Convergent Neural Correlates of Empathy and Anxiety During Socioemotional Processing

Empathy is characterized by the ability to understand and share an emotional experience with another person and is closely tied to compassion and concern for others. Consequently, this increased emotional awareness and sensitivity may also be related to increased anxiety. Taken from another perspective, higher general anxiety may translate into increased concern for others, or concern for how one’s actions might affect others, and therefore may be linked to increased empathy. Furthermore, self-reflection is positively related to perspective-taking and empathic concern, while rumination is closely tied to anxiety, thus providing an additional connecting point between empathy and anxiety through enhanced internally generated thought. While previous literature suggests a relationship between empathy and anxiety, this has yet to be empirically studied using neuroimaging tools aimed at investigating the underlying neural correlates that may support these convergent responses. We therefore conducted an functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study (N = 49) in which participants viewed fearful and neutral human faces and rated how the faces made them feel, to promote introspection. Participants also completed questionnaires assessing empathy Toronto Empathy Questionnaire (TEQ), trait anxiety State Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI), worry Penn State Worry Questionnaire (PSWQ) and rumination Ruminative Responses Scale (RRS). Behaviorally, empathy positively correlated with worry, worry and rumination positively correlated with anxiety, and significant indirect relationships were found between empathy and anxiety through worry and rumination. Using the neuroimaging face processing task as a backdrop on which the neurobiological mechanisms of empathy and anxiety may interact, regressions of questionnaires with brain activations revealed that empathy related to activation in the temporoparietal junction (TPJ), anxiety related to bilateral insula activation, and worry related to medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) activation, while rumination showed increased engagement of all three aforementioned regions. Functional connectivity (FC) analyses showed increased communication between the left amygdala and insula related to higher empathy, worry and rumination. Finally, whole-brain analysis using median split groups from questionnaires revealed that the lower halves of anxiety, worry and rumination exhibited increased activation in top-down attentional networks. In sum, empathy, worry and rumination related to enhanced bottom-up processing, while worry, rumination and anxiety exhibited decreased top-down attentional control, suggesting an indirect relationship between empathy and anxiety through the ruminative tendencies of worry

The neural mechanisms of anxiety regulation: A new approach to emotion regulation

Anxiety disorders afflict up to one third of the population. While anxiety research to date has primarily focused on the role of the amygdala, emerging perspectives suggest that a small but crucial basal forebrain region, known as the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST), may offer valuable insights into understanding and treating anxiety disorders. In 2019, the research team investigated the role of the BNST in anxiety processing, with results illustrating that the amygdala exhibits preferential engagement during a certain and predictable fear condition and is functionally connected to regions underlying stimulus processing and motor response, while the BNST exhibits preferential engagement during an uncertain and unpredictable anxiety condition and is functionally connected to prefrontal regions underlying interoception and rumination — suggesting that the amygdala and BNST play distinct but complementary roles during threat processing, with the BNST specializing in the detection of potential threats to promote hypervigilant monitoring. A primary mechanism of impaired functioning in anxiety disorders is emotion dysregulation, which has been another key focus in research. However, most emotion regulation (ER) paradigms employ explicitly cued pictorial stimuli (such as negative scenes or faces that induce disgust), when anxiety, by definition, is a sustained response to uncertain or unpredictable prospective threats. As such, this study sought to specifically investigate anxiety regulation. 30 participants underwent high-resolution fMRI while performing a novel task — a hybrid of the 2019 study’s task and a canonical ER task — in order to: 1) investigate whether the BNST can be effectively downregulated during uncertain anticipation, and 2) characterize the prefrontal regulatory mechanisms involved. Results revealed that anxiety regulation was associated with significant BNST downregulation, heightened activation of prefrontal regulatory regions (specifically, the right middle frontal gyrus [rMFG] and right inferior frontal gyrus [rIFG]), and increased connectivity between the rIFG and BNST, coupled with simultaneously reduced connectivity among attentional circuits. These results provide the first evidence that the BNST can be volitionally downregulated and further suggest that anxiety regulation modulates higher-order attentional systems to putatively reduce vigilance

Gender Differences in Functional Connectivity during Emotion Regulation

Gender differences in emotion regulation (ER) have been postulated, yet their neural basis remains poorly understood. The goal of this study was to investigate this issue from a functional connectivity (FC) perspective. Utilizing a region of interest (ROI) analysis, we investigated whether men and women (N=48) differed in their FC pattern while viewing versus regulating negative emotion induced by highly salient pictures, and whether this pattern related to their self-reported negative affect and suppression success. Despite women reporting more negative affect, both genders had comparable suppression success. Moreover, differences emerged between men and women’s FC patterns. During the regulation of negative emotion, better suppression in women was associated with stronger FC within a cingulo-opercular network, while men exhibited stronger FC within posterior regions of the ventral attentional network. We conclude that due to their propensity for higher emotional reactivity, women may employ a frontal top-down control network to downregulate negative emotion, while men may redirect attention away from the aversive stimulus by using posterior regions of the ventral attention network. The findings may have significant implications for understanding women’s vulnerability for developing affective disorders and developing targeted individualized treatment

Current understanding of fear learning and memory in humans and animal models and the value of a linguistic approach for analyzing fear learning and memory in humans

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