Contextual Threat Research Articles

Threat induction biases processing of emotional expressions.

Threats can derive from our physical or social surroundings and bias the way we perceive and interpret a given situation. They can be signaled by peers through facial expressions, as expressed anger or fear can represent the source of perceived threat. The current study seeks to investigate enhanced attentional state and defensive reflexes associated with contextual threat induced through aversive sounds presented in an emotion recognition paradigm. In a sample of 120 healthy participants, response and gaze behavior revealed differences in perceiving emotional facial expressions between threat and safety conditions: Responses were slower under threat and less accurate. Happy and neutral facial expressions were classified correctly more often in a safety context and misclassified more often as fearful under threat. This unidirectional misclassification suggests that threat applies a negative filter to the perception of neutral and positive information. Eye movements were initiated later under threat, but fixation changes were more frequent and dwell times shorter compared to a safety context. These findings demonstrate that such experimental paradigms are capable of providing insight into how context alters emotion processing at cognitive, physiological, and behavioral levels. Such alterations may derive from evolutionary adaptations necessary for biasing cognitive processing to survive disadvantageous situations. This perspective sets up new testable hypotheses regarding how such levels of explanation may be dysfunctional in patient populations.

Investigating sustained attention in contextual threat using steady-state VEPs evoked by flickering video stimuli.

Anxiety is characterized by anxious anticipation and heightened vigilance to uncertain threat. However, if threat is not reliably indicated by a specific cue, the context in which threat was previously experienced becomes its best predictor, leading to anxiety. A suitable means to induce anxiety experimentally is context conditioning: In one context (CTX+), an unpredictable aversive stimulus (US) is repeatedly presented, in contrast to a second context (CTX-), in which no US is ever presented. In this EEG study, we investigated attentional mechanisms during acquisition and extinction learning in 38 participants, who underwent a context conditioning protocol. Flickering video stimuli (32 s clips depicting virtual offices representing CTX+/-) were used to evoke steady-state visual evoked potentials (ssVEPs) as an index of visuocortical engagement with the contexts. Analyses of the electrocortical responses suggest a successful induction of the ssVEP signal by video presentation in flicker mode. Furthermore, we found clear indices of context conditioning and extinction learning on a subjective level, while cortical processing of the CTX+ was unexpectedly reduced during video presentation. The differences between CTX+ and CTX- diminished during extinction learning. Together, these results indicate that the dynamic sensory input of the video presentation leads to disruptions in the ssVEP signal, which is greater for motivationally significant, threatening contexts.

The effect of inherently threatening contexts on visuocortical engagement to conditioned threat.

Fear and anxiety are crucial for adaptive responding in life-threatening situations. Whereas fear is a phasic response to an acute threat accompanied by selective attention, anxiety is characterized by a sustained feeling of apprehension and hypervigilance during situations of potential threat. In the current literature, fear and anxiety are usually considered mutually exclusive, with partially separated neural underpinnings. However, there is accumulating evidence that challenges this distinction between fear and anxiety, and simultaneous activation of fear and anxiety networks has been reported. Therefore, the current study experimentally tested potential interactions between fear and anxiety. Fifty-two healthy participants completed a differential fear conditioning paradigm followed by a test phase in which the conditioned stimuli were presented in front of threatening or neutral contextual images. To capture defense system activation, we recorded subjective (threat, US-expectancy), physiological (skin conductance, heart rate) and visuocortical (steady-state visual evoked potentials) responses to the conditioned stimuli as a function of contextual threat. Results demonstrated successful fear conditioning in all measures. In addition, threat and US-expectancy ratings, cardiac deceleration, and visuocortical activity were enhanced for fear cues presented in threatening compared with neutral contexts. These results are in line with an additive or interactive rather than an exclusive model of fear and anxiety, indicating facilitated defensive behavior to imminent danger in situations of potential threat.

Social threat and safety learning in individuals with adverse childhood experiences: electrocortical evidence on face processing, recognition, and working memory

ABSTRACT Background: Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are often associated with stress and anxiety-related disorders in adulthood, and learning and memory deficits have been suggested as a potential link between ACEs and psychopathology. Objective: In this preregistered study, the impact of social threat learning on the processing, encoding, and recognition of unknown faces as well as their contextual settings was measured by recognition performance and event-related brain potentials. Method: Sixty-four individuals with ACEs encoded neutral faces within threatening or safe context conditions. During recognition, participants had to decide whether a face was new or had been previously presented in what context (item-source memory), looking at old and new faces. For visual working memory, participants had to detect changes in low and high load conditions during contextual threat or safety. Results: Results showed a successful induction of threat expectation in persons with ACEs. In terms of face and source recognition, overall recognition of safe and new faces was better compared to threatening face-compounds, with more socially anxious individuals having an advantage in remembering threatening faces. For working memory, an effect of task load was found on performance, irrespective of threat or safety context. Regarding electrocortical activity, an old/new recognition effect and threat-selective processing of face–context information was observed during both encoding and recognition. Moreover, neural activity associated with change detection was found for faces in a threatening context, but only at high task load, suggesting reduced capacity for faces in potentially harmful situations when cognitive resources are limited. Conclusion: While individuals with ACE showed intact social threat and safety learning overall, threat-selective face processing was observed for item/source memory, and a threatening context required more processing resources for visual working memory. Further research is needed to investigate the psychophysiological processes involved in functional and dysfunctional memory systems and their importance as vulnerability factors for stress-related disorders.

Ontogeny of risk assessment and escape-hatching performance by red-eyed treefrog embryos in two threat contexts.

Arboreal embryos of red-eyed treefrogs, Agalychnis callidryas, hatch prematurely in response to hypoxia when flooded and to mechanosensory cues in snake attacks, but hatching later improves tadpole survival. We studied ontogenetic changes in risk assessment and hatching performance of embryos in response to flooding and physical disturbance. We hypothesized that risk assessment decreases as hatchling survival improves and hatching performance increases as embryos develop. Because snakes eat faster than embryos asphyxiate, we hypothesized that embryos decide to hatch sooner and hatch faster in response to mechanosensory cues. We video-recorded individual embryos hatching in response to each cue type, then compared the incidence and timing of a series of events and behaviors from cue onset to complete hatching across ages and stimuli. Latency from cue to hatching decreased developmentally in both contexts and was shorter with mechanosensory cues, but the elements contributing to those changes differed. Hypoxia assessment involved position changes, which decreased developmentally along with assessment time. Mechanosensory cue assessment occurred more rapidly, without movement, and decreased with age. The first stages of hatching, membrane rupture and head emergence, were surprisingly age independent but faster with mechanosensory cues, congruent with greater effort under more immediate risk. In contrast, body emergence and compression showed ontogenetic improvement consistent with morphological constraints but no cue effect. Both appropriate timing and effective performance of hatching are necessary for continued development. Different stages of the process vary with development and environmental context, suggesting combinations of adaptive context- and stage-dependent behavior, cue-related constraints on information acquisition, and ontogenetic constraints on elements of performance.

Aversive anticipations modulate electrocortical correlates of decision-making and reward reversal learning, but not behavioral performance.

Predicting the consequences of one’s own decisions is crucial for organizing future behavior. However, when reward contingencies vary frequently, flexible adaptation of decisions is likely to depend on the situation. We examined the effects of an instructed threat context on choice behavior (i.e., reversal learning) and its electrocortical correlates. In a probabilistic decision-making task, 30 participants had to choose between two options that were either contingent on monetary gains or losses. Reward contingencies were reversed after reaching a probabilistic threshold. Decision-making and reversal learning were examined with two contextual background colors, which were instructed as signals for threat-of-shock or safety. Self-report data confirmed the threat context as more unpleasant, arousing, and threatening relative to safety condition. However, against our expectations, behavioral performance was comparable during the threat and safety conditions (i.e., errors-to-criterion, number of reversal, error rates, and choice times). Regarding electrocortical activity, feedback processing changed throughout the visual processing stream. The feedback-related negativity (FRN) reflected expectancy-driven processing (unexpected vs. congruent losses and gains), and the threat-selective P3 component revealed non-specific discrimination of gains vs. losses. Finally, the late positive potentials (LPP) showed strongly valence-specific processing (unexpected and congruent losses vs. gains). Thus, regardless of contextual threat, early and late cortical activity reflects an attentional shift from expectation- to outcome-based feedback processing. Findings are discussed in terms of reward, threat, and reversal-learning mechanisms with implications for emotion regulation and anxiety disorders.

Intergenerational transmission of lifetime stressor exposure in adolescent girls at differential maternal risk for depression.

Adolescent girls who grow up with mothers who are depressed are themselves highly vulnerable to developing depression (i.e., "intergenerational transmission of depression"). Stressor exposure is a strong risk factor for depression, and the transmission of depression risk from mothers to daughters is partly due to mothers experiencing more stressors, increasing daughters' stressor burden. However, research in this area has only assessed recent stressors, making the role of cumulative lifetime stressors unclear. To address this issue, we recruited 52 dyads of mothers and adolescent daughters, of which 22 daughters were at high maternal risk for depression. Participants completed diagnostic interviews, and daughters additionally self-reported their depressive symptoms. Participants also completed the Stress and Adversity Inventory, a new-generation instrument for assessing cumulative lifetime history of acute and chronic stressors based on the contextual threat approach. We tested moderated mediation models evaluating the conditional indirect effects of mothers' lifetime stressors on high- versus low-risk daughters' depressive symptoms through daughters' lifetime stressors. As hypothesized, mothers of high-risk (but not low-risk) adolescent daughters who reported more lifetime acute stressors had daughters who reported more lifetime acute stressors and current depressive symptoms. Moreover, this finding was driven specifically by mothers' stressors occurring after their daughters' births. There was also tentative evidence that high-risk daughters' lifetime chronic stressors potentiated the impact of daughters' acute stressors on their depressive symptoms. These findings provide new insights into how stressful contexts are transmitted intergenerationally.

Just let me check: The role of individual differences in self-reported anxiety and obsessive-compulsive features on subjective, behavioural, and physiological indices during a checking task

Checking behaviour has been described as a form of preventative behaviour used by an individual to establish control over the environment and avoid future misfortune. However, when compulsive, checking behaviours can become disabling and distressing and have been linked to the maintenance of anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorders. Despite this, there is limited literature across the field that has assessed the impact of dimensional measures of anxiety and obsessive-compulsive features (i.e., negative affect, uncertainty, and perfectionism) in driving checking behaviour. As such, the present study examined the impact of individual differences in self-reported anxiety and obsessive-compulsive features on subjective, behavioural, and physiological indices during a visual discrimination and checking task (n = 87). Higher self-reported anxiety and obsessive-compulsive features were associated with higher subjective ratings of unpleasantness and the urge to check during the task. Moreover, higher self-reported anxiety and obsessive-compulsive features related to general negative affect, uncertainty, and perfectionism were associated with greater checking frequency during the task. Lastly, stronger obsessional beliefs about perfectionism and the need for certainty were found to predict poorer accuracy, slower reaction times, and higher engagement of the corrugator supercilii during the task. In sum, these findings demonstrate how different anxiety and obsessive-compulsive features, in particular perfectionism and the need for certainty, may relate to and maintain checking behaviour in low threat contexts, which likely has implications for models of excessive and persistent checking in anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorders.

ART-RISK 3.0 a fuzzy—based platform that combine GIS and expert assessments for conservation strategies in cultural heritage

Heritage preservation poses numerous difficulties, especially in emergency situations or during budget cuts. In these contexts, having tools that facilitate efficient and rapid management of hazards-vulnerabilities is a priority for the preventive conservation and triage of cultural assets. This paper presents the first (to the authors' knowledge) free and public availability Artificial Intelligence platform designed for conservation strategies in cultural heritage. Art-Risk 3.0 is a platform designed as a fuzzy-logic inference system that combines information from geographical information system maps with expert assessments, in order to identify the contextual threat level and the degree of vulnerability that heritage buildings present. Thanks to the possibilities that the geographic information system offers, 12 Spanish churches (11th - 16th centuries) were analyzed. The artificial intelligence platform developed makes it possible to analyze the index of hazard, vulnerability and functionality, classify buildings according to the risk in order to do a sustainable use of budgets through the rational management of preventive conservation. The data stored in the system allows identify the danger due to geotechnics, precipitation, torrential downpour, thermal oscillation, frost, earthquake and flooding. Through the use of fuzzy logic, the tool interrelates environmental conditions with 14 other variables related to structural risks and the vulnerability of buildings, which are evaluated through bibliographic search and review of photographic images. The geographic information system has identified torrential rains and thermal oscillations as the environmental threats that mostly impact heritage buildings in Spain. The results obtained highlight the Church of Santiago de Jesús as the most vulnerable building due to a lack of preventive conservation programs. These results, consistent with the inclusion of this monument on the list of heritage at risk defined by Hispania Nostra, corroborate the functionality of the model.

P109. Backward Conditioning Indirectly Retrieves Threat Memories: Implications for Internalizing Psychopathology

In a therapeutic context, extinguishing contextual threat memories can be difficult, as direct exposure to the threatening context is often inaccessible, thus these memories must be indirectly retrieved. Unlike forward-conditioned (FW) cues, where an unconditioned stimulus (US) follows the cue, backward-conditioned (BW) cues are presented immediately after the US. BW cues do not become directly associated with the US, but may indirectly retrieve threat memories via activation of the conditioning context.

ISecureHome: A deep fusion framework for surveillance of smart homes using real-time emotion recognition

With the advent of AI, the internet of things (IoT) and human-centric computing (HCC), the world has witnessed a rapid proliferation of smart homes (SH). However, implementing a robust security system for residents of SH remains a daunting task. The existing smart homes incorporate security provisions such as biometric verification, activity tracking, and facial recognition. Integrating multi-sensor devices, networking systems and data storage facilities escalate the lifecycle costs of these systems. Facial emotions convey important cues on behaviour and intent that can be used as non-invasive feedback for contextual threat analysis. The early mitigation of a hostile situation, such as a fight or an attempted intrusion, is vital for the SH residents’ safety. This research proposes a real-time facial emotion-based security framework called iSecureHome for smart homes using a CMOS camera, which is triggered by a passive infrared (PIR) motion sensor. The impact of chromatic and achromatic features on facial Emotion Recognition (ER), as well as skin colour-based biases in current ER algorithms, are also investigated. A time-bound facial emotion decoding strategy is presented in iSecureHome that is based on EmoFusioNet—a deep fusion-based model—to predict the security concerns in the vicinity of a given residence. EmoFusioNet utilises stacked and late fusion methodologies to ensure a colour-neutral and equitable ER system. Initially, the stacked model synchronously extracts the chromatic and achromatic facial features using deep CNNs, and their predictions are then fed into the late fusion component. After that, a regularised multi-layer perceptron (R-MLP) is trained to fuse the results of stacked CNNs and generate final predictions. Experimental results suggest that the proposed fusion methodology augments the ER model and achieves the final train and test accuracy of 98.48% and 98.43%, respectively. iSecureHome also comprises a multi-threaded decision-making framework for threat analysis with efficient performance and minimal latency.

TriCTI: an actionable cyber threat intelligence discovery system via trigger-enhanced neural network

The cybersecurity report provides unstructured actionable cyber threat intelligence (CTI) with detailed threat attack procedures and indicators of compromise (IOCs), e.g., malware hash or URL (uniform resource locator) of command and control server. The actionable CTI, integrated into intrusion detection systems, can not only prioritize the most urgent threats based on the campaign stages of attack vectors (i.e., IOCs) but also take appropriate mitigation measures based on contextual information of the alerts. However, the dramatic growth in the number of cybersecurity reports makes it nearly impossible for security professionals to find an efficient way to use these massive amounts of threat intelligence. In this paper, we propose a trigger-enhanced actionable CTI discovery system (TriCTI) to portray a relationship between IOCs and campaign stages and generate actionable CTI from cybersecurity reports through natural language processing (NLP) technology. Specifically, we introduce the “campaign trigger” for an effective explanation of the campaign stages to improve the performance of the classification model. The campaign trigger phrases are the keywords in the sentence that imply the campaign stage. The trained final trigger vectors have similar space representations with the keywords in the unseen sentence and will help correct classification by increasing the weight of the keywords. We also meticulously devise a data augmentation specifically for cybersecurity training sets to cope with the challenge of the scarcity of annotation data sets. Compared with state-of-the-art text classification models, such as BERT, the trigger-enhanced classification model has better performance with accuracy (86.99%) and F1 score (87.02%). We run TriCTI on more than 29k cybersecurity reports, from which we automatically and efficiently collect 113,543 actionable CTI. In particular, we verify the actionability of discovered CTI by using large-scale field data from VirusTotal (VT). The results demonstrate that the threat intelligence provided by VT lacks a part of the threat context for IOCs, such as the Actions on Objectives campaign stage. As a comparison, our proposed method can completely identify the actionable CTI in all campaign stages. Accordingly, cyber threats can be identified and resisted at any campaign stage with the discovered actionable CTI.

TIM: threat context-enhanced TTP intelligence mining on unstructured threat data

TTPs (Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures), which represent an attacker’s goals and methods, are the long period and essential feature of the attacker. Defenders can use TTP intelligence to perform the penetration test and compensate for defense deficiency. However, most TTP intelligence is described in unstructured threat data, such as APT analysis reports. Manually converting natural language TTPs descriptions to standard TTP names, such as ATT&CK TTP names and IDs, is time-consuming and requires deep expertise. In this paper, we define the TTP classification task as a sentence classification task. We annotate a new sentence-level TTP dataset with 6 categories and 6061 TTP descriptions from 10761 security analysis reports. We construct a threat context-enhanced TTP intelligence mining (TIM) framework to mine TTP intelligence from unstructured threat data. The TIM framework uses TCENet (Threat Context Enhanced Network) to find and classify TTP descriptions, which we define as three continuous sentences, from textual data. Meanwhile, we use the element features of TTP in the descriptions to enhance the TTPs classification accuracy of TCENet. The evaluation result shows that the average classification accuracy of our proposed method on the 6 TTP categories reaches 0.941. The evaluation results also show that adding TTP element features can improve our classification accuracy compared to using only text features. TCENet also achieved the best results compared to the previous document-level TTP classification works and other popular text classification methods, even in the case of few-shot training samples. Finally, the TIM framework organizes TTP descriptions and TTP elements into STIX 2.1 format as final TTP intelligence for sharing the long-period and essential attack behavior characteristics of attackers. In addition, we transform TTP intelligence into sigma detection rules for attack behavior detection. Such TTP intelligence and rules can help defenders deploy long-term effective threat detection and perform more realistic attack simulations to strengthen defense.

Not Just About Faces in Context: Face-Context Relation Moderates the Impact of Contextual Threat on Facial Trustworthiness.

Recent work showed that the attribution of facial trustworthiness can be influenced by the surrounding context in which a face is embedded: contexts that convey threat make faces less trustworthy. In four studies (N = 388, three preregistered) we tested whether face-context integration is influenced by how faces and contexts are encoded relationally. In Experiments 1a to 1c, face-context integration was stronger when threatening stimuli were attributable to the human action. Faces were judged less trustworthy when shown in threatening contexts that were ascribable (vs. non-ascribable) to the human action. In Experiment 2, we manipulated face-context relations using instructions. When instructions presented facial stimuli as belonging to the "perpetrators" of the threatening contexts, no difference with the control (no-instructions) condition was found in face-context integration. Instead, the effect was reduced when faces were presented as "victims." We discussed the importance of considering relational reasoning when studying face-context integration.

Functional diversity of benthic macroinvertebrates regarding hydrological and land use disturbances in a heavily impaired lowland river

This paper proposes the exploration functional diversity of benthic macroinvertebrates to evaluate their response to hydrological and land use stressors in a semi-arid lowland river. We aim to assess dominant functional traits and their sensitivity to environmental drivers, and how functional diversity respond to anthropogenic ecosystem impacts. Environment was evaluated through physical-chemical characterization of water, substrate and hydrological indices. For riparian condition assessment, we applied the QBR index for riparian forest quality and hemeroby index for level of anthropogenic intervention on the landscape. Links between environmental variables (R), taxa distribution (L) and trait composition (Q) were examined with RLQ and combined with fourth-corner analysis. The principal disturbance gradient was related to discharge regulation overlapping with land use represented by hemeroby index. There was also a gradient related to the hydrological regime which alternates seasonal floods with low flow periods. Traits related to reproductive and dispersal strategies were the most influenced by disturbance gradients, both natural and anthropogenic. Functional diversity decrease in sites subject to water abstraction and with higher hemeroby levels. Our findings have been promising in order to the application of functional diversity for biomonitoring in the Dulce River. Hemeroby enables the identification of trending changes between land uses, as well as to identify threat contexts. Furthermore, hemeroby could be useful in diagnostic stages to propose biomonitoring sites, by setting areas with different anthropogenic intervention on the ecosystem.

Indoor or Outdoor? Generalization of Costly Pain-Related Avoidance Behavior to Conceptually Related Contexts

When pain persists beyond healing time and becomes a “false alarm” of bodily threat, protective strategies, such as avoidance, are no longer adaptive. More specifically, generalization of avoidance based on conceptual knowledge may contribute to chronic pain disability. Using an operant robotic-arm avoidance paradigm, healthy participants (N = 50), could perform more effortful movements in the threat context (eg, pictures of outdoor scenes) to avoid painful stimuli, whereas no pain occured in the safe context (eg, pictures of indoor scenes). Next, we investigated avoidance generalization to conceptually related contexts (ie, novel outdoor/indoor scenes). As expected, participants avoided more when presented with novel contexts conceptually related to the threat context than in novel exemplars of the safe context. Yet, exemplars belonging to one category (outdoor/indoor scenes) were not interchangeable; there was a generalization decrement. Posthoc analyses revealed that contingency-aware participants (n = 27), but not non-aware participants (n = 23), showed the avoidance generalization effect and also generalized their differential pain-expectancy and pain-related fear more to novel background scenes conceptually related to the original threat context. In contrast, the fear-potentiated startle response was not modulated by context. PerspectiveThis article provides evidence for contextual modulation of avoidance behavior and its generalization to novel exemplars of the learned categories based on conceptual relatedness. Our findings suggest that category-based generalization is a plausible mechanism explaining why patients display avoidance behavior in novel situations that were never directly associated with pain.

Assessing the extinction risk of insular, understudied marine species.

Hydrothermal vents are rare deep‐sea oases that house faunal assemblages with a similar density of life as coral reefs. Only approximately 600 of these hotspots are known worldwide, most only one‐third of a football field in size. With advancing development of the deep‐sea mining industry, there is an urgent need to protect these unique, insular ecosystems and their specialist endemic faunas. We applied the IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature) Red List criteria to assess the extinction risk of vent‐endemic molluscs with varying exposure to potential deep‐sea mining. We assessed 31 species from three key areas under different regulatory frameworks in the Indian, West Pacific, and Southern Oceans. Three vent mollusc species were also examined as case studies of different threat contexts (protected or not from potential mining) to explore the interaction of local regulatory frameworks and IUCN Red List category assignment. We found that these assessments were robust even when there was some uncertainty in the total range of individual species, allowing assessment of species that have only recently been named and described. For vent‐endemic species, regulatory changes to area‐based management can have a greater impact on IUCN Red List assessment outcomes than incorporating additional data about species distributions. Our approach revealed the most useful IUCN Red List criteria for vent‐endemic species: criteria B and D2. This approach, combining regulatory framework and distribution, has the potential to rapidly gauge assessment outcomes for species in insular systems worldwide.

An Inescapable Cat Odor Exposure Protocol for Studying Innate and Contextual Threat Conditioning in Rats.

Animals respond to threatening situations by exhibiting a number of defensive behaviors, including avoidance, freezing, and risk assessment. An animal model with an ethological approach offers a deeper insight into the biological mechanisms underlying threat responses. This paper describes a methodology to measure defensive behaviors toward both innate and learned aversive stimuli in rats. Animals were individually exposed to predator odor in an inescapable chamber to elicit a measurable, sustained, defensive state. The experimental design involved placing a rat in a familiar chamber for 10 min followed by exposure to cat odor for another 10 min in the same context. The next day, the rats were re-exposed for 10 min to the same context chamber where cat odor exposure occurred. Sessions were video-recorded and defensive behaviors were assessed on both days. The behavioral test was coupled with reversible functional inactivation and c-Fos immunohistochemistry techniques to determine the role of the interoceptive cortex in threat responses. Rats exposed to cat odor on the first day and re-exposed to the context chamber on the second day displayed higher levels of defensive behaviors, and that cat odor elicited a robust increase in the neural activity of the interoceptive cortex. Moreover, muscimol inactivation of the interoceptive cortex reduced the expression of defensive behaviors in response to cat odor and impaired contextual threat memory. These results show that this behavioral assay is a useful tool for studying neural mechanisms of defensive behaviors and may offer insight into mechanisms that mediate fear in humans and its related disorders.

Location-dependent threat and associated neural abnormalities in clinical anxiety

Anxiety disorders are characterized by maladaptive defensive responses to distal or uncertain threats. Elucidating neural mechanisms of anxiety is essential to understand the development and maintenance of anxiety disorders. In fMRI, patients with pathological anxiety (ANX, n = 23) and healthy controls (HC, n = 28) completed a contextual threat learning paradigm in which they picked flowers in a virtual environment comprising a danger zone in which flowers were paired with shock and a safe zone (no shock). ANX compared with HC showed 1) decreased ventromedial prefrontal cortex and anterior hippocampus activation during the task, particularly in the safe zone, 2) increased insula and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex activation during the task, particularly in the danger zone, and 3) increased amygdala and midbrain/periaqueductal gray activation in the danger zone prior to potential shock delivery. Findings suggest that ANX engage brain areas differently to modulate context-appropriate emotional responses when learning to discriminate cues within an environment.

Cognitive mechanisms influencing facial emotion processing in psychopathy and externalizing.

Psychopathy and externalizing are distinct forms of disinhibitory psychopathology whose destructive social behaviors are thought to be underpinned by different aberrations in social cognition. Facial emotion processing is a foundational component of social cognition, yet previous studies on facial emotion processing in psychopathy and externalizing have focused on traditional behavioral measures (e.g., response accuracy), which have limited reliability and precision. Diffusion modeling is a valuable tool for elucidating more reliable and precise sources of performance differences because it estimates parameters that reflect latent cognitive processes, including bias, drift rate (efficiency of evidence accumulation), threshold separation (extent of evidence accumulation), and nondecision time (time spent on non-decision-related processes such as stimulus encoding and motor response execution). In a sample of 92 incarcerated males, we applied diffusion modeling to an emotion identification task in which ambiguous blends of anger, happiness, and fear were identified while contextual threat (i.e., apparent movement of faces) was manipulated. Results indicated that psychopathy was associated with longer nondecision time (i.e., slower processing) across all the emotion blends in the task and particularly for mostly angry faces under greater ambiguity. In direct contrast, externalizing was associated with shorter nondecision time (i.e., faster processing) as well as greater threshold separation (i.e., more extensive evidence accumulation) for mostly angry faces under greater ambiguity, but this pattern of preferential processing of anger was only evident in the absence of contextual threat. These findings link psychopathy and externalizing to different profiles of cognitive processes influencing facial emotion processing. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).