Functional and structural amygdala – Anterior cingulate connectivity correlates with attentional bias to masked fearful faces

Cortex ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 49 (9) ◽  
pp. 2595-2600 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua M. Carlson ◽  
Jiook Cha ◽  
Lilianne R. Mujica-Parodi
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua M. Carlson ◽  
Lin Fang

AbstractIn a sample of highly anxious individuals, the relationship between gray matter volume brain morphology and attentional bias to threat was assessed. Participants performed a dot-probe task of attentional bias to threat and gray matter volume was acquired from whole brain structural T1-weighted MRI scans. The results replicate previous findings in unselected samples that elevated attentional bias to threat is linked to greater gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex, middle frontal gyrus, and striatum. In addition, we provide novel evidence that elevated attentional bias to threat is associated with greater gray matter volume in the right posterior parietal cortex, cerebellum, and other distributed regions. Lastly, exploratory analyses provide initial evidence that distinct sub-regions of the right posterior parietal cortex may contribute to attentional bias in a sex-specific manner. Our results illuminate how differences in gray matter volume morphology relate to attentional bias to threat in anxious individuals. This knowledge could inform neurocognitive models of anxiety-related attentional bias to threat and targets of neuroplasticity in anxiety interventions such as attention bias modification.


2013 ◽  
Vol 44 (8) ◽  
pp. 1639-1651 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. A. Brotman ◽  
W.-L. Tseng ◽  
A. K. Olsavsky ◽  
S. J. Fromm ◽  
E. J. Muhrer ◽  
...  

BackgroundResearch in bipolar disorder (BD) implicates fronto-limbic-striatal dysfunction during face emotion processing but it is unknown how such dysfunction varies by task demands, face emotion and patient age.MethodDuring functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), 181 participants, including 62 BD (36 children and 26 adults) and 119 healthy comparison (HC) subjects (57 children and 62 adults), engaged in constrained and unconstrained processing of emotional (angry, fearful, happy) and non-emotional (neutral) faces. During constrained processing, subjects answered questions focusing their attention on the face; this was processed either implicitly (nose width rating) or explicitly (hostility; subjective fear ratings). Unconstrained processing consisted of passive viewing.ResultsPediatric BD rated neutral faces as more hostile than did other groups. In BD patients, family-wise error (FWE)-corrected region of interest (ROI) analyses revealed dysfunction in the amygdala, inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and putamen. Patients with BD showed amygdala hyperactivation during explicit processing (hostility ratings) of fearful faces and passive viewing of angry and neutral faces but IFG hypoactivation during implicit processing of neutral and happy faces. In the ACC and striatum, the direction of dysfunction varied by task demand: BD demonstrated hyperactivation during unconstrained processing of angry or neutral faces but hypoactivation during constrained processing (implicit or explicit) of angry, neutral or happy faces.ConclusionsFindings suggest amygdala hyperactivation in BD while processing negatively valenced and neutral faces, regardless of attentional condition, and BD IFG hypoactivation during implicit processing. In the cognitive control circuit involving the ACC and putamen, BD neural dysfunction was sensitive to task demands.


Infancy ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 18 (6) ◽  
pp. 905-926 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mikko J. Peltola ◽  
Jari K. Hietanen ◽  
Linda Forssman ◽  
Jukka M. Leppänen

2009 ◽  
Vol 65 (4) ◽  
pp. 289-295 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giacomo Salvadore ◽  
Brian R. Cornwell ◽  
Veronica Colon-Rosario ◽  
Richard Coppola ◽  
Christian Grillon ◽  
...  

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eeva Eskola ◽  
Eeva‐Leena Kataja ◽  
Jukka Hyönä ◽  
Tuomo Häikiö ◽  
Juho Pelto ◽  
...  

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Won-Mo Jung ◽  
Ye-Seul Lee ◽  
In-Seon Lee ◽  
Christian Wallraven ◽  
Yeonhee Ryu ◽  
...  

AbstractWe investigated whether enhanced interoceptive bodily states of fear would facilitate recognition of the fearful faces. Participants performed an emotional judgment task after a bodily imagery task inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner. In the bodily imagery task, participants were instructed to imagine feeling the bodily sensations of two specific somatotopic patterns: a fear-associated bodily sensation (FBS) or a disgust-associated bodily sensation (DBS). They were shown faces expressing various levels of fearfulness and disgust and instructed to classify the facial expression as fear or disgust. We found a stronger bias favoring the “fearful face” under the congruent FBS condition than under the incongruent DBS condition. The brain response to fearful versus intermediate faces increased in the fronto-insular-temporal network under the FBS condition, but not the DBS condition. The fearful face elicited activity in the anterior cingulate cortex and extrastriate body area under the FBS condition relative to the DBS condition. Furthermore, functional connectivity between the anterior cingulate cortex/extrastriate body area and the fronto-insular-temporal network was modulated according to the specific bodily sensation. Our findings suggest that somatotopic patterns of bodily sensation provide informative access to the collective visceral state in the fear processing via the fronto-insular-temporal network.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Kirk ◽  
Avram J Holmes ◽  
Oliver Joe Robinson

A well characterized amygdala-prefrontal circuit is thought to be crucial for threat vigilance during anxiety. However, the engagement of this circuitry within relatively naturalistic paradigms remains unresolved. Using an open fMRI dataset (CamCAN; N=630), we sought to investigate whether anxiety correlates with dynamic connectivity between the amygdala and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex during movie-watching. Using an inter-subject representational similarity approach, we saw no effect of anxiety when comparing pairwise similarities of dynamic connectivity across the entire movie. However, preregistered analyses demonstrated a relationship between anxiety, amygdala-prefrontal dynamics, and anxiogenic features of the movie (canonical suspense ratings). Specifically, higher levels of self-reported anxiety symptoms were associated with greater amygdala-prefrontal connectivity during low suspense scenes (and perhaps less connectivity during high suspense scenes). Moreover, a measure of threat-relevant attentional bias (accuracy/reaction time to fearful faces) demonstrated an association with connectivity and suspense. Overall, the present study demonstrated the presence of anxiety-relevant differences in connectivity during movie-watching, varying with anxiogenic features of the movie. Mechanistically, exactly how and when these differences arise remains an opportunity for future research.


2010 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 443-451 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cristina M Del-Ben ◽  
Cesar AQ Ferreira ◽  
Tiago A Sanchez ◽  
Wolme C Alves-Neto ◽  
Vinicius G Guapo ◽  
...  

This study aimed to measure, using fMRI, the effect of diazepam on the haemodynamic response to emotional faces. Twelve healthy male volunteers (mean age = 24.83 ± 3.16 years), were evaluated in a randomized, balanced-order, double-blind, placebo-controlled crossover design. Diazepam (10 mg) or placebo was given 1 h before the neuroimaging acquisition. In a blocked design covert face emotional task, subjects were presented with neutral (A) and aversive (B) (angry or fearful) faces. Participants were also submitted to an explicit emotional face recognition task, and subjective anxiety was evaluated throughout the procedures. Diazepam attenuated the activation of right amygdala and right orbitofrontal cortex and enhanced the activation of right anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) to fearful faces. In contrast, diazepam enhanced the activation of posterior left insula and attenuated the activation of bilateral ACC to angry faces. In the behavioural task, diazepam impaired the recognition of fear in female faces. Under the action of diazepam, volunteers were less anxious at the end of the experimental session. These results suggest that benzodiazepines can differentially modulate brain activation to aversive stimuli, depending on the stimulus features and indicate a role of amygdala and insula in the anxiolytic action of benzodiazepines.


2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (10) ◽  
pp. 1027-1035 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johnna R Swartz ◽  
Angelica F Carranza ◽  
Annchen R Knodt

Abstract Relational bullying and victimization are common social experiences during adolescence, but relatively little functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) research has examined the neural correlates of bullying and victimization in adolescents. The aim of the present study was to address this gap by examining the association between amygdala activity to angry and fearful faces and peer relational bullying and victimization in a community-based sample of adolescents. Participants included 49 adolescents, 12–15 years old, who underwent fMRI scanning while completing an emotional face matching task. Results indicated that interactions between amygdala activity to angry and fearful faces predicted self-reported relational bullying and victimization. Specifically, a combination of higher amygdala activity to angry faces and lower amygdala activity to fearful faces predicted more bullying behavior, whereas a combination of lower amygdala activity to angry faces and lower amygdala activity to fearful faces predicted less relational victimization. Exploratory whole-brain analyses also suggested that increased rostral anterior cingulate cortex activity to fearful faces was associated with less bullying. These results suggest that relational bullying and victimization are related to different patterns of neural activity to angry and fearful faces, which may help in understanding how patterns of social information processing predict these experiences.


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