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Updated: Oct 6, 2025

Using the Threat Probability Task to Assess Anxiety and Fear During Uncertain and Certain Threat
Published on: September 12, 2014
Neural dynamics and coupling underlying uncertain anticipatory conflicts in anxious individuals
Shangfeng Han1, Jie Hu2, Jie Gao2
1Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Affective and Social Neuroscience, Center for Brain Disorders and Cognitive Sciences, School of Psychology, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen 518060, China.
Abstract:
Anticipation plays an important role in cognitive control and related psychiatric disorders such as anxiety. However, anticipation processing of conflicts in anxious individuals and the underlying brain mechanisms remain unknown. Using a newly designed cue-flanker task, we observed faster responses to congruent flankers with certain cues in individuals with high trait anxiety (HTA) than those with low trait anxiety (LTA). Microstate analyses revealed less occurrence of cue-evoked microstates in HTA than LTA. Importantly, the less occurrence of specific state was correlated to the larger flanker effect in HTA, suggesting that deficient conflict control in anxiety is associated with abnormal vigilance-related dynamic processing during anticipation. Delta-beta coupling at anticipation stage mediated the association between the level of anxiety and reaction time in conflict processing with uncertain cues in HTA, suggesting the mediatory role of delta-beta coupling in anticipatory conflict processing of anxious individuals. These results suggest hyperactive anticipatory processing of goal-relevant information for the upcoming conflict in anxious individuals. Our findings provide neurocognitive evidence for altered anticipatory cognitive control in anxious individuals and have important implications for diagnosis and treatment of anxiety-related disorders.
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