assigned readings March 26
Monicarodr
Banks, Eddy, Angstadt, Nathan, & Phan (2007) - Lindsay
Kross, Davidson, Weber, & Oschner (2009) - Stuart
Wager, Davidson, Hughes, Lindquist, & Oschner (2008) - Camille
Beauregard, Levesque, & Bourgouin (2001) - Beka
Taylor, Phan, Decker, & Liberzon (2003) - David
Beer, John, Scabini, & Knight (2006) - Jenny
If these are not, just post your articles in the socialneuro780
groups.
Nothing much will happen if you end up overlapping :)
beka strock
SocNeuro Wk 9
I’m going to focus on the Beauregard et al (2001) for this posting…
First of all, BEST METHODS SECTION EVER!! Haha. Okay seriously, how did they get this through the IRB? To recap in plain English, the authors had male subjects watch pornos (“erotic film excepts”) and neutral videos, and the two conditions were to either let themselves “react normally” or “inhibit any emotional reaction.” (Side note: In all seriousness, they only stated that they were “healthy male subjects” and I really felt that it was an egregious error not to at least ask for sexual orientation, since gay males would likely not respond to the same heterosexual cues…)
First, a really interesting finding was that those in the inhibition condition were actually able to neutrally inhibit the limbic areas activated in the sexual arousal condition (as identified by lack of activation in specific brain areas for the inhibition condition compared to significant activation in the sexual arousal condition—even using a lower p-value threshold!—as well as significant differences in self-reported sexual arousal). The sexual arousal areas included the right amygdala, right anterior temporal lobe, and right hypothalamus which corresponded to evaluation of emotional stimulus (amygdala), neuroendocrine and autonomic expression of emotion(hypothalamus), and subjective emotional experience ( “color” is the word they use which I take to mean interpretation of the emotion type; anterior temporal lobe). They also detail the order in which they think the signals travel (amygdala sends parallel messages to hypothalamus (leads to arousal) and temporal pole (leads to attending to emotion); however, this did not have any real data to back it up as far as the order of activations.
Second, the authors proposed an emotion-regulation network which includes the right dorsolateral PFC, right ACC, right amygdala, and hypothalamus. This conclusion is based upon activations in the right dorsolateral PFC (BA-10/superior frontal gyrus) and right ACC (BA 32) in the inhibition condition. As expected, the usual suspects (i.e., prefrontal cortex area) was identified as a self-regulation center. Also it was no surprise that the ACC (particularly the rostral-ventral affective subdivision) was involved in emotional/motivational processing which is consistent with what is already known about these areas.
Other activation areas included the extra-striate visual cortex (both; duh, attention to visual stimuli), inferotemportal coretex (arousal; recognition of facial expression), cerebellum (arousal; “feeling”), and parietal lobe (arousal, superior parietal lobule; attention), and the frontal gyrus (inhibition; left inferior/right anterior/left inferior; possibly associated with subvocal rehearsal working memory used for distracting themselves in the inhibition condition).
While these results are very interesting (and certainly attention-grabbing!) they are of course limited since only one type of emotional activation was suppressed (i.e., sexual arousal). It will be interesting to see if these effects are replicated in other emotional activation scenarios…
Jenny Perella
exclusively on the orbitofrontal cortex. Spectifically, the authors
were interested in role ofc activation plays in self-monitoring and
the inappropriate expression of emotional information. Previous
studies show that people with damage to the ofc exhibit impaired
interpersonal behaviors. Beer et al discuss two theories that could
explain this effect, and in their study attempt to determine which
theory is the most likely explanation. First, ofc damage could cause
an emotional deficit, causing people to experience social emotions to
a lesser degree. Support for this theory comes from the somatic marker
hypothesis, which suggests that physiological sensations guide people
to avoid awkward social moments, and from reinforcement and reversal
theory, which suggest that the ofc is important for evaluating whether
behaviors lead to positive, rewarding emotions or negative, punishing
emotions. Respective to each theory, there is evidence that shows that
people with OFC damage to not experience the anticipatory anxiety that
typically accompanies risk, and also that people with OFD damage are
not embarrassed of awkward/inappropriate social behaviors. A second
possible explanation for impaired social behavior is that people with
OFC damage are deficient at self-monitoring, a cognitive process that
is important for insight about the appropriateness of our behavior.
The authors suggest that it is the latter: OFC damage causes a deficit
in the ability to self-monitor, and that this inability to properly
self-monitor prohibits the generation of the social emotions that
typically guide behavior.
The methods were pretty interesting, though the overall sample size
was only 16. What’s more, participants were divided into 3 groups,
further reducing sample size: OFC damage (n = 4, all men), lateral pfc
damage (n = 4, 2 men), and healthy controls (n = 8, matched). The
authors included the lpfc group because previous literature has shown
an overlap in deficits with OFC damage; Beer et al believe social
impairment is specific to OFC damage. The problems I have thus far are
that the sample size was very small, the 2 target groups vary in the
gender composition, and the mean age of the OFC group was 56 while the
mean age of the lpfc group was 76. This aside, the assignment of
healthy controls was very thorough. The authors matched the controls
to a target participant on gender, age, education, community of
residence, and Mini Mental Status exam performance (I’m not sure what
this is).
On to the procedure: All participants first answered 34 questions
assessing their knowledge of social norms. Specifically, they were
asked how much intimate information they would reveal if they were
asked these questions by a complete stranger. Next, each participant
interacted with a stranger (a graduate assistant), who asked them 9 of
the previous 34 questions. These interactions were videotaped.
Participants were then asked how appropriate they thought they had
been in their interactions. They then watched the video of themselves
interacting with the stranger and were asked again about
appropriateness afterwards. All interactions were judged for
appropriateness (more about judge training later).
The authors found that all participants had roughly the same knowledge
of social norms. That is, there was no difference between groups in
the amount of personal info participants thought they would disclose
to a stranger. However, the interactions of OFC damage patients were
judged as being significantly more inappropriate (revealed too much/
uncomfortable info) than the other 2 groups. In regard to the main
purpose of the study, all participants at time 1 rated their
interactions as appropriate, but only the OFC group rated them as less
appropriate, and reported embarrassment, at time 2 (after watching the
video). These data suggest that OFC damage does not lead to an
emotional deficit, but does interfere with one’s ability to self-
monitor; since people with OFC damage are not able to properly self-
monitor, they never realize there is a need to experience emotion
relevant to guiding the appropriateness of their social behavior. This
is just as predicted by the authors, and supports that social
impairment is likely due to OFC but not LPFC damage.
Back to the judges: I just wanted to comment on this because I was
impressed by the precautions the authors took in preparing the judges.
First, all 3 judges were blind to the purpose of the study (of
course); they were also unaware that the sample included people with
brain damage. Second, they were “trained in norms of self-disclosure
through extensive literature review”… though this is still a little
vague, it’s definitely a step up from what I have seen in most
articles. In addition, the judges coded transcripts of the
interactions instead of the videos themselves so that emotional
expression would not be an influence. Judges also allegedly completed
a month-long transcript coding course and coded 10 practice
transcripts based on the current study.
All in all, I thought this study was well-done. Though the control
group was very thoughtfully created, it would have been nice to see
larger n for the 2 patient groups, and it would be nice if these at
least were matched on gender, which could be a confound. However,
being a study on brain damage I guess you get what you can find. It
doesn’t seem probable that a study could be easily matched on age as
well (though it would be desirable), as most OFC damage of
participants in this study was caused by strokes, typically associated
with older age.
I thought it was interesting that while patients with OFC damage are
apparently not able to self-monitor in the moment, they seem to be
able to monitor others/when watching themselves. I wondered if they
were also incapable of picking up on other people’s social cues during
an interaction, because the difficulty in monitoring seems to arise
when the patient is engaging in an interaction, but not when simply
observing. It would be interesting to replicate this study,
manipulating the social cue responses given by the stranger.
David Dinwiddie
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Camille Barnes
areas. thanks -Camille
Monica L. Rodriguez
Stuart Daman
Beka - It's not often very difficult to get things thru an IRB, it
just takes for-freaking-ever. And I think you raise a very good point
about homosexuals ... in addition, what is meant by this:
"Phenomenologically, the viewing of the erotic film excerpts in both
the sexual arousal and attempted inhibition conditions induced a
transient state of sexual arousal in subjects." ? ...Does this mean
they got visibly physically aroused? Why say it so obscurely? Grow up!
And why is this important? A naughty reviewer suggestion?
I focused on the Kross et al. (2009) paper. The authors were
interested in elucidating the neural mechanisms for regulating affect
associated with negative autobiographical memories. So, they basically
had people recall negative events from their lives and 'cope' with
them in one of three ways. Participants either thought about the
feelings that occurred while recalling the memory (Feel), accepted
that the event was nothing more than a recollection of events past
(Accept), or analyzed the causes for the feelings associated with the
memories (Analyze). Reading the results and discussion sections was
tedious because they did not capitalize the names of their conditions,
so it become confusing to understand what they were referring to at
times. I also found several typos in the paper, bogus.
They used fMRI to measure activation while participants thought about
these memories, but did something with the data that I don't think
we've seen before. To correct for the number of tests they were doing,
they used a method similar to bootstrapping to establish a
distribution of nulls to which their results were compared.
They found that activation in areas associated with self-referential
processing, emotion, and autobiographical memory recall. In
particular, activation in these areas was highest for the Feel
condition, followed by Analyze, then Accept. This suggested that the
coping methods did decrease emotional reactions to the memories. In
addition, they did simple effects analyses and explained the
similarities and differences in brain activation and self-reported
negative affect for the individual brain areas, across the regulation
strategies!
All in all, they suggested other implications as well. They suggest
that their results have specific meaning for depressed people. They
say that depressed individuals automatically engage in processing
similar to their Feel condition, who experienced the greatest
activation. So, they suggest that if depressed individuals were
trained to engage in the other strategies (Accept, Analyze), they may
become less depressed. Finally, because they showed that activation
was less in Accept than in Analyze conditions, they suggest that
reducing negative affect may better be achieved by acceptance than by
analysis of memories that elicit negative feelings.
The results are certainly interesting in their own right, although I
think there are other directions for future research. Rather than
focusing on decreasing negative affect, why not look at how to
increase positive affect? This may first depend on whether one
conceptualizes positive and negative affect as two ends of one
dimension or two distinct dimensions. In any case, assuming similar
trends in results, having people Feel about positive autobiographical
events could increase positive affect, which I think would be at least
as useful as finding ways to decrease negative affect. The authors end
by saying that thinking of these negative events is a pervasive
problem of everyday life ... I say, think about positive things
instead of trying to make negative things better!
Lindsay Morton
Last week we discussed several different strategies for the self-regulation of emotion. The Banks, Eddy, Angstadt, Nathan, & Phan (2007) article for this week focused on reappraisal and directly compared it to the maintenance of natural emotional experience. For the experiment, 14 participants were presented with negatively valenced IAPS images (e.g., photos of burn victims, dead animals, etc.). During “maintain” trials participants were instructed to react naturally to the pictures and sustain the experience throughout the block, whereas during the “reappraise” trials participants were instructed to reinterpret the stimuli to decrease the intensity of their reaction. All participants engaged in “maintain” and “reappraise” trials in counterbalanced order with interspersed baseline blocks for a total of 12 minutes. Directly following each block, participants also rated the intensity of their negative emotion on a 5-point scale.
The main finding of this article was that negative affective reappraisal is related to a higher correlation between activation in the amygdala and specific frontal brain regions (i.e., dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, orbitofrontal cortex, and anterior cingulated cortex). Self-reported intensity of emotion scores were also found to be negatively correlated with reappraisal-dependent amygdala-OFC/DLPFC coupling. The take-home message seems to be that one of the important neural interconnections underlying the conscious reappraisal of emotion may be within the amygdala-frontal regions. Such findings also support past research that has defined the anatomical connections between the amygdala and frontal cortex as the “emotion generation-regulation circuit.”
Interestingly, this report utilized previously collected data and re-analyzed it using psychophysiological interactions (PPI) analysis. PPI is a technique in which the reciprocal changes in brain activation among two areas (i.e., the physiological aspect) can be examined in relation to a specific task (i.e., the psychological aspect). Through the use of regression-based methods, the researchers were able to look at functional connectivity during specific an emotion processing task. It should be noted that the analysis only gives information about differences in connectivity between the tasks. It does not tell us anything about the directional changes in inter-regional activation within a task or behavior. Thus, future research is needed to tell us more about how and when different areas of the brain may interact and affect one another in the process of emotional reappraisal.
Camille Barnes
is readable, so I am going to e-mail it to Monica, and hopefully she
can forward it to everyone! sorry!
-Camille
On Mar 25, 9:43 am, beka strock <beka.str...@gmail.com> wrote:
> *SocNeuro Wk 9*
David Dinwiddie
Wager et al. are looking at two different models which look at the effectiveness of reappraisal. The PFC has been shown to be the key region associated with emotion regulation. Studies have consistently shown that there is increased activation in several PFC regions during emotion regulation. There are two models which explain why this activation reduces negative affect associated with a stimulus. The first is a direct pathway where reappraisal is directly associated with cortical activity without impacting subcortical systems. The mediation hypothesis says that these subcortical systems are activated. The subcortical systems are associated with affective appraisal and learning processes. Assuming these was a subcortical mediator the authors believed that systems involved with positive or negative affect could serve as mediators. The regions associated with positive affect were the nucleus accumbens and the ventral straitum. The regions which have been implicated with negative affect are the amygdala and insula. They believed both positive and negative pathways could be activated at the same time.
As with a lot of these articles the methods are at the back but I will present them next. In this study 30 right-handed participants were used. Participants were shown 48 aversive images and 24 neutral images while being scanned in an fMRI. The images were grouped into 3 conditions. In one they were shown negative images and told to view the images, understand them and experience any natural emotions associated with the image. A second condition had them to the same thing with the neutral images. The third condition had them look at the negative images but reappraise them by creating a positive interpretation of the scene. Within each condition they had full trials, anticipation only trials, and stimulus only trials. In the full trials there was first a 2s condition cue, followed by a 4s anticipatory interval. Then the image was presented for 8s. This was followed by a 4-7s interval. Then the words “How negative do you feel?” were presented for 2.1s. Participants rated their response on a 5 point scale. There was then a 4-7s gap before the next trail. The anticipation only trials consisted of only cue, anticipation and rating intervals. (Not exactly sure how this was different. I’m assuming it left out an interval but I can’t tell where.) In the stimulus only trials, the anticipatory interval was eliminated. This design allowed the researchers to estimate activation in each phase of the trial for each emotion condition.
The results for this study were as follows. First, they assigned reappraisal scores which was the difference in affective rating in the LookNeg and ReappNeg conditions. Larger differences were seen as more successful. Aversive images had stronger negative affect associated with it than neutral images. Reappraisal of the negative images results in less negative affective responses to the negative images. There were several regions in the brain that showed differences in activation in the LookNeg and ReappNeg conditions. There were 8 different regions that were associated with reappraisal-success. These regions were bilateral vlPFC and temporal regions, pre-SMA and dmPFC, left IPL, and right caudate. The vlPFC was chosen as the focus area in future analysis due to it being a well known region associated with cognitive control and response inhibition. This was the region which they would be primarily looking at to see if there was a mediator in the subcortical structures on its activation.
The amygdala , and nucleus accumbens/ventral straitum were next looked at as possible mediators on rvlPFC activation. Activation in rvlPFC was the predictor and reappraisal success was the DV. Within these ROI they searched voxel by voxel for mediators of this relationship. To be considered mediators they had to reach a critical value of p=.005 and there had to be at least 3 continuous voxels which reached this level of significance. They seemed to do a good job in reducing the chance of false errors. There also had to be a significant mediation effect of the region which was the product of the a and b path coefficients. The ‘a’ path was that of rvlPFC to the ROI and the ‘b’ path was that of ROI to reappraisal success. There was a region of the amygdala that was found to be a negative mediator. It produced reduced reappraisal success. This supports the idea to negative affective responses are generated through the amygdala. A region in the left NAC/VS region which positively mediated the relationship.
This article hurt to read because it was to heavy with statistics and neuroscience but this was the primary finding of importance. The amygdala was a negative mediator of the relationship between rvlPFC activation and reappraisal success while the NAC/Vs was a positive mediator.