Social cognitive and affective neuroscience
-
Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci · Aug 2014
Neural substrates of classically conditioned fear-generalization in humans: a parametric fMRI study.
Recent research on classical fear-conditioning in the anxiety disorders has identified overgeneralization of conditioned fear as an important conditioning correlate of anxiety pathology. Unfortunately, only one human neuroimaging study of classically conditioned fear generalization has been conducted, and the neural substrates of this clinically germane process remain largely unknown. The current generalization study employs a clinically validated generalization gradient paradigm, modified for the fMRI environment, to identify neural substrates of classically conditioned generalization that may function aberrantly in clinical anxiety. ⋯ Results demonstrate 'positive' generalization gradients, reflected by declines in responding as the presented stimulus differentiates from CS+, in bilateral anterior insula, dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, and bilateral inferior parietal lobule. Conversely, 'negative' gradients, reflected by inclines in responding as the presented stimulus differentiates from CS+ were instantiated in bilateral ventral hippocampus, ventromedial prefrontal cortex and precuneus cortex. These results as well as those from connectivity analyses are discussed in relation to a working neurobiology of conditioned generalization centered on the hippocampus.
-
Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci · Aug 2014
Cognitive and affective theory of mind share the same local patterns of activity in posterior temporal but not medial prefrontal cortex.
Understanding emotions in others engages specific brain regions in temporal and medial prefrontal cortices. These activations are often attributed to more general cognitive 'mentalizing' functions, associated with theory of mind and also necessary to represent people's non-emotional mental states, such as beliefs or intentions. Here, we directly investigated whether understanding emotional feelings recruit similar or specific brain systems, relative to other non-emotional mental states. ⋯ We found a striking dissociation between the temporoparietal cortex, that exhibited a remarkable voxel-by-voxel pattern overlap between emotions and beliefs (but not pain), and the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, that exhibited distinct (and yet nearby) patterns of activity during the judgment of beliefs and emotions in others. Pain judgment was instead associated with activity in the supramarginal gyrus, middle cingulate cortex and middle insular cortex. Our data reveal for the first time a functional dissociation within brain networks sub-serving theory of mind for different mental contents, with a common recruitment for cognitive and affective states in temporal regions, and distinct recruitment in prefrontal areas.