Abstract
Despite an emphasis on transdiagnostic mechanisms, translating these insights into treatments has been limited. Neuromodulation treatments allow for more direct translation between brain networks and clinical treatments. Brain stimulation to the recently proposed anxiosomatic network has been clinically successful in modulating anxiety-related symptoms in depression. To study the psychological mechanisms of this phenomenon, we tested the effect of stimulating this network on emotional conflict regulation, a proposed task-based measure of anxiety-related circuitry. We used two transcranial magnetic stimulation datasets (N = 56, N = 29) to test this hypothesis in patients with anxiety and depression. The overlap between patient stimulation sites and the anxiosomatic network predicted a component of emotional conflict regulation, emotional conflict resolution, in only one dataset. To understand these mixed findings, we tested two alternative hypotheses. First, we tested whether anxiety was related to emotional conflict regulation performance and found no significant correlation between the two. Second, we tested whether emotional conflict regulation could be selectively modulated by different stimulation targets, and found a consistent network that, when stimulated, led to selective changes in emotional conflict resolution. Based on our findings, we find that emotional conflict regulation was not consistently modified by stimulation of the anxiosomatic network, but emotional conflict resolution may still be responsive to network-targeted stimulation.