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

ABSTRACT: 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

SUBMITTER: Gunther V 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7522800 | biostudies-literature | 2020

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature