Buehler Sarah K, Lowther Millie, Lukow Paulina B, Kirk Peter A, Pike Alexandra C, Yamamori Yumeya, Chavanne Alice V, Gormley Siobhan, Goble Talya, Tuominen Ella W, Aylward Jessica, McCloud Tayla, Rodriguez-Sanchez Julia, Robinson Oliver J
University College London, London, UK.
National Institute of Mental Health, Washington, DC USA.
Commun Psychol. 2024 Aug 24;2:80. doi: 10.1038/s44271-024-00128-y. eCollection 2024.
Anxiety involves the anticipation of aversive outcomes and can impair neurocognitive processes, such as the ability to recall faces encoded during the anxious state. It is important to precisely delineate and determine the replicability of these effects using causal state anxiety inductions in the general population. This study therefore aimed to replicate prior research on the distinct impacts of threat-of-shock-induced anxiety on the encoding and recognition stage of emotional face processing, in a large asymptomatic sample ( = 92). We successfully replicated previous results demonstrating impaired recognition of faces encoded under threat-of-shock. This was supported by a mega-analysis across three independent studies using the same paradigm ( = 211). Underlying this, a whole-brain fMRI analysis revealed enhanced activation in the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), alongside previously seen activity in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) when combined in a mega-analysis with the fMRI findings we aimed to replicate. We further found replications of hippocampus activation when the retrieval and encoding states were congruent. Our results support the notion that state anxiety disrupts face recognition, potentially due to attentional demands of anxious arousal competing with affective stimuli processing during encoding and suggest that regions of the cingulate cortex play pivotal roles in this.
焦虑涉及对厌恶结果的预期，并且会损害神经认知过程，比如回忆在焦虑状态下编码的面孔的能力。使用因果性状态焦虑诱导法在普通人群中精确描述并确定这些效应的可重复性很重要。因此，本研究旨在在一个大型无症状样本（n = 92）中重复先前关于电击威胁诱导的焦虑对情绪面孔加工的编码和识别阶段的不同影响的研究。我们成功重复了先前的结果，即电击威胁下编码的面孔识别受损。这得到了三项使用相同范式的独立研究（n = 211）的元分析的支持。在此基础上，一项全脑功能磁共振成像分析显示，后扣带回皮质（PCC）激活增强，同时在与我们旨在重复的功能磁共振成像结果进行元分析时，还出现了先前在前扣带回皮质（ACC）观察到的活动。当检索和编码状态一致时，我们还发现了海马体激活的重复现象。我们的结果支持这样一种观点，即状态焦虑会干扰面孔识别，这可能是由于焦虑唤醒的注意力需求在编码过程中与情感刺激加工相互竞争所致，并且表明扣带回皮质区域在其中起关键作用。
