Separating subjective emotion from the perception of emotion-inducing stimuli: An fMRI study (original) (raw)
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Time course of the subjective emotional response to aversive pictures: relevance to fMRI studies
Psychiatry Research-neuroimaging, 2001
Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study brain activity related to the experience of emotion presents unique challenges to neuroscientists. One important consideration arises when an experimentally induced subjective emotional response persists after the end of the emotional stimulation epoch. In this case, brain activity related to the emotional response may continue during the subsequent control or comparison epoch.
The ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC) and amygdala have critical roles in the generation and regulation of unpleasant emotions, and in this study the dynamic neural basis of unpleasant emotion processing was elucidated by using paired-samples permutation t-tests to identify the timing of emotional discrimination in various brain regions. We recorded the temporal dynamics of blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) signals in those brain regions during the viewing of unpleasant pictures by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with high temporal resolution, and we compared the time course of the signal within the volume of interest (VOI) across emotional conditions. Results show that emotional discrimination in the right amygdala precedes that in the left amygdala and that emotional discrimination in both those regions precedes that in the right anterior VLPFC. They support the hypotheses that the right amygdala is part of a rapid emotional stimulus detection system and the left amygdala is specialized for sustained stimulus evaluation and that the right anterior VLPFC is implicated in the integration of viscerosensory information with affective signals between the bilateral anterior VLPFCs and the bilateral amygdalae.
Brain and emotion: Cognitive neuroscience of emotions
Review of Psychology, 2011
Cognitive neuroscience of emotions is a rapidly growing field. It focuses on the neural basis of emotional and social processes and strongly contributes to the better understanding of the biological basis of emotional processing. It integrates the results of neural and behavioral levels of analysis in healthy and clinical populations as well. The main topics and questions in cognitive neuroscience of emotions are the role of emotions in information processing, their neural basis for both cortical and sub-cortical levels, the perception of arousing and neutral stimuli, emotions and memory, the role of emotion in decision making, detecting emotional versus neutral faces, and individual differences in emotionality and their biological background. Brain imaging techniques (e.g., functional magnetic resonance imaging-fMRI) are used both for examining functional connections between emotion and perception, attention, memory and decision making, and for localizing specific psychological functions to specific brain areas. In this paper we discuss not only current research trends and methods but some important brain areas responsible for emotions (e.g., amygdala, anterior cingular cortex, prefrontal cortex) as well.
Functional neuroanatomy of emotion: a meta-analysis of emotion activation studies in PET and fMRI
Neuroimage, 2002
Neuroimaging studies with positron emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have begun to describe the functional neuroanatomy of emotion. Taken separately, specific studies vary in task dimensions and in type(s) of emotion studied and are limited by statistical power and sensitivity. By examining findings across studies, we sought to determine if common or segregated patterns of activations exist across various emotional tasks. We reviewed 55 PET and fMRI activation studies (yielding 761 individual peaks) which investigated emotion in healthy subjects. Peak activation coordinates were transformed into a standard space and plotted onto canonical 3-D brain renderings. We divided the brain into 20 nonoverlapping regions, and characterized each region by its responsiveness across individual emotions (positive, negative, happiness, fear, anger, sadness, disgust), to different induction methods (visual, auditory, recall/imagery), and in emotional tasks with and without cognitive demand. Our review yielded the following summary observations: (1) The medial prefrontal cortex had a general role in emotional processing; (2) fear specifically engaged the amygdala; (3) sadness was associated with activity in the subcallosal cingulate; (4) emotional induction by visual stimuli activated the occipital cortex and the amygdala; (5) induction by emotional recall/imagery recruited the anterior cingulate and insula; (6) emotional tasks with cognitive demand also involved the anterior cingulate and insula. This review provides a critical comparison of findings across individual studies and suggests that separate brain regions are involved in different aspects of emotion.
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This study used fMRI to examine the response of the amygdala in the evaluation and short-term recognition memory of unpleasant vs. neutral words in nine right-handed healthy adult women. To establish specificity of the amygdala response, we examined the fMRI BOLD signal in one control region (visual cortex). Alternating blocks of unpleasant and neutral trials were presented. During the emotional decision task, subjects viewed sets of three unpleasant or three neutral words while selecting the most unpleasant or neutral word, respectively. During the memory task, subjects identified words that were presented during the emotional decision task (0.50 probability). Images were detrended, filtered, and coregistered to standard brain coordinates. The Talairach coordinates for the center of the amygdala were chosen before analysis. The BOLD signal at this location in the right hemisphere revealed a greater amplitude signal for the unpleasant relative to the neutral words during the emotional decision but not the memory task, confirmed by Time Course× Word Condition ANOVAs. These results are consistent with the memory modulatory view of amygdala function, which suggests that the amygdala facilitates long-term, but not short-term, memory consolidation of emotionally significant material. The control area showed only an effect for Time Course for both the emotional decision and memory tasks, indicating the specificity of the amygdala response to the evaluation of unpleasant words. Moreover, the right-sided amygdala activation during the unpleasant word condition was strongly correlated with the BOLD response in the occipital cortex. These findings corroborate those by other researchers that the amygdala can modulate early processing of visual information in the occipital cortex. Finally, an increase in subject's state anxiety (evaluated by questionnaire) while in the scanner correlated with amygdala activation under some conditions.
Comparison of Four fMRI Paradigms Probing Emotion Processing
Brain Sciences, 2021
Previous fMRI research has applied a variety of tasks to examine brain activity underlying emotion processing. While task characteristics are known to have a substantial influence on the elicited activations, direct comparisons of tasks that could guide study planning are scarce. We aimed to provide a comparison of four common emotion processing tasks based on the same analysis pipeline to suggest tasks best suited for the study of certain target brain regions. We studied an n-back task using emotional words (EMOBACK) as well as passive viewing tasks of emotional faces (FACES) and emotional scenes (OASIS and IAPS). We compared the activation patterns elicited by these tasks in four regions of interest (the amygdala, anterior insula, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) and pregenual anterior cingulate cortex (pgACC)) in three samples of healthy adults (N = 45). The EMOBACK task elicited activation in the right dlPFC and bilateral anterior insula and deactivation in the pgACC while...
Emotional arousal and activation of the visual cortex: An fMRI analysis
Psychophysiology, 1998
Functional activity in the visual cortex was assessed using functional magnetic resonance imaging technology while participants viewed a series of pleasant, neutral, or unpleasant pictures. Coronal images at four different locations in the occipital cortex were acquired during each of eight 12-s picture presentation periods~on! and 12-s interpicture interval off !. The extent of functional activation was larger in the right than the left hemisphere and larger in the occipital than in the occipitoparietal regions during processing of all picture contents compared with the interpicture intervals. More importantly, functional activity was significantly greater in all sampled brain regions when processing emotional pleasant or unpleasant! pictures than when processing neutral stimuli. In Experiment 2, a hypothesis that these differences were an artifact of differential eye movements was ruled out. Whereas both emotional and neutral pictures produced activity centered on the calcarine fissure~Area 17!, only emotional pictures also produced sizable clusters bilaterally in the occipital gyrus, in the right fusiform gyrus, and in the right inferior and superior parietal lobules.
2003
Background: Significant differences between individual responses to emotional stimuli can be important for the study of emotion. We investigated whether incorporating individual ratings of emotional arousal in the analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data improves the detection of activation in the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) and sublenticular extended amygdala (SLEA), areas implicated in the processing of emotional salience. Methods: Healthy subjects viewed counterbalanced blocks of aversive, nonaversive, and blank images. Outside the scanner, they rated the intensity of emotional arousal (salience) of each presented picture. Results: Incorporating the subject's response to each stimulus by using individualized regressors produced more robust activations within MPFC and SLEA compared with a simple boxcar regressor, identical for all subjects. Conclusions: Our findings demonstrate that individual behavioral data are useful in improving detection of activation in block-design functional imaging studies.