What is it about?
When we feel anxious, our bodies react physically- our hearts race, our palms get sweaty, or we might struggle to catch our breath. This is called somatic anxiety. People with higher somatic anxiety tend to stay more alert, shifting their attention to important things happening around them. But how does this affect how their brains respond to real-life-like situations, like watching a movie? To explore this, we used brain imaging data (fMRI) from the Naturalistic Neuroimaging Database. We wanted to understand whether people with higher somatic anxiety showed specific patterns of brain activity- particularly in areas involved in shifting attention and focus. We discovered that people with higher somatic anxiety did, as predicted, show more similar brain activity in areas involved in shifting attention and focus. However, this was not limited to areas involved in attention- many areas of the brains were more in sync in people with higher somatic anxiety.
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Why is it important?
Our results suggest that people with higher somatic anxiety have brains that are more in tune with each other, responding to their surroundings in similar ways. This is because higher somatic anxiety may make the brain work in a more connected and coordinated way. For the everyday person, these results highlight that somatic anxiety may play a role in enhancing vigilance and threat detection. This heightened state of alertness may help with redirecting focus to important events, even in complex, real-life-like scenarios. For researchers studying how the brain processes realistic experiences, like watching movies, this is an important reminder: levels of somatic anxiety can significantly shape brain responses.
Perspectives
Understanding how our personalities shape the way we experience the world is essential, especially when considering extremely prevalent traits like anxiety. Anxiety isn’t just an emotional response; it’s a trait that influences how we perceive and process everything around us, from our interactions with others to how we respond to our environment. This research invites us to think more deeply about how anxiety impacts brain function and, in turn, how personality traits influence our daily lives in ways we may not be fully aware of. Ultimately, I hope this article sparks a shift in how we think about mental health, encouraging a focus on the foundational personality traits that shape our experiences.
Chelsea Ekstrand
University of Lethbridge
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Trait-level somatic anxiety modulates functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) neural synchrony to naturalistic stimuli., Behavioral Neuroscience, December 2024, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/bne0000615.
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