Full Description
This book focuses on the latest neuroscience findings about the neurobiology of fear and anxiety. Fear is a highly conserved and evolutionarily adaptive response to threats in the environment. Decades of research have identified the basic underlying neurocircuitry of fear and cutting-edge methods used in both animal models and humans continue to refine and shape our understanding of fear. While fear, when expressed in the appropriate context, is adaptive, excessive responses to threatening cues and contexts and anxiety are maladaptive. Fear-based disorders and anxiety disorders are highly prevalent and impairing. These disorders often begin in childhood, highlighting the importance of genetics, early environment, and risk factors. The contributors to this book are international experts in behavioral neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, clinical neuroscience, psychiatry and psychology. Collectively, they provide diverse perspectives on the neurobiology of fear and anxiety. The invited contributions are organized to provide a critical review of the recent advances in the neuroscience research and will span the continuum from basic to clinical neuroscience with representation across species, development, and disorders. The sections of this book will a) review the basic mechanisms underlying fear and anxiety, b) describe the factors that contribute to anxiety, including developmental stage, risk factors, sex differences, and genetics, c) elucidate how treatments work and describe novel treatments, and d) demonstrate the role of anxiety in other disorders including autism, substance use disorders, and schizophrenia. This critical and comprehensive collection of chapters will provide a review on the neuroscience of fear and anxiety that will be highly relevant for both scientists and clinicians interested in the brain mechanisms and associated psychopathologies related to fear and anxiety.
Contents
Part 1 Basic Mechanisms.- Disentangling the Neural Circuits of Arousal and Anxiety Like Behavior.- The Emerging Role of Brain Mitochondria in Fear and Anxiety.- Behavioral and Brain Mechanisms of Active Avoidance and their Relevance to Anxiety Disorders.- Current State of the Neuroscience of Fear Extinction and Its Relevance to Anxiety Disorders.- The Organization of Anxiety Symptoms Along the Threat Imminence Continuum.- Structural Brain Correlates of Anxiety During Development.- Computational Mechanisms of Information Seeking in Anxiety.- Emotion Regulation Under Stress A Social Processing and Memory Perspective.- Part 2 Risk Factors and Moderating Factors.- Developmental shifts in amygdala function.- Intergenerational Effects of Stress A Focus on Learning and Memory.- Insights into the Neurobiology of Behavioral Inhibition from Nonhuman Primate Models.- The impact of early life experiences on stress neurobiology and the development of anxiety.- Genetic Vulnerability to Social Anxiety Disorder.- Neurodevelopmental Pathways from Temperamental Fear to Anxiety.- Sex differences in neural circuits underlying fear processing.- Sex differences in the neurobiology of fear and anxiety.- Part 3 Treatment.- Neuromodulation of Fear and Anxiety Circuits.- Using inhibitory learning theories to optimize exposure treatment for children with anxiety disorders.- Neural Markers of Treatment Response in Pediatric Anxiety and PTSD.- Fears Worth Testing Out A Systematic Review of the Neural Mechanisms of Treatment Outcome for Anxiety Related Disorders.- Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and Generalized Anxiety Disorder.- Part 4 Cooccurring disorders.- Sensory Processing and Anxiety Within and Beyond the Autism Spectrum.- Fear and Anxiety in Schizophrenia A Focus on Development, Assessment, and Mechanisms.- Insights into Overlapping Brain Networks for Anxiety and Alcohol Use Disorders.- Part 5 Conclusion.- Summary and future directions.
