title: Neural representation of anxiety and personality during exposure to anxiety-provoking and neutral scenes from scary movies.
abstract: Some people search for intense sensations such as being scared by frightening movies while others do not. The brain mechanisms underlying such inter-individual differences are not clear. Testing theoretical models, we investigated neural correlates of anxiety and the personality trait sensation seeking in 40 subjects who watched threatening and neutral scenes from scary movies during functional magnetic resonance imaging. Threat versus neutral scenes induced increased activation in anterior cingulate cortex, insula, thalamus, and visual areas. Movie-induced anxiety correlated positively with activation in dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, indicating a role for this area in the subjective experience of being scared. Sensation seeking-scores correlated positively with brain activation to threat versus neutral scenes in visual areas and in thalamus and anterior insula, i.e. regions involved in the induction and representation of arousal states. For the insula and thalamus, these outcomes were partly due to an inverse relation between sensation seeking scores and brain activation during neutral film clips. These results support models predicting cerebral hypoactivation in high sensation seekers during neutral stimulation, which may be compensated by more intense sensations such as watching scary movies.
authors: Department of Biological and Clinical Psychology, Friedrich-Schiller-University of Jena, Germany. straube@biopsy.uni-jena.de
authors: Thomas
authors: T
authors: Straube
authors: Sandra
authors: S
authors: Preissler
authors: Judith
authors: J
authors: Lipka
authors: Johannes
authors: J
authors: Hewig
authors: Hans-Joachim
authors: HJ
authors: Mentzel
authors: Wolfgang H R
authors: WH
authors: Miltner
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001007:Anxiety / Q000503:physiopathology*; D001143:Arousal / Q000502:physiology*; D001921:Brain / Q000033:anatomy & histology / Q000502:physiology*; D001931:Brain Mapping; D002540:Cerebral Cortex / Q000033:anatomy & histology / Q000502:physiology; D005071:Evoked Potentials / Q000502:physiology; D005106:Exploratory Behavior / Q000502:physiology*; D005239:Fear / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D007839:Functional Laterality / Q000502:physiology; D006179:Gyrus Cinguli / Q000033:anatomy & histology / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D009040:Motion Pictures; D009415:Nerve Net / Q000033:anatomy & histology / Q000502:physiology*; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D017397:Prefrontal Cortex / Q000033:anatomy & histology / Q000502:physiology; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D013788:Thalamus / Q000033:anatomy & histology / Q000502:physiology; D014793:Visual Cortex / Q000033:anatomy & histology / Q000502:physiology; D055815:Young Adult