The Neural Correlates of Face-Voice-Integration in Social Anxiety Disorder.

Benjamin Kreifelts,Dirk Wildgruber,Sarah Wächter,Ariane Wiegand,Carolin Brück,Martin Lotze,Thomas Ethofer,Michael Erb

doi:10.3389/fpsyt.2020.00657

Benjamin Kreifelts, Dirk Wildgruber + Show 6 more

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https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2020.00657

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Abstract

Faces and voices are very important sources of threat in social anxiety disorder (SAD), a common psychiatric disorder where core elements are fears of social exclusion and negative evaluation. Previous research in social anxiety evidenced increased cerebral responses to negative facial or vocal expressions and also generally increased hemodynamic responses to voices and faces. But it is unclear if also the cerebral process of face-voice-integration is altered in SAD. Applying functional magnetic resonance imaging, we investigated the correlates of the audiovisual integration of dynamic faces and voices in SAD as compared to healthy individuals. In the bilateral midsections of the superior temporal sulcus (STS) increased integration effects in SAD were observed driven by greater activation increases during audiovisual stimulation as compared to auditory stimulation. This effect was accompanied by increased functional connectivity with the visual association cortex and a more anterior position of the individual integration maxima along the STS in SAD. These findings demonstrate that the audiovisual integration of facial and vocal cues in SAD is not only systematically altered with regard to intensity and connectivity but also the individual location of the integration areas within the STS. These combined findings offer a novel perspective on the neuronal representation of social signal processing in individuals suffering from SAD.

Highlights

Social anxiety (SA) can be conceptualized as maladaptive evolutionary mechanism which developed parallel to a social hierarchy which was no longer based on physical dominance but rather social skills relying on nonverbal and later verbal communication signals [1, 2]
We demonstrated increased hemodynamic face-voice-integration correlates in social anxiety disorder (SAD) anterior to the multisensory cortex of the pSTS within the TVA and a concomitant increase in functional connectivity (FC) with the striate and peristriate visual cortex
It appears plausible that these effects reflect increased extraction of emotional information from voices supported by an enhanced contribution of visual cue characteristics to voice processing potentially mirroring the neural processes underlying increased salience of bimodal face-voice-combinations as compared to voices alone in SAD

Summary

Introduction

Social anxiety (SA) can be conceptualized as maladaptive evolutionary mechanism which developed parallel to a social hierarchy which was no longer based on physical dominance but rather social skills relying on nonverbal and later verbal communication signals [1, 2]. It was demonstrated recently that SA is associated with a generally increased cerebral hemodynamic responses to faces and voices as threat carrier signals in the respective sensory face and voice processing areas and the amygdala [11]. As common carrier signals of social threat, faces and voices might be construed as generally more salient communication signals in socially anxious than in socially non-anxious individuals. To date it remains unclarified how audiovisual face-voice stimuli as one of the most common forms of natural human social communication are processed and integrated at the cerebral level

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