The psychophysiology of anxiety disorder: Fear memory imagery

Abstract

Psychophysiological response to fear memory imagery was assessed in specific phobia, social anxiety disorder, panic disorder with agoraphobia, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and healthy controls. Heart rate, skin conductance, and corrugator muscle were recorded as participants responded to tone cues signaling previously memorized descriptor sentences. Image contents included personal fears, social fears, fears of physical danger, and neutral (low arousal) scenes. Reactions to acoustic startle probes (eyeblink) were assessed during recall imagery and nonsignal periods. Participants were significantly more reactive (in physiology and report of affect) to fear than neutral cues. Panic and PTSD patients were, however, less physiologically responsive than specific phobics and the socially anxious. Panic and PTSD patients also reported the most anxiety and mood symptoms, and were most frequently comorbidly depressed. Overall, physiological reactivity to sentence memory cues was greatest in patients with focal fear of specific objects or events, and reduced in patients characterized by generalized, high negative affect.

An Integrative Common Liabilities Model for the Comorbidity of Substance Use Disorders with Externalizing and Internalizing Disorders

“…Anxiety disorders loading on the FA factor are characterized by poor parasympathetic flexibility (Licht, de Geus, van Dyck, & Penninx, 2009;Sharma, Balhara, Sagar, Deepak, & Mehta, 2011) and exaggerated sympathetic arousal to affectively arousing stimuli, especially fear stimuli (Cuthbert et al, 2003;Larson, Nitschke, & Davidson, 2007). Cuthbert et al (2003) found that individuals with PD were less physiologically responsive to the affective stimuli than individuals with specific phobias and social anxiety, a finding that is consistent with PD's relatively smaller genetic loading on the FA factor (Kendler, Prescott et al, 2003).…”

“…Anxiety disorders loading on the FA factor are characterized by poor parasympathetic flexibility (Licht, de Geus, van Dyck, & Penninx, 2009;Sharma, Balhara, Sagar, Deepak, & Mehta, 2011) and exaggerated sympathetic arousal to affectively arousing stimuli, especially fear stimuli (Cuthbert et al, 2003;Larson, Nitschke, & Davidson, 2007). Cuthbert et al (2003) found that individuals with PD were less physiologically responsive to the affective stimuli than individuals with specific phobias and social anxiety, a finding that is consistent with PD's relatively smaller genetic loading on the FA factor (Kendler, Prescott et al, 2003). Moreover, depressed individuals without anxiety disorders and anxious individuals with worry or anhedonic symptoms but not arousal symptoms do not show exaggerated physiological responses to these stimuli (Larson et al, 2007), and researchers have found blunted physiological responses to pleasant stimuli among individuals with depression (Forbes, Miller, Cohn, Fox, & Kovacs, 2005;Larson et al, 2007).…”

“…Fear in these young children has significant genetic overlap with shyness/inhibition (62%) and negative mood (53%; Eley et al, 2003), suggesting developmental continuity with later internalizing disorders that share these traits, particularly disorders in the FA subfactor. These disorders are characterized by behavioral constraint (Krueger, 1999a) and intense physiological hyperarousal (PH), such as heart racing, sweating, and shortness of breath particularly in response to stressors (Cuthbert et al, 2003;Hofmann, Moscovitch, & Kim, 2006;Martin-Soelch, Stocklin, Dammann, Opwis, & Seifritz, 2006).…”

Models and mechanisms of anxiety: evidence from startle studies

“…Under these conditions, unlike patients with phobias, patients with panic disorder or PTSD do not show increased fear-potentiated startle to their own disorder specific scenes, but they show elevated baseline startle (Cuthbert et al 2003). According to the authors, this enhanced baseline startle may reflect anxiety to the experimental context (Lang et al 1998;Lang et al 2000).…”

Glucocorticoids reduce phobic fear in humans

“…Exposure to a phobic stimulus almost invariably provokes retrieval of stimulus-associated fear memory (3), which may be innate or acquired by conditioning (4). In addition, phobic individuals tend to construct highly negative images of a phobic situation, which substantially contributes to anticipatory anxiety and negative postevent processing.…”