Trait anxiety and neural efficiency of abstract reasoning: An fMRI investigation

Insular-striatal activation during COVID-19 predicts stress reactivity in high-trait anxiety

The COVID-19 pandemic, unlike natural disasters that cause short-term stress, has led to prolonged psychological strain, increasing attentional biases toward health threats and worsening mental health. Prolonged exposure to pandemic-related stressors has exacerbated these issues, with individual differences, such as anxiety levels, influencing vulnerability and resulting in varied outcomes. Understanding how neurocognitive processes modulate attentional biases, such as prolonged attention (overresponding) to threats or avoidance, is crucial for explaining their effects on mental health during the pandemic. Real-world examination of these biases is needed to confirm their manifestation and better target interventions. This longitudinal study explored the neural network of attentional biases in anxious individuals, focusing on whether initial activation at baseline (T1) could predict changes in perceived stress. High and low trait anxious (HTA, LTA) adults completed an emotional Stroop task during two fMRI visits, one year apart. Results showed insular-fronto-striatal hypoactivation in the HTA group over time, indicating increased avoidance in HTA participants. Initial insular-striatal activation at T1 predicted perceived stress changes in the HTA group. Reduced activation in these regions suggests avoidance and impaired stress coping, highlighting increased stress vulnerability in HTA individuals during the pandemic and underscoring the importance of interventions to enhance resilience.

Understanding gender differences in reasoning and specific paradigm using meta-analysis of neuroimaging

Reasoning is a fundamental cognitive process that allows individuals to make inferences, decisions, and solve problems. Understanding the neural mechanisms of reasoning and the gender differences in these mechanisms is crucial for comprehending the neural foundations of reasoning and promoting gender equality in cognitive processing. This study conducted an Activation Likelihood Estimation (ALE) meta-analysis of 275 studies, revealing that reasoning involves multiple brain regions, including the parts of frontal, parietal, occipital, temporal lobes, limbic system, and subcortical areas. These findings indicate that reasoning is a complex cognitive process requiring the coordinated activity of multiple brain regions. Additionally, 25 studies focusing on the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST) paradigm confirmed the importance of these regions in reasoning processes. The gender-specific activation results indicate that males and females utilize different neural networks during reasoning and WCST tasks. While significant differences exist in specific regions, the overall activation patterns do not show marked gender differences. Notably, females exhibit greater activation in the limbic system compared to males, suggesting that emotional states may play a more prominent role for females when engaging in reasoning tasks.

Trait and State Anxiety Effects on Mismatch Negativity and Sensory Gating Event-Related Potentials

We used the auditory roving oddball to investigate whether individual differences in self-reported anxiety influence event-related potential (ERP) activity related to sensory gating and mismatch negativity (MMN). The state-trait anxiety inventory (STAI) was used to assess the effects of anxiety on the ERPs for auditory change detection and information filtering in a sample of thirty-six healthy participants. The roving oddball paradigm involves presentation of stimulus trains of auditory tones with certain frequencies followed by trains of tones with different frequencies. Enhanced negative mid-latency response (130-230 ms post-stimulus) was marked at the deviant (first tone) and the standard (six or more repetitions) tone at Fz, indicating successful mismatch negativity (MMN). In turn, the first and second tone in a stimulus train were subject to sensory gating at the Cz electrode site as a response to the second stimulus was suppressed at an earlier latency (40-80 ms). We used partial correlations and analyses of covariance to investigate the influence of state and trait anxiety on these two processes. Higher trait anxiety exhibited enhanced MMN amplitude (more negative) (F(1,33) = 14.259, p = 6.323 × 10-6, ηp2 = 0.302), whereas state anxiety reduced sensory gating (F(1,30) = 13.117, p = 0.001, ηp2 = 0.304). Our findings suggest that high trait-anxious participants demonstrate hypervigilant change detection to deviant tones that appear more salient, whereas increased state anxiety associates with failure to filter out irrelevant stimuli.

Testing the Reserve Capacity Model: Does Race Moderate the Relationship Between Negative Emotions and Neurocognition?

OBJECTIVE

To test whether race moderates the relationship between negative emotions and neurocognition by applying the reserve capacity model within a large sample that spans adulthood.

METHOD

The study sample (N = 1,020) consisted of community-dwelling adults between 18 and 84 years of age who were drawn from the Virginia Cognitive Aging Project. Demographic variables were used to match a sample of Black participants to a sample of White participants. Race was examined as a moderator of the relationship between negative emotions (i.e., depressive symptoms, trait anxiety, and the negative affect subscale from the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule) and neurocognitive variables (episodic memory, reasoning, spatial visualization, and processing speed) with multiple-group structural equation modeling.

RESULTS

After accounting for sociodemographic variables, depressive symptoms were negatively associated with processing speed in both groups, and with worse reasoning in the White subsample. Negative affect was associated with lower reasoning performance in both groups and with lower spatial visualization in the White subsample. Trait anxiety was not significantly associated with the neurocognitive constructs in either group. Multigroup structural equation models showed that the magnitudes of the associations were not different between the Black and White subsamples. Thus, race did not moderate the relationships between depressive symptoms, trait anxiety, and negative affect with neurocognition.

CONCLUSIONS

Negative emotions are associated with lower performance on different neurocognitive tasks, but race does not moderate these relationships. Future research should examine perceived discrimination or other psychosocial variables when examining the relationships among negative emotions and neurocognition.