Identifying the impact of unconscious fear on adolescent anxiety: Cognitive neural mechanisms and interventions

Subjects: Psychology >> Developmental Psychology submitted time 2024-04-09

LEI Yi MEI Ying Wang Jinxia YUAN Zixin

Abstract： Anxiety disorders reach their peak prevalence during adolescence, significantly impacting young individuals’ physical and mental health. Current insights into the pathogenesis, evolution, and treatment of adolescent anxiety predominantly focus on fear processing at a conscious level, overlooking a crucial aspect: the prefrontal cortex and its top-down control functions are not yet fully developed in adolescents. Therefore, applying a top-down mechanism to clinical treatment for adolescents may have limitations. Moreover, exploring automatic fear processing may help to extend the knowledge about the pathogenesis of anxiety in adolescents. This is the first research combined with unconscious perception to explore the occurrence, development, and mechanism of anxiety in adolescents. Recruiting adolescents who are in anxiety or vulnerable to anxiety as subjects and integrating paradigms used for examining unconsciousness, we aim to explore: 1) the occurrence and development of unconscious fear processing, along with its underlying neural mechanisms in adolescents, and the impact of chronic stress hormones; 2) the role of unconscious fear processing in the development of anxiety in adolescents; 3) the noninvasive intervention for unconscious fear in adolescents.This project will provide scientific support for the prevention, recognition, and intervention of anxiety in adolescents and to promote all-round development of adolescents in physical and mental.

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