Abstract
Increasing evidence has shown that positive affect enhances many aspects of daily functioning. Yet, how dispositional positive affect is represented in the intrinsic brain networks remains unclear. Here, we used resting-state functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging to test how trait positive and negative affect of an individual were associated with the intrinsic connectivity of brain regions within the salience and emotion network and the default mode network in 70 healthy young adults. We observed that positive affect was negatively associated with connectivity within the salience and emotion network, particularly with the bidirectional connections spanning the left anterior insula and left nucleus accumbens. For connections between the salience and emotion network and the rest of the brain, we observed that positive affect was negatively related to the connectivity between the right amygdala and the right middle temporal gyrus. Affect-based modulations of connectivity were specific to positive affect and to the salience and emotion network. Our findings highlight the critical role of salience and emotion network in the neural relations of positive affect, and lay the groundwork for future studies on modeling the connectivity of salience and emotion network to predict mental well-being.
Highlights
Increasing evidence has shown that positive affect enhances many aspects of daily functioning
Their findings supported the potential for using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate the affective organization in the brain, and prompted us to investigate the intrinsic brain networks relevant to Positive affect (PA), which could be further targeted during affect modulation
Given salience and emotion network (SEN) plays critical roles in affective experience (Seeley et al 2007; Touroutoglou et al 2014; Touroutoglou et al 2012), and its connectivity was found to be related to affective traits like trait drive (DelDonno et al 2017), we speculate that SEN is likely to be implicated in trait PA/negative affect (NA)
Summary
A total of 70 healthy adults participated in this study. All participants were right-handed, between 19 and 28 years old, and without a history of neurological or psychiatric disorders or contraindications for MRI scanning. We conducted correlation analyses between PA/NA and the FC between each pair of distinct ROIs within the respective network if there was a significant relation with the composite SEN/DMN connectivity. To estimate the causal interactions between regions in the SEN at rest whose FC showed significant correlations with PA, we performed spectral dynamic causal modeling (spDCM) for each individual using SPM12 (Friston et al 2014). It was performed by (1) selecting ROIs within the SEN whose FC showed significant correlations with PA as volumes of interest (VOIs); (2) extracting the first eigenvariate of the time courses in the seed VOIs after removing the effects
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