14 DAY TRIAL // Following a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) investigation of anxious and non-anxious test subjects, researchers at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) have determined the specific area of the human brain that lights up when anxiety-related feelings are being processed.
Whenever participants in the study interpreted something negatively, the medial prefrontal cortex (MPC) lit up on the fMRI machine. This instrument is used to analyze blood flow through the brain, and can help doctors figure out which regions are more involved in a particular task or disease.
The research effort was led by Tara Peris and Adriana Galván. Peris is an assistant professor of psychiatry at the UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, while Galván is an assistant professor of psychology in the UCLA College of Letters and Science.
The duo co-authored a scientific paper describing their findings, and published it in the latest online issue of the journal Biology of Mood and Anxiety Disorders. They say that the work was prompted by the large incidence of anxiety in young people – nearly 25 percent are believed to suffer symptoms.
In the experiment, 15 non-anxious teens and 16 teens diagnosed with anxiety disorders were asked to watch a series of pictures depicting neutral emotions. Each image came with one of two sentences, one that was neutral, and one that may have been construed as intimidating.
The team determined that non-anxious test subjects were oblivious to the context the sentence gave to the images they were watching. Their fMRI scans did not reveal signs of extra processing in the MPC, which could not be said for teens in the anxiety group.
“We know that the medial prefrontal cortex plays a role in social and emotional processes, and it is an area of the brain that is still developing through childhood and adolescence, so it was a natural candidate for examination,” Peris explains.
“The role this area of the brain plays is of particular interest, then, given prior research that implicates it in inferring what another person is feeling,” the expert goes on to say. Her work was sponsored by the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, the National Institutes of Mental Health, and the National Science Foundation.