Generally, people with a tendency to anxiety do not take too many risks, and try to choose the safe way. but a study they carried out scientists of the Weizmann Institute of Science, and was recently published in the scientific journal Current Biology, suggests that it may not be a matter of choice at all, but of a fundamental difference in the way these people perceive the environment. The new study showed that people suffering from anxiety have a harder time distinguishing between a neutral stimulus and a stimulus of a positive or negative nature. In other words, when it comes to emotional experiences, these people exhibit symptoms of a phenomenon called "overgeneralization". The research was led by (then) research student Dr. Ofir Laufer, from the research group of Prof. Roni Paz from the Department of Neurobiology at the Weizmann Institute of Science, who worked in collaboration with psychiatrist Dr. David Israeli.
"We showed that test subjects suffering from anxiety, who are exposed to emotional experiences, react through certain changes in the brain circuits, which exist long after the end of the experience itself," says Prof. Paz. "These changes occur in central circuits in the brain, which are responsible for mediating the response to a new stimulus, and they may cause an inability to distinguish between the old stimulus and the new stimuli, which are similar to it. Therefore, people prone to anxiety react emotionally to new stimuli, and may be attacked by anxiety even in situations that are not related to the feeling of anxiety that resulted from a previous experience. They do not control this response, as it stems from a unique perception, which does not allow them to distinguish between different types of stimuli."
As part of the study, the scientists made people prone to anxiety associate three sounds with three different outcomes: financial loss, financial gain, or no result. After that, the subjects listened to 15 different sounds, and were asked if they were familiar to them. A correct answer earned them a payment. The scientists discovered that those prone to anxiety generally made more mistakes in identifying sounds compared to subjects in the control group, and that they were often more inclined to associate a sound they had not heard before with a familiar sound. No connection was found between the personal learning and listening abilities of the participants in the study and the differences between the two groups.
The scientists used a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) system, and placed the activity mapping in the brains of the anxiety-prone subjects against the brain mapping of the subjects in the control group. Thus, significant differences between them were revealed, mainly in the amygdala, the same area of the brain associated with fear and anxiety, but also in other central sensing areas. These findings strengthened the scientists' hypothesis that past emotional experiences can cause changes in perception. "Characteristics of anxiety may be completely normal, and perhaps even beneficial from an evolutionary point of view," says Prof. Paz. "However, an emotional experience, however brief, especially if it is negative, may cause changes in the brain that can increase the tendency to anxiety."
One response
It was known at the level of grandmothers and now we simply give it empirical validity and it is not difficult to give it theoretical validity either. Each person has threshold values of various parameters that, when crossed, undergo a significant change (phase shift). People who went through a holocaust or a private holocaust, including rape experiences and much, much less job loss, are not the same people.