According to a recent national survey on 42 subjects from a pool of 1,099 undergraduate college students using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), brain activity reflects differences in types of anxiety.Â
By using psychological tests to categorize them as “high anxious apprehension,” “high anxious arousal,” or neither, the anxious apprehension (verbal rumination, worry)  group exhibited enhanced left-brain activity and the anxious arousal (intense fear, panic, or both) group had heightened activity in the right brain.
What this signifies is that
“This is biological validation of the proposal of the psychological differentiation of types of anxiety,” Miller said. “Whether you want to treat anxiety psychologically or biologically – and we know that either type of intervention affects both the psychology and the biology of the person – these findings are a reminder that you might want to assess people carefully before you embark on a particular type of treatment.”
Their work appears this month online in Psychophysiology.
According to a recent national survey, [tag-tec]anxiety disorders[/tag-tec] are the most commonly reported psychiatric disorders in the U.S. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders classifies nearly a dozen different anxiety disorders, from acute stress disorder to obsessive-compulsive disorder to panic attack and PTSD. But those who study and treat patients with anxiety disorders do not always differentiate the patients who worry, fret and ruminate from those who experience the panic, rapid heartbeat or bouts of sweating that characterize anxious arousal. These two kinds of anxiety may occur alone or in combination, with potentially important implications for treatment.
Via SpiritIndia
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