A longitudinal naturalistic fMRI study of trait anxiety and cross-phase consistency in subjective fear signature expression

Higher trait anxiety in 42 participants is significantly associated with greater cross-phase consistency in subjective-fear neural signature expression across two fMRI phases separated by ~3 months.

• Why it matters: Persistent fear in anxiety may reflect either consistent conditioned-threat processing or consistent subjectively experienced fear, but the relative link to these forms of persistence is unclear.
• What they did: Participants completed longitudinal naturalistic viewing fMRI across two phases (~3 months apart) using 19 cross-phase analysis segments, applying two pre-trained fear-related neural signatures to estimate signature expression over time.
• The result: The trait anxiety–consistency association was stronger for the subjective-fear signature than for the threat-conditioning signature and stronger than for a general negative-affect signature, emerging over longer temporal windows and not detected in average amygdala, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, insula, or hippocampus time series.