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Background: Anxiety disorders are associated with aberrant neural responses to negative emotions. Yet, the diverse range of contrasts and stimuli used to investigate these responses has produced variable, complex, and sometimes conflicting results.
Methods: To characterize brain activation during negative emotion processing in anxiety disorders, we conducted a meta-analysis of studies contrasting activation to negative stimuli perceptually similar neutral stimuli and examined the differential effects of two types of visual stimuli-scenes and faces. The relevant functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies that employed these contrasts were identified using PubMed, Web of Science, and EMBASE databases, and the meta-analysis was conducted in accordance with Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines.
Results: Across 20 studies, patients with anxiety disorders (n = 348) had increased activation in core cortical regions of default mode and frontal-parietal networks during negative emotion processing compared to healthy controls (n = 335). Further, differential and greater regional activation was found during the processing of negative scenes than faces and greater activation was associated with sex and age of patients across studies.
Conclusions: These results highlight the importance of self-reference- and cognitive regulation-related functional disturbances in the cortex rather than emotional response-related subcortical alteration during negative emotion processing and indicate a more robust effect from emotional scenes in anxiety disorders.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1092852924000166 | DOI Listing |
BJPsych Open
September 2025
Medical Research Council Integrative Epidemiology Unit at the University of Bristol, Population Health Sciences, Bristol Medical School, Bristol, UK.
Background: Some psychotic experiences in the general population show associations with higher schizophrenia and other mental health-related polygenic risk scores (PRSs), but studies have not usually included interviewer-rated positive, negative and disorganised dimensions, which show distinct associations in clinical samples.
Aims: To investigate associations of these psychotic experience dimensions primarily with schizophrenia PRS and, secondarily, with other relevant PRSs.
Method: Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) birth cohort participants were assessed for positive, negative and disorganised psychotic experience dimensions from interviews, and for self-rated negative symptoms, at 24 years of age.
Psychophysiology
September 2025
Department of Human Medicine, Institute for Systems Medicine, MSH Medical School Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany.
Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) has been associated with altered performance monitoring, reflected in enhanced amplitudes of the error-related negativity in the event-related potential. However, this is not specific to OCD, as overactive error processing is also evident in anxiety. Although similar neural mechanisms have been proposed for error and feedback processing, it remains unclear whether the processing of errors as indexed by external feedback, reflected in the feedback-related negativity (FRN), is altered in OCD.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBJPsych Open
September 2025
Institute for Human Development, Aga Khan University, Nairobi, Kenya.
Background: Depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are prevalent among healthcare workers (HCWs), including those from sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). However, there are limited summary data on the burden and factors associated with these disorders in this region. We conducted this systematic review (registration no.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSpan J Psychiatry Ment Health
September 2025
Institute of Psychiatry and Mental Health, University Hospital Gregorio Marañón, 28009 Madrid, Spain; CIBERSAM, School of Medicine, Universidad Complutense, 28040 Madrid, Spain. Electronic address:
Introduction: Since only around 10% of people with gambling disorder (GD) seek professional treatment or attend self-help groups, multiple strategies are needed to improve this rate. The proposal of the Behavioral Addictions Centre 'Adcom' (Madrid, Spain) is one of these strategies, a pioneering and innovative program aimed at the general population to identify people with addictions such as GD, in an attempt tp offer them appropriate evidence-based treatments.
Materials And Methods: We analyzed information obtained from the first 305 adults who voluntarily sought attention at Adcom for self-referred gambling, and conducted a descriptive, cross-sectional and observational study of this population.