A new study may provide some insight into why some people are more prone to anxiety than others, as researchers have found that people diagnosed with anxiety are more likely to believe in over-generalizations.
The new findings reveal that people diagnosed with anxiety are significantly less capable of distinguishing safe stimuli from dangerous stimuli.
"We show that in patients with anxiety, emotional experience induces plasticity in brain circuits that lasts after the experience is over," co-study author Rony Paz of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel said in a university release. "Such plastic changes occur in primary circuits, and these later mediate the response to new stimuli. The result is an inability to discriminate between the experience of the original stimulus and that of a new, similar stimulus. Therefore anxiety patients respond emotionally to the new stimuli as well and exhibit anxiety symptoms even in apparently irrelevant situations. They cannot control this response: it is a perceptual inability to discriminate."
The study involved patients who were trained to associate three distinct tones with one of three different results: money gain, money loss, or no consequence. The research team then played a variety of new tones and tested participants' ability to identify tones from the first part of the study, and participants were rewarded with money if they were able to correctly identify the tones.
Paz and his team found that people diagnosed with anxiety were significantly more likely to make mistakes during test by identifying a new tone as one they had heard earlier in the experiment. They said that the finding held true even after accounting for hearing and learning abilities.
The team noted that the latest findings suggest people with anxiety were more likely to overgeneralize because they perceived tones heard in the first part of the study, which were linked to an emotional experience like winning or losing money, differently than healthy participants.
They also said that the latest findings may explain why certain people are more likely to develop anxiety disorders.
"Anxiety traits can be completely normal; there is evidence that they benefitted us in our evolutionary past. Yet an emotional event, sometimes even a minor one, can induce brain changes that can potentially lead to full-blown anxiety," Paz concluded.
The findings were published in the March 3 issue of the journal Current Biology.
