Background Generalized social anxiety disorder (gSAD) is characterized by exaggerated amygdala reactivity to social signals of threat, but if and how the amygdala interacts with functionally and anatomically connected prefrontal cortex (PFC) remains largely unknown. Recent evidence points to aberrant amygdala connectivity to medial PFC in gSAD at rest, but it is difficult to attribute functional relevance without the context of threat processing. Here, we address this by studying amygdala-frontal cortex connectivity during viewing of fearful faces and at rest in gSAD patients. Methods Twenty patients with gSAD and 17 matched healthy controls (HCs) participated in functional magnetic resonance imaging of an emotional face matching task, and a resting state task. Functional connectivity and psychophysiological interaction analysis were used to assess amygdala connectivity. Results Compared to HCs, gSAD patients exhibited less connectivity between amygdala and the rostral anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) while viewing fearful faces. gSAD patients also showed less connectivity between amygdala and rostral ACC at rest in the absence of fearful faces. DLPFC connectivity was negatively correlated with LSASFear. Conclusions Task and rest paradigms provide unique and important information about discrete and overlapping functional networks. In particular, amygdala coupling to DLPFC may be a phasic abnormality, emerging only in the presence of a social predictor of threat, whereas amygdala coupling to the rostral ACC may reflect both phasic and tonic abnormalities. These findings prompt further studies to better delineate intrinsic and externally-evoked brain connectivity in anxiety and depression in relation to amygdala dysfunction.

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Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is “gold standard” psychotherapy for social anxiety disorder (SAD). Cognitive models posit that preferential processing of threat mediates excessive forms of anxiety, which is supported by exaggerated amygdala, insula, and cortical reactivity to threatening socio-emotional signals in SAD. However, little is known about neural predictors of CBT success or the mechanisms by which CBT exerts its therapeutic effects. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was conducted during responses to social signals of threat (fearful/angry faces) against positive signals (happy faces) in 14 patients with SAD before and after 12 weeks of CBT. For comparison, 14 healthy control (HC) participants also underwent two fMRI scans, 12 weeks apart. Whole-brain voxel-wise analyses showed therapeutic success was predicted by enhanced pre-treatment activation to threatening faces in higher-order visual (superior and middle temporal gyrus), cognitive, and emotion processing areas (dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, dorsomedial prefrontal cortex). Moreover, a group by time interaction was revealed in prefrontal regions (dorsomedial, medial gyrus) and insula. The interaction was driven by relatively greater activity during threat processing in SAD, which significantly reduced after CBT but did not significantly predict response to CBT. Therefore, pre-treatment cortical hyperactivity to social threat signals may serve as a prognostic indicator of CBT success in SAD. Collectively, CBT-related brain changes involved a reduction in activity in insula, prefrontal, and extrastriate regions. Results are consistent with cognitive models, which associate decreases in threat processing bias with recovery.

Aberrant subcortical-prefrontal connectivity may contribute to insula hyper-reactivity to threat in generalized social anxiety disorder (gSAD). A novel PsychoPhysiological Interaction (PPI) analysis was used to examine functional ‘coupling’ between the insula and prefrontal cortex in gSAD patients and healthy controls (HCs). During fMRI, 29 gSAD and 26 HC volunteers performed an Emotional Face Matching Task, involving the processing of fear, angry, and happy expressions. As expected, compared with HCs, gSAD patients exhibited greater bilateral anterior insula (aINS) reactivity for fear vs. happy faces; this group difference was less robust for angry vs. happy faces. PPI of insula connectivity when processing fearful faces revealed the gSAD group had less right aINS-dorsal anterior cingulate coupling compared to HCs. Findings indicate that aINS hyper-reactivity for fear faces in gSAD, compared to controls, involves reduced connectivity with a prefrontal region implicated in cognitive control and emotion regulation.

The ability to process and respond to emotional facial expressions is a critical skill for healthy social and emotional development. There has been growing interest in understanding the neural circuitry underlying development of emotional processing, with previous research implicating functional connectivity between amygdala and frontal regions. However, existing work has focused on threatening emotional faces, raising questions regarding the extent to which these developmental patterns are specific to threat or to emotional face processing more broadly. In the current study, we examined age-related changes in brain activity and amygdala functional connectivity during an fMRI emotional face matching task (including angry, fearful and happy faces) in 61 healthy subjects aged 7–25 years. We found age-related decreases in ventral medial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) activity in response to happy faces but not to angry or fearful faces, and an age-related change (shifting from positive to negative correlation) in amygdala-anterior cingulate cortex/medial prefrontal cortex (ACC/mPFC) functional connectivity to all emotional faces. Specifically, positive correlations between amygdala and ACC/mPFC in children changed to negative correlations in adults, which may suggest early emergence of bottom-up amygdala excitatory signaling to ACC/mPFC in children and later development of top-down inhibitory control of ACC/mPFC over amygdala in adults. Age-related changes in amygdala-ACC/mPFC connectivity did not vary for processing of different facial emotions, suggesting changes in amygdala-ACC/mPFC connectivity may underlie development of broad emotional processing, rather than threat-specific processing.

Increased error monitoring, as measured by the error-related negativity (ERN), has been shown to persist after treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder in youth and adults; however, no previous studies have examined the ERN following treatment for related anxiety disorders. We used a flanker task to elicit the ERN in 28 youth and young adults (8–26 years old) with primary diagnoses of generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) or social anxiety disorder (SAD) and 35 healthy controls. Patients were assessed before and after treatment with cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI), and healthy controls were assessed at a comparable interval. The ERN increased across assessments in the combined sample. Patients with SAD exhibited an enhanced ERN relative to healthy controls prior to and following treatment, even when analyses were limited to SAD patients who responded to treatment. Patients with GAD did not significantly differ from healthy controls at either assessment. Results provide preliminary evidence that enhanced error monitoring persists following treatment for SAD in youth and young adults, and support conceptualizations of increased error monitoring as a trait-like vulnerability that may contribute to risk for recurrence and impaired functioning later in life. Future work is needed to further evaluate the ERN in GAD across development, including whether an enhanced ERN develops in adulthood or is most apparent when worries focus on internal sources of threat.

BackgroundGeneralized social anxiety disorder (gSAD) is associated with a heightened neural sensitivity to signals that convey threat, as evidenced by exaggerated amygdala and/or insula activation when processing face stimuli that express negative emotions. Less clear in the brain pathophysiology of gSAD are cortical top down control mechanisms that moderate reactivity in these subcortical emotion processing regions. This study evaluated amygdala, insula, and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) activity in gSAD with a novel “Emotional Faces Shifting Attention Task” (EFSAT), an adaptation of perceptual assessment tasks well-known to elicit amygdala response. In healthy volunteers, the task has been shown to engage the amygdala when attention is directed to emotional faces and the ACC when attention is directed to shapes, away from emotional faces.MethodsDuring functional MRI, 29 participants with gSAD and 27 healthy controls viewed images comprising a trio of faces (angry, fear, or happy) alongside a trio of geometric shapes (circles, rectangles, or triangles) within the same field of view. Participants were instructed to match faces or match shapes, effectively directing attention towards or away from emotional information, respectively.ResultsParticipants with gSAD exhibited greater insula, but not amygdala, activation compared to controls when attending to emotional faces. In contrast, when attention was directed away from faces, controls exhibited ACC recruitment, which was not evident in gSAD. Across participants, greater ACC activation was associated with less insula activation.ConclusionsEvidence that individuals with gSAD exhibited exaggerated insula reactivity when attending to emotional faces in EFSAT is consistent with other studies suggesting that the neural basis of gSAD may involve insula hyper-reactivity. Furthermore, greater ACC response in controls than gSAD when sustained goal-directed attention is required to shift attention away from social signals, together with a negative relationship between ACC and bilateral insula activity, indicate the ACC may have served a regulatory role when the focus of attention was directed to shapes amidst emotional faces.

Background Individuals with generalized social anxiety disorder (gSAD) exhibit attentional bias to salient stimuli, which is reduced in patients whose symptoms improve after treatment, indicating that mechanisms of bias mediate treatment success. Therefore, pre-treatment activity in regions implicated in attentional control over socio-emotional signals (e.g. anterior cingulate cortex, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) may predict response to cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), evidence-based psychotherapy for gSAD. Method During functional magnetic resonance imaging, 21 participants with gSAD viewed images comprising a trio of geometric shapes (circles, rectangles or triangles) alongside a trio of faces (angry, fearful or happy) within the same field of view. Attentional control was evaluated with the instruction to ‘match shapes’, directing attention away from faces, which was contrasted with ‘match faces’, whereby attention was directed to emotional faces. Results Whole-brain voxel-wise analyses showed that symptom improvement was predicted by enhanced pre-treatment activity in the presence of emotional face distractors in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and dorsal medial pre-frontal cortex. Additionally, CBT success was foretold by less activity in the amygdala and/or increased activity in the medial orbitofrontal gyrus during emotion processing. Conclusions CBT response was predicted by pre-treatment activity in prefrontal regions and the amygdala. The direction of activity suggests that individuals with intact attentional control in the presence of emotional distractors, regulatory capacity over emotional faces and/or less reactivity to such faces are more likely to benefit from CBT. Findings indicate that baseline neural activity in the context of attentional control and emotion processing may serve as a step towards delineating mechanisms by which CBT exerts its effects.