Anxiety is supposed to enhance the processing of threatening information. Here, we investigated the cortical processing of angry faces during anticipated public speaking. To elicit anxiety, a group of participants was told that they would have to perform a public speech. As a control condition, another group was told that they would have to write a short essay. During anticipation of these tasks, participants saw facial expressions (angry, happy, and neutral) while electroencephalogram was recorded. Event-related potential analysis revealed larger N170 amplitudes for angry compared to happy and neutral faces in the anxiety group. The early posterior negativity as an index of motivated attention was also enhanced for angry compared to happy and neutral faces in participants anticipating public speaking. These results indicate that fear of public speaking influences early perceptual processing of faces such that especially the processing of angry faces is facilitated.
Even purely psychological interventions that lack any resemblance to classical pain treatments might alter subjective and physiological pain correlates. A manipulation of treatment expectation and actual treatment experience were mandatory to elicit this effect. Nocebo effects were especially induced, which indicated the necessity for prevention of accidental side effects besides exploitation of placebo responses.
Fear is elicited by imminent threat and leads to phasic fear responses with selective attention, whereas anxiety is characterized by a sustained state of heightened vigilance due to uncertain danger. In the present study, we investigated attention mechanisms in fear and anxiety by adapting the NPU-threat test to measure steady-state visual evoked potentials (ssVEPs). We investigated ssVEPs across no aversive events (N), predictable aversive events (P), and unpredictable aversive events (U), signaled by four-object arrays (30s). In addition, central cues were presented during all conditions but predictably signaled imminent threat only during the P condition. Importantly, cues and context events were flickered at different frequencies (15Hz vs. 20Hz) in order to disentangle respective electrocortical responses. The onset of the context elicited larger electrocortical responses for U compared to P context. Conversely, P cues elicited larger electrocortical responses compared to N cues. Interestingly, during the presence of the P cue, visuocortical processing of the concurrent context was also enhanced. The results support the notion of enhanced initial hypervigilance to unpredictable compared to predictable threat contexts, while predictable cues show electrocortical enhancement of the cues themselves but additionally a boost of context processing.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.