CiNet Monthly Seminar (English)

January 7, 2025
16:00-17:00 (JST)
at CiNet Conference Room in the CiNet bldg.

Talk Title: The Impact of Anxiety on the Neural Circuitry underlying Social Cognition and Social Decision-Making

Jan B. Engelmann
Professor
Faculty of Economics and business Section Microeconomics
University of Amsterdam

Host : Masahiko Haruno

Abstract:
Anxiety, a ubiquitous emotional state with protective functions, can significantly impair decision-making. Its effects on social cognition and decision-making, however, remain poorly understood. We investigated the neural mechanisms underlying anxiety’s influence on social cognition using two paradigms: a trust game and a novel economic adaptation of the false belief task (FBT).
To induce anxiety, we used a threat-of-shock paradigm while participants engaged in trust-based economic decisions. Anxiety suppressed trust-specific activity in the left temporoparietal junction (TPJ), disrupted its connectivity with the amygdala and posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS), and reduced trust-related behavior. These findings suggest that anxiety impairs social cognitive processes involved in mentalizing during trust decisions.
In a follow-up study, we developed an economic-games false belief task to further examine the hypothesis that anxiety disrupts mentalizing. Participants read vignettes from both standard and economic-games FBTs and inferred the beliefs of interaction partners in trust and ultimatum game contexts. Across tasks, mentalizing consistently activated key social cognition regions, including the TPJ, dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC), and temporal pole. Importantly, under anxiety activity in these regions was suppressed. Additionally, anxiety disrupted both the connectivity between social cognition nodes (e.g., precuneus, TPJ, dmPFC) during belief formation, as well as their connectivity with broader networks (e.g., attentional and reward systems) during belief inferences.
These results demonstrate that anxiety distorts the neural circuitry supporting social cognition and highlights the reliance of social cognitive processes on interactions with other large-scale networks. Understanding these disruptions may provide insight into the broader impacts of anxiety on social cognition and social decision-making.