Neural correlates of anxiety under interrogation in guilt or innocence contexts

Interrogation elicits anxiety in individuals under scrutiny regardless of their innocence, and thus, anxious responses to interrogation should be differentiated from deceptive behavior in practical lie detection settings. Despite its importance, not many empirical studies have yet been done to separate the effects of interrogation from the acts of lying or guilt state. The present fMRI study attempted to identify neural substrates of anxious responses under interrogation in either innocent or guilt contexts by developing a modified “Doubt” game. Participants in the guilt condition showed higher brain activations in the right central-executive network and bilateral basal ganglia. Regardless of the person’s innocence, we observed higher activation of the salience, theory of mind and sensory-motor networks–areas associated with anxiety-related responses in the interrogative condition, compared to the waived conditions. We further explored two different types of anxious responses under interrogation–true detection anxiety in the guilty (true positive) and false detection anxiety in the innocent (false positive). Differential neural responses across these two conditions were captured at the caudate, thalamus, ventral anterior cingulate and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. We conclude that anxiety is a common neural response to interrogation, regardless of an individual’s innocence, and that there are detectable differences in neural responses for true positive and false positive anxious responses under interrogation. The results of our study highlight a need to isolate complex cognitive processes involved in the deceptive acts from the emotional and regulatory responses to interrogation in lie detection schemes.