Feeling anxious about being anxious? Don’t worry about it, because you may be more attuned to danger.
According to a study by French researchers, the brain allocates more processing resources to social situations that are more threatening than benign. Also, anxious individuals identify threats in a different brain region than individuals who are calmer. Anxious individuals process threats in brain regions responsible for action. Calmer people process threats in sensory regions that are responsible for face recognition.
“In contrast to previous work, our findings demonstrate that the brain devotes more processing resources to negative emotions that signal threat, rather than to any display of negative emotion,” said lead author Marwa El Zein from the French Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM) and the Ecole Normale Supérieurein Paris.
Twenty-four volunteers had electrical signals measured in their brains. They were asked in the study to decide if a digitally altered face expressed anger or fear, with some of the faces displaying the same expression but with a different gaze. The researchers found that the direction a person looks is key to enhancing sensitivity to their emotions. For example, anger paired with a direct gaze produced a brain response in 200 milliseconds faster than if the anger was directed elsewhere.
“In a crowd, you will be most sensitive to an angry face looking towards you, and will be less alert to an angry person looking somewhere else,” El Zein said.
For anxious people, the neural “coding” of a threat shifts to motor circuits that produce action, compared to sensory circuits, which help people recognize faces.
(Image: Amanda Tipton/Creative Commons)
