Anxiety vulnerability is associated with altered anterior cingulate response to an affective appraisal task

Abstract

The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is critically involved not only in affective and anxiety processing, but also in error and conflict monitoring. To investigate how anxiety interacts with processing affective ambiguity, 15 anxious and 15 nonanxious individuals were scanned while performing a validated affective appraisal task, in which the fraction of faces of a particular affect or gender was parametrically controlled to provide various levels of ambiguity. The anxious group showed less ventral and greater dorsal ACC activation during ambiguous affective relative to ambiguous gender stimuli. For anxious individuals, dorsal ACC activation was related to a more biased response. Collectively, these data indicate that anxious individuals activate the dorsal and ventral components of the ACC differently during affective appraisal.

Fig. 1

Dorsal (D) and ventral (V) medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) differential activation for type of ambiguity (i.e. affective vs. gender) in anxiety prone versus anxiety normative groups (anxiety prone > anxiety normative and anxiety prone < anxiety normative are shown in dark grey and light grey, respectively). AN, anxiety normative; AP, anxiety prone.

Fig. 2

Response bias was related to dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (DACC) activity in the anxiety prone group. Response bias was calculated from the behavioral data as the interpolation of the mid-point of the sigmoid curve from the data.The lower the response bias, the fewer faces were required to classify the crowd as angry. Although the groups did not differ in their response biases, the anxiety prone classification bias was significantly (r=0.642, P=0.010) correlated with dorsal ACC activation, whereas the anxiety normative classification bias was not (r=0.068, P=0.811). AN, anxiety normative; AP, anxiety prone.