2026 / American Journal of Psychiatry
Trait anxiety
circuit.
Maps and supporting analyses for Convergent Network Localization of Brain Stimulation Targets for Trait Anxiety — the circuit map itself, and a comparison of it and five other lesion network maps against the principal connectome gradients.
Siddiqi SH et al. Convergent Network Localization of Brain Stimulation Targets for Trait Anxiety. American Journal of Psychiatry, 2026. doi:10.1176/appi.ajp.20250198 ↗
The circuit map
The circuit was derived by convergent network localization across seven independent datasets of brain lesions and stimulation sites (n = 862). Sites that worsened anxiety and sites that relieved it fall on opposite poles of the same axis; the map was then tested prospectively against an independent DBS cohort (n = 74).
Comparison with connectome gradients
A reasonable question about any lesion network map is whether it reflects something specific to the symptom or simply recovers a generic property of the connectome — most obviously its principal gradient. We therefore correlated this circuit, and a set of other published lesion network maps, against the first five principal gradients of macroscale cortical organization.
The full-resolution anxiety circuit does match PC1 most closely (r = 0.43). But the other maps load on other gradients, in both directions: each map is a mixture of positive and negative connectivity to different principal gradients rather than a variation on a single one. Alignment with connectome gradients is therefore a variable feature across lesion network maps, not a constant one.
| Lesion network map | Gradient | r | Availability |
|---|---|---|---|
| Trait anxiety full resolution | PC1 | 0.43 | NeuroVault 1082165 ↗ |
| Depression 14-dataset convergent circuit | PC3 PC1 | 0.29 −0.23 |
NeuroVault 787859 ↗ |
| Prosopagnosia | PC2 positive / temporo-occipital | 0.39 | Not available for release |
| Parkinsonism | PC2 negative / sensorimotor | −0.30 | NeuroVault 1082166 ↗ |
| Akinetic mutism | PC3 PC4 | 0.32 0.32 |
Not available for release |
| Obsessive-compulsive disorder | PC5 | 0.27 | Source repository ↗ |
What is and is not here
Four of the six maps above are publicly available, so the correlations involving them can be reproduced independently today. The OCD map comes from the public repository released by van den Heuvel et al.; the rest are ours.
The prosopagnosia and akinetic mutism maps are not released as of 1 October 2026. Both are examples drawn from a broader repository built and analysed over several years, which is currently being systematically analysed, organised, and permissioned — working out what can and should be released means reading across the terms of multiple existing data use agreements alongside other considerations. Their correlations are reported above, but cannot be checked against the underlying maps from this page until that work is finished.
Principal gradients PC1–PC5 are those of Margulies et al., available in full from the authors' own NeuroVault collection. Gradients beyond PC5 were not publicly available at the time of this analysis; they may well map onto other lesion network maps, and we make no claim either way about them.
Other maps from the group
Circuits from earlier papers, several of which appear in the comparison above or are built from overlapping source cohorts.