Altered Amygdala Information Flow during rt-fMRI Neurofeedback Training of Emotion Regulation

Abstract

Emotional illnesses are a kind of typical brain dysfunction disease that influences daily work and urban life. Previous studies have showed that real-time functional magnetic resonance imaging neurofeedback (rt-fMRI NF) had effect on improving the treatment of some mental diseases. The neurofeedback signal usually is the activation of single or multiple brain areas, which limits the applications of NF-based brain network. However, the causal relationships in the emotion regulatory network remain unclear. The amygdala is a complex brain structure that consists of functionally distinct nuclei, particularly the basolateral amygdala (BLA) and centromedial amygdala (CMA). In this study, a group of healthy participants attempted to learn emotional self-regulation of the feedback based on their brain state. We performed granger causality analysis (GCA) for the significant vibrancy in information interactions between the BLA and CMA, both in the emotion regulatory network and among amygdala nuclei. Compared with the CMA, the BLA receives more information flows within the network regions, particularly from the right thalamus to the right rostral anterior cingulate cortex. Comparison of changes in amygdala nuclei shows that the information flow is suppressed from the right BLA to the left CMA. Hence, the BLA plays a critical role in emotion processing and transfer. This study highlights the possible use for rt-fMRI NF-based emotion regulation to the brain network.