Altered prefrontal effective connectivity during emotion regulation in social anxiety disorder

Emotion regulation relies on the interplay between prefrontal and limbic brain regions, with prefrontal regions implicated in the top-down modulation of the amygdala. In social anxiety disorder, disruptions in these networks have been reported, but most studies used undirected functional connectivity.

Dynamic causal modelling (DCM) was used to assess effective (i.e. directed) connectivity differences during emotion processing and regulation in individuals with social anxiety disorder compared with healthy controls.

A total of 102 participants (61 with social anxiety disorder, 41 healthy controls) performed a functional magnetic resonance imaging emotion regulation task under two conditions: viewing neutral/negative faces, and downregulating emotions using a self-chosen strategy. DCM was applied to model effective connectivity among the amygdala and key prefrontal regions. Connectivity patterns were characterised in healthy controls, and group comparisons tested how social anxiety disorder differed from this baseline model using parametric empirical Bayes. Leave-one-out cross-validation (LOOCV) evaluated whether connectivity differences predicted diagnostic group, symptom severity and emotion regulation difficulties.

In healthy controls, observation of negative faces was characterised by reciprocal influences between the amygdala and prefrontal cortex (PFC), including increased amygdala-to-ventromedial PFC (vmPFC) connectivity and inhibitory vmPFC-to-amygdala connectivity. During emotion regulation, healthy controls showed negative modulation from the amygdala to all prefrontal regions. Patients with social anxiety disorder did not differ from controls in amygdala-prefrontal connectivity; their alterations were confined to prefrontal circuits, with inhibitory connectivity from the pre-supplementary motor area (preSMA) to dorsolateral PFC during observation and bidirectional excitatory connectivity between the preSMA and vmPFC during regulation. LOOCV indicated that connectivity differences predicted diagnostic group.

The results support the idea that emotion processing and regulation influence connectivity between prefrontal areas and the amygdala in a complex, feedback-driven manner. Our findings suggest that aberrant emotion regulation in social anxiety disorder appears to be more closely linked to differences in intra-prefrontal circuits than deficits in amygdala-prefrontal connectivity.