Episode 1: Neuroscience of Anxiety

Whether it's meeting your ex at a party or your upcoming presentation at work, we have all felt the sinking feeling of anxiety. Come and find out a little bit about what's happening upstairs in this bite-sized look at the brain regions, connections, and neurotransmitters involved in anxiety processing and regulation. If you have any comments, questions, concerns, queries, or complaints, please email me at [email protected] or DM me at @NeuroscienceAmateurHour on Instagram. Citations and relevant papers below: Price, J.S., An Evolutionary Perspective on Anxiety and Anxiety Disorders, New Insights into Anxiety Disorders (2012). Davis, M., The Role of the Amygdala in Fear and Anxiety, Annual Review Neuroscience (1992). Duval, Javanbakht, Liberzon., Neural circuits in anxiety and stress disorders: a focused review, Therapeutics and Clinical Risk Management (2015). Ventura Silva et al., Excitotoxic lesions in the central nucleus of the amygdala attenuate stress-induced anxiety behavior, Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience (2013). Levar et al., GABA concentrations in the anterior cingulate cortex are associated with fear network function and fear recovery in humans, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience (2017)Fuchs, Flugge., Cellular consequences of stress and depression, Dialogues Clinical Neuroscience, (2004)Lechin et al., Effects of buspirone on plasma neurotransmitters in healthy subjects, Journal of Neural Transmission (1998)Botterill et al., Bidirectional regulation of cognitive and anxiety-like behaviors by dentate gyrus mossy cells in male and female mice, Journal of Neuroscience (2021)Martin et al., The Neurobiology of Anxiety Disorders: Brain Imaging, Genetics, and Psychoneuroendocrinology, Psychiatric Clinics of North America (2013)Cominski et al., The role of the hippocampus in avoidance learning and anxiety vulnerability, Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience (2014). LeBlanc et al., Striatopallidal neurons control avoidance behaviors in exploratory tasks, Psychiatry (2018). Adhikari et al., Synchronized Activity between the Ventral Hippocampus and the Medial Prefrontal Cortex during Anxiety, Neuron (2010). Akimova, E., Lanzenberger, R., Kasper, S., The Seratonin-1A Receptor in Anxiety Disorders, Psychiatry (2009). Blanco et al., Effects of medial prefrontal cortex lesions on anxiety-like behavior in restrained and non-restrained rats, Behavioral Brain Research, (2009). Qiao et al., Aberrant Functional Network Connectivity as a Biomarker of Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience (2017). Support the show