Neural mechanisms of processing emotional information from faces and voices in social phobia

患有社交恐惧症的患者在处理社交威胁刺激（如愤怒的面孔和韵律）时表现出信息处理偏见，大脑反应增强。然而，目前尚不清楚社交恐惧症患者对社交威胁信号的自动大脑反应在多大程度上取决于认知资源、威胁相关性、情感社交刺激的方式和强度，以及大脑反应是否可以通过成功的心理治疗（如认知行为疗法（CBT））来改变。基于第一个资助期的刺激、方法和结果，目前的项目将研究问题扩展到临床领域。目的探讨认知行为疗法前后社交恐惧症患者情绪面部表情和韵律自动加工过程中的脑激活情况。利用并行事件相关功能磁共振成像（fMRI）和脑电图（EEG），通过情绪表达（愤怒、快乐、中性）、情绪强度（低、高）、注意力负荷（低、高）和感觉模态（面孔、声音）的变化，我们打算回答以下问题。(1)是否有证据表明社交恐惧症患者的大脑对面孔和声音有快速的威胁特异性反应？(2)注意负荷对情绪特异性激活模式有何影响？(3)社交恐惧症患者处理声音和面孔的情绪信息是否存在重叠/相似的大脑机制？(4)成功的CBT如何改变恐惧相关的自动脑反应？(5)社会刺激自动加工过程中的脑反应能否预测治疗反应？

Patients suffering from social phobia show information processing biases and increased brain responses during the processing of socially threatening stimuli, such as angry faces and prosody. However, it is unknown to what extent automatic brain responses to social threat signals in social phobia depend on cognitive resources, threat-relevance, modality and intensity of emotional social stimuli and whether brain responses can be modified by successful psychotherapy, such as cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT). Based on stimuli, methods and results from the first funding period, the current project extends the research questions into the clinical domain. The aim is to investigate brain activation during automatic processing of emotional facial expressions and prosody in social phobia before and after CBT. Using parallel event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG) and by means of the variation of emotional expression (angry, happy, neutral), emotional intensity (low, high), attentional load (low, high) and sensory modality (faces, voices), we intend to answer the following questions. (1) Is there evidence for rapid threat-specific brain responses to faces and voices in social phobia? (2) Which role does attentional load play for emotion-specific activation patterns? (3) Are there overlapping/similar brain mechanisms for processing emotional information from voices and faces in social phobia? (4) How are phobia-related automatic brain responses modified by successful CBT? (5) Do brain responses during automatic processing of social stimuli predict treatment responses?