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Background: Emotional dysfunction is a core feature of many mental disorders. Working memory training (WM-T) is promising to improve emotion regulation and reduce internalizing symptoms (anxiety and depressive symptoms), but the results are mixed. Therefore, we conducted meta-analyses to clarify these mixed results., Methods: We searched Web of Science, PubMed, ScienceDirect, and EBSCO to identify relevant studies and screened the references. The effect size was calculated using Hedges' g. Three-level, random-effects models were run using metafor in R., Results: The current study included 44 articles, of which 29 were involved with emotion regulation, and 30 were involved with internalizing symptoms. The results showed that WM-T could yield emotional benefits, but the benefits were confined to enhancing explicit emotional regulation capacity and reducing anxiety symptoms. For the meta-analysis regarding the effect of WM-T on emotion regulation, there was no significant moderator. For the meta-analysis regarding the effect of WM-T on internalizing symptoms, the emotional valence of the material and control group were statistically significant moderators., Conclusion: WM-T could yield certain emotional effects, but only to improve explicit emotion regulation capacity and reduce anxiety symptoms. In addition, some measures could enhance the effect, such as targeting specific populations, increasing the number of training sessions (≥15) or duration (>450 minutes), using negative material, and using n-back training tasks., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2024 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

The anticipation of oncoming threats is emotionally challenging and related to anxiety. The current study aimed to investigate the neural regulatory processes during the anticipatory preparations in stressful situations in relation to trait anxiety, especially in an uncertainty-related stressful situation. To this end, we measured within-subjects delta-beta amplitude-amplitude correlation (AAC) and phase-amplitude coupling (PAC) with electroencephalography using a well-defined stress-inducing paradigm in 28 high-trait-anxiety (HTA) and 29 low-trait-anxiety (LTA) college students. Specifically, a threat probability task was conducted, where participants anticipated the future stimuli under the uncertain (i.e., an average of 50% electric shocks), certain (i.e., 100% electric shocks) and no threat conditions, as well as a resting state task. Results showed a generally larger delta-beta AAC in the LTA group relative to the HTA group across conditions, supporting the hypothesis that delta-beta AAC reflects the efficiency of stress regulation and trait anxiety could compromise this adaptive regulatory activity. Furthermore, a larger delta-beta PAC was found under the uncertain threat condition relative to the no threat condition, indicating the sensitivity of delta-beta PAC in reflecting state anxiety. These findings indicate that while delta-beta AAC is more related to trait anxiety and could distinguish between high and low trait anxiety irrespective of conditions, delta-beta PAC is more related to state anxiety and is sensitive enough to detect the uncertainty-related anxious state., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2024 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Background: Parenting is a common and potent environmental factor influencing adolescent anxiety. Yet, the underlying neurobiological susceptibility signatures remain elusive. Here, we used a longitudinal twin neuroimaging study to investigate the brain network integration and its heritable relation to underpin the neural differential susceptibility of adolescent anxiety to parenting environments., Methods: 216 twins from the Beijing Twin Study completed the parenting and anxiety assessments and fMRI scanning. We first identified the brain network integration involved in the influences of parenting at age 12 on anxiety symptoms at age 15. We then estimated to what extent heritable sensitive factors are responsible for the susceptibility of brain network integration., Results: Consistent with the differential susceptibility theory, the results showed that hypo-connectivity within the central executive network amplified the impact of maternal hostility on anxiety symptoms. A high anti-correlation between the anterior salience and default mode networks played a similar modulatory role in the susceptibility of adolescent anxiety to paternal hostility. Genetic influences (21.18%) were observed for the connectivity pattern in the central executive network., Conclusions: Brain network integration served as a promising neurobiological signature of the differential susceptibility to adolescent anxiety. Our findings deepen the understanding of the neural sensitivity in the developing brain and can inform early identification and personalized interventions for adolescents at risk of anxiety disorders.

Rumination is an important etiological factor of anxiety pathology, with its mechanism related to the deficit of working memory. The current study examined whether working memory training (WM-T) and emotional working memory training (EWM-T) could reduce rumination in anxious individuals. The participants with high trait anxiety underwent 21 days of mobile applications-based WM-T (n = 34), EWM-T (n = 36) or placebo control (n = 36), with questionnaires, cognitive tasks, and resting electroencephalogram (EEG) as the pre-post-test indicators. The results revealed that two training groups obtained comparable operation span increases (WM-T: d = 0.53; EWM-T: d = 0.65), updating improvement (WM-T: d = 0.43; EWM-T: d = 0.60) and shifting improvement (WM-T: d = 0.49; EWM-T: d = 0.72). Furthermore, compared to the control group, the EWM-T showed significant self-reported rumination reduction (d = 0.69), increased inhibition ability (d = 0.72), as well as modification of resting EEG microstate C parameters (Duration C: d = 0.42, Coverage C: d = 0.39), which were closely related to rumination level (r ~ 0.4). The WM-T group also showed the potential to reduced self-reported rumination (d = 0.45), but with the absence of the observable inhibition improvement and resting EEG changes. The correlation analysis suggested that the emotional benefits of WM-T depending more on improved updating and shifting, and that of EWM-T depending more on improved inhibition ability. The advantage to add emotional distractions into general working memory training for targeting rumination related anxiety has been discussed., (Copyright © 2020. Published by Elsevier Inc.)

Attention bias modification (ABM) is a potential intervention in relieving social anxiety symptoms, while its underlying neural mechanisms are not yet understood. The current study included 63 college students with social anxiety. Participants were assigned to the attention modification program (AMP, n = 20), the attention control condition (ACC, n = 20) and the passive waiting group (PW, n = 23). Questionnaires and the emotional Stroop task with EEG recordings were used to assess whether and how the 4-week ABM period affected emotional symptoms and specific emotional processing. Results showed that the two training groups (AMP and ACC) produced comparable emotional improvements and both showed a decrease in negative bias compared with the PW group. The ERP results indicated that despite no significant ERP changes in the PW group, the ACC group exhibited a greater N1, whereas the AMP group exhibited a reduced VPP at the post-test stage compared to the pre-test stage. Besides, both training groups showed a similar late positive potential (LPP) reduction. Notably, the reduction in LPP was positively correlated with behavioral and symptom improvement. Thus, manipulations unique to ABM (face-target contingency) primarily modulate the early attention distribution of material-related stimuli. However, the clinical benefits of attention training may be due to later cognitive-affective mechanisms., (© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press.)

Objective: Previous studies have employed self-report measures to investigate emotion regulation (ER) strategy biases in individuals with anxiety. We investigated the neural signatures underlying ER strategy biases., Method: Twenty individuals with high trait anxiety (HTA) and twenty individuals with low trait anxiety (LTA) completed both the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire and ER tasks. During the tasks, participants were required to passively view, reappraise, and suppress expression while viewing negative images. Event-related potential (ERP) indexes: P2 (an early positive component of the latency around 200ms) and late positive potential (LPP) were adopted to examine the reliability of ER strategy bias in early and later stages during ER procedure., Results: Results of the questionnaire indicated that trait anxiety level was positively correlated with habitual suppression use. ERP results revealed that, in LTA individuals, P2 amplitudes were reduced during both reappraisal and suppression strategy use. HTA individuals, however, showed no significant differences in P2 amplitudes between passive-view and regulation conditions. Furthermore, during the reappraisal block, a reduction of LPP was only observed in the LTA group, while HTA individuals showed a relatively more pronounced reduction in LPP during the application of the suppression strategy., Conclusion: Individuals in the HTA group do not demonstrate the application of effectively strategies during the initial stages of ER process, perhaps due to the presence of an automatic negative bias. While during the later stages of ER, HTA individuals demonstrated successful use of suppression but were deficient in voluntarily applying reappraisal techniques. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

In the research field of anxiety, previous studies generally focus on emotional responses following threat. A recent model of anxiety proposes that altered anticipation prior to uncertain threat is related with the development of anxiety. Behavioral findings have built the relationship between anxiety and distinct anticipatory processes including attention, estimation of threat, and emotional responses. However, few studies have characterized the brain organization underlying anticipation of uncertain threat and its role in anxiety. In the present study, we used an emotional anticipation paradigm with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the aforementioned topics by employing brain activation and general psychophysiological interactions (gPPI) analysis. In the activation analysis, we found that high trait anxious individuals showed significantly increased activation in the thalamus, middle temporal gyrus (MTG), and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC), as well as decreased activation in the precuneus, during anticipation of uncertain threat compared to the certain condition. In the gPPI analysis, the key regions including the amygdala, dmPFC, and precuneus showed altered connections with distributed brain areas including the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), inferior parietal sulcus (IPS), insula, para-hippocampus gyrus (PHA), thalamus, and MTG involved in anticipation of uncertain threat in anxious individuals. Taken together, our findings indicate that during the anticipation of uncertain threat, anxious individuals showed altered activations and functional connectivity in widely distributed brain areas, which may be critical for abnormal perception, estimation, and emotion reactions during the anticipation of uncertain threat., (© 2018 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.)

We investigated the attentional bias for threat in selected high and low trait-anxious participants using an event-related potential technique. A modified cue-target paradigm was adopted with threatening and nonthreatening pictures as uninformative location cues. In high anxious individuals, reactions were speeded up and the occipitoparietal P1 amplitude was enhanced when targets appeared at the same location as threatening pictures relative to nonthreatening ones, whereas in low anxious individuals, the P1 amplitude tended to be enhanced when the targets appeared at the opposite location to threatening pictures. These results suggest that the attentional bias caused by peripheral threatening stimuli is able to modulate the visual inputs in early processing stages, and this mechanism is markedly influenced by an individual's anxiety level.

Background: The effect of working memory training (WM-T) has been found to transfer to emotional wellbeing, despite some debate on whether an affective component in training is necessary to achieve specific emotion-related benefits. These novel cognitive trainings have not yet been tested in highly anxious individuals, who have deficits in implicit and explicit emotional regulation and should be the potential beneficiaries of these trainings. Methods: We designed two types of mobile phone-based training applications: (1) WMT and (2) an emotional working memory training (EWM-T) that comprised negative face distraction. Ninety-eight participants (33, WM-T; 35, EWM-T; 30, Control group) with high trait anxiety completed the 21-day intervention or placebo program and conducted pre- and post-test procedures, including questionnaires, emotional regulation and emotional Stroop tasks alongside electroencephalogram recording. Late positive potential (LPP) in emotion regulation task and P3 in the emotional Stroop task were adopted as neutral indicators for the explicit and implicit affective regulation/control processing. Results: Those who had received training (WM-T and EWM-T) showed enhanced explicit regulation (indexed by reduced LPP during reappraisal) compared with the control. Besides, individuals in EWM-T showed reduced behavioral attention bias and a decline of P3 in response to negative faces in an emotional Stroop task. The altered neural indicators were correlated with corresponding behavior indexes that contributed to the anxiety alleviation. Conclusions: The general WM-T was effective in enhancing explicit emotional regulation, while training with emotional add-in further improved implicit emotional control. (E)WM-T shows potential as a beneficial intervention for the anxiety population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the framework of emotion regulation (ER), both explicit and implicit forms are essential to our well-being. It is the interaction between these two processes that ensures adaptive emotional responses. Although many studies have focused on explicit ER deficits in anxiety, there is still a lack of awareness about the implicit form and its role in anxiety. To address this issue, we explored the time course of implicit ER processes in individuals with high and low trait anxiety (LTA). To do this, we employed the newly developed Priming-Identify (PI) paradigm, which includes a word-matching task (externally-generated implicit goals) and a facial expression identification task (emotion processing). We aimed to modulate the implicit ER goals of individuals through the application of different priming conditions (ER-related and -unrelated words). In addition to their behavioral effects, we recorded the influence of these priming conditions through event-related potentials (ERPs) during the facial expression identification task. Three ERP components were chosen as indexes of three stages of implicit ER processing: N170, early posterior negativity (EPN) and late positive potential (LPP). In individuals with LTA, the early N170 and the middle EPN were enlarged under the ER-related priming condition, while the LPP was not influenced. However, in individuals with high trait anxiety (HTA), we observed an absence of any significant differences between the ER-related and -unrelated priming conditions across all three ERP components. Furthermore, enlargements of N170 and EPN amplitudes were significantly correlated with a decrease in negative emotion experience scores. Our results suggest that HTA individuals experience implicit ER deficits during the early and middle stages of ER. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]