Mild to moderate levels of anxiety in a healthy population cohort are related to face recognition with negative emotions and white matter integrity

Abstract

AbstractBackgroundThe face recognition tasks were applied to test the healthy population cohort with mild to moderate levels of anxiety and they underwent MRI scans to evaluate their brains' white matter integrity.MethodMAP‐MRI analysis applied to estimate diffusion indexes Generalised Fractional Anisotropy (GFA) of segmented white matter tracts in a healthy (N=174) population‐based sample (mean MMSE 28.39) from the Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience (Cam‐CAN) data including normal adults ages 18‐88 to examine microstructural properties of specific association fiber tracts involved in face recognition processing. Half sample (n=88) had anxiety symptoms ( Hospital Anxiety Scale 9.7) and half sample (n=88) were matched with age and sex and without anxiety symptoms. Two kinds of behavioral face tests to white matter measures including three pairs of association tracts, namely inferior fronto‐occipital fasciculus (IFOF), inferior longitudinal fasciculus (ILF) and uncinated fasciculus (UF). The two kinds of behavioral face tests applied were Benton Test of Facial Recognition which assesses the ability to match pictures of unfamiliar faces with variation of head orientation and lighting, and face recognition test of emotion assessing recognition of positive emotion (happiness), negative emotions (angry, disgust, fear, and sad) and surprise emotion. Paired sample t test were applied to compare the two groups' HAS, behavioral tests, and GFA of white matter tracts.ResultPaired t test results showed hospital Anxiety Scale, mean reaction time (RT) of face recognition test in negative emotion, GFA of left IFOF and left UF were significantly different in two groups. Pearson correlation analysis showed mean RT of face recognition test in negative emotion was significantly negative correlated with GFA of left UF.ConclusionHealthy life‐span population cohort with mild to moderate anxiety symptoms spent longer time recognizing faces with negative emotions and white matter integrity of the specific tract UF reflected this characteristic. There was brain‐behavior relationship.