Final Report Summary - ANXIETY & COGNITION (How anxiety transforms human cognition: an Affective Neuroscience perspective) Anxiety is a state of fear or apprehension. In this project, we better characterized how anxiety dynamically shapes and alters two fundamental cognitive functions in adult human subjects: selective attention and action monitoring. With regard to selective attention, the new empirical results gathered in this project show that state anxiety is not a monolithic block or construct, but instead, depending on the nature and content of the dread or fear transiently induced and experienced by the participant in laboratory conditions, different modulatory effects on attention control mechanisms can clearly be evidenced. More precisely, while bodily threat (threat of being hurt or encounter pain) appears to be associated with a broadening of attention (a phenomenon known as “hypervigilance”) with measurable effects visible in the visual cortex early on following stimulus onset (as captured by concurrent electrophysiological measurements of brain activity), by contrast, psychosocial threat (social comparison) is related to a narrowing of the same attentional focus or scope. These findings suggest that state anxiety dynamically changes the attentional focus, in such a way to prioritize and deal more efficiently with specific elements of the immediate environment, and in turn provide an adaptive response or behavior. Importantly, as our latest results point out, specific pathological or clinical conditions (e.g. major depression) could actually lead to a break-down in this flexibility. Our project also shed new light on the nature and extend of effects of trait anxiety on action monitoring. When human subjects respond to (either internal or external) stimuli or events, their brain “automatically” monitors whether the current action/response matches or mismatches with the goal or expectation. The results of this project show that trait anxiety (and more generally the internalizing dimension of psychopathology) somehow blurs or smears this early and automatic effect during action monitoring, with selective changes in medial frontal brain regions involved in this process. As a result, high anxious individuals or clinically depressed patients seem to experience difficulties in ascribing or tagging “online” a given value (either positive or negative) to their self-generated actions (either correct or incorrect), revealing a fundamental impairment during action monitoring in these participants, with clear-cut implications and repercussions for the rapid monitoring and adaptation of behavior in daily-life situations.
