Neural representations of the experience of fear depend on the situation we face.
- For a long time, mainstream research assumed that responses to fears of spiders, heights and heights, and public speaking manifested similarly in the brain.
- However, a new study shows that the overwhelming majority of brain regions that predict fear only do so for certain situations.
- According to the authors, these results suggest that behavioral and even pharmacological therapies must also be tailored to the person and the situation.
“There is a story in the literature that the regions of the brain that predict fear are things, such as the amygdala, or the orbital frontal cortex area, or the brainstem. They are thought to be part of a so-called ‘fear circuit’ that has been a very dominant model in neuroscience for decades,” said Ajay Satpute, professor of psychology at Northeastern University (United States). However, the extent to which neural predictors of fear depend on or generalize to situational context is unclear. This is why the researcher and his team carried out a study published in the journal The Journal of Neuroscience.
The neural response to each type of scenario activates different brain areas
As part of this research, the scientists observed brain activity when faced with three distinct scenarios thought to evoke different types of fear: heights and heights, spiders, and “social threats” (public speaking, confrontations with police). ). For the purposes of the work, they recruited 21 adults, including 10 women and 11 men, who had to answer a questionnaire on the things that scare them. Then, participants took an MRI scan while they watched 20-second videos showing tarantulas, steep ledges while hiking, or social gatherings. At the end of the viewing, they were asked to rate their fear, valence (the degree to which an experience is pleasant or unpleasant), and arousal.
The authors observed two things: Fear responses occurred in a wider range of brain regions than expected. However, not all brain regions responded in all three situations. “The amygdala, for example, seemed to contain information predictive of fear in the context of heights and emptiness, but not in some of the other contexts. We don’t see these so-called ‘classic threat zones’ involved in the prediction of fear in different situations”said Ajay Satpute.
Adapt behavioral and drug therapies to each person and situation
According to him, these results suggest that interventions must also be adapted to the person and the situation, as this could have an impact on behavioral therapies, but also, much later, on pharmacological therapies. “Drugs that target a particular circuit work, but only for about 50% of people. We don’t really know why. Our research offers at least one explanation: the brain regions that are important for any emotional experience will vary depending on the person and the situation, if you only focus on what is common, you ignore a lot of things. concluded the lead author of the study.
