题目：Anxiety-attenuated emotional face encoding persists in patients following first-line pharmacological and psychological interventions

讲者： Sarah Katharina Buehler (伦敦大学学院认知神经科学研究所)

时间：2026-11-16 15:30-17:00

地点：南方医科大学心理学系研讨室

讲座提要：

Anxiety is highly prevalent and involves alterations in neurocognitive processing, which can serve as mechanistic biomarkers of psychopathology and early treatment response. In this study, we focused on a highly replicable state anxiety (threat of shock)-induced emotional face processing impairment (and associated cingulate activation) to investigate if this is a) also engaged (or elevated) in pathological anxiety and b) modulated by a first-line pharmacological and psychological treatment for anxiety patients. A sample of 92 healthy controls and 184 anxious-depressed patients completed a threat-of-shock emotional face recognition task during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Data for the patient sample was combined across two randomized controlled trials comparing escitalopram versus placebo (n=42) or cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) versus waitlist (n=142). A cross-sectional case-control comparison and hierarchical mixed effects modelling of the longitudinal post-treatment behavioural and fMRI data was conducted. Threat-of-shock during encoding selectively impaired face recognition and increased posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) activation in both patients and controls, with no group interactions. However, patients showed higher overall recognition accuracy across all conditions alongside greater orbitofrontal activation than controls. Following treatment, CBT yielded significantly greater reductions in anxiety and depression scores than waitlist, with escitalopram and placebo showing intermediate levels of clinical improvement. Despite these clinical effects, neither CBT nor escitalopram altered the threat-of-shock–related encoding impairment or associated PCC activation. Anxiety-attenuated facial encoding is a reliable biomarker of transient anxious state that generalizes to clinical patients but does not relate to maladaptive processes that respond to treatments for anxiety and depression. This highlights the need for case-control comparisons in conjunction with treatment intervention analyses to ascertain which cognitive markers are pathological treatment targets and which are stable biomarkers of adaptive processes.

个人介绍：

Sarah is an independent postdoctoral research fellow interested in precision psychiatry and using mechanistic and prediction models of cognitive and brain imaging data to better understand which patients are more likely respond to which treatments for depression and anxiety. She completed her MSc and PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL and now conducts her postdoctoral research across institutions including UCL, KCL and University of Cambridge.