TY  - JOUR
A1  - Boehme, Stephanie
A1  - Ritter, Viktoria
A1  - Tefikow, Susan
A1  - Stangier, Ulrich
A1  - Strauss, Bernhard
A1  - Miltner, Wolfgang H. R.
A1  - Straube, Thomas
T1  - Neural correlates of emotional interference in social anxiety disorder
JF  - PLoS ONE
N2  - Disorder-relevant but task-unrelated stimuli impair cognitive performance in social anxiety disorder (SAD); however, time course and neural correlates of emotional interference are unknown. The present study investigated time course and neural basis of emotional interference in SAD using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Patients with SAD and healthy controls performed an emotional stroop task which allowed examining interference effects on the current and the succeeding trial. Reaction time data showed an emotional interference effect in the current trial, but not the succeeding trial, specifically in SAD. FMRI data showed greater activation in the left amygdala, bilateral insula, medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), and left opercular part of the inferior frontal gyrus during emotional interference of the current trial in SAD patients. Furthermore, we found a positive correlation between patients' interference scores and activation in the mPFC, dorsal ACC and left angular/supramarginal gyrus. Taken together, results indicate a network of brain regions comprising amygdala, insula, mPFC, ACC, and areas strongly involved in language processing during the processing of task-unrelated threat in SAD. However, specifically the activation in mPFC, dorsal ACC, and left angular/supramarginal gyrus is associated with the strength of the interference effect, suggesting a cognitive network model of attentional bias in SAD. This probably comprises exceeded allocation of attentional resources to disorder-related information of the presented stimuli and increased self-referential and semantic processing of threat words in SAD.
KW  - threat-related stimuli
KW  - prefrontal cortex
KW  - stroop interference
KW  - processing bias
KW  - phobia
KW  - single subject
KW  - cognitive control
KW  - amygdala response
KW  - cytoarchitectonic maps
KW  - anterior cingulate cortex
Y1  - 2015
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-148534
VL  - 10
IS  - 6
ER  -