Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) is a severe pathology that has been known to affect the functionality of individuals in their everyday lives even when the presence of a non-fearful stimuli is introduced, however, the effect of anxiety on individuals with GAD is thought to increase and therefore, effect the functionality more in the presence of fear-provoking stimuli. The present study first investigated under longitudinal baseline conditions how fear was related to the brain activity of a Camosun College Psychology student by measuring their prefrontal (frontal EEG and reinforcement-based decision making), hippocampal (free recall performance), and amygdala (heart rate) activity while being non-experimentally exposed to different levels of anxiety-causing stimuli. Correlational analyses revealed that fear was most strongly related to levels of amygdala (r = 0.36) and hippocampal (r = -0.21) activity. In a second study, in order to examine if fear plays a casual role upon hippocampal activity, this relationship was experimentally tested by randomly assigning the participant across days to a high-fear conditioning (horror movies) versus a low-fear condition (non-horror movies). The results showed no statistically significant effect of fearful stimuli upon hippocampal activity. Implication of the study suggest that the experimental level of fear induced within the study was not great enough to produce an effect upon free recall that was able to be reliably detected.
