Anxiety will affect nearly one in three Americans at some point in their lives, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. Some will develop avoidance behaviors — evading situations, people or thoughts — as a coping mechanism.
Scientists lack a full understanding of what drives avoidance behavior, or how it might influence a person’s information processing by filtering or distorting incoming data to manage emotions instead.
Vanessa Brown, an assistant professor in the Emory College of Arts and Sciences Department of Psychology, hopes her research into psychological and behavioral health can help find some answers to those questions.
She has received a five-year, $3.9 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to further her research that combines her clinical training with neuroimaging and computational reinforcement of living with anxiety.
The grant research will expand on Brown’s training in clinical psychology and combine the fields of computational reinforcement learning with anxiety.
“The work I’m doing right now is looking at uncertainty, avoidance, learning and anxiety,” Brown says. “If you’re depressed, why are things not as rewarding as they could be? If you’re anxious, why are you avoiding things that people otherwise don’t think they need to avoid?”
The NIH grant will allow Brown to investigate if neuroimages of the system of the brain that regulates stress responses, attention and cognitive function may identify the specific disregulation at work during avoidance behaviors.
Understanding those mechanisms may eventually lead to the ability to identify and track successful treatments.
To get to that point, Brown plans to:
- Develop and validate computational models focused on how individuals bury anxiety triggers
- Use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to evaluate how anxiety fluctuates in individuals over time
- Connect neuroimaging to data such as geolocation to deduce the number of unique places people experiencing anxiety visit
- Hire coordinators, undergraduate and graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers who will develop and test a novel computational model that links the biological fear response to real-world locations.
Ultimately, Brown’s research aims to advance clinical treatment methods to break the long-term fear that creates avoidance behaviors and may lead to skewed processing or retention of new information.
She will combine brain imaging with real-world data to break down avoidance behaviors into a multi-step decision process.
Understanding that process involves recording information such as geolocation, looking for differences in the number of unique locations people with anxiety and those with avoidance behaviors regularly visit.
“We often think that people with anxiety just avoid things because they think (things) are worse than they actually are. We don’t actually see that pattern of behavior in the lab,” Brown says.
“Instead, people with anxiety seem to have problems with uncertain, negative options,” Brown says. “We’re trying to figure out what exactly is going on with that and how we can intervene.”
Some of those interventions could include cognitive behavioral therapy (a common type of talk therapy) or neuromodulation (the stimulation of nerve activity through electric pulses).
Both offer new treatments beyond exposure therapy, the more common process of gradually and systemically confronting their anxiety triggers. Patients often drop out of therapy because of an inability to tolerate the intense, forced anxiety that therapy requires.
The research also leads to advancements in understanding other disorders, since the neuroimaging zeroes in on the area of the brain known to be disregulated in everything from insomnia to Alzheimer’s disease.
“Vanessa is an outstanding young researcher, and we are so fortunate to have her as faculty here at Emory,” says Lynne Nygaard, professor and chair of the Department of Psychology, noting the work is important for a better understanding of the complexity of mental and brain health.
“Her work will shed much-needed light on the complex mechanisms underlying problems with avoidance,” Nygaard adds. “In turn, that will guide treatment options for individuals with anxiety.”