Symbols and sounds not associated with adverse events can relieve anxiety

Knowing how to manage stress is not innate. For people with anxiety and stress-related disorders, new research from Yale University (UK) and Weill Cornell Medicine has found that symbols and sounds that are not associated with adverse events can help relieve anxiety. The results of their study were published by the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

According to the researchers, one in three people suffer from anxiety and stress-related disorders caused by life events or potentially disabling situations. According to their findings, symbols and sounds that are not associated with fear can reduce anxiety.

resist fear

These sounds and symbols would be a new way to combat anxiety, as they would activate an entirely different brain network. Ultimately, this approach could be used effectively in behavioral therapy, especially when millions of people have not found sufficient relief from cognitive behavioral therapy and existing antidepressants.

Paola Odriozola, a doctoral candidate in psychology at Yale and co-author of the study, explains this reasoning. “A security signal can be a piece of music, a person, or even an object like a stuffed animal, which can represent the absence of a threat to a person.”

Patients gradually exposed to the source of their fear eventually develop a resistance to it. What this new study demonstrates is that symbols and sounds that are not associated with the source of their fear can help relieve patients’ anxiety.

During the research, the team conditioned participants to associate one shape with a threatening outcome, and a different shape with a non-threatening outcome. In mice, the researchers preferred to use tones for conditioning rather than shapes. While some participants were exposed to the threat-associated form, others were exposed to both threatening and non-threatening forms together.

A future therapeutic approach

Brain imaging in humans and mice shows that in the second group — the one that considered threatening and non-threatening images — a different neural network was activated, suggesting that this may be an effective way to increase current treatments.

Dylan Gee, assistant professor of psychology at Yale and co-author of the study, elaborates. “Exposure-based therapy relies on the extinction of fear. Although a safety memory is formed during therapy, it still competes with the previous threat memory. This competition makes current therapies prone to fear relapse, but there is never a memory of threat associated with safety cues.”

For Dylan Gee, “there is a great need for alternative therapies that treat patients suffering from anxiety. A large number of patients do not benefit sufficiently from cognitive behavioral therapies, and antidepressants or the results of these two treatments do not hold up in the long term.