The impact of social evaluation on perception of facial affect in adults with social anxiety

项目摘要/摘要 社交焦虑症是成年人中最常见、危害最大的心理健康问题之一 在美国。社交焦虑的特征是对令人厌恶的未来社交的预期产生的焦虑 事件。这种预期性焦虑的升高可能会通过增强 杏仁核和视觉感觉区域之间的联系。在观看威胁面部刺激时，人们 随着社交焦虑的表现，知觉和面孔加工区域的活动增加， 这些区域和杏仁核之间的连通性，表明可能是社会性 焦虑症。然而，目前对偏见知觉的潜在神经起源的研究 它对焦虑症的贡献受到了重要限制。首先，这项工作的大部分重点是 注意机制如何提高对威胁刺激的警觉性，而对感官知之甚少 视觉回路中的威胁表现。第二，现有的知觉偏差模型在多大程度上 焦虑可概括为白人以外的人群，中等年龄的SES成年人尚不清楚。最后，大多数fMRI研究表明 对社交焦虑症患者情绪知觉偏差的调查采用了单变量分析， 不要刻画信息在神经活动模式中的表现方式，限制对信息如何表现的推断 社交焦虑可能会影响对威胁的感觉表征。在两个目标中，拟议的研究将涉及 通过在种族中应用单变量、多变量和功能连接性分析来实现这些限制 有社交焦虑症和没有社交焦虑症的年轻人样本多种多样。目标1将测试特质社交焦虑 影响神经和行为对威胁的敏感度在观看混合在 威胁(恐惧/愤怒)和安全(高兴)的表情。目标2将测试在实验中诱导 通过社交威胁产生的预期性焦虑会影响神经和行为的威胁敏感性。信号检测 理论指标将衡量行为威胁敏感度，或面孔需要的威胁影响程度 被判定为恐惧或愤怒。神经活动的单变量和多变量测量将表征神经 知觉(V1，梭状回)和情绪(杏仁核、前岛叶皮质、背侧)的威胁敏感性 前扣带回皮质、背内侧前额叶皮质、腹外侧前额叶皮质)脑区。 功能连接性分析将探索社交中预期性焦虑背后的皮层网络 焦虑。通过引发预见性焦虑，我可以测试社会威胁是否增加了 杏仁核和知觉区域，并伴随着改变多体素模糊的感觉表征 面部影响，这一点还没有做过。总而言之，这些目标集中在一个未被研究但核心的特征上 社交焦虑症，建立在我对新的多元分析技术的知识基础上，并承诺 提供有关社交焦虑的神经机制的新信息。

Project Summary/Abstract Social anxiety disorders are one of the most common and widely impairing mental health issues among adults in the United States. Social anxiety is characterized by anxiety from anticipation of aversive future social events. Elevations in such anticipatory anxiety may bias perception of threat stimuli through enhanced connections between the amygdala and visual sensory regions. Upon viewing threatening face stimuli, people with social anxiety display increased activity in perceptual and face-processing regions and increased connectivity between these regions and the amygdala, suggesting a possible etiological account for social anxiety disorders. However, current research examining the underlying neural origins of biased perception and its contributions to anxiety disorders suffers from important limitations. First, much of this work has focused on how attentional mechanisms increase vigilance to threat stimuli, and less is known about sensory representations of threat in visual circuitry. Second, the degree to which extant models of perceptual biases in anxiety are generalizable beyond white, middle SES adults is not known. Finally, most fMRI studies that investigate biases in emotion perception in social anxiety disorder have employed univariate analyses which do not characterize how information is represented in neural activity patterns, limiting inferences about how social anxiety might influence sensory representations of threat. In two aims, the proposed study will address these limitations by applying univariate, multivariate, and functional connectivity analyses, in an ethnically diverse sample of young adults with and without social anxiety. Aim 1 will test whether trait social anxiety influences neural and behavioral sensitivity to threat upon viewing ambiguous faces blended between threatening (fear/anger) and safe (happy) expressions. Aim 2 will test whether experimentally inducing anticipatory anxiety via a social threat influences neural and behavioral threat sensitivity. Signal detection theoretic metrics will measure behavioral threat sensitivity, or the degree of threat affect required for a face to be judged as fearful or angry. Univariate and multivariate measures of neural activity will characterize neural threat sensitivity in perceptual (V1, fusiform gyrus) and emotional (amygdala, anterior insular cortex, dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, ventrolateral prefrontal cortex) brain regions. Functional connectivity analyses will probe the cortical networks underlying anticipatory anxiety in social anxiety. By inducing anticipatory anxiety, I can test whether social threat increases connectivity between the amygdala and perceptual regions and concomitantly alters multivoxel sensory representations of ambiguous facial affect, which has not yet been done. Together, these aims focus on an understudied but central feature of social anxiety disorders, builds on my knowledge of new multivariate analytic techniques and promises to provide new information about the neural mechanisms underlying social anxiety.