New research at Emory examines link between anxiety and avoidance

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Vanessa Brown is an assistant professor of psychology whose research is focused on understanding what drives avoidance behavior and how it might influence learning ability.

Credit: Sarah Woods for Emory University

Most people think of anxiety as worry or fear, but research from Emory University finds that, for many people, it can show up as avoidance. As many as 1 in 3 people (31%) experience anxiety in their lifetime, according to the National Institute of Mental Health.

Vanessa Brown is a researcher and assistant professor of psychology at Emory University who uses brain imaging, computational models and real-world movement data to better understand how anxiety affects decision-making and learning in everyday life.  

Her work seeks to understand why anxiety often leads people to avoid certain situations, places or decisions. There hasn't been a good theory on avoidance behavior and anxiety since the 1950s, she said.

"I really wanted to try to use some of these kind of newer computational approaches to understand why people are avoiding and, hopefully, develop a new theory as to why avoidance is happening so that we could then help people with it," she said.

Avoidance can feel protective in the short term but may reinforce anxiety over time, Brown said.

"I'm a researcher, but I'm also trained to treat people with anxiety, and what I really noticed in treatment is that the amount that people were avoiding really seemed to predict if they were going to get better or not," she said. 

Her work is funded by a five-year, $3.9 million grant through the National Institutes of Health, and Brown hopes to begin recruiting people with anxiety for clinical trials in the next year.

The researchers will then look both at their behavior in the MRI scanner and through self-reporting surveys on their cellphone throughout the week to get at their avoidance behavior in everyday life.

"So, we're hoping to be able start collecting some really rich data on what people are avoiding and why they're avoiding, and to start to put that together with this brain model that we're developing now," she said.