ArticleFrontiers in human neuroscience2013
The impact of anxiety upon cognition: perspectives from human threat of shock studies.
Article in Frontiers in human neuroscience, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 265 papers, 7 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
265 citing papers in PubMed, 7 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 593 citations in OpenAlex.
- Mnemonic Discrimination Performance in Anxiety and Depression: A Systematic Review.Depression and anxiety · 2026Pooled it
- Cognitive rehabilitation in anxiety disorders: a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials.Scientific reports · 2025Pooled it
- Association between anxiety disorders and medication adherence in patients with cardiovascular disease: a systematic review and meta-analysis of observational studies.BMC psychiatry · 2025Pooled it
- Mindfulness to improve the mental health of university students. A systematic review and meta-analysis.Frontiers in public health · 2023Pooled it
- Psychiatric Sequelae Following Whiplash Injury: A Systematic Review.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2022Pooled it
- The Overlapping Neurobiology of Induced and Pathological Anxiety: A Meta-Analysis of Functional Neural Activation.The American journal of psychiatry · 2021Pooled it
- The Migraine-Anxiety Comorbidity Among Migraineurs: A Systematic Review.Frontiers in neurology · 2020Pooled it
- Stress and Anxiety Among Elite Volleyball Referees While Officiating.Journal of sports science & medicine · 2025Trial
- Placebo Effects Are Small on Average in the 7.5% CO2 Inhalational Model of Generalized Anxiety.The international journal of neuropsychopharmacology · 2024Trial
- Methylphenidate modulates interactions of anxiety with cognition.Translational psychiatry · 2021Trial
- Acute anxiety and autonomic arousal induced by COTranslational psychiatry · 2019Trial
- Penny for your thoughts: A review and proposed model of socioeconomic status, working memory and worry.The British journal of developmental psychology · 2026Review
- Attentional processing in individual anxiety: Electrocortical correlates of threat- and safety-related declarative memory formation.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Depression and anxiety modify cognitive concerns associated with amyloid and early clinical impairment.Neuropsychology · 2026Article
- Severe PTSD symptoms magnify episodic memory-encoding deficits and amygdala-ACC attenuation during unpredictable threat in male combat veterans.Molecular psychiatry · 2026Article
- The Effects of Anxiety and Cognitive Load on Freezing of Gait in Parkinson's Disease.The European journal of neuroscience · 2026Article
- The functional neurobiology of dispositions towards negative emotions.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Co-Designing a Digital Brain Health Intervention for Chinese Older Adults: A User-Centred Approach.Australasian journal on ageing · 2026Article
- Anxiety makes time pass quicker: neural correlates.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Article
- Linking subjective experience of anxiety to brain function using natural language processing.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Article
205 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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4 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
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Abstract
Anxiety disorders constitute a sizeable worldwide health burden with profound social and economic consequences. The symptoms are wide-ranging; from hyperarousal to difficulties with concentrating. This latter effect falls under the broad category of altered cognitive performance which is the focus of this review. Specifically, we examine the interaction between anxiety and cognition focusing on the translational threat of unpredictable shock paradigm; a method previously used to characterize emotional responses and defensive mechanisms that is now emerging as valuable tool for examining the interaction between anxiety and cognition. In particular, we compare the impact of threat of shock on cognition in humans to that of pathological anxiety disorders. We highlight that both threat of shock and anxiety disorders promote mechanisms associated with harm avoidance across multiple levels of cognition (from perception to attention to learning and executive function)-a "hot" cognitive function which can be both adaptive and maladaptive depending upon the circumstances. This mechanism comes at a cost to other functions such as working memory, but leaves some functions, such as planning, unperturbed. We also highlight a number of cognitive effects that differ across anxiety disorders and threat of shock. These discrepant effects are largely seen in "cold" cognitive functions involving control mechanisms and may reveal boundaries between adaptive (e.g., response to threat) and maladaptive (e.g., pathological) anxiety. We conclude by raising a number of unresolved questions regarding the role of anxiety in cognition that may provide fruitful avenues for future research.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.