New data on amygdala connections/activity of those with SAD vs control group.

PLoS ONE: Altered Effective Connectivity Network of the Amygdala in Social Anxiety Disorder: A Resting-State fMRI Study

Abstract: The amygdala is often found to be abnormally recruited in social anxiety disorder (SAD) patients. The question whether amygdala activation is primarily abnormal and affects other brain systems or whether it responds “normally” to an abnormal pattern of information conveyed by other brain structures remained unanswered. To address this question, we investigated a network of effective connectivity associated with the amygdala using Granger causality analysis on resting-state functional MRI data of 22 SAD patients and 21 healthy controls (HC). Implications of abnormal effective connectivity and clinical severity were investigated using the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale (LSAS). Decreased influence from inferior temporal gyrus (ITG) to amygdala was found in SAD, while bidirectional influences between amygdala and visual cortices were increased compared to HCs. Clinical relevance of decreased effective connectivity from ITG to amygdala was suggested by a negative correlation of LSAS avoidance scores and the value of Granger causality. Our study is the first to reveal a network of abnormal effective connectivity of core structures in SAD. This is in support of a disregulation in predescribed modules involved in affect control. The amygdala is placed in a central position of dysfunction characterized both by decreased regulatory influence of orbitofrontal cortex and increased crosstalk with visual cortex. The model which is proposed based on our results lends neurobiological support towards cognitive models considering disinhibition and an attentional bias towards negative stimuli as a core feature of the disorder.

The first study of its kind, and this was only published in December--yay progress!

Maybe they'll do a study near me and I can get on board. Ooo, neat!

You want them to take dirty pictures of your gray matter.

Well taking dirty pictures of my own gray matter gets boring after a while. ::

interesting. I kinda suspected amygdala to make a difference, there was an article about people without it (?) (or something like that? possibly my mind has gone into a black hole now, so maybe it was just people with damaged area around it or something like that) to be super-brave or such?

can't really think right now (or read scientific stuff), but do keep us posted. (and wanted to bump this thread to find it later)

Apparently there has been at least one case where a person had no fear response whatsoever because something had gone wrong with the amygdala. The person I read about recently did lots of unwise things because she had no fear. So that is not a good situation either. It is not technically correct to say such a person is super-brave, because the concept of courage vanishes if the capacity for fear does not exist.