Impact of Social Threat on Extended Amygdala Function in Adolescent Social Anxiety

Loading...
Thumbnail Image

Files

Publication or External Link

Date

2021

Citation

Abstract

Anticipation of uncertain social threat and certain-and-immediate presentation of social threat are key processes in social anxiety. Despite the public health burden of social anxiety disorder and the need to develop new treatments, the neural systems recruited during uncertain anticipation and presentation of social threat remain unclear. Further, adolescence is a period of peak vulnerability to developing more significant and persistent forms of social anxiety, but prior work has not yet examined neural substrates of both types of social threat processes during adolescence. The central extended amygdala (EAc)—including the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BST) and the dorsal amygdala in the region of the central nucleus (Ce)—plays a key role in prominent neuroscientific models of uncertain threat anticipation, but the relevance of these regions to social anxiety in adolescence remains poorly understood. We examined the neural circuits engaged during the anticipation of temporally uncertain social threat and presentation of social threat in a sample of 66 adolescents enriched for clinically significant levels of social anxiety. BST and Ce reactivity was rigorously assessed and directly compared in an unbiased manner using recently developed anatomical regions of interest. Results revealed that social anxiety symptoms were positively correlated with subjective ratings of anticipatory distress during our task, particularly during anticipation of social threat. Adolescents with heightened social anxiety showed marginally diminished EAc activation during temporally uncertain anticipation of social threat. Social anxiety symptoms were unrelated to any other brain activation elicited by the paradigm. Among all participants, increased activation was found in the EAc in response to temporally uncertain anticipation of social threat relative to certain anticipation of social threat. The EAc also showed heightened reactivity during presentation of social threat relative to presentation of benign social stimuli. Exploratory whole-brain voxelwise analyses highlighted a widely distributed network of regions previously implicated in social cognitive processes and the expression and regulation of fear and anxiety. Taken together, these observations hint at a potentially unique role of the EAc in social anxiety in adolescence and provide support that the EAc makes broadly similar contributions to governing responses to social threat.

Notes

Rights