Anxiety Has An Upside, According to Study

Highly Anxious People Far More Likely To Take Action Than Others, And This Study Shows Why

by Daniel LaPonsie at Psychology Punk

While the stress that anxiety can put on your body can be problematic, it does have a motivating factor for it. As opposed to something like depression, people experiencing anxiety are typically driven to do something about it, whether that be through removing oneself from a stressful situation, employing coping mechanisms or, if the anxiety has become chronic, seeking help.

A recent paper reported on a study regarding the processing of social threats. The lead author was Marwa El Zein from the French Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM) and the Ecole Normale Supérieurein Paris. She and her colleges reported on a number of ground-breaking findings. In short: While we used to think that highly anxious people were processing threats wrong, we now know that they are simply processing things differently.

Anxious people process social threats in a different region of the brain than those with low levels of anxiety.

This is perhaps the most fascinating finding in this study. It had previously been thought that highly anxious people were, perhaps, over-using a particular part of the brain—maybe due to an over-sensitivity in that brain region. However, this study demonstrated that anxious and low-anxiety people simply process threat in different regions of the brain.

Specifically, non-anxious people process social threat in the region of the brain associated with facial recognition. The paper’s authors point out that facial features “are usually ambiguous and can imply different levels of threat for the observer,” and that body posture and gaze need to be taken into account.

Anxious people, however, utilize the region of the brain associated with taking action. This is why people with high levels of anxiety demonstrate more obvious, visible symptoms associated with anxiousness and worry.

It should be noted that the researchers were observing people with high-anxiety, but not with people requiring clinical attention.

From the press release:

It has often been theorized that elevated anxiety, even in a non-clinical range, could impair the brain’s processing of threats. However, El Zein and her co-authors instead found that non-clinical anxiety shifts the neural ‘coding’ of threat to motor circuits, which produce action, from sensory circuits, which help us to recognise faces. The researchers note that it would be interesting to determine whether the same is true for people with anxiety scores in the clinical range.

This can be a good thing for high-anxiety people. This study suggests that they are more likely to take action in the presence of a threat.