ArticleDepression and anxiety2017
Anxiety Patients Show Reduced Working Memory Related dlPFC Activation During Safety and Threat.
Article in Depression and anxiety, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 58 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
58 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Cognitive rehabilitation in anxiety disorders: a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials.Scientific reports · 2025Pooled it
- Verbal and Visuospatial Working Memory Performance During the COHuman psychopharmacology · 2026Trial
- Methylphenidate modulates interactions of anxiety with cognition.Translational psychiatry · 2021Trial
- Parent-Child Neural Dynamics during a Stressful Task: Probing Associations with Temperament and Anxiety.Clinical psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2026Article
- Neurodevelopmental impacts of unique postnatal adversity subgroups in children with prenatal alcohol exposure.Child neuropsychology : a journal on normal and abnormal development in childhood and adolescence · 2026Article
- The impact of psychological distress on working memory during COVID-19 by disentangling cognitive deficits from emotional burden.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- The association between childhood maltreatment and neural functioning during a working memory task in adults with internalizing disorders.Brain imaging and behavior · 2026Article
- Memory in Psychiatric Disorders: A Review.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Dual process impairments in reinforcement learning and working memory systems underlie learning deficits in physiological anxiety.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- An Exploratory Study on the Regulatory Effect of Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response on Anxiety: Evidence From Functional Near-Infrared Brain Imaging Technology.The European journal of neuroscience · 2025Article
- Neural mechanisms underlying implicit emotion regulation deficit in relational and nonrelational trauma PTSD: Insights from the Nested Hierarchical Model of Self.Psychological medicine · 2025Article
- Digital measures of activity and motivation impact depression and anxiety in the real world.NPJ digital medicine · 2025Article
- Brain activity during a public-speaking situation in virtual reality in patients with irritable bowel syndrome and functional dyspepsia.Journal of gastroenterology · 2025Article
- Neural circuit basis of pathological anxiety.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2025Review
- Comparing reliability-based measures of functional connectivity between movie and rest: An ROI-based approach.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Neuroanatomical prediction of individual anxiety problems level using machine learning models: A population-based cohort study of young adults.Neurobiology of stress · 2025Article
- Theta power reduction and theta-gamma coupling desynchronization are associated with working memory interference and anxiety symptoms in panic disorder: a retrospective study.BMC psychiatry · 2024Article
- Orbitofrontal and Prelimbic Cortices Serve Complementary Roles in Adapting Reward Seeking to Learned Anxiety.Biological psychiatry · 2024Article
- The maintenance of complex visual scenes in working memory may require activation of working memory manipulation circuits in the dlPFC: a preliminary report.Mental health science · 2024Article
- Relationships between depression, anxiety, and motivation in the real-world: Effects of physical activity and screentime.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundAnxiety patients exhibit deficits in cognitive tasks that require prefrontal control of attention, including those that tap working memory (WM). However, it is unclear whether these deficits reflect threat-related processes or symptoms of the disorder. Here, we distinguish between these hypotheses by determining the effect of shock threat versus safety on the neural substrates of WM performance in anxiety patients and healthy controls.
methodsPatients, diagnosed with generalized and/or social anxiety disorder, and controls performed blocks of an N-back WM task during periods of safety and threat of shock. We recorded blood-oxygen-level dependent (BOLD) activity during the task, and investigated the effect of clinical anxiety (patients vs. controls) and threat on WM load-related BOLD activation.
resultsBehaviorally, patients showed an overall impairment in both accuracy and reaction time compared to controls, independent of threat. At the neural level, patients showed less WM load-related activation in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a region critical for cognitive control. In addition, patients showed less WM load-related deactivation in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate cortex, which are regions of the default mode network. Most importantly, these effects were not modulated by threat.
conclusionsThis work suggests that the cognitive deficits seen in anxiety patients may represent a key component of clinical anxiety, rather than a consequence of threat.
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