AI Article Synopsis
- - The study explores how different types of anxiety (anxious arousal and anxious apprehension) affect the way individuals engage with threatening stimuli, which is important for treating anxiety disorders.
- - Results showed that anxious arousal leads to quick brain activation related to attention that decreases over time, while anxious apprehension involves slower activation as it relies on worry before responding to negative stimuli.
- - Overall, the findings suggest that anxiety types are distinct in how they process negative stimuli, highlighting the complexity of anxiety in relation to attention mechanisms.
Article Abstract
Background Habituation of the fear response, critical for the treatment of anxiety, is inconsistently observed during exposure to threatening stimuli. One potential explanation for this inconsistency is differential attentional engagement with negatively valenced stimuli as a function of anxiety type. Methods The present study tested this hypothesis by examining patterns of neural habituation associated with anxious arousal, characterized by panic symptoms and immediate engagement with negatively valenced stimuli, versus anxious apprehension, characterized by engagement in worry to distract from negatively valenced stimuli. Results As predicted, the two anxiety types evidenced distinct patterns of attentional engagement. Anxious arousal was associated with immediate activation in attention-related brain regions that habituated over time, whereas anxious apprehension was associated with delayed activation in attention-related brain regions that occurred only after habituation in a worry-related brain region. Conclusions Results further elucidate mechanisms involved in attention to negatively valenced stimuli and indicate that anxiety is a heterogeneous construct with regard to attention to such stimuli.
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Source |
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| http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3869982 | PMC |
| http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/brb3.157 | DOI Listing |
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