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Self-referential and anxiety-relevant information processing in subclinical social anxiety: an fMRI study

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Abstract

The fear of negative evaluation is one of the hallmark features of social anxiety. Behavioral evidence thus far largely supports cognitive models which postulate that information processing biases in the face of socially relevant information are a key factor underlying this widespread phobia. So far only one neuroimaging study has explicitly focused on the fear of negative evaluation in social anxiety where the brain responses of social phobics were compared to healthy participants during the processing of self-referential relative to other-referential criticism, praise or neutral information. Only self-referential criticism led to stronger activations in emotion-relevant regions of the brain, such as the amygdala and medial prefrontal cortices (mPFC), in the social phobics. The objective of the current study was to determine whether these findings could be extended to subclinical social anxiety. In doing so, the specificity of this self-referential bias was also examined by including both social and non-social (physical illness-related) threat information as well as a highly health anxious control group in the experimental paradigm. The fMRI findings indicated that the processing of emotional stimuli was accompanied by activations in the amygdala and the ventral mPFC, while self-referential processing was associated with activity in regions such as the mPFC, posterior cingulate and temporal poles. Despite the validation of the paradigm, the results revealed that the previously reported behavioral and brain biases associated with social phobia could not be unequivocally extended to subclinical social anxiety. The divergence between the findings is explored in detail with reference to paradigm differences and conceptual issues.

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Notes

  1. It should be noted that health anxiety or hypochondriasis belongs to the generic classification of somatoform disorders and not anxiety disorders (DSM-IV-TR). Health anxiety was nevertheless chosen as the control variable in this study as it offered a good parallel to social anxiety in several respects. With few other disorders is it possible, for instance, to generate the variety of salient verbal stimuli necessary for such a paradigm that can be sensibly adapted to test self-referentiality versus other-referentiality. Moreover, as the symptom of anxiety or worry is a core feature of hypochondriasis, the hypotheses regarding the brain structures involved would be expected to be similar when it comes to the processing of anxiety-relevant stimuli. In fact, there is evidence that some facets of information processing-related brain differences in hypochondriasis are comparable to that of other anxiety disorders, such as panic disorders (van den Heuvel et al. 2005).

  2. For more information, refer to: http://www.cbs.mpg.de/institute/software/lipsia/index.html)

  3. For more information, refer to: http://static.cbs.mpg.de/lipsia/vbayes/index.html

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Acknowledgements

We thank scientists at the BION, particularly Dr. Bertram Walter, Dr. Ulrich Ott, Dr. Carlo Blecker, and Professor Dieter Vaitl for their support.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Clinical Psychology, Justus Liebig University of Giessen, Otto-Behagel-Strasse 10F, 35394, Giessen, Germany

    Anna Abraham, Carolin Kaufmann, Ronny Redlich, Stephan Stevens & Christiane Hermann

  2. University of Muenster, Muenster, Germany

    Carolin Kaufmann & Ronny Redlich

  3. Bender Institute of Neuroimaging, Justus-Liebig-University of Giessen, Giessen, Germany

    Andrea Hermann & Rudolf Stark

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  1. Anna Abraham
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  2. Carolin Kaufmann
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  7. Christiane Hermann
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Correspondence to Anna Abraham.

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Carolin Kaufmann and Ronny Redlich contributed equally to this paper.

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Abraham, A., Kaufmann, C., Redlich, R. et al. Self-referential and anxiety-relevant information processing in subclinical social anxiety: an fMRI study. Brain Imaging and Behavior 7, 35–48 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11682-012-9188-x

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