New Principal Investigators 12

Patients with social phobia (SP) fear and avoid interpersonal interactions and experience intense anxiety in many social situations. These anxieties are frequently conveyed through biased visual scanning and altered interpretations of people’s facial expressions. The fusiform face area (FFA) is a primary face processing brain region, yet, little is known about the function of the FFA in SP. To provide empirical insight into these FFA neural foundations, 11 unmedicated patients with a primary diagnosis of SP and 11 age, gender, and education matched healthy control (HC) participants underwent functional MRI while viewing prototypical emotional faces. As expected, both groups independently demonstrated significant blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) responses in the right FFA to emotional faces. This region served as the seed region for a functional connectivity analysis. Group differences revealed the SP group exhibited positive FFA functional connectivity with subgenual and supragenual anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) subregions and a precuneus / posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) region, while the HC group exhibited inverse FFA functional connectivity patterns in these regions. These results provide unique support for a neural model of SP characterised by social threat and negative self-relevant evaluations associated with the visual processing of facial expressions.