Public release date: 3-Apr-2008 Contact: Catherine West
Association for Psychological Science Anxiety gets a lot of bad
press. Dwelling on the negative can lead to chronic stress and
anxiety disorders and phobias, but evolutionarily speaking,
anxiety holds some functional value. In humans, learning to
avoid harm is necessary not only for surviving in the face of
basic threats (such as predators or rotten food), but also for
avoiding more complex social or economic threats (such as
enemies or questionable investments). A team of psychologists at
Stanford University have identified a region of the brain, the
anterior insula, which plays a key role in predicting harm and
also learning to avoid it. In a new study, Gregory Samanez-
Larkin and colleagues scanned the brains of healthy adults while
they anticipated losing money. Adults with greater activation of
their insula while anticipating a financial loss were better at
learning to avoid financial losses in a separate game several
months later. Conversely, partic