Improving Emotion Control in Social Anxiety
The findings, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, demonstrate that coordinating activity between two brain regions improves people's ability to override their automatic responses to social threats.
Participants performed a task in which they viewed happy and angry faces and had to either pull a joystick towards themselves or push it away. Sometimes, the instructions deliberately went against their automatic tendencies. “We are interested in how people control their automatic action tendencies, especially in social and emotional contexts,” says PhD candidate Mariana Carneiro de Andrade. “If you see an angry person, your automatic tendency might be to walk away. But in daily life, it is often important to overcome that impulse and engage with the situation instead.”
Brain stimulation intervention
In this new study, the researchers tested approximately 50 people with elevated levels of social anxiety. “When we use this neuromodulatory intervention, people get better at controlling their automatic tendencies,” says Carneiro de Andrade. “And it seems to work especially well for people who are more anxious.” The stimulation itself follows what the brain already does. Researchers place two electrodes on the scalp and apply an alternating current of around one milliamp, barely enough to feel something on the skin.
“It’s not about stimulating a single brain region,” explains Sjoerd Meijer, first author of the study and currently postdoc at University of Oxford. “One area keeps the goal in mind: ‘I need to approach’ while the other performs the action. We are trying to make the communication between those areas easier.”
According to Meijer, this focus on communication between brain regions makes the approach particularly innovative. “There aren’t many studies showing that you can improve the communication between two brain areas in this way,” he says.
Step towards clinical applications
The publication is also an important step towards clinical applications. The team is currently analysing data from the SpeakUp!2.0 project, in which socially anxious patients receive the same neuromodulatory intervention while giving an impromptu speech in front of an audience in the context of exposure.
“The biggest barrier for therapy is avoidance,” says Meijer. “If you keep looking away from what you fear, you never learn that it is actually safe.” Carneiro de Andrade adds: “What we expect is often much worse than reality. By confronting our fears, we can learn that we’ll probably be fine.”