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

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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.