Showing posts with label frontal. Show all posts
Showing posts with label frontal. Show all posts

Friday, December 07, 2007

ARTICLE UPDATE - Relative left frontal activation to appetitive stimuli: Considering the role of individual differences.

Gable P, Harmon-Jones E.

Psychophysiology, in press

Experiments examining asymmetrical frontal activity in response to affective pictures have produced inconsistent results. These inconsistencies may have occurred because the pictorial stimuli may not have evoked strong emotional or motivational tendencies for all individuals. In the current study, participants were asked to indicate their liking for dessert and the time since they had last eaten to assess individual differences in emotion and motivation. Then, they were shown dessert pictures or neutral pictures while EEG activity was recorded. Results indicated that the individual differences predicted greater left than right frontal activity (inverse of the alpha power) within the first second as well as all 12 s of viewing of the dessert pictures.

Monday, November 19, 2007

ARTICLE UPDATE - Amygdala–frontal connectivity during emotion regulation

Sarah J. Banks, Kamryn T. Eddy, Mike Angstadt, Pradeep J. Nathan and K. Luan Phan

Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2, 303-312

Successful control of affect partly depends on the capacity to modulate negative emotional responses through the use of cognitive strategies (i.e., reappraisal). Recent studies suggest the involvement of frontal cortical regions in the modulation of amygdala reactivity and the mediation of effective emotion regulation. However, within-subject inter-regional connectivity between amygdala and prefrontal cortex in the context of affect regulation is unknown. Here, using psychophysiological interaction analyses of functional magnetic resonance imaging data, we show that activity in specific areas of the frontal cortex (dorsolateral, dorsal medial, anterior cingulate, orbital) covaries with amygdala activity and that this functional connectivity is dependent on the reappraisal task. Moreover, strength of amygdala coupling with orbitofrontal cortex and dorsal medial prefrontal cortex predicts the extent of attenuation of negative affect following reappraisal. These findings highlight the importance of functional connectivity within limbic-frontal circuitry during emotion regulation.