Negative social media posts correlated with changes in the brain’s fear network during the COVID-19 lockdown

Negative social media posts correlated with changes in the brain’s fear network during the COVID-19 lockdown

The collective emotional stress of the COVID-19 pandemic may be reflected in how the human brain regulates fear and anxiety. A recent study published in Frontiers in Nuclear Medicine indicates that on days when public social media posts expressed higher levels of negative emotions, brain scans of patients taken on those same days showed reduced activity in areas responsible for emotional regulation. This provides evidence that societal stress ca…