Heart-brain interactions in anxiety influence decision-making and learning

Ch. 4. P. 22–29.

Interception is defined as sensing, integration, and regulation of internal states of an organism by the brain. Interceptual processing plays a significant role in the functioning of a human organism, including homeostasis and allostasis, the perception of self and other, the processing of reality, learning, and decision-making. Interceptual processing may be enhanced or disrupted in psychiatric disorders and in anxious or stressful situations. Heartbeat-evoked responses ( HER ) are evoked potentials or evoked fields ( in the magnetoencephalographic ( MEG ) setting ) that occur in response to a heartbeat event (. Trait anxiety is viewed as a fairly stable characteristic in connection to personality.Experiencing state anxiety more frequently and perceiving the world as being generally unsafe and threatening are the major features of trait anxiety ( Wiedemann, 2001 ). The amplitude of heartbeat-evoked responses time-locked to the processing of external stimuli has been shown to disrupt exceptional processing ( Park et al., 2014 ). In our recent work we showed that state anxiety disrupts learning and decision making in a volatile environment, decreasing the amount to which individuals update their beliefs using feedback ( Hein et al., 2021 ). Analyzing the HER locked to the T-wave of the cardiac cycle, we aim to assess the degree to which the HER amplitude modulates trial-by-trial belief updating and learning, as a function of trait anxiety. Investigating how interception can modulate learning in high trait anxiety,we can discover important characteristics of anxiety as a personality trait as well as a clinical condition. This knowledge can improve our understanding of mental health conditions as many of them include anxiety as a symptom, which can later used in the development of better treatments for such conditions.

Keywords: decision making, interoception, anxiety and cognitive biases, magnitoencephalograpy, heartbeat-evoked response, learning in volatile environment, reward-based learning

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6th HBP Student Conference on Interdisciplinary Brain Research

Frontiers Media S.A., 2022.