“…These brain regions largely belong to the limbic system including the amygdala (Kraus et al, 2018;Figel et al, 2019;Frick et al, 2020), bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST; Figel et al, 2019), and PFC (Buff et al, 2016;Kawashima et al, 2016;Frick et al, 2020). In particular, both near-infrared spectroscopy (Kawashima et al, 2016) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies (Buff et al, 2016) revealed that hyperactivity of PFC is tightly linked to excessive and long-lasting fear states in patients with SAD. In human, the PFC is mainly composed of four subregions, namely, orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), dorsolateral PFC, ventrolateral PFC, and mPFC (Ko, 2017), which have an important role in the processing of complicated cognitive and executive behaviors (e.g., social behaviors; Amodio and Frith, 2006) as well as emotion (Etkin et al, 2011).…”