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NEUROSCIENCE

Brain maps of fear and anxiety

Nature Human Behaviour volume 3, pages 662–663 (2019)Cite this article

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Anxiety, ‘the disease of the 21st century’, is a clinical enigma. Using virtual predators to create real-world threat scenarios, two new studies build on prior rodent-based anxiety theory to map effects of personality and decision complexity in human prefrontal cortex. We may soon have coherent neural maps of these disabling and costly psychiatric disorders.

Why is this important? Anxiety disorders are a major cause of human distress and create huge costs for modern health systems. But diagnosis uses symptoms (akin to fever); there are no known fundamental causes (akin to measles virus), and so treatments are poorly targeted. We need a better understanding of neural processing of threat.

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  1. Dept. Psychology, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

    Neil McNaughton

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  1. Neil McNaughton
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Correspondence to Neil McNaughton.

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McNaughton, N. Brain maps of fear and anxiety. Nat Hum Behav 3, 662–663 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-019-0621-7

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