title: Spatiotemporal dissociation of brain activity underlying threat and reward in social anxiety disorder.
abstract: Social anxiety disorder (SAD) involves abnormalities in social motivation, which may be independent of well-documented differences in fear and arousal systems. Yet, the neurobiology underlying motivational difficulties in SAD is not well understood. The aim of the current study was to spatiotemporally dissociate reward circuitry dysfunction from alterations in fear and arousal-related neural activity during anticipation and notification of social and non-social reward and punishment. During fMRI acquisition, non-depressed adults with social anxiety disorder (SAD; N = 21) and age-, sex- and IQ-matched control subjects (N = 22) completed eight runs of an incentive delay task, alternating between social and monetary outcomes and interleaved in alternating order between gain and loss outcomes. Adults with SAD demonstrated significantly reduced neural activity in ventral striatum during the anticipation of positive but not negative social outcomes. No differences between the SAD and control groups were observed during anticipation of monetary gain or loss outcomes or during anticipation of negative social images. However, consistent with previous work, the SAD group demonstrated amygdala hyper-activity upon notification of negative social outcomes. Degraded anticipatory processing in bilateral ventral striatum in SAD was constrained exclusively to anticipation of positive social information and dissociable from the effects of negative social outcomes previously observed in the amygdala. Alterations in anticipation-related neural signals may represent a promising target for treatment that is not addressed by available evidence-based interventions, which focus primarily on fear extinction and habituation processes.
authors: Department of Psychology, Virginia Tech., 109 Williams Hall, MC0436 Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA.
authors: John
authors: J
authors: A Richey
authors: Department of Psychology, Virginia Tech., 109 Williams Hall, MC0436 Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA.
authors: Merage
authors: M
authors: Ghane
authors: Department of Psychology, Virginia Tech., 109 Williams Hall, MC0436 Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA.
authors: Andrew
authors: A
authors: Valdespino
authors: Department of Psychology, Virginia Tech., 109 Williams Hall, MC0436 Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA.
authors: Marika C
authors: MC
authors: Coffman
authors: Department of Psychology, Virginia Tech., 109 Williams Hall, MC0436 Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA.
authors: Marlene V
authors: MV
authors: Strege
authors: Department of Psychology, Virginia Tech., 109 Williams Hall, MC0436 Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA.|Virginia Tech Child Study Center, Suite 207, Turner St, Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA.
authors: Susan W
authors: SW
authors: White
authors: Department of Psychology, Virginia Tech., 109 Williams Hall, MC0436 Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA.|Virginia Tech Child Study Center, Suite 207, Turner St, Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA.
authors: Thomas H
authors: TH
authors: Ollendick
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001143:Arousal / Q000502:physiology; D001921:Brain / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging*; D001931:Brain Mapping / Q000379:methods; D005239:Fear / Q000502:physiology / Q000523:psychology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging / Q000379:methods; D008297:Male; D009042:Motivation; D000072861:Phobia, Social / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging* / Q000523:psychology; D011678:Punishment / Q000523:psychology; D012201:Reward; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: fMRI; monetary incentive delay; nucleus accumbens; reward; social anxiety disorder; threat