TEAMwork: Testing Emotional Attunement and Mutuality During Parent-Adolescent fMRI.

The parent-child relationship and family context influence the development of emotion regulation (ER) brain circuitry and related skills in children and adolescents. Although both parents' and children's ER neurocircuitry simultaneously affect how they interact with one another, neuroimaging studies of parent-child relationships typically include only one member of the dyad in brain imaging procedures. The current study examined brain activation related to parenting and ER in parent-adolescent dyads during concurrent fMRI scanning with a novel task - the Testing Emotional Attunement and Mutuality (TEAM) task. The TEAM task includes feedback trials indicating the other dyad member made an error, resulting in a monetary loss for both participants. Results indicate that positive parenting practices as reported by the adolescent were positively correlated with parents' hemodynamic activation of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, a region related to empathy, during these error trials. Additionally, during feedback conditions both parents and adolescents exhibited fMRI activation in ER-related regions, including the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, anterior insula, fusiform gyrus, thalamus, caudate, precuneus, and superior parietal lobule. Adolescents had higher left amygdala activation than parents during the feedback condition. These findings demonstrate the utility of dyadic fMRI scanning for investigating relational processes, particularly in the parent-child relationship

Behavioral and Neural Mechanisms of Social Heterogeneity in Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is one of the most common child-onset neurodevelopment disorders, affecting 5% of children in the United States (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). Treatment matching in ADHD is difficult and unsatisfactory; the same general treatment algorithm is recommended for all children. It is therefore important to consider the development of specialized treatment programs based on a variety of behavioral and neurological biomarkers. Unfortunately, due to its multi-faceted classification, the heterogeneity of this behavioral disorder is under-investigated (Costa Dias et al., 2015). Scientific research in this area is especially limited as the severity of ADHD goes undiagnosed, children tend to have difficulties remaining still in MRI scanners, and the hyperactivity-impulsivity that is associated with ADHD may cause further challenges when trying to remain motionless in the scanner. Furthermore, tasks such as Facial Emotion Perception Task (FEPT) and Theory of Mind (ToM) have not been used to analyze social and behavioral deficits in children with ADHD. More research needs to be allocated to helping uncover the neural substrates underlying the inattention and hyperactivity traits of this disorder. For this reason, we acquired functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data from five children with ADHD performing the FEPT and ToM tasks. The results showed the children have an easier and quick time correctly identifying happy emotional states, as compared to the fearful, angry, and neutral conditions. Results from the FEPT task also revealed that the participants were thinking and reasoning more (i.e., taking longer to deduce an ending) when identifying emotions than identifying animals. The ToM task showed that the default mode network (DMN) may not be fully suppressed when the children are choosing the correct cartoon ending, and therefore the children may be having lapses in attention. These findings may assist the current hypothesis that the default mode network has reduced network homogeneity in people with ADHD. Overall, the findings presented in this thesis provide a good diving board into discovering the reason(s) for the social cognition and emotion recognition impairments associated with ADHD, but further research is needed in order to one day pinpoint and ultimately correct the regions(s) of dysfunction

Extending the concept of emotion regulation with model-based fMRI

Effective emotion regulation is essential for our social and emotional well-being. Yet, the concept of emotion regulation, as it is conventionally regarded in the field, does not take important aspects of emotions and emotion regulation into account. The overarching aim of the current thesis was to include such missing aspects and thereby expand the concept of emotion regulation. The expansion occurred in two directions: firstly, the definition of emotion within the field of emotion regulation was widened to include the motivational aspect of emotions in terms of value-based prediction errors and their neural implementation; and secondly, an underestimated type of emotion regulation – the social emotion regulation – and its neural underpinnings were investigated. Projects 1 and 2 of the current thesis expand the emotion part of emotion regulation. Project 1 investigated whether emotion regulation affects not only emotional response-related brain activity but also influences aversive prediction error-related activity, i.e., the motivation-related brain signal. We found that self- initiated reappraisal, a type of cognitive emotion regulation, indeed affected prediction error-related activity, such that this activity was enhanced in the ventral tegmental area, ventral striatum, insula and hippocampus, possibly via a prefrontal-tegmental pathway. Project 2 further examined the way emotion regulation affects emotions and prediction errors, by testing whether self- initiated reappraisal directly targets the brain network for motivated behaviour previously outlined by animal studies. We found that superior (in contrast to inferior) regulators affected the balance of competing influences of ventral striatal afferents on striatal aversive prediction error signals; they reduced the impact of subcortical striatal afferents (i.e., hippocampus, amygdala and ventral tegmental area), while keeping the influence of the prefrontal cortex on ventral striatal prediction errors constant. Inferior regulators, on the other hand, failed to supress subcortical inputs into the ventral striatum and instead counterproductively reduced the prefrontal influence on ventral striatal prediction error signals. Projects 3 and 4 of the thesis extend the regulation part of emotion regulation. Project 3 explored the neural correlates of social cognitive emotion regulation, specifically reappraisal, and directly compared them with those of self-initiated reappraisal. We found that regions of the anterior, the medial parietal, and the lateral temporo-parietal default mode network were specifically involved in social emotion regulation, and that social regulation success and the default mode network involvement during regulation were related to participants’ attachment security scores. Project 4 investigated social emotion modulation and its impact on two distinct types of emotional brain activity – emotional response- and aversive prediction error-related activity. We found – for the simple contrast of being with somebody versus being alone – a three-fold dissociation between signal types and insula subregions, including left and right anterior and posterior insula parts. Social emotion modulation reduced aversive stimulus-related activity in the posterior insula, while simultaneously increasing aversive prediction error-related activity in the anterior insula. Furthermore, the social effect on prediction error-related activity was positively associated with aversive learning in the right, but negatively in the left anterior insula. Altogether, by expanding the concept of emotion regulation, projects of the current thesis provide new insights into both the effects and the neural underpinnings of three distinct emotion regulation types. Considering that problems in both intrapersonal emotion regulation and social interaction are linked to affective disorders, our findings might contribute to a better understanding of these disorders and the disorder-specific emotional and social impairments

The social brain: neural basis of social knowledge

Social cognition in humans is distinguished by psychological processes that allow us to make inferences about what is going on inside other people—their intentions, feelings, and thoughts. Some of these processes likely account for aspects of human social behavior that are unique, such as our culture and civilization. Most schemes divide social information processing into those processes that are relatively automatic and driven by the stimuli, versus those that are more deliberative and controlled, and sensitive to context and strategy. These distinctions are reflected in the neural structures that underlie social cognition, where there is a recent wealth of data primarily from functional neuroimaging. Here I provide a broad survey of the key abilities, processes, and ways in which to relate these to data from cognitive neuroscience

Olfaction, Emtion & the Amygdala: arousal-dependent modulation of long-term autobiographical memory and its association with olfaction

The sense of smell is set apart from other sensory modalities. Odours possess the capacity to trigger immediately strong emotional memories. Moreover, odorous stimuli provide a higher degree of memory retention than other sensory stimuli. Odour perception, even in its most elemental form - olfaction - already involves limbic structures. This early involvement is not paralleled in other sensory modalities. Bearing in mind the considerable connectivity with limbic structures, and the fact that an activation of the amygdala is capable of instantaneously evoking emotions and facilitating the encoding of memories, it is unsurprising that the sense of smell has its characteristic nature. The aim of this review is to analyse current understanding of higher olfactory information processing as it relates to the ability of odours to spontaneously cue highly vivid, affectively toned, and often very old autobiographical memories (episodes known anecdotally as Proust phenomena). Particular emphasis is placed on the diversity of functions attributed to the amygdala. Its role in modulating the encoding and retrieval of long-term memory is investigated with reference to lesion, electrophysiological, immediate early gene, and functional imaging studies in both rodents and humans. Additionally, the influence of hormonal modulation and the adrenergic system on emotional memory storage is outlined. I finish by proposing a schematic of some of the critical neural pathways that underlie the odour-associated encoding and retrieval of emotionally toned autobiographical memories

Anatomy and computational modeling of networks underlying cognitive-emotional interaction

The classical dichotomy between cognition and emotion equated the first with rationality or logic and the second with irrational behaviors. The idea that cognition and emotion are separable, antagonistic forces competing for dominance of mind has been hard to displace despite abundant evidence to the contrary. For instance, it is now known that a pathological absence of emotion leads to profound impairment of decision making. Behavioral observations of this kind are corroborated at the mechanistic level: neuroanatomical studies reveal that brain areas typically described as underlying either cognitive or emotional processes are linked in ways that imply complex interactions that do not resemble a simple mutual antagonism. Instead, physiological studies and network simulations suggest that top-down signals from prefrontal cortex realize "cognitive control" in part by either suppressing or promoting emotional responses controlled by the amygdala, in a way that facilitates adaptation to changing task demands. Behavioral, anatomical, and physiological data suggest that emotion and cognition are equal partners in enabling a continuum or matrix of flexible behaviors that are subserved by multiple brain regions acting in concert. Here we focus on neuroanatomical data that highlight circuitry that structures cognitive-emotional interactions by directly or indirectly linking prefrontal areas with the amygdala. We also present an initial computational circuit model, based on anatomical, physiological, and behavioral data to explicitly frame the learning and performance mechanisms by which cognition and emotion interact to achieve flexible behavior.R01 MH057414 - NIMH NIH HHS; R01 NS024760 - NINDS NIH HH

Affective neuroscience, emotional regulation, and international relations

International relations (IR) has witnessed an emerging interest in neuroscience, particularly for its relevance to a now widespread scholarship on emotions. Contributing to this scholarship, this article draws on the subfields of affective neuroscience and neuropsychology, which remain largely unexplored in IR. Firstly, the article draws on affective neuroscience in illuminating affect's defining role in consciousness and omnipresence in social behavior, challenging the continuing elision of emotions in mainstream approaches. Secondly, it applies theories of depth neuropsychology, which suggest a neural predisposition originating in the brain's higher cortical regions to attenuate emotional arousal and limit affective consciousness. This predisposition works to preserve individuals' self-coherence, countering implicit assumptions about rationality and motivation within IR theory. Thirdly, it outlines three key implications for IR theory. It argues that affective neuroscience and neuropsychology offer a route towards deep theorizing of ontologies and motivations. It also leads to a reassessment of the social regulation of emotions, particularly as observed in institutions, including the state. It also suggests a productive engagement with constructivist and poststructuralist approaches by addressing the agency of the body in social relations. The article concludes by sketching the potential for a therapeutically-attuned approach to IR