Event-related fMRI Research Articles

Neural basis of implicit cognitive reappraisal in panic disorder: an event-related fMRI study

BackgroundPanic disorder (PD) is thought to be related with deficits in emotion regulation, especially in cognitive reappraisal. According to the cognitive model, PD patients’ intrinsic and unconscious misappraisal strategies are the cause of panic attacks. However, no studies have yet been performed to explore the underlying neuromechanism of cognitive reappraisal that occur on an unconscious level in PD patients.MethodsTwenty-six patients with PD and 25 healthy controls (HC) performed a fully-verified event-block design emotional regulation task aimed at investigating responses of implicit cognitive reappraisal during an fMRI scan. Participants passively viewed negatively valanced pictures that were beforehand neutrally, positively, or adversely portrayed in the task.ResultsWhole-brain analysis of fMRI data showed that PD patients exhibited less activation in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) and right dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) compared to HC, but presented greater activation in parietal cortex when negative pictures were preceded by positive/neutral vs negative descriptions. Simultaneously, interactive effects of Group × Condition were observed in the right amygdala across both groups. Furthermore, activation in dlPFC and dmPFC was is negatively correlated to severity of anxiety and panic in PD when negative images were preceded by non-negative vs negative descriptions.ConclusionsEmotional dysregulation in PD is likely the result of deficient activation in dlPFC and dmPFC during implicit cognitive reappraisal, in line with impaired automatic top-down regulation. Correlations between severity of anxiety and panic attack and activation of right dlPFC and dmPFC suggest that the failure to engage prefrontal region during implicit cognitive reappraisal might be associated wtih the severity of anxiety and panic; such functional patterns might be the target of possible treatments.

Enhanced insightfulness and neural activation induced by metaphorical solutions to appropriate mental distress problems.

Although the neural correlates of novelty and appropriateness of creative insight during cognitive tasks have been investigated in several studies, they have not been examined during mental distress in a psychotherapeutic setting. This study aimed to reveal the promoting effects of novelty and appropriateness processing on therapeutic insight in a micro-psychotherapeutic setting. We examined the effects of appropriateness (between-subject factor: appropriateness group, 20 participants; inappropriateness group, 21 participants) by manipulating the preceding negative scenarios that either fit or did not fit the subsequent solutions, and those of novelty (within-subject factor) by varying the linguistic expressions for describing solutions (metaphorical, literal, or problem-restatement). Event-related functional magnetic resonance images were collected. We found the following effects: an interactive effect of the two factors on insightfulness and activation in the bilateral hippocampus and amygdala, right superior frontal gyrus, and left superior/middle temporal gyrus; a simple effect of novelty on activation in the bilateral inferior frontal gyrus, fusiform gyrus, and inferior/middle occipital gyrus; and a simple effect of appropriateness on activation in the left inferior parietal lobule. Our findings indicate that solutions with high novelty and appropriateness generate the highest levels of therapeutic insightfulness as well as the strongest activation in the hippocampus and amygdala, which may be involved in episodic memory encoding.

Effective connectivity and spatial selectivity-dependent fMRI changes elicited by microstimulation of pulvinar and LIP

The thalamic pulvinar and the lateral intraparietal area (LIP) share reciprocal anatomical connections and are part of an extensive cortical and subcortical network involved in spatial attention and oculomotor processing. The goal of this study was to compare the effective connectivity of dorsal pulvinar (dPul) and LIP and to probe the dependency of microstimulation effects on task demands and spatial tuning properties of a given brain region. To this end, we applied unilateral electrical microstimulation in the dPul (mainly medial pulvinar) and LIP in combination with event-related BOLD fMRI in monkeys performing fixation and memory-guided saccade tasks. Microstimulation in both dPul and LIP enhanced task-related activity in monosynaptically-connected fronto-parietal cortex and along the superior temporal sulcus (STS) including putative face patch locations, as well as in extrastriate cortex. LIP microstimulation elicited strong activity in the opposite homotopic LIP while no homotopic activation was found with dPul stimulation. Both dPul and LIP stimulation also elicited activity in several heterotopic cortical areas in the opposite hemisphere, implying polysynaptic propagation of excitation. Despite extensive activation along the intraparietal sulcus evoked by LIP stimulation, there was a difference in frontal and occipital connectivity elicited by posterior and anterior LIP stimulation sites. Comparison of dPul stimulation with the adjacent but functionally dissimilar ventral pulvinar also showed distinct connectivity. On the level of single trial timecourses within each region of interest (ROI), most ROIs did not show task-dependence of stimulation-elicited response modulation. Across ROIs, however, there was an interaction between task and stimulation, and task-specific correlations between the initial spatial selectivity and the magnitude of stimulation effect were observed. Consequently, stimulation-elicited modulation of task-related activity was best fitted by an additive model scaled down by the initial response amplitude. In summary, we identified overlapping and distinct patterns of thalamocortical and corticocortical connectivity of pulvinar and LIP, highlighting the dorsal bank and fundus of STS as a prominent node of shared circuitry. Spatial task-specific and partly polysynaptic modulations of cue and saccade planning delay period activity in both hemispheres exerted by unilateral pulvinar and parietal stimulation provide insight into the distributed interhemispheric processing underlying spatial behavior.

Beta-frequency electrophysiological bursts: BOLD correlates and relationships with psychotic illness

AimsTo identify the BOLD (blood oxygenation level dependent) correlates of bursts of beta frequency band electrophysiological activity, and to compare BOLD responses between healthy controls and patients with psychotic illness.The post movement beta rebound (PMBR) is a transient increase in power in the beta frequency band (13-30 Hz), recorded with methods such as electroencephalography (EEG), following the completion of a movement. PMBR size is reduced in patients with schizophrenia and inversely correlated with severity of illness. PMBR size is inversely correlated with measures of schizotypy in non-clinical groups. Therefore, beta-band activity may reflect a fundamental neural process whose disruption plays an important role in the pathophysiology of schizophrenia. Recent work has found that changes in beta power reflect changes in the probability-of-occurrence of transient bursts of beta-frequency activity. Understanding the generators of beta bursts could help unravel the pathophysiology of psychotic illness and thus identify novel treatment targets.MethodEEG data were recorded simultaneously with BOLD data measured with 3T functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), whilst participants performed an n-back working memory task. We included seventy-eight participants – 32 patients with schizophrenia, 16 with bipolar disorder and 30 healthy controls. Beta bursts were identified in the EEG data using a thresholding method and burst timings were used as markers in an event-related fMRI design convolved with a conventional haemodynamic response function. A region of interest analysis compared beta-event-related BOLD activity between patients and controls.ResultBeta bursts phasically activated brain regions implicated in coding task-relevant content (specifically, regions involved in the phonological representation of letter stimuli, as well as areas representing motor responses). Further, bursts were associated with suppression of tonically-active regions. In the EEG, PMBR was greater in controls than patients, and, in patients, PMBR size was positively correlated with Global Assessment of Functioning scores, and negatively correlated with persisting symptoms of disorganisation and performance on a digit symbol substition test. Despite this, patients showed greater, more extensive, burst-related BOLD activation than controls.ConclusionOur findings are consistent with a recent model in which beta bursts serve to reactivate latently-maintained, task-relevant, sensorimotor information. The increased BOLD response associated with bursts in patients, despite reduced PMBR, could reflect inefficiency of burst-mediated cortical synchrony, or it may suggest that the sensorimotor information reactivated by beta bursts is less precisely specified in psychosis. We propose that dysfunction of the mechanisms by which beta bursts reactivate task-relevant content can manifest as disorganisation and working memory deficits, and may contribute to persisting symptoms and impairment in psychosis.

Neural correlates of phonology-to-orthography mapping consistency effects on Chinese spoken word recognition

Previous studies have shown that reading experience reshapes speech processing. The orthography can be implemented in the brain by restructuring the phonological representations or being co-activated during spoken word recognition. This study utilized event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging and functional connectivity analysis to examine the neural mechanism underlying two types of orthographic effects in the Chinese auditory semantic category task, namely phonology-to-orthography consistency (POC) and homophone density (HD). We found that the POC effects originated from the speech network, suggesting that sublexical orthographic information could change the organization of preexisting phonological representations when learning to read. Meanwhile, the HD effects were localized to the left fusiform and lingual gyrus, suggesting that lexical orthographic knowledge may be activated online during spoken word recognition. These results demonstrated the different natures and neural mechanisms for the POC and HD effects on Chinese spoken word recognition.

Temporal lobe epilepsy alters neural responses to human and avatar facial expressions in the face perception network.

Background and ObjectiveAlthough avatars are now widely used in advertisement, entertainment, and business today, no study has investigated whether brain lesions in neurological patients interfere with brain activation in response to dynamic avatar facial expressions. The aim of our event‐related fMRI study was to compare brain activation differences in people with epilepsy and controls during the processing of fearful and neutral dynamic expressions displayed by human or avatar faces.MethodsUsing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we examined brain responses to dynamic facial expressions of trained actors and their avatar look‐alikes in 16 people with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) and 26 controls. The actors' fearful and neutral expressions were recorded on video and conveyed onto their avatar look‐alikes by face tracking.ResultsOur fMRI results show that people with TLE exhibited reduced response differences between fearful and neutral expressions displayed by humans in the right amygdala and the left superior temporal sulcus (STS). Further, TLE was associated with reduced response differences between human and avatar fearful expressions in the dorsal pathway of the face perception network (STS and inferior frontal gyrus) as well as in the medial prefrontal cortex.ConclusionsTaken together, these findings suggest that brain responses to dynamic facial expressions are altered in people with TLE compared to neurologically healthy individuals—regardless of whether the face is human or computer‐generated. In TLE, areas sensitive to dynamic facial features and associated with processes relating to the self and others are particularly affected when processing dynamic human and avatar expressions. Our findings highlight that the impact of TLE on facial emotion processing must be extended to artificial faces and should be considered when applying dynamic avatars in the context of neurological conditions.

Differences in cue-induced brain activation between long-term methadone maintenance treatment and protracted abstinence in heroin use disorder patients: a functional magnetic resonance imaging study.

Heroin use disorder (HUD) remains one of the gravest public health issues in China. Methadone maintenance treatment (MMT) and protracted abstinence (PA) are the most commonly used treatments for HUD. Although both treatment approaches can alleviate heroin cravings, a previous study found that MMT patients had stronger cue-induced brain activation than patients undergoing PA; however, the changes associated with long-term treatment are unclear. Male patients with HUD who had been undergoing either PA (n=24) or MTT (n=21) for approximately 12 months, together with 20 demographically matched healthy controls, completed an event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) task. The subjective craving for heroin was evaluated using a visual analog scale. Compared to the healthy controls, the MMT and PA groups demonstrated significantly higher brain activation in the left pallidum, middle occipital gyrus, postcentral gyrus, anterior cingulate cortex, middle cingulate cortex, inferior parietal lobule, superior parietal lobule, amygdala, hippocampus, right inferior temporal gyrus, inferior frontal gyrus triangularis, and caudate during exposure to heroin-related cues. Compared to those undergoing PA, patients in the MMT group demonstrated significantly higher brain activation in all of these regions. Except for the left inferior parietal lobule and left superior parietal lobule, there were no statistically significant differences between the PA and healthy control groups. The MMT patients showed significantly higher subjective cravings before and after exposure to heroin cues than the PA group, but there was no significant difference in the change in subjective cravings between the 2 groups. The results suggested that although the HUD patients receiving long-term MMT complied with the treatment, they still had higher subjective cravings and cue-induced brain activation than those undergoing PA. Therefore, long-term PA appears to be more beneficial than MMT in reducing the salience value of drug cues in patients with HUD.

The Human Basal Ganglia Mediate the Interplay between Reactive and Proactive Control of Response through Both Motor Inhibition and Sensory Modulation.

The basal ganglia (BG) have long been known for contributing to the regulation of motor behaviour by means of a complex interplay between tonic and phasic inhibitory mechanisms. However, after having focused for a long time on phasic reactive mechanisms, it is only recently that psychological research in healthy humans has modelled tonic proactive mechanisms of control. Mutual calibration between anatomo-functional and psychological models is still needed to better understand the unclear role of the BG in the interplay between proactive and reactive mechanisms of control. Here, we implemented an event-related fMRI design allowing proper analysis of both the brain activity preceding the target-stimulus and the brain activity induced by the target-stimulus during a simple go/nogo task, with a particular interest in the ambiguous role of the basal ganglia. Post-stimulus activity was evoked in the left dorsal striatum, the subthalamus nucleus and internal globus pallidus by any stimulus when the situation was unpredictable, pinpointing its involvement in reactive, non-selective inhibitory mechanisms when action restraint is required. Pre-stimulus activity was detected in the ventral, not the dorsal, striatum, when the situation was unpredictable, and was associated with changes in functional connectivity with the early visual, not the motor, cortex. This suggests that the ventral striatum supports modulatory influence over sensory processing during proactive control.

Cerebellar and Cortical Correlates of Internal and External Speech Error Monitoring.

An event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging study examined how speakers inspect their own speech for errors. Concretely, we sought to assess 1) the role of the temporal cortex in monitoring speech errors, linked with comprehension-based monitoring; 2) the involvement of the cerebellum in internal and external monitoring, linked with forward modeling; and 3) the role of the medial frontal cortex for internal monitoring, linked with conflict-based monitoring. In a word production task priming speech errors, we observed enhanced involvement of the right posterior cerebellum for trials that were correct, but on which participants were more likely to make a word as compared with a nonword error (contrast of internal monitoring). Furthermore, comparing errors to correct utterances (contrast of external monitoring), we observed increased activation of the same cerebellar region, of the superior medial cerebellum, and of regions in temporal and medial frontal cortex. The presence of the cerebellum for both internal and external monitoring indicates the use of forward modeling across the planning and articulation of speech. Dissociations across internal and external monitoring in temporal and medial frontal cortex indicate that monitoring of overt errors is more reliant on vocal feedback control.

Attention recruits frontal cortex in human infants

Young infants learn about the world by overtly shifting their attention to perceptually salient events. In adults, attention recruits several brain regions spanning the frontal and parietal lobes. However, it is unclear whether these regions are sufficiently mature in infancy to support attention and, more generally, how infant attention is supported by the brain. We used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in 24 sessions from 20 awake behaving infants 3 mo to 12 mo old while they performed a child-friendly attentional cuing task. A target was presented to either the left or right of the infant's fixation, and offline gaze coding was used to measure the latency with which they saccaded to the target. To manipulate attention, a brief cue was presented before the target in three conditions: on the same side as the upcoming target (valid), on the other side (invalid), or on both sides (neutral). All infants were faster to look at the target on valid versus invalid trials, with valid faster than neutral and invalid slower than neutral, indicating that the cues effectively captured attention. We then compared the fMRI activity evoked by these trial types. Regions of adult attention networks activated more strongly for invalid than valid trials, particularly frontal regions. Neither behavioral nor neural effects varied by infant age within the first year, suggesting that these regions may function early in development to support the orienting of attention. Together, this furthers our mechanistic understanding of how the infant brain controls the allocation of attention.

Pathogenesis and brain functional imaging in nocturnal enuresis: A review.

Nocturnal enuresis is a common and distressing developmental disease, which may cause various degrees of psychosocial stress and impairment to self-esteem in affected children as well as agitation to their parents or caregivers. Nevertheless, the etiology and pathogenesis of nocturnal enuresis are not understood. Currently, nocturnal enuresis is generally considered a multifactorial disease associated with a complex interaction of somatic, psychosocial, and environmental factors. A variety of postulations have been proposed to explain the occurrence and progression of nocturnal enuresis, including hereditary aberration, abnormal circadian rhythm of antidiuretic hormone secretion during sleep, bladder dysfunction, abnormal sleep, difficulties in arousal, neuropsychological disorders, and maturational delays of the brain. In recent decades, the introduction of functional neuroimaging technologies has provided new approaches for uncovering the mechanisms underlying nocturnal enuresis. The main neuroimaging modalities have included brain morphometry based on structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), task-based and event-related functional MRI (fMRI), and resting-state fMRI. The relevant studies have indicated that nocturnal enuresis is associated with functional and structural alterations of the brain. In this review, we briefly summarized the popular hypotheses regarding the pathogenesis of nocturnal enuresis and the current progress of functional neuroimaging studies in examining the underlying mechanisms thereof.

Searchlight Classification Informative Region Mixture Model (SCIM): Identification of Cortical Regions Showing Discriminable BOLD Patterns in Event-Related Auditory fMRI Data.

The investigation of abstract cognitive tasks, e.g., semantic processing of speech, requires the simultaneous use of a carefully selected stimulus design and sensitive tools for the analysis of corresponding neural activity that are comparable across different studies investigating similar research questions. Multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) methods are commonly used in neuroimaging to investigate BOLD responses corresponding to neural activation associated with specific cognitive tasks. Regions of significant activation are identified by a thresholding operation during multivariate pattern analysis, the results of which are susceptible to the applied threshold value. Investigation of analysis approaches that are robust to a large extent with respect to thresholding, is thus an important goal pursued here. The present paper contributes a novel statistical analysis method for fMRI experiments, searchlight classification informative region mixture model (SCIM), that is based on the assumption that the whole brain volume can be subdivided into two groups of voxels: spatial voxel positions around which recorded BOLD activity does convey information about the present stimulus condition and those that do not. A generative statistical model is proposed that assigns a probability of being informative to each position in the brain, based on a combination of a support vector machine searchlight analysis and Gaussian mixture models. Results from an auditory fMRI study investigating cortical regions that are engaged in the semantic processing of speech indicate that the SCIM method identifies physiologically plausible brain regions as informative, similar to those from two standard methods as reference that we compare to, with two important differences. SCIM-identified regions are very robust to the choice of the threshold for significance, i.e., less “noisy,” in contrast to, e.g., the binomial test whose results in the present experiment are highly dependent on the chosen significance threshold or random permutation tests that are additionally bound to very high computational costs. In group analyses, the SCIM method identifies a physiologically plausible pre-frontal region, anterior cingulate sulcus, to be involved in semantic processing that other methods succeed to identify only in single subject analyses.

Functional connectivity of posterior cingulate gyrus in heroin dependents treated by methadone maintenance and protracted abstinence measures: an event-related fMRI study.

Protracted abstinence (PA) and Methadone maintenance treatment (MMT) are two main types of heroin addiction treatment, however, the effects of both measures on the functional connectivity (FC) of the brain in heroin dependents in the drug cue event-related response are unclear. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) based drug cue-reactivity task has been widely used in addiction research, which may provide a new way to understand the change of brain function during a certain period of treatment. The default function network (DMN) with posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) as the core is generally involved in the process of addiction. The aim of the present study was to explore the brain response of FC in patients with heroin-dependent during PA, MMT treatment under task-fMRI. Twenty-two heroin-dependent patients during PA, 18 heroin-dependent patients during MMT and 16 healthy control (HC) individuals were included to conduct the heroin cue-reactivity task during fMRI. The MMT and PA patients' subjective craving for heroin was evaluated. The psychophysiological interaction (PPI) analysis of SPM12 was used to get FC during the task state. There was a significant difference on FC between PCC and the right medial Prefrontal Cortex (mPFC) in three groups. The post-hoc analysis showed that there was a significant difference of brain regions between the MMT and the PA group. The FC of PCC-mPFC in the MMT group was significantly stronger than that in the PA group. Compared with the PA group, the FC of the DMN in the MMT group was significantly increased under drug cue response. Therefore, PA is more beneficial for the heroin-dependent patients to lower the salience value of drug related cues, in turn to reduce relapse risks. It also reflected the important role of PCC-mPFC pathway in heroin dependents induced by heroin cues.

Neuroimaging of valence decisions in children and adults

To date, the neural underpinnings of affective components in language processing in children remain largely unknown. To fill this gap, the present study examined behavioural and neural correlates of children and adults performing the same auditory valence decision task with an event-related fMRI paradigm. Based on previous findings in adults, activations in anterior and posterior cingulate cortex, orbitofrontal cortex and left inferior frontal gyrus were expected for both positive and negative valence categories. Recent behavioural findings on valence decisions showed similar ratings and reaction time patterns in children and adults. This finding was successfully replicated in the present study. On a neural level, our analysis of affective language processing showed activations in regions associated with both semantic (superior and middle temporal and frontal) and affective (anterior and posterior cingulate, orbitofrontal and inferior frontal, insula and amygdala) processing. Neural activations in children and adults were systematically different in explicit affective word processing. In particular, adults showed a more distributed semantic network activation while children recruited additional subcortical structures.

Preference for locomotion-compatible curved paths and forward direction of self-motion in somatomotor and visual areas

During locomotion, leg movements define the direction of walking (forward or backward) and the path one is taking (straight or curved). These aspects of locomotion produce characteristic visual motion patterns during movement. Here, we tested whether cortical regions responding to either egomotion-compatible visual motion, or leg movements, or both, are sensitive to these locomotion-relevant aspects of visual motion. We compared a curved path (typically the visual feedback of a changing direction of movement in the environment) to a linear path for simulated forward and backward motion in an event-related fMRI experiment. We used an individual surface-based approach and two functional localizers to define (1) six egomotion-related areas (V6+, V3A, intraparietal motion area [IPSmot], cingulate sulcus visual area [CSv], posterior cingulate area [pCi], posterior insular cortex [PIC]) using the flow field stimulus and (2) three leg-related cortical regions (human PEc [hPEc], human PE [hPE] and primary somatosensory cortex [S–I]) using a somatomotor task. Then, we extracted the response from all these regions with respect to the main event-related fMRI experiment, consisting of passive viewing of an optic flow stimulus, simulating a forward or backward direction of self-motion in either linear or curved path. Results showed that some regions have a significant preference for the curved path motion (hPEc, hPE, S–I, IPSmot) or a preference for the forward motion (V3A), while other regions have both a significant preference for the curved path motion and for the forward compared to backward motion (V6+, CSv, pCi). We did not find any significant effects of the present stimuli in PIC. Since controlling locomotion mainly means controlling changes of walking direction in the environment during forward self-motion, such a differential functional profile among these cortical regions suggests that they play a differentiated role in the visual guidance of locomotion.

Target processing in overt serial visual search involves the dorsal attention network: A fixation-based event-related fMRI study

In serial visual search we shift attention successively from location to location in search for the target. Although such search has been investigated using fMRI, overt attention (i.e., eye movements) was usually neglected or discouraged. As a result, it is unclear what happens in the instant when our gaze falls upon a target as compared to a distractor. In the present experiment, we used a multiple target search task that required eye movements and employed an analysis based on fixations as events of interest to investigate differences between target and distractor processing. Twenty young healthy adults indicated the number of targets (0–3) among distractors in a 20-item display. Compared to distractor fixations, we found that target fixations gave rise to wide-spread activation in the dorsal attention system, as well as in the visual cortex. Targets that were found later during the search activated the left inferior frontal gyrus and the left supramarginal gyrus more strongly than those that were found earlier. Finally, areas associated with visual and verbal working memory showed increased activation with a larger number of targets in the display.

Increased Reward-Related Activation in the Ventral Striatum During Stress Exposure Associated With Positive Affect in the Daily Life of Young Adults With a Family History of Depression. Preliminary Findings.

Background: Being the offspring of a parent with major depression disorder (MDD) is a strong predictor for developing MDD. Blunted striatal responses to reward were identified in individuals with MDD and in asymptomatic individuals with family history of depression (FHD). Stress is a major etiological factor for MDD and was also reported to reduce the striatal responses to reward. The stress-reward interactions in FHD individuals has not been explored yet. Extending neuroimaging results into daily-life experience, self-reported ambulatory measures of positive affect (PA) were shown to be associated with striatal activation during reward processing. A reduction of self-reported PA in daily life is consistently reported in individuals with current MDD. Here, we aimed to test (1) whether increased family risk of depression is associated with blunted neural and self-reported reward responses. (2) the stress-reward interactions at the neural level. We expected a stronger reduction of reward-related striatal activation under stress in FHD individuals compared to HC. (3) the associations between fMRI and daily life self-reported data on reward and stress experiences, with a specific interest in the striatum as a crucial region for reward processing.Method: Participants were 16 asymptomatic young adults with FHD and 16 controls (HC). They performed the Fribourg Reward Task with and without stress induction, using event-related fMRI. We conducted whole-brain analyses comparing the two groups for the main effect of reward (rewarded > not-rewarded) during reward feedback in control (no-stress) and stress conditions. Beta weights extracted from significant activation in this contrast were correlated with self-reported PA and negative affect (NA) assessed over 1 week.Results: Under stress induction, the reward-related activation in the ventral striatum (VS) was higher in the FHD group than in the HC group. Unexpectedly, we did not find significant group differences in the self-reported daily life PA measures. During stress induction, VS reward-related activation correlated positively with PA in both groups and negatively with NA in the HC group.Conclusion: As expected, our results indicate that increased family risk of depression was associated with specific striatum reactivity to reward in a stress condition, and support previous findings that ventral striatal reward-related response is associated with PA. A new unexpected finding is the negative association between NA and reward-related ventral striatal activation in the HC group.

Altered Effective Connectivity within the Fronto-Limbic Circuitry in Response to Negative Emotional Task in Female Patients with Major Depressive Disorder.

Background: Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a mood disorder associated with disruptions in emotional control. Previous studies have investigated abnormal regional activity and connectivity within the fronto-limbic circuit. However, condition-specific connectivity changes and their association with the pathophysiology of MDD remain unexplored. This study investigated effective connectivity in the fronto-limbic circuit induced by negative emotional processing from patients with MDD. Methods: Thirty-four unmedicated female patients with MDD and 28 healthy participants underwent event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging at 7T while viewing emotionally negative and neutral images. Brain regions whose dynamics are driven by experimental conditions were identified by using statistical parametric mapping. Effective connectivity among regions of interest was then estimated by using dynamic causal modeling. Results: Patients with MDD had lower activation of the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and higher activation of the parahippocampal gyrus (PHG) than healthy controls (HC). In association with these regional changes, we found that patients with MDD did not have significant modulatory connections from the primary visual cortex (V1) to OFC, whereas those connections of HC were significantly positively modulated during negative emotional processing. Regarding the PHG activity, patients with MDD had greater modulatory connection from the V1, but reduced negative modulatory connection from the OFC, compared with healthy participants. Conclusions: These results imply that disrupted effective connectivity among regions of the OFC, PHG, and V1 may be closely associated with the impaired regulation of negative emotional processing in the female patients with MDD.

A Review of EEG and fMRI Measuring Aesthetic Processing in Visual User Experience Research.

In human-computer interaction, the visual interaction of user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) plays an important role in enriching the quality of daily life. The purpose of our study analyzes the use of brain-computer interface (BCI), wearable technology, and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to explore the aesthetic processing of visual neural response to UI and UX designs. Specifically, this review aims to understand neuroaesthetic processing knowledge, aesthetic appreciation models, and the ways in which visual brain studies can improve the quality of current and future UI and UX designs. Recent research has found that subjective evaluations of aesthetic appreciation produce different results for objective evaluations of brain research analysis. We applied SWOT analysis and examined the advantages and disadvantages of both evaluation methods. Furthermore, we conducted a traditional literature review on topics pertaining to the use of aesthetic processing knowledge in the visual interaction field in terms of art therapy, information visualization, website or mobile applications, and other interactive platforms. Our main research findings from current studies have helped and motivated researchers and designers to use convincing scientific knowledge of brain event-related potential, electroencephalography, and fMRI to understand aesthetic judgment. The key trend finds that many designers, artists, and engineers use artistic BCI technology in the visual interaction experience. Herein, the scientific methods applied in the aesthetic appreciation to human-computer interface are summarized, and the influence of the latest wearable brain technology on visual interaction design is discussed. Furthermore, current possible research entry points for aesthetics, usability, and creativity in UI and UX designs are explicated. The study results have implications for the visual user experience research domain as well as for interaction industries, which produce interactive projects to improve people's daily lives.

Fetal Alcohol Exposure Alters BOLD Activation Patterns in Brain Regions Mediating the Interpretation of Facial Affect.

Although deficits in the interpretation of affective facial expressions have been described clinically and in behavioral studies of fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD), effects of prenatal alcohol exposure on the neural networks that mediate affective appraisal have not previously been examined. We administered a nonverbal event-related fMRI affective appraisal paradigm to 64 children (mean age=12.5years; 18 with fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) or partial FAS (PFAS), 18 nonsyndromal heavily exposed (HE), and 28 controls). Happy, sad, angry, fearful, and neutral faces and pixelated control images were presented sequentially in a randomized order. The child indicated whether the currently displayed face showed the same or different affect as the previous one. Data from whole-brain analyses showed that all groups activated the appropriate face processing neural networks. Region of interest analyses indicated that, compared to HE and control children, the FAS/PFAS group exhibited greater blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) signal changes when processing neutral faces than pixelated images in 2 regions that form part of the visual sensory social brain network, which plays an important role in the initial processing of facial affect. By contrast, BOLD signal when processing angry faces was weaker for the FAS/PFAS group in a region involved in the processing of facial identity and facial expressions and in a region involved in the recognition and selection of behavioral responses to aggressive behavior. These findings of greater BOLD signal in the FAS/PFAS group in response to neutral faces suggest less efficient neural processing of more difficult to interpret emotions, and the weaker BOLD response to angry faces suggests altered processing of angry stimuli. Although behavioral performance did not differ in this relatively simple affective appraisal task, these data suggest that in children with FAS and PFAS, the appraisal of neutral affect and anger is likely to be more effortful in more challenging and dynamic social contexts.