Experts studied brain scans to see what happens in anxious and non-anxious people in a simulated social situation.
Anxious
people use a less suitable section of the forebrain when choosing their
behaviour in socially difficult situations than non-anxious persons. This can
be detected in brain scans, according to research conducted by Bob Bramson and
Sjoerd Meijer at Radboud University's Donders Institute.
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 behaviour 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
behaviour, 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 behaviour 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 behaviour. The researchers think that the results could be used to
develop new treatments for people with anxiety.
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