amygdala, despite activation of both insula and amygdala in the traditional valence contrast across trials (i.e., negative vs. neutral pictures). In addition, we found that subjects that exhibit a stronger RT distractor effect across trials also show a stronger BOLD valence contrast in the right anterior insula but not in the amygdala. Our results indicate that the current neuroimaging-based evidence for the involvement of the amygdala in RT slowing is limited. We advocate that models of emotional capture should incorporate both the amygdala and the anterior insula as separate entities.

State anxiety influences P300 and P600 event-related potentials over parietal regions in the hollow-mask illusion experiment

The hollow-mask illusion is an optical illusion where a concave face is perceived as convex. It has been demonstrated that individuals with schizophrenia and anxiety are less susceptible to the illusion than controls. Previous research has shown that the P300 and P600 event-related potentials (ERPs) are affected in individuals with schizophrenia. Here, we examined whether individual differences in neuroticism and anxiety scores, traits that have been suggested to be risk factors for schizophrenia and anxiety disorders, affect ERPs of healthy participants while they view concave faces. Our results confirm that the participants were susceptible to the illusion, misperceiving concave faces as convex. We additionally demonstrate significant interactions of the concave condition with state anxiety in central and parietal electrodes for P300 and parietal areas for P600, but not with neuroticism and trait anxiety. The state anxiety interactions were driven by low-state anxiety participants showing lower amplitudes for concave faces compared to convex. The P300 and P600 amplitudes were smaller when a concave face activated a convex face memory representation, since the stimulus did not match the active representation. The opposite pattern was evident in high-state anxiety participants in regard to state anxiety interaction and the hollow-mask illusion, demonstrating larger P300 and P600 amplitudes to concave faces suggesting impaired late information processing in this group. This could be explained by impaired allocation of attentional resources in high-state anxiety leading to hyperarousal to concave faces that are unexpected mismatches to standard memory representations, as opposed to expected convex faces.

Spider Phobia: Neural Networks Informing Diagnosis and (Virtual/Augmented Reality-Based) Cognitive Behavioral Psychotherapy-A Narrative Review

Recent fMRI studies on specific animal phobias, particularly spider phobia (arachnophobia), have identified a large variety of specific brain regions involved in normal and disturbed fear processing. Both functional and structural brain abnormalities have been identified among phobic patients. Current research suggests that both conscious and subconscious fear processing play a crucial role in phobic disorders. Cognitive behavioral therapy has been identified as an effective treatment for specific phobias and has been associated with neuroplastic effects which can be evaluated using current neuroimaging techniques. Recent research suggests that new approaches using virtual (VR) or augmented reality (AR) tend to be similarly effective as traditional "in vivo" therapy methods and could expand treatment options for different medical or individual scenarios. This narrative review elaborates on neural structures and particularities of arachnophobia. Current treatment options are discussed and future research questions are highlighted.

Neural mechanisms of eye gaze processing as a function of emotional expression and working memory load

The aim of the present study was to investigate the role of working memory load on the gaze cueing effect in high and low trait-anxious participants, using electroencephalography. Fearful and neutral faces predicted the location of a target, which was a digit that participants were asked to recall from a series encoded in each trial, in a modified version of the attentional cueing task. Working memory load impacted cueing irrespective of emotion and anxiety in analysis of reaction times. Lateralized EEG components then showed that effects of emotion were only apparent in high anxious individuals, with an initial hypervigilance to target locations cued by fearful faces, followed by a difficulty to disengage from these locations when targets appeared at uncued sites (P1). Enhanced amplitude following fearful faces was observed, when discriminative processes leading to response selection are implemented (N1). Conversely, all the effects of working memory load were independent of emotion in the low anxious group, where the shifting of attention directed by the gaze was only visible when enough resources were available in the working memory span. Working memory loads impacted the processing of gaze differently (P1) in low anxious participants, suggesting that top-down influence may play a role in this case.

Neurovisceral integration in the executive control network: A resting state analysis

Neurovisceral integration models emphasize the role of frontal lobes in cognitive, behavioral, and emotional regulation. Two candidate hubs for the regulation of cardio-autonomic control, anxiety, and executive attention are the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and middle frontal gyrus (MFG). Two-hundred and seventy-one adults (62.9 % female) aged 18-85 years were selected from the NKI-Rockland Sample. Resting state functional imaging data was preprocessed, and seeds extracted from bilateral DLPFC and MFG to test 4 regression models predicting connectivity with high frequency HRV (HF-HRV), trait anxiety (TA), and reaction time on an executive attention task. After controlling for age, sex, body mass index and head motion, the right DLPFC-MFG seed pair provided strongest support for neurovisceral integration indexed by HF-HRV, low TA and shorter reaction time on the attention network task. This hemispheric effect may underlie the inhibitory role of right PFC in the regulation of cardio-autonomic function, emotion, and executive attention.

Computational modelling of attentional bias towards threat in paediatric anxiety

Computational modelling can be used to precisely characterize the cognitive processes involved in attentional biases towards threat, yet so far has only been applied in the context of adult anxiety. Furthermore, studies investigating attentional biases in childhood anxiety have largely used tasks that conflate automatic and controlled attentional processes. By using a perceptual load paradigm, we separately investigate contributions from automatic and controlled processes to attentional biases towards negative stimuli and their association with paediatric anxiety. We also use computational modelling to investigate these mechanisms in children for the first time. In a sample of 60 children (aged 5‐11 years) we used a perceptual load task specifically adapted for children, in order to investigate attentional biases towards fearful (compared with happy and neutral) faces. Outcome measures were reaction time and percentage accuracy. We applied a drift diffusion model to investigate the precise cognitive mechanisms involved. The load effect was associated with significant differences in response time, accuracy and the diffusion modelling parameters drift rate and extra‐decisional time. Greater anxiety was associated with greater accuracy and the diffusion modelling parameter ‘drift rate’ on the fearful face trials. This was specific to the high load condition. These findings suggest that attentional biases towards fearful faces in childhood anxiety are driven by increased perceptual sensitivity towards fear in automatic attentional systems. Our findings from computational modelling suggest that current attention bias modification treatments should target perceptual encoding directly rather than processes occurring afterwards.

State anxiety reduces working memory capacity but does not impact filtering cost for neutral distracters

Current theories propose that anxiety adversely impacts working memory (WM) by restricting WM capacity and interfering with efficient filtering of task-irrelevant information. The current study investigated the effect of shock-induced state anxiety on WM capacity and the ability to filter task-irrelevant neutral stimuli. We measured the contralateral delay activity (CDA), an event-related potential that indexes the number of items maintained in WM, while participants completed a lateralized change detection task. The task included low and high WM loads, as well as a low load plus distracter condition. This design was used to assess WM capacity for low and high loads and investigate an individual's ability to filter neutral task-irrelevant stimuli. Participants completed the task under two conditions, threat of shock and safe. We observed a reduced CDA in the threat compared to the safe condition that was specific for high memory load. However, we did not find any differences in CDA filtering cost between threat and safe conditions. In addition, we did not find any differences in behavioral performance between the threat and safe conditions. These findings suggest that being in an anxious state reduces the neural representation for large amounts of information in WM, but have little effect on the filtering of neutral distracters.

Individual differences in anxiety and automatic amygdala response to fearful faces: A replication and extension of Etkin et al. (2004)

Trait anxiety refers to the stable tendency to attend to threats and experience fears and worries across many situations. According to the widely noticed, pioneering investigation by Etkin et al. (2004) trait anxiety is strongly associated with reactivity in the right basolateral amygdala to non-conscious threat. Although this observation was based on a sample of only 17 individuals, no replication effort has been reported yet. We reexamined automatic amygdala responsiveness as a function of anxiety in a large sample of 107 participants. Besides self-report instruments, we administered an indirect test to assess implicit anxiety. To assess early, automatic stages of emotion processing, we used a color-decision paradigm presenting brief (33 ms) and backward-masked fearful facial expressions. N = 56 participants were unaware of the presence of masked faces. In this subset of unaware participants, the relationship between trait anxiety and basolateral amygdala activation by fearful faces was successfully replicated in region of interest analyses. Additionally, a relation of implicit anxiety with masked fear processing in the amygdala and temporal gyrus was observed. We provide evidence that implicit measures of affect can be valuable predictors of automatic brain responsiveness and may represent useful additions to explicit measures. Our findings support a central role of amygdala reactivity to non-consciously perceived threat in understanding and predicting dispositional anxiety, i.e. the frequency of spontaneously occurring anxiety in everyday life.

The role of the locus coeruleus in the generation of pathological anxiety

This review aims to synthesise a large pre-clinical and clinical literature related to a hypothesised role of the locus coeruleus norepinephrine system in responses to acute and chronic threat, as well as the emergence of pathological anxiety. The locus coeruleus has widespread norepinephrine projections throughout the central nervous system, which act to globally modulate arousal states and adaptive behavior, crucially positioned to play a significant role in modulating both ascending visceral and descending cortical neurocognitive information. In response to threat or a stressor, the locus coeruleus–norepinephrine system globally modulates arousal, alerting and orienting functions and can have a powerful effect on the regulation of multiple memory systems. Chronic stress leads to amplification of locus coeruleus reactivity to subsequent stressors, which is coupled with the emergence of pathological anxiety-like behaviors in rodents. While direct in vivo evidence for locus coeruleus dysfunction in humans with pathological anxiety remains limited, recent advances in high-resolution 7-T magnetic resonance imaging and computational modeling approaches are starting to provide new insights into locus coeruleus characteristics.

Reducing Amygdala Activity and Phobic Fear through Cognitive Top-Down Regulation

The amygdala is critically involved in emotional processing, including fear responses, and shows hyperactivity in anxiety disorders. Previous research in healthy participants has indicated that amygdala activity is down-regulated by cognitively demanding tasks that engage the PFC. It is unknown, however, if such an acute down-regulation of amygdala activity might correlate with reduced fear in anxious participants. In an fMRI study of 43 participants (11 men) with fear of snakes, we found reduced amygdala activity when visual stimuli were processed under high cognitive load, irrespective of whether the stimuli were of neutral or phobic content. Furthermore, dynamic causal modeling revealed that this general reduction in amygdala activity was partially mediated by a load-dependent increase in dorsolateral PFC activity. Importantly, high cognitive load also resulted in an acute decrease in perceived phobic fear while viewing the fearful stimuli. In conclusion, our data indicate that a cognitively demanding task results in a top-down regulation of amygdala activity and an acute reduction of fear in phobic participants. These findings may inspire the development of novel psychological intervention approaches aimed at reducing fear in anxiety disorders.

Basolateral Amygdala Connectivity With Subgenual Anterior Cingulate Cortex Represents Enhanced Fear-Related Memory Encoding in Anxious Humans

BACKGROUND

The amygdala can enhance emotional memory encoding as well as anxiogenesis via corticotropin-releasing factor neurons. However, the amygdala's explicit role in emotional encoding remains unclarified in humans. We examined how functional connectivity (FC) of amygdala subnuclei affects emotional encoding, considering its mechanism in which anxiety, attention, and cortisol conceivably participate.

METHODS

A total of 65 healthy humans underwent resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging scans and saliva collection at 10 points in time over 2 days. FC analysis was performed for basolateral amygdala subnucleus (BLA) and centromedial amygdala subnucleus. We assessed attentional control via an emotional Stroop task and assessed emotional encoding via a facial identification task that examines how strongly a neutral face is memorized when accompanied by an emotional face (fearful, sad, or happy). FC and task performance were compared between high-anxious and non-high-anxious groups classified by anxious personality scores.

RESULTS

BLA connected with subgenual anterior cingulate cortex (sgACC) in proportion to the strength of fear-related encoding, whereas centromedial subnucleus connected with caudate nucleus for happy-related encoding. The high-anxious group showed more enhanced fear-related encoding but impaired happy-related encoding compared with the non-high-anxious group. BLA-sgACC FC was more intensified in the high-anxious group than in the non-high-anxious group; however, centromedial-caudate FC did not differ between them. Although emotional encoding was uncorrelated with either attentional control or cortisol, BLA-sgACC was positively correlated with cortisol increase after awakening.

CONCLUSIONS

The study revealed that neural interactions of BLA, specifically with sgACC, might play a critical role in fear-related memory encoding, depending on the individual's level of anxiety. These findings aid in understanding the complicated mechanisms of emotional memory in anxiety disorders.

Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation in Patients with Anxiety: Current Perspectives

Anxiety is one of the most prevalent and debilitating psychiatric conditions worldwide. Pharmaco- and psycho-therapies have been employed in the treatment of human anxiety to date. Yet, either alone or in combination, unsatisfactory patient outcomes are prevalent, resulting in a considerable number of people whose symptoms fail to respond to conventional therapies with symptoms remaining after intervention. The demand for new therapies has given birth to several noninvasive brain stimulation techniques. Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) has arisen as a promising tool and has been proven to be safe and well tolerated for the treatment of many diseases, including chronic pain, depression, and anxiety. Here, reports of the use of tDCS in anxiety disorders in human patients were reviewed and summarized. A literature search was conducted in mid-2019, to identify clinical studies that evaluated the use of tDCS for the treatment of anxiety behavior. The PubMed, Web of Science, and Scielo and PsycInfo databases were explored using the following descriptors: "anxiety", "anxious behavior", "tDCS", and "transcranial direct current stimulation". Among the selected articles, considerable variability in the type of tDCS treatment applied in interventions was observed. Evidence shows that tDCS may be more effective when used in combination with drugs and cognitive behavioral therapies; however future large-scale clinical trials are recommended to better clarify the real effects of this intervention alone, or in combination with others.

Dual-Task Interference on Early and Late Stages of Facial Emotion Detection Is Revealed by Human Electrophysiology

Rapid and accurate processing of potential social threats is paramount to social thriving, and provides a clear evolutionary advantage. Though automatic processing of facial expressions has been assumed for some time, some researchers now question the extent to which this is the case. Here, we provide electrophysiological data from a psychological refractory period (PRP) dual-task paradigm in which participants had to decide whether a target face exhibited a neutral or fearful expression, as overlap with a concurrent auditory tone categorization task was experimentally manipulated. Specifically, we focused on four event-related potentials (ERP) linked to emotional face processing, covering distinct processing stages and topography: the early posterior negativity (EPN), early frontal positivity (EFP), late positive potential (LPP), and also the face-sensitive N170. As expected, there was an emotion modulation of each ERP. Most importantly, there was a significant attenuation of this emotional response proportional to the degree of task overlap for each component, except the N170. In fact, when the central overlap was greatest, this emotion-specific amplitude was statistically null for the EFP and LPP, and only marginally different from zero for the EPN. N170 emotion modulation was, on the other hand, unaffected by central overlap. Thus, our results show that emotion-specific ERPs for three out of four processing stages—i.e., perceptual encoding (EPN), emotion detection (EFP), or content evaluation (LPP)—are attenuated and even eliminated by central resource scarcity. Models assuming automatic processing should be revised to account for these results.

The Impact of Situational Test Anxiety on Retest Effects in Cognitive Ability Testing: A Structural Equation Modeling Approach

When a cognitive ability is assessed repeatedly, test scores and ability estimates are often observed to increase across test sessions. This phenomenon is known as the retest (or practice) effect. One explanation for retest effects is that situational test anxiety interferes with a testee's performance during earlier test sessions, thereby creating systematic measurement bias on the test items (interference hypothesis). Yet, the influence of anxiety diminishes with test repetitions. This explanation is controversial, since the presence of measurement bias during earlier measurement occasions cannot always be confirmed. It is argued that people from the lower end of the ability spectrum become aware of their deficits in test situations and therefore report higher anxiety (deficit hypothesis). In 2014, a structural equation model was proposed that specifically allows the comparison of these two hypotheses with regard to explanatory power for the negative anxiety-ability correlation found in cross-sectional assessments. We extended this model for usage in longitudinal studies to investigate the impact of test anxiety on test performance and on retest effects. A latent neighbor-change growth curve was implemented into the model that enables an estimation of retest effects between all pairs of successive test sessions. Systematic restrictions on model parameters allow testing the hypothetical reduction in anxiety interference over the test sessions, which can be compared to retest effect sizes. In an empirical study with seven measurement occasions, we found that a substantial reduction in interference upon the second test session was associated with the largest retest effect in a figural matrices test, which served as a proxy measure for general intelligence. However, smaller retest effects occurred up to the fourth test administration, whereas evidence for anxiety-induced measurement bias was only produced for the first two test sessions. Anxiety and ability were not negatively correlated at any time when the interference effects were controlled for. Implications, limitations, and suggestions for future research are discussed.

Amygdala-prefrontal cortex connectivity increased during face discrimination but not time perception

Time sensitivity is affected by emotional stimuli such as fearful faces. The effect of threatening stimuli on time perception depends on numerous factors, including task type and duration range. We applied a two-interval forced-choice task using face stimuli to healthy volunteers to evaluate time perception and emotion interaction using functional magnetic resonance imaging. We conducted finite impulse response analysis to examine time series for the significantly activated brain areas and psycho-physical interaction to investigate the connectivity between selected regions. Time perception engaged a right-lateralised frontoparietal network, while a face discrimination task activated the amygdala and fusiform face area (FFA). No voxels were active with regard to the effect of expression (fearful versus neutral). In parallel with this, our behavioural results showed that attending to the fearful faces did not cause duration overestimation. Finally, connectivity of the amygdala and FFA to the middle frontal gyrus increased during the face processing condition compared to the timing task. Overall, our results suggest that the prefrontal-amygdala connectivity might be required for the emotional processing of facial stimuli. On the other hand, attentional load, task type and task difficulty are discussed as possible factors that influence the effects of emotion on time perception.

Brain connection pattern under interoceptive attention state predict interoceptive intensity and subjective anxiety feeling

Interoception involves the processing of a variety of different types of information ascending from the body. Accumulating evidence has indicated that interoception plays a fundamental role in cognitive and emotional processes, such as anxiety, but how different functional connectivity patterns contribute to emotions and visceral feelings during an interoceptive attention state is still unclear. In the present study, an interoceptive attention task was performed during functional magnetic resonance imaging of healthy subjects, and the participants' subjective ratings of the intensity of interoception and feelings of anxiety were recorded. Several network nodes were selected, based on previous studies, to construct task-dependent functional connectivity patterns, which were processed by support vector regression to predict the corresponding feeling scores. The results showed that for interoception, the cingulo-opercular task control network provided the greatest contribution, whereas the most important feature for anxiety was the connections between the sensorimotor area (SSM) and the salience network (SN). There existed four overlapping connections between the two predictions: two negative connections between the default mode network (DMN) and the SSM, one negative connection between the DMN and the SN, and one positive connection between the ventral attention network and the SN; this overlap might suggest common bodily attention processing that is involved in both interoception and anxiety. This study remediates the lack of network-level biomarkers of interoception and provides a reference at the level of the brain for further understanding anxiety from an interoceptive perspective.

Implicitly and explicitly assessed anxiety: No relationships with recognition of and brain response to facial emotions

Trait anxiety, the disposition to experience anxiety, is known to facilitate perception of threats. Trait anxious individuals seem to identify threatening stimuli such as fearful facial expressions more accurately, especially when presented under temporal constraints. In past studies on anxiety and emotion face recognition, only self-report or explicit measures of anxiety have been administered. Implicit measures represent indirect tests allowing to circumvent problems associated with self-report. In our study, we made use of implicit in addition to explicit measures to investigate the relationships of trait anxiety with recognition of and brain response to emotional faces. 75 healthy young volunteers had to identify briefly presented (67 ms) fearful, angry, happy, and neutral facial expressions masked by neutral faces while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging. The Implicit Association Test, the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory and the Beck Anxiety Inventory were applied as implicit and explicit measures of trait anxiety. After corrections for multiple testing, neither implicitly nor explicitly measured anxiety correlated with recognition of emotional facial expressions. Moreover, implicitly and explicitly assessed anxiety was not linked to brain response to emotional faces. Our data suggest links between discrimination accuracy and brain response to facial emotions. Activation of the caudate nucleus seems be of particular importance for recognizing fear and happiness from facial expressions. Processes of somatosensory resonance appear to be involved in identifying fear from facial expressions. The present data indicate that, regardless of assessment method, trait anxiety does not affect the recognition of fear or other emotions as has been proposed previously.