Journal of Translational Neurosciences

Description

Although numerous studies have focused on cognitive deficits in older depression patients, research on the connection between anxiety and cognition is still in its infancy. Late-life anxiety and cognition may have a negative relationship, according to a small but growing body of research. A recent critical review found that older adults with clinically significant anxiety symptoms performed worse than those with minimal or no symptoms on difficult tasks. Recent theories suggest that anxiety causes adults with and without anxiety to perform differently on cognitively demanding tasks because it shifts cognitive resources away from goal-relevant information and toward threat-focused information. Impaired cognitive control ability is linked to older people's self-reported anxiety and anxiety status, according to convergent evidence from multiple studies. In a mechanistic definition of executive functions, the processes associated with goal-directed behavior are referred to as cognitive control.

Prevalence of Co-Occurring Late-Life Anxiety and Depression

Among the older population, comorbidity between anxiety and depression is common. In older age, clinically significant anxiety symptoms and Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) frequently coexist with depressive symptoms and episodes. Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) and anxiety symptoms, referred to as anxious depression, have sparked interest due to the prevalence of co-occurring late-life anxiety and depression. Therefore, late-life studies of cognitive control in adults with GAD and anxious depression are included in this review. Cognitive control-centered studies of late-life anxiety or depression typically focus on how anxious older people deal with negative emotion interference. In studies of anxiety, emotional content is typically incorporated into the standard Stroop paradigm to measure interference. The resulting effects show how emotional conflict and stimuli with negative valences affect cognitive control. The issue can be conceptualized as a more general problem of how an individual minimizes the interference caused by information that is irrelevant to the task, despite the fact that the majority of the literature has concentrated on the Stroop interference that is associated with anxiety. The connection between interference effects and cognitive control may be better understood with the help of a framework from cognitive neuroscience. When referring to voluntary attention control, the terms cognitive control processing and top-down processing are frequently used interchangeably. It has been demonstrated that inadequate top-down processing increases the processing of threat information, suggesting that it may be a contributor to conditions like pathological worry and generalized anxiety disorder. Others have refuted such assertions by arguing that threat evaluation takes place prior to top-down processes influencing processing.

Relationship between Late-Life Anxiety and Cognition

 Effortful tasks done while anxious may involve both top-down and bottom-up information processing, according to recent behavioral and imaging data. As a result, it appears that threat-related information processing is influenced by intricate interactions between top-down and bottom-up processing. The relationship between late-life anxiety and cognition can be better understood with greater precision if these factors are the sole focus of the investigation. Even in the absence of anxiety, normal aging affects late-life cognitive processing. As a result, any interactions with anxiety must be taken into account in addition to the independent effects of aging. Emotional processing and cognitive functioning change significantly as people get older. Neuroimaging studies of cognitive control in older adults with anxiety disorders or anxious depression have provided a plausible biological explanation of observed behavioral findings between older anxious and nonanxious individuals, as well as between older and younger anxious adults. It is believed that older adults exhibit greater emotional wellbeing and emotional stability, increased orientation to positive stimuli, and greater complexity and differentiation of emotional response to negative stimuli than their younger counterparts. When attentional demands rise in the context of conflict caused by color inconsistency, regions of the Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex (DLPFC) activate, regardless of the emotional content of the stimuli. The reviewed cognitive and emotional aging theories, as well as the findings of behavioral and neuroimaging, lead to a number of observations and testable hypotheses.