Does a Sick Cingulate Syndrome Promote Anxiety?

When normal individuals adapt to emotional conflict, activation in the pregenual anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) dampens emotional processing in the amygdala, a top-down inhibitory pattern. To examine this aspect of emotional processing in generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), investigators compared patterns of brain activation and adaptation during the experience of implicit emotional conflict in 17 patients with GAD and 24 healthy controls.

Participants were asked to categorize rapidly flashed photos of emotionally expressive faces that were overlaid with sometimes congruent, sometimes incongruent, affect-laden words (“fear' or “happy”). Researchers assessed behavioral reaction times and used functional magnetic resonance imaging to identify…