MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Dr Oliver J Robinson Ph.D. Section on Neurobiology of Fear and Anxiety, National Institute of Mental Health, NIH, Bethesda, MD, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience University College London, London, UK Medical Research: What are the main findings of the study? Dr. Robinson: This study is looking at a symptom of anxiety disorders known as “negative affective bias”. This describes the tendency of people with anxiety disorders to focus on negative or threatening information at the expense of positive information. We completed a number of previous studies looking at so called “adaptive” anxiety in healthy individuals – this is the normal, everyday anxiety that everyone experiences; walking home in the dark, for instance (in these prior studies we used unpredictable electrical shocks to make people anxious and stressed). When we made healthy people transiently anxious in this way we showed that this was also associated with negative affective bias and driven by a specific brain circuit: the dorsal medial prefrontal (anterior cingulate) cortex—amygdala aversive amplification circuit. In this study we showed that the same circuit that was engaged by transient anxiety in our healthy sample was actually engaged ‘at baseline’ (i.e. without stress) in our patient group. This suggests that this mechanism which can be temporarily activated in healthy controls becomes permanently ‘switched on’ in our patient group. This might explain why people with anxiety disorders show persistent ‘negative affective biases’. Furthermore, the extent to which this circuit was turned on correlated with self-reported anxiety. That is to say the more anxious an individual said they were, the greater the activity in this circuit. Therefore, there seems to be more of a dimension or scale of anxiety, rather than a simple well/unwell diagnosis. (more…)