A causal role for inferior parietal lobule in emotion body perception

Long-term effects of childhood single-parent family structure on brain connectivity and psychological well-being

The high and increasing proportion of single-parent families is considered a risk factor associated with various childhood trauma experiences. Consequently, concerns have been raised regarding the potential long-term effects of the childhood single-parent family structure. In this study, we employed advanced magnetic resonance imaging technology, including morphometric similarity mapping, functional connectivity density, and network-based analysis, to investigate brain connectivity and behavioral differences among young adults who were raised in single-parent families. Our study also aimed to explore the relationship between these differences and childhood trauma experiences. The results showed that individuals who grew up in single-parent families exhibited higher levels of anxiety, depression, and harm-avoidant personality. The multimodal MRI analysis further showed differences in regional and network-based connectivity properties in the single-parent family group, including increased functional connectivity density in the left inferior parietal lobule, enhanced cortical structural connectivity between the left isthmus cingulate cortex and peri-calcarine cortex, and an increase in temporal functional connectivity. Moreover, elevated levels of anxiety and depression, along with heightened functional connectivity density in the left inferior parietal lobule and increased temporal functional connectivity, were found to be correlated with a greater number of childhood trauma experiences. Through analyzing multiple data patterns, our study provides objective neuropsychobiological evidence for the enduring impact of childhood single-parent family structure on psychiatric vulnerability in adulthood.

Facial feedback manipulation influences the automatic detection of unexpected emotional body expressions

Unexpected or changing facial expressions are known to be able to engage more automatic processing than frequently occurring facial expressions, thereby inducing a neural differential wave response known as expression mismatch negativity (EMMN). Recent studies have shown that EMMN can be modulated by the observer's facial feedback (i.e., feedback from their own facial movements). A similar EMMN activity has been discovered for body expressions, but thus far only a few emotion types have been investigated. It is unknown whether the EMMNs evoked by body expressions can be influenced by facial feedback. To explore this question, we recorded EEG activity of 29 participants in the reverse oddball paradigm. Here two unexamined categories of body expressions were presented, happy and sad, placed in two paired stimulus sequences: in one the happy body was presented with a probability of 80% (standards) while the sad body was presented with a probability of 20% (deviants), and in the other the probabilities were reversed. The facial feedback was manipulated by different pen holding conditions (i.e., participants holding the pen with the teeth, lips, or nondominant hand). The nonparametric cluster permutation test revealed significant happy and sad body-related EMMN (bEMMN) activities. The happy-bEMMN were more negative than sad-bEMMN within the range of 100-150 ms. Additionally, the bEMMN amplitude of both emotions is modulated by the facial feedback conditions. These results expand the range of emotional types applicable to bEMMN and provide evidence for the validity of the facial feedback hypothesis across emotional carriers.

Abnormal fractional amplitude of low-frequency fluctuations and regional homogeneity in major depressive disorder with non-suicidal self-injury

OBJECTIVE

We conducted this resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rsfMRI) study to characterize changes in regional homogeneity (ReHo) or fractional amplitude of low-frequency fluctuations (fALFF) in young adult patients with major depressive disorder (MDD), with or without non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI).

METHODS

We recruited 54 MDD patients with NSSI (MDD/NSSI), 68 MDD patients without NSSI, which is referred to as simple MDD (sMDD), and 66 matched healthy controls (HCs). A combination of fALFF and ReHo analyses was conducted. The effects of NSSI on the brain and their relationship to clinical variables were examined in this study.

RESULTS

MDD/NSSI patients have decreased fALFF in the right superior frontal gyrus (SFG) and the right inferior parietal lobe (IPL), decreased ReHo in the right SFG and the right middle temporal gyrus (MTG) and the left middle occipital gyrus (MOG). fALFF and ReHo values of the right SFG are positively correlated. The ReHo values of the right SFG and the number of recent self-injuries are positively correlated; the fALFF values of the right SFG are negatively correlated with NSSI severity.

CONCLUSIONS

There is a difference in brain activity between MDD/NSSI and sMDD, which may serve as an important physiological marker to determine the risk of self-injury and suicide.

SIGNIFICANCE

Abnormal brain activity in patients with NSSI may provide new perspectives and significant implications on the severity of MDD patients and the prevention of self-injury and suicide.

Role of the intraparietal sulcus (IPS) in anxiety and cognition: Opportunities for intervention for anxiety-related disorders

Our objective was to review the literature on the parietal cortex and intraparietal sulcus (IPS) in anxiety-related disorders, as well as opportunities for using neuromodulation to target this region and reduce anxiety. We provide an overview of prior research demonstrating: 1) the importance of the IPS in attention, vigilance, and anxious arousal, 2) the potential for neuromodulation of the IPS to reduce unnecessary attention toward threat and anxious arousal as demonstrated in healthy samples; and 3) limited data on the potential for neuromodulation of the IPS to reduce hyper-attention toward threat and anxious arousal among clinical samples with anxiety-related disorders. Future research should evaluate the efficacy of IPS neuromodulation in fully powered clinical trials, as well as the value in augmenting evidence-based treatments for anxiety with IPS neuromodulation.

Dissociating representations of affect and motion in visual cortices

While a delicious dessert being presented to us may elicit strong feelings of happiness and excitement, the same treat falling slowly away can lead to sadness and disappointment. Our emotional response to the item depends on its visual motion direction. Despite this importance, it remains unclear whether (and how) cortical areas devoted to decoding motion direction represents or integrates emotion with perceived motion direction. Motion-selective visual area V5/MT+ sits, both functionally and anatomically, at the nexus of dorsal and ventral visual streams. These pathways, however, differ in how they are modulated by emotional cues. The current study was designed to disentangle how emotion and motion perception interact, as well as use emotion-dependent modulation of visual cortices to understand the relation of V5/MT+ to canonical processing streams. During functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), approaching, receding, or static motion after-effects (MAEs) were induced on stationary positive, negative, and neutral stimuli. An independent localizer scan was conducted to identify the visual-motion area V5/MT+. Through univariate and multivariate analyses, we demonstrated that emotion representations in V5/MT+ share a more similar response profile to that observed in ventral visual than dorsal, visual structures. Specifically, V5/MT+ and ventral structures were sensitive to the emotional content of visual stimuli, whereas dorsal visual structures were not. Overall, this work highlights the critical role of V5/MT+ in the representation and processing of visually acquired emotional content. It further suggests a role for this region in utilizing affectively salient visual information to augment motion perception of biologically relevant stimuli.

A comparison of uni- and multi-variate methods for identifying brain networks activated by cognitive tasks using intracranial EEG

Cognitive tasks are commonly used to identify brain networks involved in the underlying cognitive process. However, inferring the brain networks from intracranial EEG data presents several challenges related to the sparse spatial sampling of the brain and the high variability of the EEG trace due to concurrent brain processes. In this manuscript, we use a well-known facial emotion recognition task to compare three different ways of analyzing the contrasts between task conditions: permutation cluster tests, machine learning (ML) classifiers, and a searchlight implementation of multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) for intracranial sparse data recorded from 13 patients undergoing presurgical evaluation for drug-resistant epilepsy. Using all three methods, we aim at highlighting the brain structures with significant contrast between conditions. In the absence of ground truth, we use the scientific literature to validate our results. The comparison of the three methods’ results shows moderate agreement, measured by the Jaccard coefficient, between the permutation cluster tests and the machine learning [0.33 and 0.52 for the left (LH) and right (RH) hemispheres], and 0.44 and 0.37 for the LH and RH between the permutation cluster tests and MVPA. The agreement between ML and MVPA is higher: 0.65 for the LH and 0.62 for the RH. To put these results in context, we performed a brief review of the literature and we discuss how each brain structure’s involvement in the facial emotion recognition task.

Resting-state neural signal variability in women with depressive disorders

Aberrant activity and connectivity in default mode (DMN), frontoparietal (FPN), and salience (SN) network regions is well-documented in depression. Recent neuroimaging research suggests that altered variability in the blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) signal may disrupt normal network integration and be an important novel predictor of psychopathology. However, no studies have yet determined the relationship between resting-state BOLD signal variability and depressive disorders nor applied BOLD signal variability features to the classification of depression history using machine learning (ML). We collected resting-state fMRI data for 79 women with different depression histories: no history, past history, and current depressive disorder. We tested voxelwise differences in BOLD signal variability related to depression group and severity. We also investigated whether BOLD signal variability of DMN, FPN, and SN regions could predict depression history group using a supervised random forest ML model. Results indicated that individuals with any history of depression had significantly decreased BOLD signal variability in the left and right cerebellum and right parietal cortex (pFWE <0.05). Furthermore, greater depression severity was also associated with reduced BOLD signal variability in the cerebellum. A random forest model classified participant depression history with 74% accuracy, with the ventral anterior cingulate cortex of the DMN as the most important variable in the model. These findings provide novel support for resting-state BOLD signal variability as a marker of neural dysfunction in depression and implicate decreased neural signal variability in the pathophysiology of depression.

Functional Connectome Dynamics After Mild Traumatic Brain Injury According to Age and Sex

Neural and cognitive deficits after mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) are paralleled by changes in resting state functional correlation (FC) networks that mirror post-traumatic pathophysiology effects on functional outcomes. Using functional magnetic resonance images acquired both acutely and chronically after injury (∼1 week and ∼6 months post-injury, respectively), we map post-traumatic FC changes across 136 participants aged 19-79 (52 females), both within and between the brain's seven canonical FC networks: default mode, dorsal attention, frontoparietal, limbic, somatomotor, ventral attention, and visual. Significant sex-dependent FC changes are identified between (A) visual and limbic, and between (B) default mode and somatomotor networks. These changes are significantly associated with specific functional recovery patterns across all cognitive domains (p < 0.05, corrected). Changes in FC between default mode, somatomotor, and ventral attention networks, on the one hand, and both temporal and occipital regions, on the other hand, differ significantly by age group (p < 0.05, corrected), and are paralleled by significant sex differences in cognitive recovery independently of age at injury (p < 0.05, corrected). Whereas females' networks typically feature both significant (p < 0.036, corrected) and insignificant FC changes, males more often exhibit significant FC decreases between networks (e.g., between dorsal attention and limbic, visual and limbic, default-mode and somatomotor networks, p < 0.0001, corrected), all such changes being accompanied by significantly weaker recovery of cognitive function in males, particularly older ones (p < 0.05, corrected). No significant FC changes were found across 35 healthy controls aged 66-92 (20 females). Thus, male sex and older age at injury are risk factors for significant FC alterations whose patterns underlie post-traumatic cognitive deficits. This is the first study to map, systematically, how mTBI impacts FC between major human functional networks.

Perspective-taking is associated with increased discriminability of affective states in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex

Recent work using multivariate-pattern analysis (MVPA) on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data has found that distinct affective states produce correspondingly distinct patterns of neural activity in the cerebral cortex. However, it is unclear whether individual differences in the distinctiveness of neural patterns evoked by affective stimuli underlie empathic abilities such as perspective-taking (PT). Accordingly, we examined whether we could predict PT tendency from the classification of blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) fMRI activation patterns while participants (n = 57) imagined themselves in affectively charged scenarios. We used an MVPA searchlight analysis to map where in the brain activity patterns permitted the classification of four affective states: happiness, sadness, fear and disgust. Classification accuracy was significantly above chance levels in most of the prefrontal cortex and in the posterior medial cortices. Furthermore, participants' self-reported PT was positively associated with classification accuracy in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and insula. This finding has implications for understanding affective processing in the prefrontal cortex and for interpreting the cognitive significance of classifiable affective brain states. Our multivariate approach suggests that PT ability may rely on the grain of internally simulated affective representations rather than simply the global strength.

Features and Extra-Striate Body Area Representations of Diagnostic Body Parts in Anger and Fear Perception

Social species perceive emotion via extracting diagnostic features of body movements. Although extensive studies have contributed to knowledge on how the entire body is used as context for decoding bodily expression, we know little about whether specific body parts (e.g., arms and legs) transmit enough information for body understanding. In this study, we performed behavioral experiments using the Bubbles paradigm on static body images to directly explore diagnostic body parts for categorizing angry, fearful and neutral expressions. Results showed that subjects recognized emotional bodies through diagnostic features from the torso with arms. We then conducted a follow-up functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment on body part images to examine whether diagnostic parts modulated body-related brain activity and corresponding neural representations. We found greater activations of the extra-striate body area (EBA) in response to both anger and fear than neutral for the torso and arms. Representational similarity analysis showed that neural patterns of the EBA distinguished different bodily expressions. Furthermore, the torso with arms and whole body had higher similarities in EBA representations relative to the legs and whole body, and to the head and whole body. Taken together, these results indicate that diagnostic body parts (i.e., torso with arms) can communicate bodily expression in a detectable manner.

The automatic detection of unexpected emotion and neutral body postures: A visual mismatch negativity study

The ability to automatically detect emotional changes in the environment is crucial for social interaction. In the visual system, expression-related mismatch negativity (EMMN) reflects the automatic processing of emotional changes in facial expression. However, body postures also carry visual emotional information that can be recognized effectively and processed automatically, although their processing mechanism remains unknown. In this study, the reverse oddball paradigm was used to investigate the mismatch responses of unexpected fear and neutral body postures. The nonparametric cluster permutation test revealed significant fear and neutral visual mismatch negativity (vMMN) activities, and the fear-related vMMN was enhanced prior (130-230 ms) to the neutral vMMN (180-230 ms). The body-sensitive N190 component may partially account for the vMMN obtained in this study. The fearful body posture evoked a greater N190 response over the neutral body, and amplitudes of N190 were more negative in the deviant condition than the standard condition. Additionally, the body-related visual mismatch oscillatory responses were associated with enhancement of the alpha band oscillation, especially for the fearful body posture. These results expanded the applicable scope of body posture cues corresponding to mismatch signals, objectively defined the electrophysiological activities evoked, and revealed the processing bias toward negative emotion.

Neural impact of neighborhood socioeconomic disadvantage in traumatically injured adults

Nearly 14 percent of Americans live in a socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhood. Lower individual socioeconomic position (iSEP) has been linked to increased exposure to trauma and stress, as well as to alterations in brain structure and function; however, the neural effects of neighborhood SEP (nSEP) factors, such as neighborhood disadvantage, are unclear. Using a multi-modal approach with participants who recently experienced a traumatic injury (N = 185), we investigated the impact of neighborhood disadvantage, acute post-traumatic stress symptoms, and iSEP on brain structure and functional connectivity at rest. After controlling for iSEP, demographic variables, and acute PTSD symptoms, nSEP was associated with decreased volume and alterations of resting-state functional connectivity in structures implicated in affective processing, including the insula, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, amygdala, and hippocampus. Even in individuals who have recently experienced a traumatic injury, and after accounting for iSEP, the impact of living in a disadvantaged neighborhood is apparent, particularly in brain regions critical for experiencing and regulating emotion. These results should inform future research investigating how various levels of socioeconomic circumstances may impact recovery after a traumatic injury as well as policies and community-developed interventions aimed at reducing the impact of socioeconomic stressors.

Incongruence effects in cross-modal emotional processing in autistic traits: An fMRI study

In everyday life, emotional information is often conveyed by both the face and the voice. Consequently, information presented by one source can alter the way in which information from the other source is perceived, leading to emotional incongruence. Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine neutral correlates of two different types of emotional incongruence in audiovisual processing, namely incongruence of emotion-valence and incongruence of emotion-presence. Participants were in two groups, one group with a low Autism Quotient score (LAQ) and one with a high score (HAQ). Each participant experienced emotional (happy, fearful) or neutral faces or voices while concurrently being exposed to emotional (happy, fearful) or neutral voices or faces. They were instructed to attend to either the visual or auditory track. The incongruence effect of emotion-valence was characterized by activation in a wide range of brain regions in both hemispheres involving the inferior frontal gyrus, cuneus, superior temporal gyrus, and middle frontal gyrus. The incongruence effect of emotion-presence was characterized by activation in a set of temporal and occipital regions in both hemispheres, including the middle occipital gyrus, middle temporal gyrus and inferior temporal gyrus. In addition, the present study identified greater recruitment of the right inferior parietal lobule in perceiving audio-visual emotional expressions in HAQ individuals, as compared to the LAQ individuals. Depending on face or voice-to-be attended, different patterns of emotional incongruence were found between the two groups. Specifically, the HAQ group tend to show more incidental processing to visual information whilst the LAQ group tend to show more incidental processing to auditory information during the crossmodal emotional incongruence decoding. These differences might be attributed to different attentional demands and different processing strategies between the two groups.

Decoding the difference between explicit and implicit body expression representation in high level visual, prefrontal and inferior parietal cortex

Recent studies provide an increasing understanding of how visual objects categories like faces or bodies are represented in the brain and also raised the question whether a category based or more dynamic network inspired models are more powerful. Two important and so far sidestepped issues in this debate are, first, how major category attributes like the emotional expression directly influence category representation and second, whether category and attribute representation are sensitive to task demands. This study investigated the impact of a crucial category attribute like emotional expression on category area activity and whether this varies with the participants' task. Using (fMRI) we measured BOLD responses while participants viewed whole body expressions and performed either an explicit (emotion) or an implicit (shape) recognition task. Our results based on multivariate methods show that the type of task is the strongest determinant of brain activity and can be decoded in EBA, VLPFC and IPL. Brain activity was higher for the explicit task condition in VLPFC and was not emotion specific. This pattern suggests that during explicit recognition of the body expression, body category representation may be strengthened, and emotion and action related activity suppressed. Taken together these results stress the importance of the task and of the role of category attributes for understanding the functional organization of high level visual cortex.

Brain activation and connectivity in anorexia nervosa and body dysmorphic disorder when viewing bodies: relationships to clinical symptoms and perception of appearance

Anorexia nervosa (AN) and body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) are characterized by distorted perception of appearance, yet no studies have directly compared the neurobiology associated with body perception. We compared AN and BDD in brain activation and connectivity in relevant networks when viewing images of others' bodies and tested their relationships with clinical symptoms and subjective appearance evaluations. We acquired fMRI data from 64 unmedicated females (20 weight-restored AN, 23 BDD, 21 controls) during a matching task using unaltered or spatial-frequency filtered photos of others' bodies. Using general linear model and independent components analyses we compared brain activation and connectivity in visual, striatal, and parietal networks and performed univariate and partial least squares multivariate analyses to investigate relationships with clinical symptoms and appearance evaluations. AN and BDD showed partially overlapping patterns of hyperconnectivity in the dorsal visual network and hypoconnectivity in parietal network compared with controls. BDD, but not AN, demonstrated hypoactivity in dorsal visual and parietal networks compared to controls. Further, there were significant activity and connectivity differences between AN and BDD in both networks. In both groups, activity and/or connectivity were associated with symptom severity and appearance ratings of others' bodies. Thus, AN and BDD demonstrate both distinct and partially-overlapping aberrant neural phenotypes involved in body processing and visually encoding global features. Nevertheless, in each disorder, aberrant activity and connectivity show relationships to clinically relevant symptoms and subjective perception. These results have implications for understanding distinct and shared pathophysiology underlying perceptual distortions of appearance and may inform future novel treatment strategies.

Accurate neuroimaging biomarkers to predict body mass index in adolescents: a longitudinal study

Obesity is often associated with cardiovascular complications. Adolescent obesity is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease in adulthood; thus, intensive management is warranted in adolescence. The brain state contributes to the development of obesity in addition to metabolic conditions, and hence neuroimaging is an important tool for accurately assessing an individual's risk of developing obesity. Here, we aimed to predict body mass index (BMI) progression in adolescents with neuroimaging features using machine learning approaches. From an open database, we adopted 76 resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) datasets from adolescents with longitudinal BMI scores. Functional connectivity analyses were performed on cortical surfaces and subcortical volumes. We identified baseline functional connectivity features in the prefrontal-, posterior cingulate-, sensorimotor-, and inferior parietal-cortices as significant determinants of BMI changes. A BMI prediction model based on the identified fMRI biomarkers exhibited a high accuracy (intra-class correlation = 0.98) in predicting BMI at the second visit (1~2 years later). The identified brain regions were significantly correlated with the eating disorder-, anxiety-, and depression-related scores. Based on these results, we concluded that these functional connectivity features in brain regions related to eating disorders and emotional processing could be important neuroimaging biomarkers for predicting BMI progression.

Difficulties in Recognising Dynamic but not Static Emotional Body Movements in Autism Spectrum Disorder

In this study, we investigated whether the difficulties in body motion (BM) perception may led to deficit in emotion recognition in Autism spectrum disorder (ASD). To this aim, individuals with high-functioning ASD were asked to recognise fearful, happy, and neutral BM depicted as static images or dynamic point-light and full-light displays. Results showed slower response times in participants with ASD only in recognising dynamic stimuli, but no group differences in accuracy. This suggests that i) a deficit in action chaining mechanism in ASD may prevent the recognition of dynamic BM automatically and rapidly, ii) individuals with ASD and high cognitive resources can develop alternative—but equally successful—strategies to recognise emotional body expressions. Implications for treatment are discussed

Neuroplasticity in Corticolimbic Brain Regions in Patients After Anterior Cruciate Ligament Reconstruction

CONTEXT

Fear has been cited as the primary barrier to return to sport (RTS) by athletes after anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction (ACLR). Understanding the neural factors that contribute to fear after ACLR may help us to identify interventions for this population.

OBJECTIVE

To characterize the underlying neural substrate of injury-related fear in patients after ACLR versus healthy matched control individuals during a picture imagination task (PIT) consisting of sport-specific images and images of activities of daily living (ADL).

DESIGN

Case-control study.

SETTING

Research laboratory.

PATIENTS OR OTHER PARTICIPANTS

A total of 24 right-hand-dominant participants (12 with left-sided ACLR and 12 control individuals) were enrolled. Participants underwent full-brain functional magnetic resonance imaging.

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE(S)

Functional data were acquired using blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) echoplanar imaging. Independent t tests were conducted to identify between-groups differences in BOLD signal changes during all images of the PIT. Paired t tests were computed to examine differences in BOLD signal change between sport-specific and ADL images in the ACLR group.

RESULTS

Increased activation in the inferior parietal lobule and the mediodorsal thalamus was observed during PIT in the ACLR group. An inability to suppress the default mode network in the ACLR group was noted. The ACLR group exhibited increased activation in the cerebellum and inferior occipital regions during the sport-specific images versus the ADL images, but no other regions of interest demonstrated differences.

CONCLUSION

After ACLR, patients may be more predisposed to fear, anxiety, and pain during sport-specific activities and ADLs. Psychosocial interventions may be warranted after ACLR to reduce injury-related fear and mitigate potentially maladaptive neuroplasticity.

Functional coupling of the orbitofrontal cortex and the basolateral amygdala mediates the association between spontaneous reappraisal and emotional response

Emotional regulation is known to be associated with activity in the amygdala. The amygdala is an emotion-generative region that comprises of structurally and functionally distinct nuclei. However, little is known about the contributions of different frontal-amygdala sub-region pathways to emotion regulation. Here, we investigated how functional couplings between frontal regions and amygdala sub-regions are involved in different spontaneous emotion regulation processes by using an individual-difference approach and a generalized psycho-physiological interaction (gPPI) approach. Specifically, 50 healthy participants reported their dispositional use of spontaneous cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression in daily life and their actual use of these two strategies during the performance of an emotional-picture watching task. Results showed that functional coupling between the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and the basolateral amygdala (BLA) was associated with higher scores of both dispositional and actual uses of reappraisal. Similarly, functional coupling between the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) and the centromedial amygdala (CMA) was associated with higher scores of both dispositional and actual uses of suppression. Mediation analyses indicated that functional coupling of the right OFC-BLA partially mediated the association between reappraisal and emotional response, irrespective of whether reappraisal was measured by dispositional use (indirect effect(SE)=-0.2021 (0.0811), 95%CI_(BC)= [-0.3851, -0.0655]) or actual use (indirect effect(SE)=-0.1951 (0.0796), 95%CI_(BC)= [-0.3654, -0.0518])). These findings suggest that spontaneous reappraisal and suppression involve distinct frontal- amygdala functional couplings, and the modulation of BLA activity from OFC may be necessary for changing emotional response during spontaneous reappraisal.

The brain under stress-A systematic review and activation likelihood estimation meta-analysis of changes in BOLD signal associated with acute stress exposure

Psychosocial stress is an omnipresent phenomenon whose neural correlates in humans are still poorly understood. Several paradigms have been developed to induce acute stress in fMRI settings, but it is unclear whether there is a global brain activation pattern related to psychosocial stress. To integrate the different neuronal activation patterns, we conducted an activation likelihood estimation analysis on 31 studies totaling 1279 participants. Studies used the ScanSTRESS, Montreal Imaging Stress Test, aversive viewing paradigm (AVP), Social-Evaluative Threat or Cyberball. The analysis revealed bilateral activation clusters comprising the claustrum, insula and inferior frontal gyrus. This indicates that exposure to psychosocial stress leads to activations in brain areas involved in affective processing and the endocrine stress response. Furthermore, in a systematic review, Cyberball and AVP presented themselves as outliers due to increased activation in motor areas and lack of induction of stress related activity changes, respectively. As different paradigms emphasize different dimensions of psychosocial stress such as social evaluation or performance pressure, future research is needed to identify differences between the paradigms.

Hyperscanning EEG and Classification Based on Riemannian Geometry for Festive and Violent Mental State Discrimination

Interactions between two brains constitute the essence of social communication. Daily movements are commonly executed during social interactions and are determined by different mental states that may express different positive or negative behavioral intent. In this context, the effective recognition of festive or violent intent before the action execution remains crucial for survival. Here, we hypothesize that the EEG signals contain the distinctive features characterizing movement intent already expressed before movement execution and that such distinctive information can be identified by state-of-the-art classification algorithms based on Riemannian geometry. We demonstrated for the first time that a classifier based on covariance matrices and Riemannian geometry can effectively discriminate between neutral, festive, and violent mental states only on the basis of non-invasive EEG signals in both the actor and observer participants. These results pave the way for new electrophysiological discrimination of mental states based on non-invasive EEG recordings and cutting-edge machine learning techniques.

First-person perspective sharpens the understanding of distressful physical feelings associated with physical disability: A functional magnetic resonance study

We investigated whether observation of hand movements of people with hemiplegia by healthy individuals from the first-person perspective (FPP), compared to that from the third-person perspective (TPP), enables better understanding of disability-associated distress. We measured the neural activity of healthy individuals using functional magnetic resonance imaging while they observed hemiplegic movements from the FPP or TPP. Subjective assessment of the movements was determined with questionnaires. Compared to the TPP, the FPP elicited stronger activation in the inferior parietal lobule (IPL), right temporoparietal junction, and anterior cingulate cortex, which are associated with body representation, mentalization, and empathy, respectively. Enhanced IPL activity correlated positively with personal empathic traits. Observing movements of hemiplegic individuals from the FPP provided precise subjective understanding of the physically distressing aspects of their movements. These findings suggest that observing hemiplegic individuals from the FPP effectively improved observers' understanding of disability-associated distress via body representation, mentalization, and empathy systems.

Computation-Based Feature Representation of Body Expressions in the Human Brain

Humans and other primate species are experts at recognizing body expressions. To understand the underlying perceptual mechanisms, we computed postural and kinematic features from affective whole-body movement videos and related them to brain processes. Using representational similarity and multivoxel pattern analyses, we showed systematic relations between computation-based body features and brain activity. Our results revealed that postural rather than kinematic features reflect the affective category of the body movements. The feature limb contraction showed a central contribution in fearful body expression perception, differentially represented in action observation, motor preparation, and affect coding regions, including the amygdala. The posterior superior temporal sulcus differentiated fearful from other affective categories using limb contraction rather than kinematics. The extrastriate body area and fusiform body area also showed greater tuning to postural features. The discovery of midlevel body feature encoding in the brain moves affective neuroscience beyond research on high-level emotion representations and provides insights in the perceptual features that possibly drive automatic emotion perception.

Discriminating stress from rest based on resting-state connectivity of the human brain: A supervised machine learning study

Acute stress induces large-scale neural reorganization with relevance to stress-related psychopathology. Here, we applied a novel supervised machine learning method, combining the strengths of a priori theoretical insights with a data-driven approach, to identify which connectivity changes are most prominently associated with a state of acute stress and individual differences therein. Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging scans were taken from 334 healthy participants (79 females) before and after a formal stress induction. For each individual scan, mean time-series were extracted from 46 functional parcels of three major brain networks previously shown to be potentially sensitive to stress effects (default mode network (DMN), salience network (SN), and executive control networks). A data-driven approach was then used to obtain discriminative spatial linear filters that classified the pre- and post-stress scans. To assess potential relevance for understanding individual differences, probability of classification using the most discriminative filters was linked to individual cortisol stress responses. Our model correctly classified pre- versus post-stress states with highly significant accuracy (above 75%; leave-one-out validation relative to chance performance). Discrimination between pre- and post-stress states was mainly based on connectivity changes in regions from the SN and DMN, including the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, amygdala, posterior cingulate cortex, and precuneus. Interestingly, the probability of classification using these connectivity changes were associated with individual cortisol increases. Our results confirm the involvement of DMN and SN using a data-driven approach, and specifically single out key regions that might receive additional attention in future studies for their relevance also for individual differences.

"Motion or Emotion? Recognition of Emotional Bodily Expressions in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder With and Without Intellectual Disability"

The recognition of emotional body movement (BM) is impaired in individuals with Autistic Spectrum Disorder ASD, yet it is not clear whether the difficulty is related to the encoding of body motion, emotions, or both. Besides, BM recognition has been traditionally studied using point-light displays stimuli (PLDs) and is still underexplored in individuals with ASD and intellectual disability (ID). In the present study, we investigated the recognition of happy, fearful, and neutral BM in children with ASD with and without ID. In a non-verbal recognition task, participants were asked to recognize pure-body-motion and visible-body-form stimuli (by means of point-light displays-PLDs and full-light displays-FLDs, respectively). We found that the children with ASD were less accurate than TD children in recognizing both the emotional and neutral BM, either when presented as FLDs or PLDs. These results suggest that the difficulty in understanding the observed BM may rely on atypical processing of BM information rather than emotion. Moreover, we found that the accuracy improved with age and IQ only in children with ASD without ID, suggesting that high level of cognitive resources can mediate the acquisition of compensatory mechanisms which develop with age.

Blocking facial mimicry affects recognition of facial and body expressions

Facial mimicry is commonly defined as the tendency to imitate-at a sub-threshold level-facial expressions of other individuals. Numerous studies support a role of facial mimicry in recognizing others' emotions. However, the underlying functional mechanism is unclear. A prominent hypothesis considers facial mimicry as based on an action-perception loop, leading to the prediction that facial mimicry should be observed only when processing others' facial expressions. Nevertheless, previous studies have also detected facial mimicry during observation of emotional bodily expressions. An emergent alternative hypothesis is that facial mimicry overtly reflects the simulation of an "emotion", rather than the reproduction of a specific observed motor pattern. In the present study, we tested whether blocking mimicry ("Bite") on the lower face disrupted recognition of happy expressions conveyed by either facial or body expressions. In Experiment 1, we tested participants' ability to identify happy, fearful and neutral expressions in the Bite condition and in two control conditions. In Experiment 2, to ensure that such a manipulation selectively affects emotion recognition, we tested participants' ability to recognize emotional expressions, as well as the actors' gender, under the Bite condition and a control condition. Finally, we investigated the relationship between dispositional empathy and emotion recognition under the condition of blocked mimicry. Our findings demonstrated that blocking mimicry on the lower face hindered recognition of happy facial and body expressions, while the recognition of neutral and fearful expressions was not affected by the mimicry manipulation. The mimicry manipulation did not affect the gender discrimination task. Furthermore, the impairment of happy expression recognition correlated with empathic traits. These results support the role of facial mimicry in emotion recognition and suggest that facial mimicry reflects a global sensorimotor simulation of others' emotions rather than a muscle-specific reproduction of an observed motor expression.

Amygdala responds to direct gaze in real but not in computer-generated faces

Computer-generated (CG) faces are an important visual interface for human-computer interaction in social contexts. Here we investigated whether the human brain processes emotion and gaze similarly in real and carefully matched CG faces. Real faces evoked greater responses in the fusiform face area than CG faces, particularly for fearful expressions. Emotional (angry and fearful) facial expressions evoked similar activations in the amygdala in real and CG faces. Direct as compared with averted gaze elicited greater fMRI responses in the amygdala regardless of facial expression but only for real and not for CG faces. We observed an interaction effect between gaze and emotion (i.e., the shared signal effect) in the right posterior temporal sulcus and other regions, but not in the amygdala, and we found no evidence for different shared signal effects in real and CG faces. Taken together, the present findings highlight similarities (emotional processing in the amygdala) and differences (overall processing in the fusiform face area, gaze processing in the amygdala) in the neural processing of real and CG faces.

How do you perceive threat? It's all in your pattern of brain activity

Whether subtle differences in the emotional context during threat perception can be detected by multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) remains a topic of debate. To investigate this question, we compared the ability of pattern recognition analysis to discriminate between patterns of brain activity to a threatening versus a physically paired neutral stimulus in two different emotional contexts (the stimulus being directed towards or away from the viewer). The directionality of the stimuli is known to be an important factor in activating different defensive responses. Using multiple kernel learning (MKL) classification models, we accurately discriminated patterns of brain activation to threat versus neutral stimuli in the directed towards context but not during the directed away context. Furthermore, we investigated whether it was possible to decode an individual’s subjective threat perception from patterns of whole-brain activity to threatening stimuli in the different emotional contexts using MKL regression models. Interestingly, we were able to accurately predict the subjective threat perception index from the pattern of brain activation to threat only during the directed away context. These results show that subtle differences in the emotional context during threat perception can be detected by MVPA. In the directed towards context, the threat perception was more intense, potentially producing more homogeneous patterns of brain activation across individuals. In the directed away context, the threat perception was relatively less intense and more variable across individuals, enabling the regression model to successfully capture the individual differences and predict the subjective threat perception.

Increased Functional Connectivity Between Medulla and Inferior Parietal Cortex in Medication-Free Major Depressive Disorder

Emerging evidence has documented the abnormalities of primary brain functions in major depressive disorder (MDD). The brainstem has shown to play an important role in regulating basic functions of the human brain, but little is known about its role in MDD, especially the roles of its subregions. To uncover this, the present study adopted resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging with fine-grained brainstem atlas in 23 medication-free MDD patients and 34 matched healthy controls (HC). The analysis revealed significantly increased functional connectivity of the medulla, one of the brainstem subregions, with the inferior parietal cortex (IPC) in MDD patients. A positive correlation was further identified between the increased medulla-IPC functional connectivity and Hamilton anxiety scores. Functional characterization of the medulla and IPC using a meta-analysis revealed that both regions primarily participated in action execution and inhibition. Our findings suggest that increased medulla-IPC functional connectivity may be related to over-activity or abnormal control of negative emotions in MDD, which provides a new insight for the neurobiology of MDD.

What neuromodulation and lesion studies tell us about the function of the mirror neuron system and embodied cognition

We review neuromodulation and lesion studies that address how activations in the mirror neuron system contribute to our perception of observed actions. Past reviews showed disruptions of this parieto-premotor network impair imitation and goal and kinematic processing. Recent studies bring five new themes. First, focal perturbations of a node of that circuit lead to changes across all nodes. Second, primary somatosensory cortex is an integral part of this network suggesting embodied representations are somatosensory-motor. Third, disturbing this network impairs the ability to predict the actions of others in the close (∼300ms) future. Fourth, disruptions impair our ability to coordinate our actions with others. Fifth, disrupting this network, the insula or cingulate also impairs emotion recognition.

Effects of Musical Tempo on Musicians' and Non-musicians' Emotional Experience When Listening to Music

Tempo is an important musical element that affects human’s emotional processes when listening to music. However, it remains unclear how tempo and training affect individuals’ emotional experience of music. To explore the neural underpinnings of the effects of tempo on music-evoked emotion, music with fast, medium, and slow tempi were collected to compare differences in emotional responses using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of neural activity between musicians and non-musicians. Behaviorally, musicians perceived higher valence in fast music than did non-musicians. The main effects of musicians and non-musicians and tempo were significant, and a near significant interaction between group and tempo was found. In the arousal dimension, the mean score of medium-tempo music was the highest among the three kinds; in the valence dimension, the mean scores decreased in order from fast music, medium music, to slow music. Functional analyses revealed that the neural activation of musicians was stronger than those of non-musicians in the left inferior parietal lobe (IPL). A comparison of tempi showed a stronger activation from fast music than slow music in the bilateral superior temporal gyrus (STG), which provided corresponding neural evidence for the highest valence reported by participants for fast music. Medium music showed stronger activation than slow music in the right Heschl’s gyrus (HG), right middle temporal gyrus (MTG), right posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), right precuneus, right IPL, and left STG. Importantly, this study confirmed and explained the connection between music tempo and emotional experiences, and their interaction with individuals’ musical training.

Computational Feature Analysis of Body Movements Reveals Hierarchical Brain Organization

Social species spend considerable time observing the body movements of others to understand their actions, predict their emotions, watch their games, or enjoy their dance movements. Given the important information obtained from body movements, we still know surprisingly little about the details of brain mechanisms underlying movement perception. In this fMRI study, we investigated the relations between movement features obtained from automated computational analyses of video clips and the corresponding brain activity. Our results show that low-level computational features map to specific brain areas related to early visual- and motion-sensitive regions, while mid-level computational features are related to dynamic aspects of posture encoded in occipital–temporal cortex, posterior superior temporal sulcus and superior parietal lobe. Furthermore, behavioral features obtained from subjective ratings correlated with activity in higher action observation regions. Our computational feature-based analysis suggests that the neural mechanism of movement encoding is organized in the brain not so much by semantic categories than by feature statistics of the body movements.

Dynamic Interactions between Emotion Perception and Action Preparation for Reacting to Social Threat: A Combined cTBS-fMRI Study

Expressions of emotion are powerful triggers for situation-appropriate responses by the observer. Of particular interest regarding the preparation of such adaptive actions are parietal and premotor cortices, given their potential for interaction with the amygdala (AMG), which is known to play a crucial role in the processing of affective information and in motor response. We set out to disentangle the respective roles of the inferior parietal lobule (IPL) and ventral premotor cortex (PMv) in humans in the processing of emotional body expressions by assessing remote effects of continuous theta burst stimulation (cTBS) in the action network and in AMG. Participants were presented with blocks of short videos showing either angry or neutral whole-body actions. The experiment consisted of three fMRI sessions: two sessions were preceded by stimulation of either right IPL (rIPL) or right PMv (rPMv); and a third session assessed baseline activity. Interestingly, whereas at baseline the left AMG did not differentiate between neutral and angry body postures, a significant difference between these conditions emerged after stimulation of either rIPL or rPMv, with much larger responses to angry than to neutral stimuli. In addition, the effects of cTBS stimulation and emotion were also observed in two other action-relevant areas, the supplementary motor area and the superior parietal cortex. Together, these results show how areas involved in action and emotion perception and in action preparation interact dynamically.

Encoding of Self-Referential Pain Catastrophizing in the Posterior Cingulate Cortex in Fibromyalgia

OBJECTIVE

Pain catastrophizing is a common feature of chronic pain, including fibromyalgia (FM), and is strongly associated with amplified pain severity and disability. While previous neuroimaging studies have focused on evoked pain response modulation by catastrophizing, the brain mechanisms supporting pain catastrophizing itself are unknown. We designed a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)-based pain catastrophizing task whereby patients with chronic pain engaged in catastrophizing-related cognitions. We undertook this study to test our hypothesis that catastrophizing about clinical pain would be associated with amplified activation in nodes of the default mode network (DMN), which encode self-referential cognition and show altered functioning in chronic pain.

METHODS

During fMRI, 31 FM patients reflected on how catastrophizing (CAT) statements (drawn from the Pain Catastrophizing Scale) impact their typical FM pain experience. Response to CAT statements was compared to response to matched neutral (NEU) statements.

RESULTS

During statement reflection, higher fMRI signal during CAT statements than during NEU statements was found in several DMN brain areas, including the ventral (posterior) and dorsal (anterior) posterior cingulate cortex (vPCC and dPCC, respectively). Patients' ratings of CAT statement applicability were correlated solely with activity in the vPCC, a main DMN hub supporting self-referential cognition (r = 0.38, P < 0.05). Clinical pain severity was correlated solely with activity in the dPCC, a PCC subregion associated with cognitive control and sensorimotor processing (r = 0.38, P < 0.05).

CONCLUSION

These findings provide evidence that the PCC encodes pain catastrophizing in FM and suggest distinct roles for different PCC subregions. Understanding the brain circuitry encoding pain catastrophizing in FM will prove to be important in identifying and evaluating the success of interventions targeting negative affect in chronic pain management.

Modulating Mimetic Preference with Theta Burst Stimulation of the Inferior Parietal Cortex

We like an object more when we see someone else reaching for it. To what extent is action observation causally linked to object valuation? In this study, we set out to answer to this question by applying continuous theta burst stimulation (cTBS) over the left inferior parietal lobule (IPL). Previous studies pointed to this region as critical in the representation of others' actions and in tool manipulation. However, it is unclear to what extent IPL's involvement simply reflects action observation, rather than a casual role in objects' valuation. To clarify this issue, we measured cTBS-dependent modulations of participants' “mimetic preference ratings”, i.e., the difference between the ratings of pairs of familiar objects that were (vs. were not) reached out for by other individuals. Our result shows that cTBS increased mimetic preference ratings for tools, when compared to a control condition without stimulation. This effect was selective for items that were reached for or manipulated by another individual, whilst it was not detected in non-tool objects. Although preliminary, this finding suggests that the automatic and covert simulation of an observed action, even when there is no intention to act on an object, influences explicit affective judgments for objects. This work supports embodied cognition theories by substantiating that our subjective preference is grounded in action.

Short parietal lobe connections of the human and monkey brain

The parietal lobe has a unique place in the human brain. Anatomically, it is at the crossroad between the frontal, occipital, and temporal lobes, thus providing a middle ground for multimodal sensory integration. Functionally, it supports higher cognitive functions that are characteristic of the human species, such as mathematical cognition, semantic and pragmatic aspects of language, and abstract thinking. Despite its importance, a comprehensive comparison of human and simian intraparietal networks is missing. In this study, we used diffusion imaging tractography to reconstruct the major intralobar parietal tracts in twenty-one datasets acquired in vivo from healthy human subjects and eleven ex vivo datasets from five vervet and six macaque monkeys. Three regions of interest (postcentral gyrus, superior parietal lobule and inferior parietal lobule) were used to identify the tracts. Surface projections were reconstructed for both species and results compared to identify similarities or differences in tract anatomy (i.e., trajectories and cortical projections). In addition, post-mortem dissections were performed in a human brain. The largest tract identified in both human and monkey brains is a vertical pathway between the superior and inferior parietal lobules. This tract can be divided into an anterior (supramarginal gyrus) and a posterior (angular gyrus) component in both humans and monkey brains. The second prominent intraparietal tract connects the postcentral gyrus to both supramarginal and angular gyri of the inferior parietal lobule in humans but only to the supramarginal gyrus in the monkey brain. The third tract connects the postcentral gyrus to the anterior region of the superior parietal lobule and is more prominent in monkeys compared to humans. Finally, short U-shaped fibres in the medial and lateral aspects of the parietal lobe were identified in both species. A tract connecting the medial parietal cortex to the lateral inferior parietal cortex was observed in the monkey brain only. Our findings suggest a consistent pattern of intralobar parietal connections between humans and monkeys with some differences for those areas that have cytoarchitectonically distinct features in humans. The overall pattern of intraparietal connectivity supports the special role of the inferior parietal lobule in cognitive functions characteristic of humans.

Affective vocalizations influence body ownership as measured in the rubber hand illusion

Emotional signals, like threatening sounds, automatically ready the perceiver to prepare an appropriate defense behavior. Conjecturing that this would manifest itself in extending the safety zone around the body we used the rubber hand illusion (RHI) to test this prediction. The RHI is a perceptual illusion in which body ownership is manipulated by synchronously stroking a rubber hand and real hand occluded from view. Many factors, both internal and external, have been shown to influence the strength of the illusion, yet the effect of emotion perception on body ownership remains unexplored. We predicted that listening to affective vocalizations would influence how strongly participants experience the RHI. In the first experiment four groups were tested that listened either to affective sounds (angry or happy vocalizations), non-vocal sounds or no sound while undergoing synchronous or asynchronous stroking of the real and rubber hand. In a second experiment three groups were tested comparing angry or neutral vocalizations and no sound condition. There was a significantly larger drift towards the rubber hand in the emotion versus the no emotion conditions. We interpret these results in the framework that the spatial increase in the RHI indicates that under threat the body has the capacity to extend its safety zone.

State-Dependent TMS Reveals Representation of Affective Body Movements in the Anterior Intraparietal Cortex

In humans, recognition of others' actions involves a cortical network that comprises, among other cortical regions, the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS), where biological motion is coded and the anterior intraparietal sulcus (aIPS), where movement information is elaborated in terms of meaningful goal-directed actions. This action observation system (AOS) is thought to encode neutral voluntary actions, and possibly some aspects of affective motor repertoire, but the role of the AOS' areas in processing affective kinematic information has never been examined. Here we investigated whether the AOS plays a role in representing dynamic emotional bodily expressions. In the first experiment, we assessed behavioral adaptation effects of observed affective movements. Participants watched series of happy or fearful whole-body point-light displays (PLDs) as adapters and were then asked to perform an explicit categorization of the emotion expressed in test PLDs. Participants were slower when categorizing any of the two emotions as long as it was congruent with the emotion in the adapter sequence. We interpreted this effect as adaptation to the emotional content of PLDs. In the second experiment, we combined this paradigm with TMS applied over either the right aIPS, pSTS, and the right half of the occipital pole (corresponding to Brodmann's area 17 and serving as control) to examine the neural locus of the adaptation effect. TMS over the aIPS (but not over the other sites) reversed the behavioral cost of adaptation, specifically for fearful contents. This demonstrates that aIPS contains an explicit representation of affective body movements.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT In humans, a network of areas, the action observation system, encodes voluntary actions. However, the role of these brain regions in processing affective kinematic information has not been investigated. Here we demonstrate that the aIPS contains a representation of affective body movements. First, in a behavioral experiment, we found an adaptation after-effect for emotional PLDs, indicating the existence of a neural representation selective for affective information in biological motion. To examine the neural locus of this effect, we then combined the adaptation paradigm with TMS. Stimulation of the aIPS (but not over pSTS and control site) reversed the behavioral cost of adaptation, specifically for fearful contents, demonstrating that aIPS contains a representation of affective body movements.

The Basolateral Amygdalae and Frontotemporal Network Functions for Threat Perception

Although the amygdalae play a central role in threat perception and reactions, the direct contributions of the amygdalae to specific aspects of threat perception, from ambiguity resolution to reflexive or deliberate action, remain ill understood in humans. Animal studies show that a detailed understanding requires a focus on the different subnuclei, which is not yet achieved in human research. Given the limits of human imaging methods, the crucial contribution needs to come from individuals with exclusive and selective amygdalae lesions. The current study investigated the role of the basolateral amygdalae and their connection with associated frontal and temporal networks in the automatic perception of threat. Functional activation and connectivity of five individuals with Urbach–Wiethe disease with focal basolateral amygdalae damage and 12 matched controls were measured with functional MRI while they attended to the facial expression of a threatening face–body compound stimuli. Basolateral amygdalae damage was associated with decreased activation in the temporal pole but increased activity in the ventral and dorsal medial prefrontal and medial orbitofrontal cortex. This dissociation between the prefrontal and temporal networks was also present in the connectivity maps. Our results contribute to a dynamic, multirole, subnuclei-based perspective on the involvement of the amygdalae in fear perception. Damage to the basolateral amygdalae decreases activity in the temporal network while increasing activity in the frontal network, thereby potentially triggering a switch from resolving ambiguity to dysfunctional threat signaling and regulation, resulting in hypersensitivity to threat.

How white and black bodies are perceived depends on what emotion is expressed

Body language is a powerful indicator of others’ emotions in social interactions, with positive signals triggering approach and negative ones retreat and defensiveness. Intergroup and interracial factors can influence these interactions, sometimes leading to aggressive or even violent behaviour. Despite its obvious social relevance however, the interaction between body expression and race remains unexplored, with explanations of the impact of race being almost exclusively based on the role of race in face recognition. In the current fMRI study we scanned white European participants while they viewed affective (angry and happy) body postures of both same race (white) and other race (black) individuals. To assess the difference between implicit and explicit recognition participants performed either an explicit emotion categorisation task, or an irrelevant shape judgement task. Brain activity was modulated by race in a number of brain regions across both tasks. Race-related activity appeared to be task- as well as emotion- specific. Overall, the other-race effects appeared to be driven by positive emotions, while same-race effects were observed for negative emotions. A race specific effect was also observed in right amygdala reflecting increased activation for explicit recognition of angry white body expressions. Overall, these results provide the first clear evidence that race influences affective body perception.

The role of the basolateral amygdala in the perception of faces in natural contexts

The amygdala is a complex structure that plays its role in perception and threat-related behaviour by activity of its specific nuclei and their separate networks. In the present functional magnetic resonance imaging study, we investigated the role of the basolateral amygdala in face and context processing. Five individuals with focal basolateral amygdala damage and 12 matched controls viewed fearful or neutral faces in a threatening or neutral context. We tested the hypothesis that basolateral amygdala damage modifies the relation between face and threatening context, triggering threat-related activation in the dorsal stream. The findings supported this hypothesis. First, activation was increased in the right precentral gyrus for threatening versus neutral scenes in the basolateral amygdala damage group compared with the control group. Second, activity in the bilateral middle frontal gyrus, and left anterior inferior parietal lobule was enhanced for neutral faces presented in a threatening versus neutral scene in the group with basolateral amygdala damage compared with controls. These findings provide the first evidence for the neural consequences of basolateral amygdala damage during the processing of complex emotional situations.

IMAGING OF BRAIN FUNCTION BASED ON THE ANALYSIS OF FUNCTIONAL CONNECTIVITY - IMAGING ANALYSIS OF BRAIN FUNCTION BY FMRI AFTER ACUPUNCTURE AT LR3 IN HEALTHY INDIVIDUALS

Objective:

This Study observed the relevant brain areas activated by acupuncture at the Taichong acupoint (LR3) and analyzed the functional connectivity among brain areas using resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to explore the acupoint specificity of the Taichong acupoint.

Methods:

A total of 45 healthy subjects were randomly divided into the Taichong (LR3) group, sham acupuncture group and sham acupoint group. Subjects received resting state fMRI before acupuncture, after true (sham) acupuncture in each group. Analysis of changes in connectivity among the brain areas was performed using the brain functional connectivity method.

Results:

The right cerebrum temporal lobe was selected as the seed point to analyze the functional connectivity. It had a functional connectivity with right cerebrum superior frontal gyrus, limbic lobe cingulate gyrus and left cerebrum inferior temporal gyrus (BA 37), inferior parietal lobule compared by before vs. after acupuncture at LR3, and right cerebrum sub-lobar insula and left cerebrum middle frontal gyrus, medial frontal gyrus compared by true vs. sham acupuncture at LR3, and right cerebrum occipital lobe cuneus, occipital lobe sub-gyral, parietal lobe precuneus and left cerebellum anterior lobe culmen by acupuncture at LR3 vs. sham acupoint.

Conclusion:

Acupuncture at LR3 mainly specifically activated the brain functional network that participates in visual function, associative function, and emotion cognition, which are similar to the features on LR3 in tradition Chinese medicine. These brain areas constituted a neural network structure with specific functions that had specific reference values for the interpretation of the acupoint specificity of the Taichong acupoint.

Early Preferential Responses to Fear Stimuli in Human Right Dorsal Visual Stream--A Meg Study

Emotional expressions of others are salient biological stimuli that automatically capture attention and prepare us for action. We investigated the early cortical dynamics of automatic visual discrimination of fearful body expressions by monitoring cortical activity using magnetoencephalography. We show that right parietal cortex distinguishes between fearful and neutral bodies as early as 80-ms after stimulus onset, providing the first evidence for a fast emotion-attention-action link through human dorsal visual stream.