Individual differences in anxiety and automatic amygdala response to fearful faces: A replication and extension of Etkin et al. (2004)

• Published in: NeuroImage clinical Vol. 28; p. 102441
• Main Authors: Günther, Vivien, Hußlack, Anja, Weil, Anna-Sophie, Bujanow, Anna, Henkelmann, Jeanette, Kersting, Anette, Quirin, Markus, Hoffmann, Karl-Titus, Egloff, Boris, Lobsien, Donald, Suslow, Thomas
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Netherlands Elsevier Inc 01.01.2020; Elsevier
• Subjects: Amygdala - diagnostic imaging; Anxiety; Automatic response; Brain Mapping; Emotions; Facial Expression; Fear; fMRI; Humans; Implicit anxiety; Individuality; Magnetic Resonance Imaging; Non-conscious perception; Regular; Threat sensitivity; Trait anxiety; fMRI; Automatic response; Trait anxiety; Non-conscious perception; Threat sensitivity; Implicit anxiety
• ISSN: 2213-1582; 2213-1582
• DOI: 10.1016/j.nicl.2020.102441

•The relationship between non-conscious threat vigilance and anxiety was re-examined.•Anxiety was assessed using direct (self-report) and indirect (implicit) measures.•Unawareness of briefly presented fear stimuli was carefully controlled.•The relationship of trait anxiety with automatic amygdala activation was replicated.•Implicit anxiety was related to masked fear processing in the amygdala. Trait anxiety refers to the stable tendency to attend to threats and experience fears and worries across many situations. According to the widely noticed, pioneering investigation by Etkin et al. (2004) trait anxiety is strongly associated with reactivity in the right basolateral amygdala to non-conscious threat. Although this observation was based on a sample of only 17 individuals, no replication effort has been reported yet. We reexamined automatic amygdala responsiveness as a function of anxiety in a large sample of 107 participants. Besides self-report instruments, we administered an indirect test to assess implicit anxiety. To assess early, automatic stages of emotion processing, we used a color-decision paradigm presenting brief (33 ms) and backward-masked fearful facial expressions. N = 56 participants were unaware of the presence of masked faces. In this subset of unaware participants, the relationship between trait anxiety and basolateral amygdala activation by fearful faces was successfully replicated in region of interest analyses. Additionally, a relation of implicit anxiety with masked fear processing in the amygdala and temporal gyrus was observed. We provide evidence that implicit measures of affect can be valuable predictors of automatic brain responsiveness and may represent useful additions to explicit measures. Our findings support a central role of amygdala reactivity to non-consciously perceived threat in understanding and predicting dispositional anxiety, i.e. the frequency of spontaneously occurring anxiety in everyday life.