Quantifying Neural Signatures of Multi-step Avoidance Behavior in Anxiety
Emory University
Summary
This study aims to learn more about avoidance behavior in people with anxiety, using mathematical models of decision-making processes and decoded neural signals of threat imminence. Researchers are investigating anxiety-related behavior and brain function in people with and without anxiety. Investigators are also looking at how behavior and brain function during tasks in the lab relate to avoidance in their daily lives. The investigators will also test whether changing how people avoid things in a behavioral task affects how people avoid things in their everyday life.
Description
Current learning theories of anxiety propose that disrupted fear learning underlie anxiety disorders. This suggests that treatments like exposure therapy work by changing learned threat values. However, empirical data does not support these models where changes in fear conditioning lead to symptom changes and later reductions of avoidance behavior. Instead, recent findings suggest that avoidance behavior can be a mechanism on its own, and reductions in avoidance behavior both precede and predict improvements in anxiety symptoms. To target avoidance, a working theory of the processes underlying…
Eligibility
- Age range
- 22–55 years
- Sex
- All
- Healthy volunteers
- Yes
Inclusion Criteria: * Ability to comprehend written and spoken English * Ability to provide informed consent * Estimated intelligence quotient (IQ) \>70. * Clinically significant anxiety symptoms (scoring above clinical cutoff on at least one Inventory of Depression and Anxiety Symptoms (IDAS) anxiety-related subscale and/or OASIS total) * Significant anxiety-related avoidance (scoring 2 or above on a 0-4 scale, indicating at least "occasional" avoidance) on the avoidance-related question on the Overall Anxiety Severity and Impairment Scale (OASIS) * Functional impairment, defined as at least…
Interventions
- BehavioralBehavioral Tasks with imaging
Participants will complete the MDP task only during 3 separate fMRI scanning sessions. After each session, they will complete one week of ambulatory assessment of real-world avoidance behavior (self-reported avoidance behavior) via Emory Qualtrics surveys. In a fourth scanning session, the brain signature of threat imminence constructed in the first set of participants (Aim 1) will be used to predict and modify avoidance behavior (on the task and in a further week of ambulatory assessment of avoidance) in these participants. During their last visit, the behavioral task will be modified to decrease the availability of avoidance choices; subsequent effects on EMA and passive sensing measures will be assessed.
Locations (2)
- Emory CollegeAtlanta, Georgia
- Facility for Education and Research in Neuroscience (FERN)Atlanta, Georgia