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ABSTRACT
Introduction: According to the High-order Theory of Emotional Consciousness (HOTEC), every emotional process is a conscious and high-order state of mind carried out by the General Networks of Cognition (GNC), which consists mainly of prefrontal mechanisms. This means that anxiety is also an emotional state of mind carried out by the GNC (positive correlation). However, numerous studies have suggested what is commonly called “hypofrontality” during states of anxiety (negative correlation), which seems to give rise to a theoretical and empirical contraction.
Methods: I present a theoretical review to address the following issue: how to advocate a HOTEC view of anxiety in the face of a growing paradigm of hypofrontality during states of anxiety?
Results: Here I propose that dmPFC, the dACC, and the anterior insula are GNC areas positively correlated with anxiety, which, along with the prefrontal areas responsible for regulating the activation of survival circuits and driving the attention to adaptive ways to overcome potential threats, form an interconnective model of anticipatory and regulatory mechanisms related to learned threats based on autobiographical memories.
Conclusions: Through this model, I propose that HOTEC is still a valid way to approach and understand both healthy and unhealthy anxious states of mind.
Acknowledgements
This paper was supported by São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP).
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 As it can be seen, this view is somehow similar to Barrett's model of constructed emotions (Barrett, Citation2006, Citation2017; Barrett & Satpute, Citation2017), although there are significant differences between these model, of which a deep discussion is unfortunately beyond the scope of this current paper (for a short comment on this topic, see Rosa, Citation2018).
2 It may be important to point out that it is the same case for “fear”. The well-known “fight-flight-freeze response” is a (unconscious) first-order representation that may or may not participate in the construction of conscious fear, since these neurophysiological reactions do not seem to be sufficient to give rise to a conscious state of mind (LeDoux & Brown, Citation2017). Rather, the model assumes that an emotional experience may happen without first-order representations. For a review on this new definition of fear see LeDoux and Pine (Citation2016) and LeDoux and Hofmann (Citation2018).
3 According to HOTEC, this is possible based on Brown's HOROR model, by which a high-order representation can also be re-represented, giving rise to a thought about a thought (introspection) (Brown, Citation2015). Thus, since HOTEC is based on Brown's HOROR theory, we can argue that HOTEC admits the possibility of having a high-order representation without a previous first-order representation.