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When it comes to fear, what is your first reaction? We think about running away.
What about anxiety? Would we ever think of running away?
Fear and anxiety are both responses to danger, but at different times. Fear strikes when something is an imminent threat: a tiger jumps over a fence and lunges at you.
Anxiety, on the other hand, occurs when you have time to consider a threat: You spot a tiger in the distance and have time to consider whether to run or hide.
Fear and anxiety are both responses to danger, but they differ in time.
Dean Mobbs, assistant professor of cognitive neuroscience at Caltech , published "Slow escape decisions are swayed by trait anxiety" in the journal "Nature Human Behavior" in 2019. This article shows that anxious people can escape far faster Dangerous threats.
"If you tell an anxious person that there's a tiger in the building, then they're going to want to get out quickly," says Dean Mobbs. "We can see this in the brain - when faced with a slow-aggressive threat. At the same time, anxious people show faster and stronger activity in the brain’s anxiety circuit.”
So next, let’s take a look at the specific content with the editor! Anxiety is often described as a state of persistent, conscious fear. Theoretical research proposes that anxiety is an emotional state independent of fear. When threats get closer and closer, anxiety will be aroused instead, and should be minimally affected by organizational anxiety states.
While this is generally recognized in the non-human animal literature, researchers in the field of human affective neuroscience have paid relatively little attention to whether anxiety and fear have different associated neural circuits, and under what conditions anxiety may influence defenses in ecological situations Behavior.
Furthermore, recent advances distinguish different categories of defensive responses that rely on different neural circuits, which may complicate the theoretical relationship between fear and anxiety. The study builds on previous work by Mobbs and colleagues that teased out fear and anxiety circuits in the human brain. In the study, participants were asked to play the " Virtual Predator " video game inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine that measured brain activity.
Participants' goal is to escape attacks from virtual predators. The longer they wait for an incoming attack, the more money they make; if they wait too long and are caught, their hands will receive electric shocks.
They encountered three colors of virtual predators, each color representing a different attack distance (Figure 1). The "fast" and "slow" here describe the timing of a predator's attack.
Subjects underwent fMRI while performing this task to assess the relative contributions of “reactive fear” and “cognitive fear” networks to their escape decisions, and whether behavioral or brain activity in these circuits varied with Changes in trait anxiety.
The results found that rapid threats lead to responses in the fear circuit, which is located in the central part of the brain and consists of connections between two structures, the gray matter and the middle cingulate cortex.
In contrast, slow threat induces responses in the anxiety circuitry closer to the front of the brain, which consists of the hippocampus , the posterior cingulate cortex (both involved in memory and thinking about the future), and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. (The area of the brain responsible for assessing risk and making decisions).
In the new study, these same tests were administered to people rated as having varying levels of anxiety.
The results showed that people with higher anxiety traits escaped virtual attackers faster than those with lower anxiety, but only under slow threat conditions.
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Conclusion
Research is the first to show how the brains of anxious individuals respond to fast (fear-based) and slow (anxiety-based) attack threats. It turns out that most people, anxious or not, respond to rapid threats in the same way. The above process can run normally under most conditions. But when it comes to slow threats, a person's level of anxiety varies:
The more anxious they are, the sooner they can escape from a dangerous situation.
Bowen J. Fung, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral scholar in computational affective neuroscience at Caltech, said:
"This kind of anxiety manifests itself only in relatively prolonged negative situations, and the slow threat seems to be sensible, which is what we The first evidence obtained in an ecological context. One thing I find particularly interesting is that it supports the idea that 'getting over it' is a strategy to avoid feelings of anxiety - whether that's ripping off the band-aid The physical pain or the emotional burden of admitting is to blame," Song Qi, a graduate student at Caltech and co-author of the paper, shared a similar view: "Although subjects with anxious temperaments did not make as much money on the task, But they run away more often. So, evolutionarily, it seems important to balance the rewards of daring with survival due to anxious assessments of possible risks," explains
Mobbs explains that anxiety stems from the time before danger. Lag because it gives us time to imagine future scenarios and plan accordingly.
"Anxiety is part of a predictive strategy that leads to prevention," he said, "but anxiety was not necessarily made for the modern world. Today we can imagine dangerous scenarios that may never happen. The better we understand it How it works in the brain, the more we can figure out how this process is broken down in anxiety disorders."
The above is the main content of this article. Do you have a better understanding of fear and anxiety? Woolen cloth?
References:
Fung, B.J., Qi, S., Hassabis, D., Daw, N., & Mobbs, D. (2019). Slow escape decisions are swayed by trait anxiety. Nature Human Behavior 3, 702– 708.
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-019-0595-5
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