ArticleNeuroImage2023
Age-related reduction in trait anxiety: Behavioral and neural evidence of automaticity in negative facial emotion processing.
Article in NeuroImage, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed, 23 citations in OpenAlex.
- Perturbed Inflammatory, Proliferation, Regulatory, And Neurodegeneration Signaling Pathways Are Associated With Trait Anxiety In Cancer Survivors.Research square · 2026Article
- Alcohol misuse and negative emotion processing in neurotypical drinkers: Sex differences in behavioral and neural markers.Psychiatry research. Neuroimaging · 2026Article
- Aging effects on emotionality, cognition and brain mononuclear cells in Sprague-Dawley rats of both sexes.npj aging · 2026Article
- Sleep dependent autonomic correlates of affect and arousal in younger and older adults.Sleep advances : a journal of the Sleep Research Society · 2026Article
- The effects of polygenic risks for alcohol misuse on negative emotion processing in young adult binge drinkers.Translational psychiatry · 2025Article
- Profilin 1 controls a microglial cytoskeleton checkpoint to prevent senescence and premature synaptic decline.Journal of neuroinflammation · 2025Article
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- Aging and the neuropsychiatry of multiple sclerosis: a cross-sectional study.Journal of neurology · 2025Article
- Prevalence of non-communicable disease and the associated factors among healthcare workers in Qatar.BMC primary care · 2025Article
- Network and state specificity in connectivity-based predictions of individual behavior.Human brain mapping · 2024Article
- Sex differences in the effects of individual anxiety state on regional responses to negative emotional scenes.Biology of sex differences · 2024Article
- Age-related differences in affective behaviors in mice: possible role of prefrontal cortical-hippocampal functional connectivity and metabolomic profiles.Frontiers in aging neuroscience · 2024Article
- Age-related reduction in anxiety and neural encoding of negative emotional memory.Frontiers in aging neuroscience · 2024Article
- Sex differences in the effects of trait anxiety and age on resting-state functional connectivities of the amygdala.Journal of affective disorders reports · 2023Article
- Network and State Specificity in Connectivity-Based Predictions of Individual Behavior.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2023Article
- Polygenic risk for depression and resting-state functional connectivity of subgenual anterior cingulate cortex in young adults.Journal of psychiatry & neuroscience : JPNArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Trait anxiety diminishes with age, which may result from age-related decline in registering salient emotional stimuli and/or enhancement in emotion regulation. We tested the hypotheses in 88 adults 21 to 85 years of age and studied with fMRI of the Hariri task. Age-related decline in stimulus registration would manifest in delayed reaction time (RT) and diminished saliency circuit activity in response to emotional vs. neutral stimuli. Enhanced control of negative emotions would manifest in diminished limbic/emotional circuit and higher prefrontal cortical (PFC) responses to negative emotion. The results showed that anxiety was negatively correlated with age. Age was associated with faster RT and diminished activation of the medial PFC, in the area of the dorsal and rostral anterior cingulate cortex (dACC/rACC) - a hub of the saliency circuit - during matching of negative but not positive vs. neutral emotional faces. A slope test confirmed the differences in the regressions. Further, age was not associated with activation of the PFC in whole-brain regression or in region-of-interest analysis of the dorsolateral PFC, an area identified from meta-analyses of the emotion regulation literature. Together, the findings fail to support either hypothesis; rather, the findings suggest age-related automaticity in processing negative emotions as a potential mechanism of diminished anxiety. Automaticity results in faster RT and diminished anterior cingulate activity in response to negative but not positive emotional stimuli. In support, analyses of psychophysiological interaction demonstrated higher dACC/rACC connectivity with the default mode network, which has been implicated in automaticity in information processing. As age increased, individuals demonstrated faster RT with higher connectivity during matching of negative vs. neutral images. Automaticity in negative emotion processing needs to be investigated as a mechanism of age-related reduction in anxiety.
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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.