“Failure of anterior cingulate activation and connectivity with the amygdala during implicit regulation of emotional processing in generalized anxiety disorder”
How are the anterior cingulate and anxiety related?
I reckon that fear and anxiety can be both poison and medicine. If we do not feel anxiety at all, we expose ourselves to highly dangerous situations, increasing the risk of injury or death. Conversely, if we are too sensitive to fear and anxiety, we are constantly overcome by anxiousness and everyday life is as hard to get through as a haunted house. Being overly anxious is not good, but neither is being insufficiently anxious.
For humans to live as living beings, we have to work out how to deal with anxiety well. I say “deal with anxiety well,” but what state does this refer to, looking at it from a neurobiological point of view?
The paper I discuss today investigates anxiety and control over it, and it suggests that being in proper control of anxiety means the state where the front part of the anterior cingulate (the pregenual anterior cingulate) is operating well. The amygdala is active in relation with emotions like anxiety and fear, and anxiety disorder patients tend to show higher activity in this region and an inability to make accurate cognitive judgments. By contrast, in normal people, the pregenual anterior cingulate operates well to suppress excessive activity in the amygdala and they tend to be able to make accurate cognitive judgments. The paper suggests that when thinking about anxiety from this perspective, we must think about the operation of the anterior cingulate, as well as the amygdala.
[Abstract]
OBJECTIVE:
Clinical data suggest that abnormalities in the regulation of emotional processing contribute to the pathophysiology of generalized anxiety disorder, yet these abnormalities remain poorly understood at the neurobiological level. The authors recently reported that in healthy volunteers the pregenual anterior cingulate regulates emotional conflict on a trial-by-trial basis by dampening activity in the amygdala. The authors also showed that this process is specific to the regulation of emotional, compared to nonemotional, conflict. Here the authors examined whether this form of noninstructed emotion regulation is perturbed in generalized anxiety disorder.
METHOD:
Seventeen patients with generalized anxiety disorder and 24 healthy comparison subjects underwent functional MRI while performing an emotional conflict task that involved categorizing facial affect while ignoring overlaid affect label words. Behavioral and neural measures were used to compare trial-by-trial changes in conflict regulation.
RESULTS:
Comparison subjects effectively regulated emotional conflict from trial to trial, even though they were unaware of having done so. By contrast, patients with generalized anxiety disorder were completely unable to regulate emotional conflict and failed to engage the pregenual anterior cingulate in ways that would dampen amygdalar activity. Moreover, performance and brain activation were correlated with symptoms and could be used to accurately classify the two groups.
CONCLUSIONS:
These data demonstrate that patients with generalized anxiety disorder show significant deficits in the noninstructed and spontaneous regulation of emotional processing. Conceptualization of anxiety as importantly involving abnormalities in emotion regulation, particularly a type occurring outside of awareness, may open up avenues for novel treatments, such as by targeting the medial prefrontal cortex. <**2>”
Comments
I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I have heard that there is an anxiety gene. It is involved in the secretion of serotonin, and Japanese people have 50% higher levels of this gene than Westerners, which is supposed to be linked to the Japanese tendency to be introverted and compliant with authority. However, returnees who have lived in the West and second- and third-generation Japanese immigrants to other countries are not necessarily introverted, while even after just a few years living in foreign country, Japanese people will become accustomed to it and lose their hesitancy to say what they think.
I think, therefore, that genes do not determine everything. If we were to compare people’s characters to the flavor of cooking, genetic qualities would be the natural taste of the ingredients, while the environment would be the herbs and spices added for flavor. Genes may manifest or not depending on these herbs and spices (the environment).
Thinking about it this way, a uniform education policy is like saying that putting a bit of salt on everything will be fine, which can only go so far. There will surely be people who have an odd gene turned on and suffer from cancer of the mind.
To oneself and to others, it is best to act like a humble chef.
