Abstract
Trait anxiety is thought to be associated with pathological anxiety, and a risk factor for psychiatric disorders. The present study examines the brain mechanisms associated with trait anxiety during the performing of verbal fluency tasks. The aim is to show how trait anxiety modulates executive functions as measured by verbal fluency, and to explore the link between verbal fluency and anxiety due to the putative negative biases in high-anxious individuals. Seven tasks of verbal fluency were used: letter “k,” “f,” verbs, “animals,” “vehicles,” “joy,” and “fear.” The results of 35 subjects (whole sample), and 17 subjects (nine men, eight women) selected from the whole sample for the low/high-anxious groups on the basis of Trait Anxiety scores were analyzed. The subjects were healthy, Polish speaking, right-handed and aged from 20 to 35 years old. fMRI (whole-brain analysis with FWE corrections) was used to show the neural signals under active participation in verbal fluency tasks. The results confirm that trait anxiety slightly modulates neural activation during the performance of verbal fluency tasks, especially in the more difficult tasks. Significant differences were found in brain activation during the performance of more complex tasks between individuals with low anxiety and those with high anxiety. Greater activation in the right hemisphere, frontal gyri, and cerebellum was found in people with low anxiety. The results reflect better integration of cognitive and affective capacities in individuals with low anxiety.
Highlights
Trait anxiety is a stable personality trait describing one’s tendency to respond fearfully to a wide variety of stimuli (Spielberger et al, 1970)
The results showed that the total number of words produced during verbal fluency tasks predicted the level of state anxiety, and it can be interpreted as support for a theoretical model of executive control capacity which may mediate emotional experience of state anxiety
There were no significant differences between the groups with low anxiety (LA) and high anxiety (HA) in terms of age, education, Vocabulary, Digit Span, number of words in positive verbal fluency, number of words in negative verbal fluency tasks, number of words in the categories of “animals,” “vehicles,” number of verbs, and number of words from the phonemic fluency
Summary
Trait anxiety is a stable personality trait describing one’s tendency to respond fearfully to a wide variety of stimuli (Spielberger et al, 1970). This is a general disposition to experiencing anxietyrelevant feelings or thoughts, or exhibiting anxiety-related behaviors (Spielberger, 1979). Trait-anxious people tend to perceive situations as more threatening, and they experience anxious states more frequently. They modify their perception of reality in such a way that they attribute a variety of stimuli with negative valence, and concentrate on these negatively perceived stimuli [the mechanism of attention inhibition (Öhman et al, 2000)]. Fear is a reaction to specific and short-term stimuli, while anxiety may be experienced in the absence of a direct threat, and lasts a longer period of time
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