Thrilled to have recently joined @mkflugge.bsky.social's lab at Oxford, where they just published this great work on amygdala-TUS and emotion processing! 🧠🥳
🧠 Can brain stimulation help socially anxious people approach what they fear? 😠😰
We used synchronized electrical brain stimulation to improve control over emotional behaviour in social anxiety, while scanning their brains to understand who responds best and why.
🆕📄 doi.org/10.1523/JNEU...
This builds on our previous finding that socially anxious people recruit a different, perhaps less effective prefrontal circuit for daily-life emotion control (📄 doi.org/10.1038/s414...).
Here we show that circuit can be strengthened.
Next step: can this approach enhance exposure therapy outcomes?
🏃😠 Social anxiety is maintained by avoidance. Your brain tells you to walk away from what feels threatening. You never learn it's safe.
The prefrontal cortex helps override that tendency by instructing action areas what to do. In socially anxious people, this communication might be less effective.
Who benefits most? 📊
The effect depended on how strongly prefrontal cortex responded to stimulation. Strongest responders showed the largest behavioural improvement. And that brain response scaled with trait anxiety.
The stimulation works best where there is most room to help.
How does this interact with valence-driven avoidance?
The link between amygdala activation and behavioural avoidance weakened as prefrontal engagement increased during in-phase tACS. This suggests that strengthening cortical control may reduce the influence of emotional signals on action selection.
How do you strengthen communication between brain regions? 🧠
We used dual-site electrical stimulation: synchronized theta-band stimulation over prefrontal cortex with gamma-band stimulation over sensorimotor cortex, targeting the same mechanism supporting emotion control in non-anxious individuals.
Amazing to work with such a great team on this!
@BobBramson @IvanToni @epanlab.bsky.social at DondersInstitute
📄 Paper (open access) doi.org/10.1523/JNEU...
Sjoerd Meijer
Sjoerd Meijer
Sjoerd Meijer
Sjoerd Meijer
Sjoerd Meijer
Sjoerd Meijer
Sjoerd Meijer
Sjoerd Meijer
Social avoidance is a hallmark of social anxiety disorder. Difficulties in controlling avoidance behavior are the core maintaining factor of this impairing condition, hampering the efficacy of existin...
doi.org
Why anxious individuals fail to control emotional behaviour is not well understood. Here, the authors show that highly anxious individuals have a more excitable lateral frontopolar cortex, and fail to...
Very happy our first paper using ultrasound stimulation (TUS) to stimulate the human amygdala (BLA) got out in @cp-neuron.bsky.social today! 🎉🥳🔊Great FUN with co-first authors @mirunmigyu.bsky.social @lilweb.bsky.social in @mkflugge.bsky.social 's lab!
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
The amygdala shows abnormal metabolism in depression, a disorder marked by altered emotion, motivation, and learning. Yet its causal role in these pro…
