The impact of incidental anxiety on the neural signature of mentalizing

Abstract

Abstract While the effects of anxiety on various cognitive processes, including memory, attention, and learning, have been relatively well documented, the neurobiological effects of anxiety on social cognitive processes remain largely unknown. We address this gap using threat-of-shock to induce incidental anxiety while participants performed two false-belief tasks, a standard and an economic-games version. During belief formation and belief inferences, regions in a canonical social cognition network showed activation reflecting mentalizing, including the temporoparietal junction (TPJ), precuneus, and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC). At the same time, we found threat-related suppression of social cognition regions during belief inferences. A conjunction analysis confirmed that a network of regions was simultaneously engaged during mentalizing and suppressed by anxiety: bilateral TPJ, bilateral inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), and putamen. We examined how threat impacted the connectivity between these seed regions and its targets. During belief formation, we found that threat suppressed the connectivity between the precuneus and two key mentalizing nodes, the dmPFC and right TPJ. Moreover, during belief inferences, threat specifically suppressed belief-based connectivity between putamen and its targets in intraparietal sulcus (IPS) and dlPFC. Dispositional distress significantly modulated threat-related suppression of connectivity between the left TPJ and left IPS. Our results indicate that social cognitive processes rely on support from other large-scale networks, such as the reward and attentional systems, and that these network interactions are disrupted under incidental and dispositional anxiety.