Anxiety Supercharges Emotions

Why do even small situations trigger overwhelming emotions for me? 

Scientists from Radboud University, Nijmegen, NL have uncovered the specific neural processes responsible for regulating emotions in people with anxiety.¹ Neuroscientists scanned the brains of chronic worriers to see whether their brains behaved differently to their more ‘chill’ counterparts during an emotional experience. The researchers found that in highly anxious subjects, their emotional control centres received a far stronger signal from their amygdala – the part of the brain that controls fear. This led to their brain recruiting a less ‘emotionally attuned’ part of their brain to support the management of emotional responses, but it doesn’t function as effectively as it should. 

This extra piece of the puzzle helped the Radboud neuroscientists to conclude that anxious people experience and hold on to negative emotions more intensely because their brains struggle to distinguish between a slight and a slam. These findings provide fresh insights into the neural underpinnings of emotion regulation in anxiety, offering potential avenues for developing targeted treatments.

Triggered

Researchers compared the brain activity of 52 highly anxious male and female students to 44 non-anxious male students while they carried out a social-emotional approach-avoidance task. This task, designed by psychologists, tests how people subconsciously control their reflex responses to emotions. For example, if someone feels a strongly negative social emotion, such as shame or guilt, they might instinctively avoid the trigger or source of that emotion. 

The participants were put inside a brain scanner and shown images of an angry face or a happy face. If the researchers displayed a happy face, they instructed the subject to push a joystick away from themself, while an angry face signalled them to pull the joystick towards themself. This mismatch between the negative emotion evoked by the angry face and the action of pulling the joystick inwards created a slight delay in their response time. Researchers hypothesized that the greater the emotional upset caused by the angry face, the longer the delay would be.

Scanners

The scientists used high-tech brain imaging technique functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (MRS) and Diffusion Weighted Imaging (DWI) scans to monitor brain activity while the participants looked at the faces. 

They combined data about how upset the subject was when they saw the angry face with their brain’s activity in that moment. The researchers then compared how each subject’s emotional responses and brain activity differed between the anxious and non-anxious people.

Pushing the Brain’s Boundaries

The brain scans showed that in highly anxious individuals, the lateral frontopolar cortex (FPl), a key brain region responsible for regulating emotions, received much stronger neural input from the amygdala, the region associated with fear and anxiety, compared to their non-anxious counterparts.

This heightened response from the amygdala overwhelmed the lateral frontopolar cortex in anxious people, so they needed to recruit another brain region, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), to help with processing emotions. However, this part of the brain is less adept at processing emotions. Non-anxious people were able to manage their emotional responses to the angry face effectively using only their lateral frontopolar cortex.

For people with anxiety, this means that their brain struggles to fine-tune their emotional responses when dealing with negative social emotions. An interaction that a non-anxious person might brush off as a minor inconvenience might be processed the same as a full-blown row by an anxious person’s overloaded dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.

Finding a Balance  

The amygdala, a small structure nestled within the brain’s temporal lobe, serves as a pivotal regulator of emotions, particularly fear.² It is a crucial component of the brain’s limbic system, receiving a wide variety of incoming sensory information from various parts of the brain. These inputs range from sight to sound and even smell – and the brain is trying to make sense of all them.

 Once the brain processes the sensory information and identifies a threat, often before conscious awareness, the amygdala activates the hypothalamus.³ This triggers the release of stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline to prepare the body for a fight-or-flight response. In contrast, the lateral frontopolar cortex (FPl) is a specialized brain region optimized for managing emotions by connecting emotional experiences with logical thinking.⁴ 

When this brain region is oversaturated with incoming sensory signals from the amygdala, it can become overloaded, creating a bottleneck for processing emotions. This overload forces individuals to rely on the less flexible dorsolateral prefrontal cortex for controlling emotional actions instead of the specialized lateral frontopolar cortex circuitry.

New Directions

In recent years, our world has become increasingly fast-paced and uncertain, with anxiety tightening its grip, affecting millions of us in deep and often hidden ways.⁵ Within the umbrella of anxiety disorders, generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) stands out as the most common type, affecting an estimated 4% of the global population with women being more likely to be diagnosed than men.^{6, 7} 

Clinically, generalized anxiety disorder is characterized by excessive worry or anxiety about a variety of everyday problems and concerns, often accompanied by physical symptoms such as restlessness, fatigue, muscle tension, and difficulty concentrating.⁸ Although anxiety is not completely curable, it is highly treatable with cognitive behavioural therapy as one of the most effective forms of psychotherapy.^9,10 

As research continues to advance, the development of FDA-approved treatments specifically targeting the amygdala may become a reality. Amygdala targeting could offer new ways for individuals with anxiety to gain mastery over their emotions and lead fulfilling lives.

Reference

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