People with anxiety disorders use less of the appropriate part of the forebrain when making decisions in socially challenging situations than people without anxiety disorders, according to a new brain scan study. This difference in brain activity can cause people with anxiety disorders to avoid social situations, hindering their ability to learn from such experiences.
People with anxiety disorders tend to use different parts of the forebrain in socially challenging situations than people without anxiety disorders.
People with anxiety disorders tend to use different areas of the forebrain than non-anxious people in socially challenging situations. Research by Bob Bramson and Sjoerd Meijer at the Donders Institute of Radboud University shows that this can be seen in brain scans.
For example, an anxious person and a non-anxious person both meet someone they have been in love with for a long time. Both of them felt very nervous and wanted to ask each other out. But will you go to that person? Or pretend not to see it to avoid embarrassment?
Non-anxious people can put aside this emotion and choose behaviors that bring them closer to potential lovers, which is much more difficult for anxious people. "People with anxiety disorders use less appropriate parts of their forebrains for this kind of control," says Bramson. "It's more difficult for them to choose alternative behaviors, so they avoid social situations more."
Decisions like this require a balance between possible threats and rewards, and non-anxious people make this decision in the prefrontal cortex. Researchers at Radboud University have now shown that people with social anxiety disorder use another part of their forebrain to make similar decisions.
brain scan
Bramson and Mayer studied brain scans to see what happens in people with anxiety and those without anxiety in simulated social situations. "Our subjects were shown happy and angry faces, and they had to first move the joystick toward the happy faces and away from the angry faces. At a certain point, they had to do the opposite: move toward the angry faces and away from the happy faces. This requires controlling our tendency to automatically avoid negative situations."
It turns out that anxious people perform just as well as non-anxious people on this simple task, but the scans revealed that a completely different part of the brain was active. "In non-anxious people, we often see that during emotion control, signals are sent from the very front of the prefrontal cortex to the motor cortex, the part of the brain that directs body actions. In anxious people, a less efficient part of the front is used." Other scans suggest that the cause may be that the "right" part is overstimulated in anxious people. "This may explain why anxious people have difficulty choosing alternative behaviors to avoid social situations. The downside of this is that they never learn that social situations are not as negative as they thought."
Brain scans have shown for the first time that the forebrains of people with anxiety disorders work differently than those of people without anxiety disorders in controlling emotional behavior. The researchers believe the results could be used to develop new treatments for people with anxiety disorders.