Neural Correlates of Emotional Interference in Social Anxiety Disorder

Boehme, Stephanie; Ritter, Viktoria; Tefikow, Susan; Stangier, Ulrich; Strauß, Bernhard; Miltner, Wolfgang H. R.; Straube, Thomas

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0128608

Cited by 28 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 89 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…These brain regions are considered to be part of the neural network involved in affective processing in SAD ( Brühl et al, 2014 , Etkin and Wager, 2007 , Freitas-Ferrari et al, 2010 , Miskovic and Schmidt, 2012 ). Their activation was observed especially under conditions without attentional restriction during emotional stimulus encoding ( Heitmann et al, 2016 , Klumpp et al, 2012 , Straube et al, 2005 ), but some regions (insula, STS) also during automatic processing, such as with facial affect in gender discrimination tasks ( Blair et al, 2008a , Boehme et al, 2015 , Gentili et al, 2008 , Straube et al, 2004 ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Most functional imaging studies on brain responses during automatic processing of task-irrelevant threat stimuli in SAD presented emotional faces, which were judged with respect to emotion-irrelevant aspects such as gender discrimination ( Blair et al, 2008a , Campbell et al, 2007 , Gentili et al, 2008 , Stein et al, 2002 , Straube et al, 2004 ). Other studies either used gender judgment on stimuli with emotional prosody ( Quadflieg et al, 2008 ), disorder-related words in grammatical decision ( Schmidt et al, 2010 ) or in an emotional Stroop task ( Boehme et al, 2015 ). These studies particularly reported amygdala hyperactivation and less consistent hyperactivations in the insula, prefrontal regions (e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Brain activation to task-irrelevant disorder-related threat in social anxiety disorder: The impact of symptom severity

Heitmann¹,

Feldker²,

Neumeister³

et al. 2017

NeuroImage: Clinical

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Unintentional and uncontrollable processing of threat has been suggested to contribute to the pathology of social anxiety disorder (SAD). The present study investigated the neural correlates of processing task-irrelevant, highly ecologically valid, disorder-related stimuli as a function of symptom severity in SAD. Twenty-four SAD patients and 24 healthy controls (HC) performed a feature-based comparison task during functional magnetic resonance imaging, while task-irrelevant, disorder-related or neutral scenes were presented simultaneously at a different spatial position. SAD patients showed greater activity than HC in response to disorder-related versus neutral scenes in brain regions associated with self-referential processing (e.g. insula, precuneus, dorsomedial prefrontal cortex) and emotion regulation (e.g. dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), inferior frontal gyrus). Symptom severity was positively associated with amygdala activity, and negatively with activation in dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and dlPFC in SAD patients. Additional correlation analysis revealed that amygdala-prefrontal coupling was positively associated with symptom severity. A network of brain regions is thus involved in SAD patients' processing of task-irrelevant, complex, ecologically valid, disorder-related scenes. Furthermore, increasing symptom severity in SAD patients seems to reflect a growing imbalance between neural mechanisms related to stimulus-driven bottom-up and regulatory top-down processes resulting in dysfunctional regulation strategies.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Brain activation to task-irrelevant disorder-related threat in social anxiety disorder: The impact of symptom severity

Heitmann¹,

Feldker²,

Neumeister³

et al. 2017

NeuroImage: Clinical

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Final analyses took place in Leiden, the Netherlands. The initial sample consisted of 251 SAD-patients and 230 healthy control (HC)-participants ( Table 1 ), and results on these datasets have been published previously ( Boehme et al, 2015 , Boehme et al, 2014a , Boehme et al, 2014b , Cremers et al, 2014 , Geiger et al, 2016 , Howells et al, 2015 , Klumpp et al, 2016 , Månsson et al, 2015 , Månsson et al, 2013 , Pannekoek et al, 2013 , Phan et al, 2013 , Syal et al, 2012 , van Tol et al, 2010 ) – see Inline Supplementary Document 1 for more details on the in- and exclusion criteria and recruitment of participants for each sample. At each site, the local ethical committee approved data-collection and all participants provided written informed consent after the procedure had been fully explained.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Voxel-based morphometry multi-center mega-analysis of brain structure in social anxiety disorder

Bas-Hoogendam

Steenbergen

Pannekoek

et al. 2017

NeuroImage: Clinical

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is a prevalent and disabling mental disorder, associated with significant psychiatric co-morbidity. Previous research on structural brain alterations associated with SAD has yielded inconsistent results concerning the direction of the changes in gray matter (GM) in various brain regions, as well as on the relationship between brain structure and SAD-symptomatology. These heterogeneous findings are possibly due to limited sample sizes. Multi-site imaging offers new opportunities to investigate SAD-related alterations in brain structure in larger samples.An international multi-center mega-analysis on the largest database of SAD structural T1-weighted 3T MRI scans to date was performed to compare GM volume of SAD-patients (n = 174) and healthy control (HC)-participants (n = 213) using voxel-based morphometry. A hypothesis-driven region of interest (ROI) approach was used, focusing on the basal ganglia, the amygdala-hippocampal complex, the prefrontal cortex, and the parietal cortex. SAD-patients had larger GM volume in the dorsal striatum when compared to HC-participants. This increase correlated positively with the severity of self-reported social anxiety symptoms. No SAD-related differences in GM volume were present in the other ROIs. Thereby, the results of this mega-analysis suggest a role for the dorsal striatum in SAD, but previously reported SAD-related changes in GM in the amygdala, hippocampus, precuneus, prefrontal cortex and parietal regions were not replicated. Our findings emphasize the importance of large sample imaging studies and the need for meta-analyses like those performed by the Enhancing NeuroImaging Genetics through Meta-Analysis (ENIGMA) Consortium.

show abstract

“…Furthermore, adults with a more negative disposition show heightened amygdala activation to threat-related cues (Calder et al, 2011), even when they are task-irrelevant (Ewbank et al, 2009), and there is evidence that this is associated with enhanced attentional capture (i.e., response slowing; Ewbank et al, 2009). Other recent work shows that adults (Boehme et al, 2015) and youth (9–14 years; Price et al, 2016) with anxiety disorders show increased amygdala activation and exaggerated behavioral interference when performing standard emotional attention tasks (e.g., emotional Stroop, dot-probe).…”

Section: Relevance Of the Amygdala To Hyper-vigilance And Attentionalmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Neurobiology of Dispositional Negativity and Attentional Biases to Threat: Implications for Understanding Anxiety Disorders in Adults and Youth

Shackman

Stockbridge

Tillman

et al. 2016

Journal of Experimental Psychopathology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

When extreme, anxiety can become debilitating. Anxiety disorders, which often first emerge early in development, are common and challenging to treat, yet the neurocognitive mechanisms that confer increased risk have only recently begun to come into focus. Here we review recent work highlighting the importance of neural circuits centered on the amygdala. We begin by describing dispositional negativity, a core dimension of childhood temperament and adult personality and an important risk factor for the development of anxiety disorders and other kinds of stress-sensitive psychopathology. Converging lines of epidemiological, neurophysiological, and mechanistic evidence indicate that the amygdala supports stable individual differences in dispositional negativity across the lifespan and contributes to the etiology of anxiety disorders in adults and youth. Hyper-vigilance and attentional biases to threat are prominent features of the anxious phenotype and there is growing evidence that they contribute to the development of psychopathology. Anatomical studies show that the amygdala is a hub, poised to govern attention to threat via projections to sensory cortex and ascending neuromodulatory systems. Imaging and lesion studies demonstrate that the amygdala plays a key role in selecting and prioritizing the processing of threat-related cues. Collectively, these observations provide a neurobiologically-grounded framework for understanding the development and maintenance of anxiety disorders in adults and youth and set the stage for developing improved intervention strategies.

show abstract

Neural Correlates of Emotional Interference in Social Anxiety Disorder

Cited by 28 publications

References 89 publications

Brain activation to task-irrelevant disorder-related threat in social anxiety disorder: The impact of symptom severity

Brain activation to task-irrelevant disorder-related threat in social anxiety disorder: The impact of symptom severity

Voxel-based morphometry multi-center mega-analysis of brain structure in social anxiety disorder

The Neurobiology of Dispositional Negativity and Attentional Biases to Threat: Implications for Understanding Anxiety Disorders in Adults and Youth

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About