Everybody gets the odd case of butterflies in the stomach - a state known as anxiety. Dwelling on its negative side can lead to chronic stress and anxiety disorders and phobias, but evolutionarily speaking, anxiety holds some functional value, says a new study.
According to the study, a healthy amount of anxiety grants some survival value, while too much may lead to excessive worry and clinical conditions.A team of psychologists at Stanford University has identified a region of the brain, the anterior insula, which plays a key role in predicting harm and also learning to avoid it.
In the 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, participants with low levels of insula activation had a harder time learning to avoid losses and lost more money in the game as a result.
For these subjects, higher levels of insula activation helped them to learn to avoid losses months later. However, researchers have found that excessive insula activation might prove problematic.
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The findings of the study may help explain why anxious traits persist in humanity's genetic endowment, even as environmental threats vary over the ages.
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Source-ANI
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