Boosting activity in the brain’s areas related to thinking and problem-solving may also buffer against worsening anxiety.
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Researchers have found that boosting activity in the brain’s areas related to thinking and problem-solving may also buffer against worsening anxiety.
Using non-invasive brain imaging, the researchers found that people at risk of anxiety were less likely to develop the disorder if they had higher activity in a brain region responsible for complex mental operations.
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“These findings help reinforce a strategy whereby individuals may be able to improve their emotional functioning — their mood, anxiety, experience of depression — not only by directly addressing those phenomena, but also by indirectly improving their general cognitive functioning,” said Ahmad Hariri, Professor at the Duke University in North Carolina, US.
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For the study, published in the journal Cerebral Cortex, researchers investigated undergraduate students whether higher activity in a brain region called dorsolateral prefrontal cortex could help shield these at-risk individuals from future mental illness.
Each participant completed a series of mental health questionnaires and underwent a type of non-invasive brain scan called functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) while engaged in tasks meant to activate specific regions of the brain.
The researchers asked each participant to answer simple memory-based maths problems to stimulate the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.
Participants also viewed angry or scared faces to activate a region of the brain called the amygdala and played a reward-based guessing game to stimulate activity in the brain’s ventral striatum.
By comparing participants’ mental health assessments at the time of the brain scans, and in a follow-up on an average seven months later, the researcher found that these at-risk individuals were less likely to develop anxiety if they also had high activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.
“We found that if you have a more functioning dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the imbalance in these deeper brain structures is not expressed as changes in mood or anxiety,” Hariri noted.
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