ARTICLE UPDATE - Dissociable neural effects of stimulus valence and preceding context during the inhibition of responses to emotional faces.

Schulz KP, Clerkin SM, Halperin JM, Newcorn JH, Tang CY, Fan J.

Human Brain Mapping, in press

Socially appropriate behavior requires the concurrent inhibition of actions that are inappropriate in the context. This self-regulatory function requires an interaction of inhibitory and emotional processes that recruits brain regions beyond those engaged by either processes alone. In this study, we isolated brain activity associated with response inhibition and emotional processing in 24 healthy adults using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and a go/no-go task that independently manipulated the context preceding no-go trials (ie, number of go trials) and the valence (ie, happy, sad, and neutral) of the face stimuli used as trial cues. Parallel quadratic trends were seen in correct inhibitions on no-go trials preceded by increasing numbers of go trials and associated activation for correct no-go trials in inferior frontal gyrus pars opercularis, pars triangularis, and pars orbitalis, temporoparietal junction, superior parietal lobule, and temporal sensory association cortices. Conversely, the comparison of happy versus neutral faces and sad versus neutral faces revealed valence-dependent activation in the amygdala, anterior insula cortex, and posterior midcingulate cortex. Further, an interaction between inhibition and emotion was seen in valence-dependent variations in the quadratic trend in no-go activation in the right inferior frontal gyrus and left posterior insula cortex. These results suggest that the inhibition of response to emotional cues involves the interaction of partly dissociable limbic and frontoparietal networks that encode emotional cues and use these cues to exert inhibitory control over the motor, attention, and sensory functions needed to perform the task, respectively.

ARTICLE UPDATE - Inhibition of Return to Social Signals of Fear.

Stoyanova, Raliza S.; Pratt, Jay; Anderson, Adam K.

Emotion, 7, 49-56.

The present study examined whether inhibition of return (IOR) is modulated by the fear relevance of the cue. Experiment 1 found similar magnitude of IOR was produced by neutral and fear faces and luminance matched cues. To allow a more sensitive measure of endogenously directed attention, Experiment 2 removed a central reorienting cue and more precisely measured the time course of IOR. At stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) of 500, 1,000 and 1,500 ms, fear face and luminance matched cues resulted in similar IOR. These findings suggest that IOR is triggered by event onsets and disregards event value. Views of IOR as an adaptive "foraging facilitator," whereby attention is guided to promote optimal sampling of important environmental events, are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2007 APA, all rights reserved)