Atypical empathic responses in adolescents with aggressive conduct disorder: A functional MRI investigation

Abstract Because youth with aggressive conduct disorder (CD) often inflict pain on others, it is important to determine if they exhibit atypical empathic responses to viewing others in pain. In this initial functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, 8 adolescents with aggressive CD and 8 matched controls were scanned while watching animated visual stimuli depicting other people experiencing pain or not experiencing pain. Furthermore, these situations involved either an individual whose pain was caused by accident or an individual whose pain was inflicted on purpose by another person. After scanning, participants rated how painful the situations were. In both groups the perception of others in pain was associated with activation of the pain matrix, including the ACC, insula, somatosensory cortex, supplementary motor area and periaqueductal gray. The pain matrix was activated to a significantly greater extent in participants with CD, who also showed strong amygdala, ventral striatum, and temporal pole activation. When watching situations in which pain was intentionally inflicted, control youth also exhibited signal increase in the medial prefrontal frontal cortex, lateral obitofrontal cortex, and temporoparietal junction, whereas youth with CD only exhibited activation in the insula. Furthermore, connectivity analyses demonstrated that youth with CD exhibited less amygdala/prefrontal coupling when watching pain inflicted by another than did control youth. These preliminary findings suggest that youth with aggressive CD exhibit an atypical pattern of neural response to viewing others in pain that should be explored in further studies

Brain Training Game Improves Executive Functions and Processing Speed in the Elderly: A Randomized Controlled Trial

The beneficial effects of brain training games are expected to transfer to other cognitive functions, but these beneficial effects are poorly understood. Here we investigate the impact of the brain training game (Brain Age) on cognitive functions in the elderly.Thirty-two elderly volunteers were recruited through an advertisement in the local newspaper and randomly assigned to either of two game groups (Brain Age, Tetris). This study was completed by 14 of the 16 members in the Brain Age group and 14 of the 16 members in the Tetris group. To maximize the benefit of the interventions, all participants were non-gamers who reported playing less than one hour of video games per week over the past 2 years. Participants in both the Brain Age and the Tetris groups played their game for about 15 minutes per day, at least 5 days per week, for 4 weeks. Each group played for a total of about 20 days. Measures of the cognitive functions were conducted before and after training. Measures of the cognitive functions fell into four categories (global cognitive status, executive functions, attention, and processing speed). Results showed that the effects of the brain training game were transferred to executive functions and to processing speed. However, the brain training game showed no transfer effect on any global cognitive status nor attention.Our results showed that playing Brain Age for 4 weeks could lead to improve cognitive functions (executive functions and processing speed) in the elderly. This result indicated that there is a possibility which the elderly could improve executive functions and processing speed in short term training. The results need replication in large samples. Long-term effects and relevance for every-day functioning remain uncertain as yet.UMIN Clinical Trial Registry 000002825

Processing of Anomalous Sentences in Japanese: An fMRI Study

Most previous ncuroimaging studies of anomalous sentence processing have used Indo-Huropean languages to separately identify syntactic and semantic processing mechanisms. However, typologically distant languages such as Japanese use different sources of information in grammatical role assignments. Thus, we expected that the activation pattern during processing of anomalous sentences in Japanese would be at least partially different from that in other languages reported in previous studies. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure activation during judgments of the correctness of normal and anomalous sentences in native Japanese speakers. We presented simple Japanese sentences as auditory stimuli. Significant activation was found in the left middle and inferior frontal regions (pars orbitaris and pars triangularis) and the superior parietal lobule during processing of sentences with semantic violations. On the other hand, no preferential activation was found, except for the left anterior part of the superior temporal gyrus, during the processing of sentences with syntactic violations. Additionally, activation in the left inferior frontal gyrus, which has been reported in previous studies using Indo-European languages, was not found in our study. The results support our assumption that the left inferior frontal gyrus plays a minor role in syntactic processing of simple Japanese sentences

Behavioral data (n = 29).

<p>The mean percent accuracy (A) and mean reaction times (B) in both Pre and Post sessions during functional MRI scanning are shown for the easy and hard conditions. Each line indicates the subjective task difficulty of the easy and hard tasks, which were analyzed using a two-way ANOVA for factors Load (Easy vs. Hard) and Time (Pre vs. Post) (C). Each bar graph indicates the means of the subjective feelings of fatigue, aversion, and sleepiness in both Pre and Post sessions, which were analyzed using paired <i>t</i>-tests (D). Error bars indicate standard errors. * <i>p</i><0.05; ** <i>p</i><0.001. E, Easy; H, Hard; n.s., no significance; Post, the last three runs again in the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner; Pre, the first three runs in the MRI scanner.</p

Deactivation related to fatigue and compensatory effort (n = 29).

<p>E, Easy; H, Hard; L, left; MNI, Montreal Neurological Institute; Post, the last three runs again in the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner; Pre, the first three runs in the MRI scanner; R, right.</p

Deactivation related to fatigue and compensatory effort (n = 29).

<p>All voxels were significant at a statistical threshold of <i>p</i><0.05 for family wise error (FWE) corrected for multiple comparisons. Fatigue-induced deactivation in the H condition (i.e., PreH – PostH) (A), fatigue-induced deactivation in the E condition (i.e., PreE – PostE) (B), and deactivation reflecting the compensatory effort (i.e., [PreH – PostH] – [PreE – PostE]) (C). The activation profile of each area represents the parameter estimates in each condition. Errors bar represent the standard errors. The coordinates in the MNI standard space are indicated. E, Easy; H, Hard; Post, the last three runs again in the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner; Pre, the first three runs in the MRI scanner.</p