Klamer Keva, Craig Joshua, Haines Christina, Sullivan KiAnna, Ekstrand Chelsea
Behav Neurosci. 2024 Dec;138(6):409-419. doi: 10.1037/bne0000615.
Somatic anxiety refers to the tendency to appraise situations as threatening, leading to heightened physiological arousal. Symptoms associated with higher levels of somatic anxiety that reflect autonomic arousal and perceptions of threat include elevated heartbeat perception, difficulty breathing, and palpitation. Somatic anxiety is generally associated with increased stimulus-driven attention; however, it is currently unknown how somatic anxiety modulates neural synchrony, measured by intersubject correlations (ISC), in response to complex audiovisual stimuli. The present study seeks to identify how differing levels of somatic anxiety are associated with neural synchrony during psychological processing of audiovisual stimuli, as measured by ISC and intersubject representational similarity analyses. We hypothesize that individuals with higher levels of somatic anxiety will show heightened ISC in response to an audiovisual stimulus in regions associated with stimulus-driven attention, including the superior parietal lobule, supplementary motor area, and precentral gyrus. Results from this study identified that higher levels of somatic anxiety are associated with widespread heightened ISC across the brain, including in regions associated with perceptual processing and stimulus-driven attention. Taken together, this research suggests that higher levels of somatic anxiety are associated with similar processing in brain regions involved in stimulus-driven attention and top-down processing, whereas lower levels of somatic anxiety are associated with similar processing in brain regions associated with higher level visual processing. These results collectively emphasize that somatic anxiety levels should be measured and controlled for during naturalistic functional magnetic resonance imaging paradigms, as this trait may have an influence on synchronous neurological activity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).
躯体焦虑是指将情境评估为具有威胁性的倾向，从而导致生理唤醒增强。与较高水平躯体焦虑相关的症状反映了自主唤醒和威胁感知，包括心跳感知增强、呼吸困难和心悸。躯体焦虑通常与刺激驱动的注意力增加有关；然而，目前尚不清楚躯体焦虑如何调节神经同步性（通过受试者间相关性（ISC）来衡量）以应对复杂的视听刺激。本研究旨在确定不同水平的躯体焦虑在视听刺激的心理加工过程中如何与神经同步性相关，这通过ISC和受试者间表征相似性分析来衡量。我们假设，躯体焦虑水平较高的个体在对视听刺激做出反应时，在与刺激驱动注意力相关的区域，包括顶上小叶、辅助运动区和中央前回，会表现出更高的ISC。这项研究的结果表明，较高水平的躯体焦虑与大脑中广泛增强的ISC相关，包括与感知加工和刺激驱动注意力相关的区域。综上所述，这项研究表明，较高水平的躯体焦虑与参与刺激驱动注意力和自上而下加工的脑区的相似加工有关，而较低水平的躯体焦虑与与高级视觉加工相关的脑区的相似加工有关。这些结果共同强调，在自然主义功能磁共振成像范式中应测量和控制躯体焦虑水平，因为这种特质可能会对同步神经活动产生影响。（PsycInfo数据库记录（c）2024美国心理学会，保留所有权利）
