Different anxiety types reflected in brain activity
Other psychological assessments standardized the pool of participants by removing those with mood disorders or other complicating factors.
To tryout whether neural activation patterns supported the speculation that these two categories of anxiety are distinct, the researchers selected 42 subjects from a pool of 1,099 undergraduate college students, using psychological tests to categorize them as “high anxious apprehension,” “high anxious arousal,” or neither. The team has found the most compelling evidence yet of differing patterns of brain activity associated with each of two types of anxiety: anxious apprehension (verbal rumination, worry) and anxious arousal (intense fear and/or panic). The anxious arousal group had more activity in a region of the right-hemisphere inferior temporal lobe that is believed to be involved in tracking and responding to knowledge signaling danger.
This is the first study, however, to localize the affected regions to identify areas within each hemisphere that seem to matter.
Other studies using electroencephalographic (EEG) methods had found that patients diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder had heightened activity in the left brain, whereas patients with panic disorder, panic symptoms or those subjected to high stress situations exhibited enhanced activity in the right hemisphere.
Specificity of regional brain activity in anxiety types during emotion processing
Psychophysiology.
Miller stressed the importance of a related finding: The researchers distinguished the left-brain region involved in anxious apprehension from a nearby structure that is associated with positive emotional processing. But those who study and treat patients with anxiety disorders do not always differentiate the patients who distress, fret and ruminate from those who experience the panic, rapid heartbeat or bouts of sweating that characterize anxious arousal. Engels to the U. “We had reason to think there were different brain mechanisms, different parts of the brain active at different times, depending on what type of anxiety one is facing.”
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders classifies nearly a dozen different anxiety disorders, from acute stress disorder to obsessive-compulsive disorder to panic attack and PTSD.   [Abstract]
The work was supported primarily by
This research is based on a master’s thesis submitted by graduate student Anna S.
The researchers used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to map the brain areas with heightened neural activity during a variety of psychological probes. psychology professor Gregory A. These two kinds of anxiety may occur alone or in combination, with potentially fundamental implications for treatment. Support additionally was provided by the Beckman Institute, the agency of psychology and the Intercampus Research Initiative on Biotechnology at the University of Illinois.
“This study looks at two facets of anxiety that often are not distinguished,” said U. 2007 May;44(3):352-63.
“Left and right is not the only distinction we made,” Miller said. Miller, co-principal investigator on the study with psychology professor Wendy Heller. “We did left/right comparisons with groups, but we plus did comparisons within the left hemisphere to show that these different areas are doing different things.”
“This is biological validation of the proposal of the psychological differentiation of types of anxiety,” Miller said. of I.
All anxiety is not created equal, and a research team at the University of Illinois now has the goods to prove it.
Engels AS, Heller W, Mohanty A, Herrington JD, Banich MT, et al.
As the researchers had predicted, the anxious apprehension group exhibited enhanced left-brain activity and the anxious arousal group had heightened activity in the right brain. of I.
Original post by Anxiety Insights
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