Volume of subcortical brain regions in social anxiety disorder: mega-analytic results from 37 samples in the ENIGMA-Anxiety Working Group.

There is limited convergence in neuroimaging investigations into volumes of subcortical brain regions in social anxiety disorder (SAD). The inconsistent findings may arise from variations in methodological approaches across studies, including sample selection based on age and clinical characteristics. The ENIGMA-Anxiety Working Group initiated a global mega-analysis to determine whether differences in subcortical volumes can be detected in adults and adolescents with SAD relative to healthy controls.

Functional neural changes associated with psychotherapy in anxiety disorders - A meta-analysis of longitudinal fMRI studies.

Successful psychotherapy for anxiety disorders is thought to be linked to functional neural changes in prefrontal control areas and fear-related limbic regions. Thus, discovering such therapy-associated neural changes might point to relevant mechanisms of action. Using AES-SDM, we conducted a coordinate-based meta-analysis of 22 whole-brain datasets (n = 419 anxiety patients) from 18 studies identified by our systematic literature search following PRISMA criteria (preregistration available at OSF: https://osf.

Which traits predict elevated distress during the Covid-19 pandemic? Results from a large, longitudinal cohort study with psychiatric patients and healthy controls.

The Covid-19 pandemic resulted in repeated, prolonged restrictions in daily life. Social distancing policies as well as health anxiety are thought to lead to mental health impairment. However, there is lack of longitudinal data identifying at-risk populations particularly vulnerable for elevated Covid-19-related distress.

Response inhibition to emotional faces is modulated by functional hemispheric asymmetries linked to handedness.

Effective response inhibition requires efficient bottom-up perceptual processing and effective top-down inhibitory control. To investigate the role of hemispheric asymmetries in these processes, 49 right- and 50 left-handers completed a tachistoscopic Go/Nogo task with positive and negative emotional faces while ERPs were recorded. Frontal resting state EEG asymmetry was assessed as a marker of individual differences in prefrontal inhibitory networks.

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

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.