Professor Paul Siegel Awarded Third NIMH Grant

A competitive National Institute for Mental Health grant funds promising research to combat fear and anxiety.


The Anxiety of Facing Your Fears 

If you seek treatment for an anxiety disorder, your therapy is likely to involve directly confronting your fears.

For example, a college student with social anxiety disorder who intensely fears being watched or judged by others might eventually be asked to speak up in class or introduce themselves to a peer. For most young people with this disorder, the prospect of such confrontation is so terrifying that they do not seek help. Social Anxiety Disorder is highly prevalent among American youth and a major driver of the national mental health crisis.

Promising New Treatments

With the support of a $484,000 research grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), Professor of Psychology Paul Siegel and his collaborator Dr. Bradley Peterson of the University of Southern California are developing a new treatment for Social Anxiety Disorder that does not involve confronting feared situations, and thus does not cause emotional pain. NIMH grants are the most competitive for research on mental illness.

In very brief exposure (VBE), a highly phobic person is repeatedly exposed to subliminal images representing their fear (for Social Anxiety Disorder, an extremely critical or disapproving facial expression). The phobic images flash so quickly on a computer screen that the viewer is not aware of them.

Dr. Peterson is Director of the Institute for the Developing Mind at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles/USC and Chief of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the Keck School of Medicine, USC.

From Spiders to Social Phobia

For the past 18 years, Professor Siegel and several former psychology majors have been developing VBE in the lab as a treatment for spider phobia. In a series of studies, they have shown that VBE reduces fear enough to make a crucial difference: highly phobic participants are willing to approach—move significantly closer to—a live tarantula. As a result, they report much less fear, suggesting that VBE may render treatment-avoidant people more willing to engage in exposure therapies.

Revealing Brain Circuitry

With two prior NIMH grants, Drs. Siegel and Peterson used brain imaging to show that VBE engages neural circuits supporting fear extinction in diagnostic samples.

With the current grant, they will use neuroimaging to see if VBE activates the same circuits in college-age youth with social anxiety disorder. If it does, NIMH will likely want Drs. Siegel and Peterson to test VBE as a treatment for other impairing anxiety disorders, like Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Our students benefit from this research as they pursue their own studies. Psychology majors will be able to use the collected brain imaging data in Senior Projects on social anxiety disorder.

 


Above: Brain activity of spider phobic people during repeated presentation of subliminal pictures of spiders (left column), and association of such brain activity with reduced avoidance of a live tarantula (right column).

The phobic people actively processed t​he spider pictures even though they were unaware of them, particularly in brain systems that support regulation of fear and its associated behavioral responses (including prefrontal cortex, caudate nucleus, anterior cingulate cortex).​

These are 2D slices parallel to the floor when standing; the front of the brain is at the top of each slice.