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Neuroimaging data analysis often requires purpose-built software, which can be challenging to install and may produce different results across computing environments. Beyond being a roadblock to neuroscientists, these issues of accessibility and portability can hamper the reproducibility of neuroimaging data analysis pipelines. Here, we introduce the Neurodesk platform, which harnesses software containers to support a comprehensive and growing suite of neuroimaging software (https://www.neurodesk.org/). Neurodesk includes a browser-accessible virtual desktop environment and a command line interface, mediating access to containerized neuroimaging software libraries on various computing platforms, including personal and high-performance computers, cloud computing and Jupyter Notebooks. This community-oriented, open-source platform enables a paradigm shift for neuroimaging data analysis, allowing for accessible, flexible, fully reproducible, and portable data analysis pipelines.

Color plays an important part in human activities, affects circadian cycle and decision making process. Therefore, it is important to investigate human judgment under different color of illumination, especially, because color perception is subjective. In this study, we developed required instrumentation to control the red (R), green (G), Blue (B) and Amber (A) colored light emitting diode (LED) lamp for carrying out Magneto Encephalography (MEG) brain scan. We developed a software to generate all the colors in the visual spectrum, predefined white light combinations and saturation of an illuminated objects by using RGBA color pallet. The lamp is required to control from outside of the MEG electromagnetically shielded room with the LED lamp located inside the MEG room. Hence, USB is used for the communication mode. The feasibility of using LED lamp with MEG brain scanner has been validated for bio-medical and psychological MEG experiments.

The faces of our friends and loved ones are among the most pervasive and important social stimuli we encounter in our everyday lives. We employed electroencephalography to investigate the time line of personally relevant face processing and potential interactions with emotional facial expressions by presenting female participants with photographs of their romantic partner, a close friend and a stranger, displaying fearful, happy and neutral facial expressions. Our results revealed elevated activity to the partner’s face from 100 ms after stimulus onset as evident in increased amplitudes of P1, early posterior negativity, P3 and late positive component, while there were no effects of emotional expressions and no interactions. Our findings indicate the prominent role of personal relevance in face processing; the time course of effects further suggests that it might not rely solely on the core face processing network but might start even before the stage of structural face encoding. Our results suggest a new direction of research in which face processing models should be expanded to adequately capture the dynamics of the processing of real-life, personally relevant faces.

Neuroimaging data analysis often requires purpose-built software, which can be challenging to install and may produce different results across computing environments. Beyond being a roadblock to neuroscientists, these issues of accessibility and portability can hamper the reproducibility of neuroimaging data analysis pipelines. Here, we introduce the Neurodesk platform, which harnesses software containers to support a comprehensive and growing suite of neuroimaging software (https://www.neurodesk.org/). Neurodesk includes a browser-accessible virtual desktop environment and a command line interface, mediating access to containerized neuroimaging software libraries on various computing platforms, including personal and high-performance computers, cloud computing and Jupyter Notebooks. This community-oriented, open-source platform enables a paradigm shift for neuroimaging data analysis, allowing for accessible, flexible, fully reproducible, and portable data analysis pipelines.

Heightened responding to uncertain threat is considered a hallmark of anxiety disorder pathology. We sought to determine whether individual differences in self-reported intolerance of uncertainty (IU), a key transdiagnostic dimension in anxiety-related pathology, underlies differential recruitment of neural circuitry during cue-signalled uncertainty of threat (n = 42). In an instructed threat of shock task, cues signalled uncertain threat of shock (50%) or certain safety from shock. Ratings of arousal and valence, skin conductance response (SCR), and functional magnetic resonance imaging were acquired. Overall, participants displayed greater ratings of arousal and negative valence, SCR, and amygdala activation to uncertain threat versus safe cues. IU was not associated with greater arousal ratings, SCR, or amygdala activation to uncertain threat versus safe cues. However, we found that high IU was associated with greater ratings of negative valence and greater activity in the medial prefrontal cortex and dorsomedial rostral prefrontal cortex to uncertain threat versus safe cues. These findings suggest that during cue-signalled uncertainty of threat, individuals high in IU rate uncertain threat as aversive and engage prefrontal cortical regions known to be involved in safety-signalling and conscious threat appraisal. Taken together, these findings highlight the potential of IU in modulating safety-signalling and conscious appraisal mechanisms in situations with cue-signalled uncertainty of threat, which may be relevant to models of anxiety-related pathology. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.3758/s13415-021-00932-7.

It has been proposed that the extinction of conditioned fear and the instructed regulation of emotion engage common ventromedial prefrontal (vmPFC) circuitry, indicating common underlying processes. Here we report an fMRI study using a novel task designed to investigate the neural overlap between cognitive emotion regulation and extinction of conditioned fear in a simple and controlled way. Participants were conditioned to expect an electric shock during the presentation of one of two letters (CS+ and CS-). In a second phase, the same letters were presented within words belonging to two distinct semantic categories. Participants were told that one of these categories would indicate safety from shock. We hypothesised that cognitive processing of words from the safety category would lead participants to engage neural circuitry involved in extinction and learned safety, and lead to reduced conditioned responses in limbic circuitry. The contrast between safe and dangerous CS+ trials revealed activation in a network of brain regions including left inferior frontal gyrus, as well as bilateral temporal and parietal cortices, though no activation in vmPFC was observed. Clusters in bilateral insula and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), part of the network typically associated with anticipation and experience of pain, showed activation for dangerous CS+ trials that was reduced for safe CS+ trials. These results suggest that the task elicited the expected aversive conditioned response during trials that remained dangerous, whereas a semantically based cognitive control mechanism down-regulated this response during safe trials. Results from this task were also compared with those from a modified version of an instructed emotion regulation task using negative IAPS images as affective stimuli. A voxelwise conjunction analysis showed no significant overlap between the two tasks, suggesting that the neural mechanisms involved in both types of emotion regulation may be largely distinct.

Heightened responding to uncertain threat is considered a hallmark of anxiety disorder pathology. Here, we sought to determine if individual differences in self-reported intolerance of uncertainty (IU), a key transdiagnostic dimension in anxiety-related pathology, underlies differential recruitment of neural circuitry during instructed outcome uncertainty of threat (n = 42). In an instructed threat of shock task, cues signalled uncertain threat of shock (50%) or certain safety from shock outcomes. Ratings of arousal and valence, skin conductance response (SCR) and functional magnetic resonance imaging were acquired. Overall, participants displayed greater ratings of arousal and negative valence, SCR, and amygdala activation to uncertain threat vs. safe cues. IU was not associated with greater arousal ratings, SCR or amygdala activation to uncertain threat vs. safe cues. However, we found that high IU was associated with greater ratings of negative valence and greater activity in the medial prefrontal cortex and dorsomedial rostral prefrontal cortex to uncertain threat vs safe cues. These findings suggest that during instructed outcome uncertainty of threat, individuals high in IU rate uncertain threat as aversive and engage prefrontal cortical regions known to be involved in safety-signalling and conscious threat appraisal. Taken together, these findings highlight the potential of IU in modulating safety-signalling and conscious appraisal mechanisms in situations with instructed outcome uncertainty of threat, which may be relevant to models of anxiety-related pathology.

Botvinik-Nezer, Rotem et al., Data analysis workflows in many scientific domains have become increasingly complex and flexible. Here we assess the effect of this flexibility on the results of functional magnetic resonance imaging by asking 70 independent teams to analyse the same dataset, testing the same 9 ex-ante hypotheses. The flexibility of analytical approaches is exemplified by the fact that no two teams chose identical workflows to analyse the data. This flexibility resulted in sizeable variation in the results of hypothesis tests, even for teams whose statistical maps were highly correlated at intermediate stages of the analysis pipeline. Variation in reported results was related to several aspects of analysis methodology. Notably, a meta-analytical approach that aggregated information across teams yielded a significant consensus in activated regions. Furthermore, prediction markets of researchers in the field revealed an overestimation of the likelihood of significant findings, even by researchers with direct knowledge of the dataset. Our findings show that analytical flexibility can have substantial effects on scientific conclusions, and identify factors that may be related to variability in the analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging. The results emphasize the importance of validating and sharing complex analysis workflows, and demonstrate the need for performing and reporting multiple analyses of the same data. Potential approaches that could be used to mitigate issues related to analytical variability are discussed., European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/en) under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement no. 665501. A. Eed was supported by a predoctoral fellowship La Caixa-Severo Ochoa from Obra Social La Caixa. S.B.E. was supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under grant agreement no. 785907 (HBP SGA2).

Extinction-resistant threat is regarded as a central hallmark of pathological anxiety. However, it remains relatively under-studied in social anxiety. Here we sought to determine whether self-reported trait social anxiety is associated with compromised threat extinction learning and retention. We tested this hypothesis within two separate, socially relevant conditioning studies. In the first experiment, a Selective Extinction Through Cognitive Evaluation (SECE) paradigm was used, which included a cognitive component during the extinction phase, while experiment 2 used a traditional threat extinction paradigm. Skin conductance responses and subjective ratings of anxiety (experiment 1 and 2) and expectancy (experiment 2) were collected across both experiments. The findings of both studies demonstrated no effect of social anxiety on extinction learning or retention. Instead, results from experiment 1 indicated that individual differences in Intolerance of Uncertainty (IU) were associated with the ability to use contextual cues to decrease a conditioned response during SECE. However, during extinction retention, high IU predicted greater generalisation across context cues. Findings of experiment 2 revealed that higher IU was associated with impaired extinction learning and retention. The results from both studies suggest that compromised threat extinction is likely to be a characteristic of high levels of IU and not social anxiety.

In social, personality and mental health research, the tendency to select absolute end-points on Likert scales has been linked to certain cultures, lower intelligence, lower income and personality/mental health disorders. It is unclear whether this response style reflects an absolutist cognitive style or is merely an experimental artefact. In this study, we introduce an alternative, more informative, flexible and ecologically valid approach for estimating absolute responding, that uses natural language markers. We focussed on ‘function words’ (e.g. particles, conjunctions, prepositions) as they are more generalizable because they do not depend on any specific context. To identify such linguistic markers and test their generalizability, we conducted a text analysis of online reviews for films, tourist attractions and consumer products. All written reviews were accompanied by a rating scale (akin to Likert scale), which allowed us to label text samples as absolute/moderate. The data was split into independent ‘training’ and ‘test’ sets. Using the training set we identified a rank order of linguistic markers for absolute and moderate text, which were evaluated in a classifier on the test set. The top three markers alone (“but”, “!” and “seem”) produced 88% classification accuracy, which increased to 91% using 31 linguistic markers.

Color influences human decision making process, affects mood. It is important to investigate human color judgment of objects under different illumination. By controlling of a red (R), green (G), Blue (B) and Amber (A) colored lamp a MagnetoEncephaloGraphy (MEG) brain scanner was tested for its performance. We developed a software to generate all the colors in the visual spectrum, predefined white light combinations and saturation of an illuminated objects by using RGBA colors. The lamp was controlled from outside of the shielded MEG room while the LED lamp was located inside of electromagnetically shielded room. The USB was used as for LED-lamp control. To check the feasibility of using LED lamp with MEG brain scanner and showed feasibility to use the LED-lamp, color control software and MEG scanner together for human and color related research.

Absolutist thinking is considered a cognitive distortion by most cognitive therapies for anxiety and depression. Yet, there is little empirical evidence of its prevalence or specificity. Across three studies, we conducted a text analysis of 63 internet forums (over 6,400 members) using the Linguistic- Inquiry and Word Count software (Pennebaker, Booth, Boyd, & Francis, 2015) to examine absolutism at the linguistic level. We predicted and found that anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation forums contained more absolutist words than control forums (d’s > 3.14). Suicidal ideation forums also contained more absolutist words than anxiety and depression forums (d’s > 1.71). We show that these differences are more reflective of absolutist thinking than psychological distress. Interestingly, absolutist words tracked the severity of affective disorder forums more faithfully than ‘negative emotion’ words. Finally, we found elevated levels of absolutist words in depression ‘recovery’ forums. This suggests that absolutist thinking may be a vulnerability factor.

Faces are a primary source of social information, but little is known about the sequence of neural processing of personally relevant faces, such as those of our loved ones. We applied representational similarity analyses to EEG-fMRI measurement of neural responses to faces of personal relevance to participants – their romantic partner and a friend – compared to a stranger. Faces expressed fear, happiness or no emotion. Shared EEG-fMRI representations started 100ms after stimulus onset not only in visual cortex, but also regions involved in social cognition, value representation and autobiographical memory, including ventromedial prefrontal cortex, temporoparietal junction and posterior cingulate. According to established models of face recognition, these activations precede the stage of structural face encoding at around 170 ms after stimulus onset. Representations in fusiform gyrus, amygdala, insular cortex and N. accumbens were evident after 200 ms. Representations related to romantic love emerged after 400ms in subcortical brain regions associated with reward. Our results point to the prioritized processing of personal relevance with extensive cortical representation as soon as 100 ms after stimulus onset; preceding the stage of structural face encoding. Significance Statement Models of face processing, supported by studies using EEG or fMRI, postulate that recognition of face identity takes place with structural encoding in the fusiform gyrus around 170 ms after stimulus onset. We provide evidence, based on simultaneous measurement of EEG and fMRI, that the high personal relevance of our friends’ and loved ones’ faces is detected prior to structural encoding. These effects start as early as 100 ms after stimulus onset and are not confined to visual cortex, encompassing brain regions involved in value representation, self-relevant processing and social cognition. Our findings imply that our brain can ‘bypass’ full structural encoding of face identity in order to prioritise the processing of faces most relevant to us.

Rodent models highlight the key role of μ-opioid receptor (MOR) signaling in palatable food consumption. In humans, however, the effects of MOR stimulation on eating and food liking remain unclear.Here, we tested sweet pleasantness experience in humans following MOR drug manipulations. We hypothesized that behaviors regulated by the endogenous MOR system would be enhanced by MOR agonism and decreased by antagonism. In line with rodent findings, we expected the strongest drug effects for the sweetest (high-calorie) sucrose stimuli. As very sweet stimuli are considered aversive by many people (called sweet dislikers), we also assessed whether MOR manipulations affect pleasantness ratings of sucrose-water stimuli differently depending on subjective and objective value.In a bidirectional psychopharmacological cross-over study, 49 healthy men underwent a sweet taste paradigm following double-blind administration of the MOR agonist morphine, placebo, and the opioid antagonist naltrexone.As hypothesized, MOR stimulation with morphine increased pleasantness of the sweetest of five sucrose solutions, without enhancing pleasantness of the lower-sucrose solutions. For opioid antagonism, an opposite pattern was observed for the sweetest drink only. The observed drug effects on pleasantness of the sweetest drink did not differ between sweet likers and dislikers.The bidirectional effect of agonist and antagonist treatment aligns with rodent findings showing that MOR manipulations most strongly affect the highest-calorie foods. We speculate that the MOR system promotes survival in part by increasing concordance between the objective (caloric) and subjective (hedonic) value of food stimuli, so that feeding behavior becomes more focused on the richest food available.

Simultaneous multi-slice (SMS) imaging is a popular technique for increasing acquisition speed in echo-planar imaging (EPI) fMRI. However, SMS data are prone to motion sensitivity and slice leakage artefacts, which spread signal between simultaneously acquired slices. Relevant to motion sensitivity, artefacts from moving anatomic structures propagate along the phase-encoding (PE) direction. This is particularly relevant for eye movement. As signal from the eye is acquired along with signal from simultaneously excited slices during SMS, there is potential for signal to spread in-plane and between spatially remote slices. After identifying an artefact temporally coinciding with signal fluctuations in the eye and spatially distributed in correspondence with multiband slice acceleration and parallel imaging factors, we conducted a series of small experiments to investigate eye movement artefacts in SMS data and the contribution of PE direction to the invasiveness of these artefacts. Five healthy adult volunteers were scanned during a blinking task using a standard SMS-EPI protocol with posterior-to-anterior (P ≫ A), anterior-to-posterior (A ≫ P) or right-to-left (R ≫ L) PE direction. The intensity of signal fluctuations (artefact severity) was measured at expected artefact positions and control positions. We demonstrated a direct relationship between eye movements and artefact severity across expected artefact regions. Within-brain artefacts were apparent in P ≫ A- and A ≫ P-acquired data but not in R ≫ L data due to the shift in artefact positions. Further research into eye motion artefacts in SMS data is warranted but researchers should exercise caution with SMS protocols. We recommend rigorous piloting of SMS protocols and switching to R ≫ L/L ≫ R PE where feasible.

Highlights • Distributed cortical activation to faces covaries with ERPs as early as 100 ms. • Covariations depend on both sustained attention and trial-by-trial cognitive conflict. • Top-down gating might apply to earlier visual processing stages than previously known., The speed of visual processing is central to our understanding of face perception. Yet the extent to which early visual processing influences later processing in distributed face processing networks, and the top-down modulation of such bottom-up effects, remains unclear. We used simultaneous EEG-fMRI to investigate cortical activity that showed unique covariation with ERP components of face processing (C1, P1, N170, P3), while manipulating sustained attention and transient cognitive conflict employing an emotional face-word Stroop task. ERP markers of visual processing within 100 ms after stimulus onset showed covariation with brain activation in precuneous, posterior cingulate gyrus, left middle temporal gyrus, left inferior frontal gyrus and frontal operculum, and a left lateral parietal-occipital cluster, illustrating the impact of early stage processing on higher-order mechanisms. Crucially, this covariation depended on sustained attentional focus and was absent for incongruent trials, suggesting flexible top-down gating of bottom-up processing.

We evaluated whether sliding-window analysis can reveal functionally relevant brain network dynamics during a well-established fear conditioning paradigm. To this end, we tested if fMRI fluctuations in amygdala functional connectivity (FC) can be related to task-induced changes in physiological arousal and vigilance, as reflected in the skin conductance level (SCL). Thirty-two healthy individuals participated in the study. For the sliding-window analysis we used windows that were shifted by one volume at a time. Amygdala FC was calculated for each of these windows. Simultaneously acquired SCL time series were averaged over time frames that corresponded to the sliding-window FC analysis, which were subsequently regressed against the whole-brain seed-based amygdala sliding-window FC using the GLM. Surrogate time series were generated to test whether connectivity dynamics could have occurred by chance. In addition, results were contrasted against static amygdala FC and sliding-window FC of the primary visual cortex, which was chosen as a control seed, while a physio-physiological interaction (PPI) was performed as cross-validation. During periods of increased SCL, the left amygdala became more strongly coupled with the bilateral insula and anterior cingulate cortex, core areas of the salience network. The sliding-window analysis yielded a connectivity pattern that was unlikely to have occurred by chance, was spatially distinct from static amygdala FC and from sliding-window FC of the primary visual cortex, but was highly comparable to that of the PPI analysis. We conclude that sliding-window analysis can reveal functionally relevant fluctuations in connectivity in the context of an externally cued task.

Epidemiological, clinical and laboratory studies show sex differences in pain responses, with women more sensitive to nociceptive stimulation and more vulnerable to long term pain conditions than men. Given evidence that males are culturally reinforced for the ability to endure (or under-report) pain, some of these findings might be explained by socio-cultural beliefs about gender-appropriate behaviour. One potential manifestation of these effects might be differential participation in pain studies, with males adhering to stereotypical masculine roles viewing participation as a way to demonstrate their masculinity. To test this possibility, we assessed gender identification in 137 healthy participants. At the end of the assessment, they were asked if they would like to participate in other research studies. Interested participants were then asked to participate in a study involving administration of pain-evoking stimulation. We compared individuals who agreed to participate in the pain study to those who declined. We observed a significant sex by participation interaction in masculine gender identification, such that males (but not females) who agreed to participate identified significantly more with masculine gender. Among masculine gender traits examined, we found that high levels of aggression and competitiveness were the strongest predictors of pain study participation. Our results suggest that male samples in pain studies might have higher levels of masculine gender identification than the wider male population. Taken together with previous findings of lower pain sensitivity (or reporting) in masculine-identifying males, these results suggest an explanation for some of the sex-related differences observed in pain responses.\ud \ud \ud Perspective\ud \ud : To examine whether sex and gender affect willingness to participate in pain studies, we assessed gender identification in male and female participants, then attempted to recruit them to participate in a pain study. Males who agree to participate in pain studies are significantly higher in masculine gender identification than males who decline to participate or females who agree to participate. Males who agreed to participate were particularly high in aggressiveness and competitiveness.

Background\ud The quality of the early environment is hypothesized to be an influence on morphological development in key neural areas related to affective responding, but direct evidence to support this possibility is limited. In a 22-year longitudinal study, we examined hippocampal and amygdala volumes in adulthood in relation to early infant attachment status, an important indicator of the quality of the early caregiving environment.\ud \ud Methods\ud Participants (N = 59) were derived from a prospective longitudinal study of the impact of maternal postnatal depression on child development. Infant attachment status (24 Secure; 35 Insecure) was observed at 18 months of age, and MRI assessments were completed at 22 years.\ud \ud Results\ud In line with hypotheses, insecure versus secure infant attachment status was associated with larger amygdala volumes in young adults, an effect that was not accounted for by maternal depression history. We did not find early infant attachment status to predict hippocampal volumes.\ud \ud Conclusions\ud Common variations in the quality of early environment are associated with gross alterations in amygdala morphology in the adult brain. Further research is required to establish the neural changes that underpin the volumetric differences reported here, and any functional implications.

The experience of pain occurs when the level of a stimulus is sufficient to elicit a marked affective response, putatively to warn the organism of potential danger and motivate appropriate behavioral responses. Understanding the biological mechanisms of the transition from innocuous to painful levels of sensation is essential to understanding pain perception as well as clinical conditions characterized by abnormal relationships between stimulation and pain response. Thus, the primary objective of this study was to characterize the neural response associated with this transition and the correspondence between that response and subjective reports of pain.\ud Towards this goal, this study examined BOLD response profiles across a range of temperatures spanning the pain threshold. 14 healthy adults underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while a range of thermal stimuli (44-49oC) were applied. BOLD responses showed a sigmoidal profile along the range of temperatures in a network of brain regions including insula and mid- cingulate, as well as a number of regions associated with motor responses including ventral lateral nuclei of the thalamus, globus pallidus and premotor cortex. A sigmoid function fit to the BOLD responses in these regions explained up to 85% of the variance in individual pain ratings, and yielded an estimate of the temperature of steepest transition from non-painful to painful heat that was nearly identical to that generated by subjective ratings.\ud These results demonstrate a precise characterization of the relationship between objective levels of stimulation, resulting neural activation, and subjective experience of pain and provide direct evidence for a neural mechanism supporting the nonlinear transition from innocuous to painful levels along the sensory continuum.

Sensitivity, specificity, and reproducibility are vital to interpret neuroscientific results from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments. Here we examine the scan-rescan reliability of the percent signal change (PSC) and parameters estimated using Dynamic Causal Modeling (DCM) in scans taken in the same scan session, less than five minutes apart. We find fair to good reliability of PSC in regions that are involved with the task, and fair to excellent reliability with DCM. Also, the DCM analysis uncovers group differences that were not present in the analysis of PSC, which implies that DCM may be more sensitive to the nuances of signal changes in fMRI data.

article i nfo The present study investigated the premise that individual differences in autonomic physiology could be used to specify the nature and consequences of information processing taking place in medial prefrontal regions during cognitive reappraisal of unpleasant pictures. Neural (blood oxygenation level-dependent functional magnetic resonance imaging) and autonomic (electrodermal (EDA), pupil diameter, cardiac acceleration) signals were recorded simultaneously as twenty-six older people (ages 64-66 years) used reappraisal to increase, maintain, or decrease their responses to unpleasant pictures. EDA was higher when increasing and lower when decreasing compared to maintaining. This suggested modulation of emotional arousal by reappraisal. By contrast, pupil diameter and cardiac acceleration were higher when increasing and decreasing compared to maintaining. This suggested modulation of cognitive demand. Importantly, reappraisal-related activation (increase, decreaseNmaintain) in two medial prefrontal regions (dorsal medial frontal gyrus and dorsal cingulate gyrus) was correlated with greater cardiac acceleration (increase, decreaseNmaintain) and monotonic changes in EDA (increaseNmaintainNdecrease). These data indicate that these two medial prefrontal regions are involved in the allocation of cognitive resources to regulate unpleasant emotion, and that they modulate emotional arousal in accordance with the regulatory goal. The emotional arousal effects were mediated by the right amygdala. Reappraisal-related activation in a third medial prefrontal region (subgenual anterior cingulate cortex) was not associated with similar patterns of change in any of the autonomic measures, thus highlighting regional specificity in the degree to which cognitive demand is reflected in medial prefrontal activation during reappraisal.

Objective: The anticipation of adverse outcomes, or worry, is a cardinal symptom of generalized anxiety disorder. Prior work with healthy subjects has shown that anticipating aversive events recruits a network of brain regions, including the amygdala and anterior cingulate cortex. This study tested whether patients with generalized anxiety disorder have alterations in anticipatory amygdala function and whether anticipatory activity in the anterior cingulate cortex predicts treatment response. Method: Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was employed with 14 generalized anxiety disorder patients and 12 healthy comparison subjects matched for age, sex, and education. The event-related fMRI paradigm was composed of one warning cue that preceded aversive pictures and a second cue that preceded neutral pictures. Following the fMRI session, patients received 8 weeks of treatment with extended-release venlafaxine. Results: Patients with generalized anxiety disorder showed greater anticipatory activity than healthy comparison subjects in the bilateral dorsal amygdala preceding both aversive and neutral pictures. Building on prior reports of pretreatment anterior cingulate cortex activity predicting treatment response, anticipatory activity in that area was associated with clinical outcome 8 weeks later following treatment with venlafaxine. Higher levels of pretreatment anterior cingulate cortex activity in anticipation of both aversive and neutral pictures were associated with greater reductions in anxiety and worry symptoms. Conclusions: These findings of heightened and indiscriminate amygdala responses to anticipatory signals in generalized anxiety disorder and of anterior cingulate cortex associations with treatment response provide neurobiological support for the role of anticipatory processes in the pathophysiology of generalized anxiety disorder.

Event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (efMRI) has emerged as a powerful technique for detecting brains' responses to presented stimuli. A primary goal in efMRI data analysis is to estimate the Hemodynamic Response Function (HRF) and to locate activated regions in human brains when specific tasks are performed. This paper develops new methodologies that are important improvements not only to parametric but also to nonparametric estimation and hypothesis testing of the HRF. First, an effective and computationally fast scheme for estimating the error covariance matrix for efMRI is proposed. Second, methodologies for estimation and hypothesis testing of the HRF are developed. Simulations support the effectiveness of our proposed methods. When applied to an efMRI dataset from an emotional control study, our method reveals more meaningful findings than the popular methods offered by AFNI and FSL.

Although depressed mood is a normal occurrence in response to adversity in all individuals, what distinguishes those who are vulnerable to major depressive disorder (MDD) is their inability to effectively regulate negative mood when it arises. Investigating the neural underpinnings of adaptive emotion regulation and the extent to which such processes are compromised in MDD may be helpful in understanding the pathophysiology of depression. We report results from a functional magnetic resonance imaging study demonstrating left-lateralized activation in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) when downregulating negative affect in nondepressed individuals, whereas depressed individuals showed bilateral PFC activation. Furthermore, during an effortful affective reappraisal task, nondepressed individuals showed an inverse relationship between activation in left ventrolateral PFC and the amygdala that is mediated by the ventromedial PFC (VMPFC). No such relationship was found for depressed individuals, who instead show a positive association between VMPFC and amygdala. Pupil dilation data suggest that those depressed patients who expend more effort to reappraise negative stimuli are characterized by accentuated activation in the amygdala, insula, and thalamus, whereas nondepressed individuals exhibit the opposite pattern. These findings indicate that a key feature underlying the pathophysiology of major depression is the counterproductive engagement of right prefrontal cortex and the lack of engagement of left lateral-ventromedial prefrontal circuitry important for the downregulation of amygdala responses to negative stimuli.

Anxiolytic effects of perceived control have been observed across species. In humans, neuroimaging studies have suggested that perceived control and cognitive reappraisal reduce negative affect through similar mechanisms. An important limitation of extant neuroimaging studies of perceived control in terms of directly testing this hypothesis, however, is the use of within-subject designs, which confound participants' affective response to controllable and uncontrollable stress. To compare neural and affective responses when participants were exposed to either uncontrollable or controllable stress, two groups of participants received an identical series of stressors (thermal pain stimuli). One group (“controllable”) was led to believe they had behavioral control over the pain stimuli, whereas another (“uncontrollable”) believed they had no control. Controllable pain was associated with decreased state anxiety, decreased activation in amygdala, and increased activation in nucleus accumbens. In participants who perceived control over the pain, reduced state anxiety was associated with increased functional connectivity between each of these regions and ventral lateral/ventral medial pFC. The location of pFC findings is consistent with regions found to be critical for the anxiolytic effects of perceived control in rodents. Furthermore, interactions observed between pFC and both amygdala and nucleus accumbens are remarkably similar to neural mechanisms of emotion regulation through reappraisal in humans. These results suggest that perceived control reduces negative affect through a general mechanism involved in the cognitive regulation of emotion.

Asthma, like many inflammatory disorders, is affected by psychological stress, suggesting that reciprocal modulation may occur between peripheral factors regulating inflammation and central neural circuitry underlying emotion and stress reactivity. Despite suggestions that emotional factors may modulate processes of inflammation in asthma and, conversely, that peripheral inflammatory signals influence the brain, the neural circuitry involved remains elusive. Here we show, using functional magnetic resonance imaging, that activity in the anterior cingulate cortex and insula to asthma-relevant emotional, compared with valence-neutral stimuli, is associated with markers of inflammation and airway obstruction in asthmatic subjects exposed to antigen. This activation accounts for ≥40% of the variance in the peripheral markers and suggests a neural basis for emotion-induced modulation of airway disease in asthma. The anterior cingulate cortex and insula have been implicated in the affective evaluation of sensory stimulation, regulation of homeostatic responses, and visceral perception. In individuals with asthma and other stress-related conditions, these brain regions may be hyperresponsive to disease-specific emotional and afferent physiological signals, which may contribute to the dysregulation of peripheral processes, such as inflammation.

In the choir of the chapel at St Mary’s College, Oscott, is a stained glass window dedicated to the memory of Fr John Wheble, a military chaplain who died in the Crimean War. Whereas the four upper lights of the window depict scenes from the life of St John the Apostle, Fr Wheble’s patron saint, the four lower ones show Wheble setting sail for the Crimea, giving absolution to soldiers, attending the wounded at the Battle of the Alma, and his death on board the hospital ship Arabia on November 3, 1854. St Edmund’s College, Ware, also has a Crimean window and again Fr Wheble, a benefactor of the college, is depicted along with two alumni of the college, Fr Michael Canty and Fr Denis Sheehan, who also died in the Crimea.

Diminished gaze fixation is one of the core features of autism and has been proposed to be associated with abnormalities in the neural circuitry of affect. We tested this hypothesis in two separate studies using eye tracking while measuring functional brain activity during facial discrimination tasks in individuals with autism and in typically developing individuals. Activation in the fusiform gyrus and amygdala was strongly and positively correlated with the time spent fixating the eyes in the autistic group in both studies, suggesting that diminished gaze fixation may account for the fusiform hypoactivation to faces commonly reported in autism. In addition, variation in eye fixation within autistic individuals was strongly and positively associated with amygdala activation across both studies, suggesting a heightened emotional response associated with gaze fixation in autism.

Here we show inverse fMRI activation patterns in amygdala and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) depending upon whether subjects interpreted surprised facial expressions positively or negatively. More negative interpretations of surprised faces were associated with greater signal changes in the right ventral amygdala, while more positive interpretations were associated with greater signal changes in the ventral mPFC. Accordingly, signal change within these two areas was inversely correlated. Thus, individual differences in the judgment of surprised faces are related to a systematic inverse relationship between amygdala and mPFC activity, a circuitry that the animal literature suggests is critical to the assessment of stimuli that predict potential positive vs negative outcomes.

Deficits in facial mimicry have been widely reported in autism. Some studies have suggested that these deficits are restricted to spontaneous mimicry and do not extend to volitional mimicry. We bridge these apparently inconsistent observations, by testing the impact of reward value on neural indices of mimicry, and how autistic traits modulate this impact. Neutral faces were conditioned with high and low reward. Subsequently, functional connectivity between the ventral striatum (VS) and inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) was measured whilst neurotypical adults (n = 30) watched happy expressions made by these conditioned faces. We found greater VS-IFG connectivity in response to high-reward vs. low-reward happy faces. This difference was negatively proportional to autistic traits, suggesting that reduced spontaneous mimicry of social stimuli seen in autism, maybe related to a failure in the modulation of the mirror system by the reward system rather than a circumscribed deficit in the mirror system.

Some experiments have been carried out to study and compensate for within-speaker variations in speaker verification. To induce speaker variation, a speaking behaviour elicitation software package has been developed. A 50-speaker database with voluntary and involuntary speech variation has been recorded using this software. The database has been used for acoustic analysis as well as for automatic speaker verification (ASV) tests. The voluntary speech variations are used to form an enrolment set for the ASV system. This set is called structured training and is compared to neutral training where only normal speech is used. Both sets contain the same number of utterances. It is found that the ASV system improves its performance when testing on a mixed speaking style test without decreasing the performance of the tests with normal speech.

Background Animal research indicates that the neural substrates of emotion regulation may be persistently altered by early environmental exposures. If similar processes operate in human development then this is significant, as the capacity to regulate emotional states is fundamental to human adaptation. Methods We utilised a 22-year longitudinal study to examine the influence of early infant attachment to the mother, a key marker of early experience, on neural regulation of emotional states in young adults. Infant attachment status was measured via objective assessment at 18-months, and the neural underpinnings of the active regulation of affect were studied using fMRI at age 22 years. Results Infant attachment status at 18-months predicted neural responding during the regulation of positive affect 20-years later. Specifically, while attempting to up-regulate positive emotions, adults who had been insecurely versus securely attached as infants showed greater activation in prefrontal regions involved in cognitive control and reduced co-activation of nucleus accumbens with prefrontal cortex, consistent with relative inefficiency in the neural regulation of positive affect. Conclusions Disturbances in the mother–infant relationship may persistently alter the neural circuitry of emotion regulation, with potential implications for adjustment in adulthood.

Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) has been associated with biased processing and abnormal regulation of negative and positive information, which may result from compromised coordinated activity of prefrontal and subcortical brain regions involved in evaluating emotional information. We tested whether patients with MDD show distributed changes in functional connectivity with a set of independently derived brain networks that have shown high correspondence with different task demands, including stimulus salience and emotional processing. We further explored if connectivity during emotional word processing related to the tendency to engage in positive or negative emotional states. In this study, 25 medication-free MDD patients without current or past comorbidity and matched controls (n = 25) performed an emotional word-evaluation task during functional MRI. Using a dual regression approach, individual spatial connectivity maps representing each subject's connectivity with each standard network were used to evaluate between-group differences and effects of positive and negative emotionality (extraversion and neuroticism, respectively, as measured with the NEO-FFI). Results showed decreased functional connectivity of the medial prefrontal cortex, ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, and ventral striatum with the fronto-opercular salience network in MDD patients compared to controls. In patients, abnormal connectivity was related to extraversion, but not neuroticism. These results confirm the hypothesis of a relative (para)limbic–cortical decoupling that may explain dysregulated affect in MDD. As connectivity of these regions with the salience network was related to extraversion, but not to general depression severity or negative emotionality, dysfunction of this network may be responsible for the failure to sustain engagement in rewarding behavior., Highlights • We studied whole-brain functional connectivity in MDD during an emotional task. • We used a set of independent template networks, corresponding to various task demands. • We showed lower connectivity of reward related regions with a salience network in MDD. • Lower salience connectivity specifically related to extraversion in patients • Results may reflect vulnerability for MDD via a circuit vital for rewarding behavior.

Bottom-up processes can interrupt ongoing cognitive processing in order to adaptively respond to emotional stimuli of high potential significance, such as those that threaten wellbeing. However it is vital that this interference can be modulated in certain contexts to focus on current tasks. Deficits in the ability to maintain the appropriate balance between cognitive and emotional demands can severely impact on day-to-day activities. This fMRI study examined this interaction between threat processing and cognition; 18 adult participants performed a visuospatial working memory (WM) task with two load conditions, in the presence and absence of anxiety induction by threat of electric shock. Threat of shock interfered with performance in the low cognitive load condition; however interference was eradicated under high load, consistent with engagement of emotion regulation mechanisms. Under low load the amygdala showed significant activation to threat of shock that was modulated by high cognitive load. A directed top-down control contrast identified two regions associated with top-down control; ventrolateral PFC and dorsal ACC. Dynamic causal modeling provided further evidence that under high cognitive load, top-down inhibition is exerted on the amygdala and its outputs to prefrontal regions. Additionally, we hypothesized that individual differences in a separate, non-emotional top-down control task would predict the recruitment of dorsal ACC and ventrolateral PFC during top-down control of threat. Consistent with this, performance on a separate dichotic listening task predicted dorsal ACC and ventrolateral PFC activation during high WM load under threat of shock, though activation in these regions did not directly correlate with WM performance. Together, the findings suggest that under high cognitive load and threat, top-down control is exerted by dACC and vlPFC to inhibit threat processing, thus enabling WM performance without threat-related interference.

OBJECTIVE Deficits in positive affect and their neural bases have been associated with major depression. However, whether reductions in positive affect result solely from an overall reduction in nucleus accumbens activity and fronto-striatal connectivity or the additional inability to sustain engagement of this network over time is unknown. The authors sought to determine whether treatment-induced changes in the ability to sustain nucleus accumbens activity and fronto-striatal connectivity during the regulation of positive affect are associated with gains in positive affect. METHOD Using fMRI, the authors assessed the ability to sustain activity in reward-related networks when attempting to increase positive emotion during performance of an emotion regulation paradigm in 21 depressed patients before and after 2 months of antidepressant treatment. Over the same interval, 14 healthy comparison subjects underwent scanning as well. RESULTS After 2 months of treatment, self-reported positive affect increased. The patients who demonstrated the largest increases in sustained nucleus accumbens activity over the 2 months were those who demonstrated the largest increases in positive affect. In addition, the patients who demonstrated the largest increases in sustained fronto-striatal connectivity were also those who demonstrated the largest increases in positive affect when controlling for negative affect. None of these associations were observed in healthy comparison subjects. CONCLUSIONS Treatment-induced change in the sustained engagement of fronto-striatal circuitry tracks the experience of positive emotion in daily life. Studies examining reduced positive affect in a variety of psychiatric disorders might benefit from examining the temporal dynamics of brain activity when attempting to understand changes in daily positive affect.

Spontaneous mimicry is a marker of empathy. Conditions characterized by reduced spontaneous mimicry (e.g., autism) also display deficits in sensitivity to social rewards. We tested if spontaneous mimicry of socially rewarding stimuli (happy faces) depends on the reward value of stimuli in 32 typical participants. An evaluative conditioning paradigm was used to associate different reward values with neutral target faces. Subsequently, electromyographic activity over the Zygomaticus Major was measured whilst participants watched video clips of the faces making happy expressions. Higher Zygomaticus Major activity was found in response to happy faces conditioned with high reward versus low reward. Moreover, autistic traits in the general population modulated the extent of spontaneous mimicry of happy faces. This suggests a link between reward and spontaneous mimicry and provides a possible underlying mechanism for the reduced response to social rewards seen in autism.