Neural correlates of emotional processing in panic disorder

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Psychiatry
• Cognitive Psychology

Background:

• Emotional processing deficits are central to anxiety models, particularly panic disorder (PD).
• Neuroimaging reveals aberrant neural function in PD during emotional tasks, but non-conscious processing effects remain unclear.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate neural activation and functional connectivity differences in PD patients versus healthy controls (HC).
• To compare brain responses during subliminal and supraliminal emotional facial expression processing.

Main Methods:

• Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used in 22 PD and 33 HC participants.
• Participants viewed happy, sad, neutral, fear, anger, and disgust facial expressions under subliminal and supraliminal conditions.
• Voxelwise region of interest (ROI) analyses were conducted with FWE-corrected p < 0.05.

Main Results:

• PD patients showed reduced pregenual anterior cingulate cortex (pgACC) activation to subliminal happy and sad faces.
• Lower pgACC-right amygdala connectivity was observed in PD during subliminal sad and fear processing.
• PD patients exhibited decreased right cerebellum activity during supraliminal emotional facial expression viewing.

Conclusions:

• Aberrant neural processing occurs in PD during both conscious and non-conscious emotional stimulus processing.
• Findings suggest impaired recruitment of implicit regulatory networks in PD.
• Deficits in regulatory connections between inhibitory and emotional networks may occur early in PD processing of negative states.