The effect of induced anxiety on cognition: threat of shock enhances aversive processing in healthy individuals

Robinson, Oliver J.; Letkiewicz, Allison M.; Overstreet, Cassie; Ernst, Monique; Grillon, Christian

doi:10.3758/s13415-011-0030-5

Cited by 108 publications

(134 citation statements)

References 65 publications

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“…Indeed it could be the case that it is not embodiment in a dark-skinned VB per se that is responsible for the results but nervousness due to such embodiment. There is evidence to suggest that anxiety enhances aversive processing (Robinson, Charney, Overstreet, Vytal, & Grillon, 2012;Robinson, Letkiewicz, Overstreet, Ernst, & Grillon, 2011) so that one explanation for our results could be as follows: when people with racial bias are embodied in a dark-skinned body this makes them nervous, which then speeds up their responses, which therefore lowers the IAT score. However, this explanation appears not to hold.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Putting yourself in the skin of a black avatar reduces implicit racial bias

Peck

Seinfeld

Aglioti

et al. 2013

Consciousness and Cognition

685

568

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Putting yourself in the skin of a black avatar reduces implicit racial bias

Peck

Seinfeld

Aglioti

et al. 2013

Consciousness and Cognition

685

568

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“…This allows the system to predict whether those stimuli are aversive, appetitive or neutral, and to motivate action (e.g., approach, avoid, communicate to others) accordingly. The tendency to categorize stimuli as threatening at this early stage of processing varies according to differences in state and trait anxiety (Hariri, 2009;Yiend, 2010;Robinson, Letkiewicz, Overstreet, Ernst, & Grillon, 2011), and probably variations in arousal more generally. This process is largely unconscious, although the individual may become aware of non-specific intuitions or "gut feelings" in relation to the stimulus (e.g., threatening vs. rewarding; avoid vs. approach), as well as associated autonomic symptoms.…”

Section: Consciousness Emotional Processing and Behaviourmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards an integrative theory of psychogenic non-epileptic seizures (PNES)

Brown

Reuber

2016

Clinical Psychology Review

210

208

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Current models of PNES can account for some but not all of the available data.• Automatic activation of seizure representations in memory may be a unifying process.• Suppression of arousal and distress are typical maintaining factors for PNES.• Inhibitory dysfunction, often arising from chronic stress, is a key vulnerability. • Trauma exposure is common but neither necessary nor sufficient for PNES to occur. a b s t r a c tPsychogenic Nonepileptic Seizures (PNES) superficially resemble epileptic seizures but are thought to have a psychological rather than epileptic basis. Patients with PNES vary widely in terms of background, personality profiles, comorbidities, response to treatment and outcomes. Previous accounts interpreting these seizures as the activation of dissociated material, a physical manifestation of emotional distress, hard-wired reflex responses, or learned behaviours cannot explain key features of the phenomenon. Drawing on a brief review of the literature on etiology, correlates and phenomenology of PNES, this paper integrates existing approaches and data within a novel explanatory framework that applies to all PNES patients with subjectively involuntary seizures. Following the Integrative Cognitive Model of medically unexplained symptoms, we suggest that the central feature of all PNES is the automatic activation of a mental representation of seizures (the "seizure scaffold") in the context of a high level inhibitory processing dysfunction. This often arises in response to elevated autonomic arousal, and may disrupt the individual's awareness of distressing material, but can become divorced from abnormal autonomic and emotional activity. This model accounts both for existing findings and the heterogeneity of patients with PNES, whilst leading to a number of novel hypotheses against which it can be evaluated.

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“…paradigm (Fig. 1A), in which boxes were associated with learned emotional outcomes [fearful or happy faces matched for arousal per ratings of the same faces in a prior study (29)] according to a partial (75%) probabilistic reinforcement strategy. There were four boxes (star, oval, diamond, and triangle), two of which (order counterbalanced) were followed by 75% happy faces and two by 75% fearful faces.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…On 25% of trials, this feedback was reversed, leading to either a fear or a happy face PE. Faces were used because they are naturalistic emotional stimuli with privileged aversive and appetitive responses (relative to more secondary, conditioned rewards and punishments, such as money) and because they provide a direct link to our recent work using the same facial stimuli during perception tasks (11,29). [As an aside, we also showed previously that simple "smiley" cartoon happy and sad faces can elicit dissociable striatal PEs (6) that are differentially sensitive to dopamine (30), serotonin (31,32), and major depression (33).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Stress increases aversive prediction error signal in the ventral striatum

Robinson

Overstreet

Charney

et al. 2013

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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From job interviews to the heat of battle, it is evident that people think and learn differently when stressed. In fact, learning under stress may have long-term consequences; stress facilitates aversive conditioning and associations learned during extreme stress may result in debilitating emotional responses in posttraumatic stress disorder. The mechanisms underpinning such stress-related associations, however, are unknown. Computational neuroscience has successfully characterized several mechanisms critical for associative learning under normative conditions. One such mechanism, the detection of a mismatch between expected and observed outcomes within the ventral striatum (i.e., "prediction errors"), is thought to be a critical precursor to the formation of new stimulusoutcome associations. An untested possibility, therefore, is that stress may affect learning via modulation of this mechanism. Here we combine a translational model of stress with a cognitive neuroimaging paradigm to demonstrate that stress significantly increases ventral striatum aversive (but not appetitive) prediction error signal. This provides a unique account of the propensity to form threat-related associations under stress with direct implications for our understanding of both normal stress and stress-related disorders.threat of shock | punishment | anxiety | face perception L earning to associate cues with threat is adaptive because it allows future threat to be predicted and avoided (1). However, such associative learning also may lead to haunting and debilitating memories; the smell of stir-fry may evoke painful intrusive memories in Vietnam veterans. How aversive information is integrated to guide adaptive or maladaptive behavior, however, is not well understood. Here, we report that stress increases a key learning mechanism: the neural detection of a mismatch between an expected and observed aversive outcome within the ventral striatum, commonly referred to as the aversive prediction error (PE) signal (1, 2).Neurocomputational and neuroeconomic accounts of cognition posit that stimulus-outcome associations during conditioning are formed via temporal difference learning (1, 3, 4), in which learning depends upon comparing expectation to what is currently happening. New associations, it is argued, are driven by a difference between predicted and actual outcomes (i.e., "prediction errors"), with greater mismatch between expected and actual outcomes evoking greater PE, resulting in greater predictive learning. This mismatch gives rise to phasic dopamine release in the ventral striatum (1, 3-5) for both appetitive and aversive stimuli (1, 2, 6, 7). Little is known, however, about how PE processing might be affected by an organism's emotional state. Stress, for instance, is well known to facilitate aversive conditioning in both humans and animals (8, 9), raising the possibility that aversive PEs also might be increased by stress. This hypothesis, however, is untested. Therefore, here we used a translational stress induction method in healt...

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The effect of induced anxiety on cognition: threat of shock enhances aversive processing in healthy individuals

Cited by 108 publications

References 65 publications

Putting yourself in the skin of a black avatar reduces implicit racial bias

Putting yourself in the skin of a black avatar reduces implicit racial bias

Towards an integrative theory of psychogenic non-epileptic seizures (PNES)

Stress increases aversive prediction error signal in the ventral striatum

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