Participants who showed overactivity in the amygdala developed much stronger fear responses to gestures that predicted screams. A second entirely separate risk factor turned out to be failure to activate the ventral prefrontal cortex. Researchers found that participants who were able to activate this region were much more capable of decreasing their fear responses, even before the screams stopped.
The discovery that there is not one, but two routes in the brain circuitry that lead to heightened fear or anxiety is a key finding, the researchers said, and it offers hope for new targeted treatment approaches.
"Some individuals with anxiety disorders are helped more by cognitive therapies, while others are helped more by drug treatments," Bishop said. "If we know which of these neural vulnerabilities a patient has, we may be able to predict what treatment is most likely to be of help."
In addition to Bishop, coauthors of the study are Anwar O. Nunez Elizalde at UC Berkeley; Iole Indovina of the Neuroimaging Laboratory of the Santa Lucia Foundation in Rome, Italy; Trevor Robbins at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom; and Barney Dunn at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, UK.
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