Many factors contribute to the heightened risk for anxiety among college students. It could be academic factors, social issues, or sleep disturbances. However, researchers have found one more dimension to the anxiety levels and negative bias among college students and that is connected to the size of the inferior frontal cortex in the brain.

Healthy college students who have a relatively small inferior frontal cortex – a brain region behind the temples that helps regulate thoughts and emotions – are more likely than others to suffer from anxiety. According to studies, they also have a propensity to see neutral or even positive occurrences negatively.

Using standard questionnaires and brain structural data from neuroimaging scans, the researchers assessed 62 students to ascertain their anxiety levels and propensity for negative bias.

Relationship between brain size and negative bias

Postdoctoral researcher Sanda Dolcos of the University of the Islands in psychology, who led the study with graduate student Yifan Hu, noted that previous research on individuals diagnosed with anxiety has identified similar links between the size of the IFC and anxiety and negative bias. However, the researchers noted that their new discoveries—which were published in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience—are the first to observe these same dynamics in healthy individuals.

“You would expect these brain changes more in clinical populations where anxiety is very serious, but we are seeing differences even in the brains of healthy young adults,” Dolcos said.

The study also discovered that anxiety level acted as a mediator in the association between a student’s negative bias and the size of the IFC.

Higher anxiety associated with more negative bias

“People who have smaller volumes have higher levels of anxiety; people who have larger IFCs tend to have lower levels of anxiety,” Dolcos said. And higher anxiety is associated with more negative bias, she said. “How we see this is that the higher volume of the IFC confers resilience.”

“We found that larger IFC volume is protecting against negative bias through lower levels of trait anxiety,” Hu said.

High level of anxiety among the students

Nearly 60% of college students report experiencing at least one distressing episode of worried worry annually, according to the American College Health Association, indicating that anxiety is common on college campuses.

“There is a very high level of anxiety in the student population, and this is affecting their life, their academic performance, everything,” Dolcos said. “We are interested in identifying what is going on and preventing them from moving to the next level and developing clinical anxiety.”

According to Hu, anxiety may cause problems in many aspects of life, even in the best of situations, making a person hypervigilant for possible issues. According to her, a person’s devotion to pursuits that could help them achieve their life goals can also be hampered by negative prejudice.

Scientific research into the relationship between brain anatomy, function, personality traits like anxiety, and their behavioural implications like negative bias can aid in the development of therapies that target certain brain regions in healthy populations, according to Hu.

“We hope to be able to train the brain to function better,” she said. “That way, we might prevent these at-risk people from moving on to more severe anxiety.”

The Brain and Behaviour Research Foundation and Health Minds Canada supported this research.

Story Source:

Materials provided by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference:

Yifan Hu, Sanda Dolcos. Trait anxiety mediates the link between inferior frontal cortex volume and negative affective bias in healthy adults. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2017; DOI: 10.1093/scan/nsx008

Page citation:

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “Brain structure, anxiety and negative bias linked in healthy adults.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 13 April 2017. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/04/170413130642.htm>.

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