Abstract
Stress is associated with different emotional states, where fear and anxiety are the most commonly experienced during stressful situations. Fear plays a critical role in rapid reactions to perceived threats, preparing the organism for immediate responses to face potential dangers, including the ability to get ready to cope with adversity or to escape. It may be an adaptive emotion, but chronic and uncontrollable fear has been associated with the origin and development of anxiety, which is characterized by anticipated fear and uncertainty, associated with threatening events. Anxiety may contribute to improve adaptive responses, stimulating attention and arousal, shaping cognitive processes involved in different coping strategies. If anxiety continues longer, as it is observed during chronic stress, it may interfere with cognitive and emotional processes, which, in turn, may lead to the origin and development of chronic and severe anxiety disorders. Chronic stress, mostly produced by the impact of unavoidable and uncontrollable conditions, may lead to learned helplessness, which has been associated with the origin and development of depression. Chronic stress may lead to hyper-activation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, with the resulting increased levels of cortisol, and various aminergic systems are also involved in this process, including the serotonergic, the dopaminergic and the noradrenergic systems, which, in turn, are also interconnected with cortical and limbic structures. The amygdala plays a critical role in identifying potentially stressful stimuli and detecting present threats or imminent danger, which therefore contributes to activating the necessary adaptive responses. It represents the main structure of an adaptive neural circuit involved in cognitive and emotional processing, which includes reciprocal connections with other neural structures, such as the hippocampus, the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST) and different areas of the prefrontal cortex (PFC). Activation of the amygdala, associated with feelings of fear and anxiety, may be neutralized by the ventro-medial PFC (VM-PFC), which has been involved in decreasing learned helplessness and the resulting learned control, consolidating neural pathways involved in predictability and controllability, which are crucial for the development of resilience.
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Tafet, G.E. (2022). Clinical Approach to Stress. In: Neuroscience of Stress. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-00864-1_4
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