In this study, we examined the impact of goal-directed processing on the response to emotional pictures and the impact of emotional pictures on goal-directed processing. Subjects (N=22) viewed neutral or emotional pictures in the presence or absence of a demanding cognitive task. Goal-directed processing disrupted the BOLD response to emotional pictures. In particular, the BOLD response within bilateral amygdala and inferior frontal gyrus decreased during concurrent task performance. Moreover, the presence of both positive and negative distractors disrupted task performance, with reaction times increasing for emotional relative to neutral distractors. Moreover, in line with the suggestion of the importance of lateral frontal regions in emotional regulation [Ochsner, K. N., Ray, R. D., Cooper, J. C., Robertson, E. R., Chopra, S., Gabrieli, J. D., et al. (2004). For better or for worse: neural systems supporting the cognitive down-and up-regulation of negative emotion. NeuroImage, 23(2), 483-499], connectivity analysis revealed positive connectivity between lateral superior frontal cortex and regions of middle frontal cortex previously implicated in emotional suppression [Beauregard, M., Levesque, J., and Bourgouin, P. (2001). Neural correlates of conscious self-regulation of emotion. J. Neurosci., 21 (18), RC165.; Levesque, J., Eugene, F., Joanette, Y., Paquette, V., Mensour, B., Beaudoin, G., et al. (2003). Neural circuitry underlying voluntary suppression of sadness. Biol. Psychiatry, 53 (6), 502-510.;Ohira, H., Nomura, M., Ichikawa, N., Isowa, T., Iidaka, T., Sato, A., et al. (2006). Association of neural and physiological responses during voluntary emotion suppression. NeuroImage, 29 (3), 721-733] and negative connectivity with bilateral amygdala. These data suggest that processes involved in emotional regulation are recruited during task performance in the context of emotional distractors.

Objective-Generalized social phobia involves fear/avoidance, specifically of social situations, whereas generalized anxiety disorder involves intrusive worry about diverse circumstances. It remains unclear the degree to which these two, often comorbid, conditions represent distinct disorders or alternative presentations of a single, core underlying pathology. Functional magnetic resonance imaging assessed the neural response to facial expressions in generalized social phobia and generalized anxiety disorder.Method-Individuals matched on age, IQ, and gender with generalized social phobia without generalized anxiety disorder (N=17), generalized anxiety disorder (N= 17), or no psychopathology (N=17) viewed neutral, fearful, and angry expressions while ostensibly making a simple gender judgment.Results-The patients with generalized social phobia without generalized anxiety disorder showed increased activation to fearful relative to neutral expressions in several regions, including the amygdala, compared to healthy individuals. This increased amygdala response related to selfreported anxiety in patients with generalized social phobia without generalized anxiety disorder. In contrast, patients with generalized anxiety disorder showed significantly less activation to fearful relative to neutral faces compared to the healthy individuals. They did show significantly increased response to angry expressions relative to healthy individuals in a lateral region of the middle frontal gyrus. This increased lateral frontal response related to self-reported anxiety in patients with generalized anxiety disorder.Conclusions-These results suggest that neural circuitry dysfunctions differ in generalized social phobia and generalized anxiety disorder.Generalized social phobia and generalized anxiety disorder are two highly prevalent, chronic, and disabling anxiety disorders (1,2) that are sometimes comorbid. Generalized social phobia involves fear/avoidance, specifically of social situations, whereas generalized anxiety disorder involves intrusive worry about a broader array of everyday life circumstances. Although both have considerable social and economic costs, disagreement exists concerning the degree to which the conditions result from a shared or unique pathophysiology. For example, high rates of comorbidity in cross-sectional and longitudinal studies suggest that the distinction between the two conditions may be relatively subtle at the descriptive level (3,4). On the other hand, data from family-based and therapeutic research suggest the two conditions can be dissociated. Specifically, such dissociation is reflected in patterns of disorder aggregation within families (5), as well as by the fact that generalized anxiety disorder, but not social phobia, responds to most tricyclic antidepressants and to buspirone (6-8). Because no brain-imaging study has directly compared the two conditions, it remains unclear whether the two disorders have dissociable neural correlates.The principal goal of the current study was to inves...

Mindfulness meditation is a set of attention-based, regulatory and self-inquiry training regimes. Although the impact of mindfulness meditation training (MT) on self-regulation is well established, the neural mechanisms supporting such plasticity are poorly understood. MT is thought to act on attention through interoceptive salience and attentional control mechanisms, but until now conflicting evidence from behavioral and neural measures has made it difficult to distinguish the role of these mechanisms. To resolve this question we conducted a fully randomized 6-week longitudinal trial of MT, explicitly controlling for cognitive and treatment effects with an active control group. We measured behavioral metacognition and whole-brain Blood Oxygenation Level Dependent (BOLD) signals using functional MRI during an affective Stroop task before and after intervention. Although both groups improved significantly on a response-inhibition task, only the MT group showed reduced affective Stroop conflict. Moreover, the MT group displayed greater dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) responses during executive processing, consistent with increased recruitment of top-down mechanisms to resolve conflict. In contrast, we did not observe overall group by time interactions on negative affect-related RTs or BOLD responses. However, only participants with the greatest amount of MT practice showed improvements in response-inhibition and increased recruitment of dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), and right anterior insula during negative valence processing. Collectively our findings highlight the importance of active control in MT research, and indicate unique neural mechanisms for progressive stages of mindfulness training.

OBJECTIVE Dysfunction in amygdala and orbital frontal cortex functioning has been reported in youths and adults with psychopathic traits. However, the specific nature of the computational irregularities within these brain structures remains poorly understood. The current study used the passive avoidance task to examine responsiveness of these systems to early stimulus-reinforcement exposure, when prediction errors are greatest and learning maximized, and to reward in youths with psychopathic traits and comparison youths. METHOD 30 youths (N=15 with conduct disorder or oppositional defiant disorder plus high psychopathic traits and N=15 comparison subjects) completed a 3.0 T fMRI scan while performing a passive avoidance learning task. RESULTS Relative to comparison youth, youths with conduct disorder or oppositional defiant disorder plus psychopathic traits showed reduced orbitofrontal cortex responsiveness both to early stimulus-reinforcement exposure and to rewards, as well as reduced caudate response to early stimulus-reinforcement exposure. Contrary to other predictions, however, there were no group differences in amygdala responsiveness specifically to these two task parameters. However, amygdala responsiveness throughout the task was reduced in the youths with conduct disorder or oppositional defiant disorder plus psychopathic traits. CONCLUSIONS This study demonstrates that youths with conduct disorder or oppositional defiant disorder plus psychopathic traits are marked by a compromised sensitivity to early reinforcement information in both orbitofrontal cortex and caudate and to reward outcome information within orbitofrontal cortex. They further suggest that the integrated functioning of the amygdala, caudate and orbitofrontal cortex may be disrupted in individuals with this disorder.

The ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and dorsal anterior cingulate cortices (ACd) are considered important for reward-based decision making. However, work distinguishing their individual functional contributions has only begun. One aspect of decision making that has received little attention is that making the right choice often translates to making the better choice. Thus, response choice often occurs in situations where both options are desirable (e.g., choosing between mousse au chocolat or crème caramel cheesecake from a menu) or, alternatively, in situations where both options are undesirable. Moreover, response choice is easier when the reinforcements associated with the objects are far apart, rather than close together, in value. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to delineate the functional roles of the vmPFC and ACd by investigating these two aspects of decision making: (1) decision form (i.e., choosing between two objects to gain the greater reward or the lesser punishment), and (2) between-object reinforcement distance (i.e., the difference in reinforcements associated with the two objects). Blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) responses within the ACd and vmPFC were both related to decision form but differentially. Whereas ACd showed greater responses when deciding between objects to gain the lesser punishment, vmPFC showed greater responses when deciding between objects to gain the greater reward. Moreover, vmPFC was sensitive to reinforcement expectations associated with both the chosen and the forgone choice. In contrast, BOLD responses within ACd, but not vmPFC, related to between-object reinforcement distance, increasing as the distance between the reinforcements of the two objects decreased. These data are interpreted with reference to models of ACd and vmPFC functioning.

Background Generalized Social Phobia (GSP) and Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) are both associated with emotion dysregulation. In healthy subjects, research implicates dorsal anterior cingulate (dACC) in both explicit emotion regulation and top-down attentional control. While studies have examined these processes in GSP or GAD, no work compares findings across the two disorders. Moreover, no work examines functioning in cases comorbid for both disorders (GSP/GAD). Here we compare the neural correlates of explicit emotion regulation (EER) and top-down attentional control (TAC) in GSP, GAD, and GSP/GAD. Method Medication-free adults with GSP (EER n=19; TAC n=18), GAD (EER n=17; TAC n =17), GSP/GAD (EER n=17; TAC=15), or no psychopathology (EER n=18; TAC n=18). During EER, individuals alternatively viewed, up-regulated, and down-regulated responses to emotional pictures. During TAC, they performed an emotional Stroop task. Results For both tasks, significant group-by-condition interactions emerged in dACC and parietal cortices. Healthy adults showed significantly increased recruitment during emotion regulation, relative to emotion-picture viewing. GAD, GSP, and GSP/GAD subjects showed no such increases, with all three groups differing from healthy adults but not from each other. Evidence of emotion-related disorder-specificity emerged in medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) and amygdala. This disorder-specific responding varied as a function of stimulus emotion content but not emotion-regulatory demands. Conclusions GSP and GAD both involve reduced capacity for engaging emotion-regulation brain networks, whether explicitly or via top-down attentional control. A reduced ability to recruit regions implicated in top-down attention might represent a general risk factor for anxiety disorders.

Children with narrow phenotype bipolar disorder (NP-BD; i.e., history of at least one hypomanic or manic episode with euphoric mood) are deficient when labeling face emotions. It is unknown if this deficit is specific to particular emotions, or if it extends to children with severe mood dysregulation (SMD; i.e., chronic irritability and hyperarousal without episodes of mania). Thirty-nine NP-BD, 31 SMD, and 36 control subjects completed the emotional expression multimorph task, which presents gradations of facial emotions from 100% neutrality to 100% emotional expression (happiness, surprise, fear, sadness, anger, and disgust). Groups were compared in terms of intensity of emotion required before identification occurred and accuracy. Both NP-BD and SMD youth required significantly more morphs than controls to label correctly disgusted, surprised, fearful, and happy faces. Impaired face labeling correlated with deficient social reciprocity skills in NP-BD youth and dysfunctional family relationships in SMD youth. Compared to controls, patients with NP-BD or SMD require significantly more intense facial emotion before they are able to label the emotion correctly. These deficits are associated with psychosocial impairments. Understanding the neural circuitry associated with face-labeling deficits has the potential to clarify the pathophysiology of these disorders.

Context Generalized social phobia (GSP) is characterized by fear/avoidance of social situations. Previous studies have examined the neural responses in GSP to one class of social stimuli, facial expressions. However, studies have not examined the neural response in GSP to another equally important class of social stimuli, the communication of praise or criticism. Objective To examine the neural response to receipt of praise or criticism in GSP; specifically, to determine whether patients with GSP show an increased response to the receipt of both praise and criticism and whether self-relevance modulates this relationship. Design Case-control study. Setting Government clinical research institute. Participants Unmedicated individuals with GSP (n=17) and age-, IQ-, and sex-matched healthy comparison individuals (n=17). Main Outcome Measure Blood oxygenation level–dependent signal, as measured via functional magnetic resonance imaging. During functional magnetic resonance imaging scans, individuals read positive (eg, You are beautiful), negative (eg, You are ugly), and neutral (eg, You are human) comments that could be either about the self or about somebody else (eg, He is beautiful). Results Hypothesized significant group×valence×referent interactions were observed within regions of the medial prefrontal cortex and bilateral amygdala. In these regions, the patients with GSP showed significantly increased blood oxygenation level–dependent responses, relative to comparison individuals, to negative comments (criticism) referring to themselves. However, in contrast, there were no significant group differences with respect to negative comments referring to others or neutral or positive comments referring to self or others. Conclusions These results implicate the medial prefrontal cortex, involved in the representation of the self, together with the amygdala, in the pathophysiology of GSP. Further, findings demonstrate a meaningful effect of psychological context on neural-circuitry hyperactivity in GSP.