Abstract
Highly anxious individuals often show excessive emotional arousal, somatic arousal, and characteristics of mental illness. Previous researches have extensively investigated the emotional and cognitive biases of individuals with high anxiety, but overlooked the spontaneous brain activity and functional connections associated with somatic arousal. In this study, we investigated the relationship between state anxiety and the spontaneous brain activity of the somatosensory cortex in a non-clinical healthy population with state anxiety. Furthermore, we also explored the functional connections of the somatosensory cortex. We found that state anxiety was positively correlated with the amplitude of low-frequency fluctuations (ALFFs) of somatic related brain regions, including the right postcentral gyrus (somatosensory cortex) and the right precentral gyrus (somatic motor cortex). Furthermore, we found that state anxiety was positively correlated with the connections between the postcentral gyrus and the left cerebellum gyrus, whereas state anxiety was negatively correlated with the connectivity between the postcentral gyrus and brain regions including the left inferior frontal cortex and left medial superior frontal cortex. These results revealed the association between the anxious individuals’ body-loop and state anxiety in a healthy population, which revealed the importance of somatic brain regions in anxiety symptoms and provided a new perspective on anxiety for further study.
Highlights
Anxiety is a negative state of mind caused by stress or potential threat
The results showed that state anxiety was positively correlated with connectivity between the right postcentral gyrus and the left cerebellum gyrus (r = 0.43, p < 0.001) and that state anxiety was negatively correlated with connectivity between the right postcentral gyrus and the left inferior frontal cortex (r = –0.40, p < 0.001) and the left medial superior frontal cortex (r = –0.40, p < 0.001)
The aim of the current study was to highlight the key role of the somatosensory cortex in healthy population with state anxiety by investigating the association between the spontaneous activity of postcentral gyrus and state anxiety as well as the relationship between functional connectivity (FC) regarding the right postcentral as region of interest (ROI) and state anxiety
Summary
Anxiety is a negative state of mind caused by stress or potential threat. It is a natural response to dangerous or threatening situations, which involves physical, affective, and cognitive changes [1, 2]. It is accompanied by obviously somatic symptoms. As a matter of fact, almost everyone will experience anxious emotion in their daily life, and existing research showed that the sub-threshold anxiety symptoms are highly detected in a non-clinical population [3]. The somatic marker hypothesis formulated by Antonio Damasio proposed that emotional processing guides behaviors, decision-making [6]. In Damasio’s model, all feelings are based on homeostatic representations of changes in the state of the body [7]. This hypothesis proposed that the somatosensory cortex (including postcentral gyrus) plays a crucial role in emotional processing and is usually activated by bodily states, and that substrates that represent
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