A new study found that anxious people use a different part of the brain for social behaviour than people who are not anxious.
The study, published in the journal Nature, suggests that this difference in brain function may be responsible for the difficulty that anxious people often have in social situations.
Researchers at Radboud University in the Netherlands asked participants to perform a task in which they had to move a joystick towards a happy face and away from an angry face, then do the same in reverse.
This task required them to control their automatic tendency to avoid negative situations.
Brain scans of the participants showed that non-anxious people used the prefrontal cortex, a region of the brain involved in decision-making and planning, to control their behaviour in this task.
‘Anxious people use a less suitable section of the forebrain for this control. It’s more difficult for them to choose alternative behaviour, so they avoid social situations more often,’ said Bob Bramson, one of the study’s authors.
The anxious people used a different region of the prefrontal cortex, which is less efficient at controlling behaviour.
‘In non-anxious people we often see that, during emotional control, a signal is sent from the foremost section of the prefrontal cortex to the motor cortex, the section of the brain that directs your body to act. In anxious people a less efficient section of that foremost section is used.’
Other scans showed that the reason for this is probably because the ‘correct’ section becomes overstimulated in anxious people.
This is the first time brain scans have shown that the forebrain of anxious people works differently from that of non-anxious people with regard to control of emotional behaviour.
By understanding how the brains of anxious people work differently, researchers may be able to develop therapies that target the specific brain regions involved in anxiety.
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