Social cognitive and affective neuroscience
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Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci · Mar 2015
God will forgive: reflecting on God's love decreases neurophysiological responses to errors.
In religions where God is portrayed as both loving and wrathful, religious beliefs may be a source of fear as well as comfort. Here, we consider if God's love may be more effective, relative to God's wrath, for soothing distress, but less effective for helping control behavior. Specifically, we assess whether contemplating God's love reduces our ability to detect and emotionally react to conflict between one's behavior and overarching religious standards. ⋯ Reflecting on God's love caused dampened ERNs and worse performance on the Go/No-Go task. Thinking about God's punishment did not affect performance or ERNs. Results suggest that one possible reason religiosity is generally linked to positive well-being may be because of a decreased affective response to errors that occurs when God's love is prominent in the minds of believers.
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Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci · Dec 2014
Randomized Controlled TrialLong-term expression of human contextual fear and extinction memories involves amygdala, hippocampus and ventromedial prefrontal cortex: a reinstatement study in two independent samples.
Human context conditioning studies have focused on acquisition and extinction. Subsequent long-term changes in fear behaviors not only depend on associative learning processes during those phases but also on memory consolidation processes and the later ability to retrieve and express fear and extinction memories. Clinical theories explain relapse after successful exposure-based treatment with return of fear memories and remission with stable extinction memory expression. ⋯ These areas have earlier been implicated in the expression of cued extinction and fear memories. The present results suggest a general role for these structures in defining the balance between fear and extinction memories, independent of the conditioning mode. The results are discussed in the light of hypotheses implicating the anterior hippocampus in the processing of situational ambiguity.
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Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci · Nov 2014
Insula-amygdala functional connectivity is correlated with habituation to repeated negative images.
Behavioral habituation during repeated exposure to aversive stimuli is an adaptive process. However, the way in which changes in self-reported emotional experience are related to the neural mechanisms supporting habituation remains unclear. We probed these mechanisms by repeatedly presenting negative images to healthy adult participants and recording behavioral and neural responses using functional magnetic resonance imaging. ⋯ Posterior insula activation during image presentation was correlated with greater negative affect ratings for novel presentations of negative images. Further, repeated negative image presentation was associated with increased functional connectivity between left posterior insula and amygdala, and increasing insula-amygdala functional connectivity was correlated with increasing behavioral habituation. These results suggest that habituation is subserved in part by insula-amygdala connectivity and involves a change in the activity of bottom-up affective networks.
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Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci · Nov 2014
Memory consolidation of fear conditioning: bi-stable amygdala connectivity with dorsal anterior cingulate and medial prefrontal cortex.
Investigations of fear conditioning in rodents and humans have illuminated the neural mechanisms of fear acquisition and extinction. However, the neural mechanism of memory consolidation of fear conditioning is not well understood. To address this question, we measured brain activity and the changes in functional connectivity following fear acquisition using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging. ⋯ These findings suggest the amygdala functional connectivity with dACC and mPFC may play an important role in memory consolidation of fear conditioning. The change of amygdala-mPFC functional connectivity could predict the subjective fear. Accordingly, this study provides a new perspective for understanding fear memory consolidation.
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Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci · Nov 2014
How music alters a kiss: superior temporal gyrus controls fusiform-amygdalar effective connectivity.
While watching movies, the brain integrates the visual information and the musical soundtrack into a coherent percept. Multisensory integration can lead to emotion elicitation on which soundtrack valences may have a modulatory impact. Here, dynamic kissing scenes from romantic comedies were presented to 22 participants (13 females) during functional magnetic resonance imaging scanning. ⋯ In conclusion, fusiform to amygdala coupling strength is modulated via feedback through aSTG as region for multisensory integration of emotional material. This mechanism was emotion-specific and more pronounced for sad music. Therefore, soundtrack valences may modulate emotion elicitation in movies by differentially changing preprocessed visual information to the amygdala.