McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.
Nat Neurosci. 2012 May;15(5):776-85. doi: 10.1038/nn.3088.
The pregenual anterior cingulate cortex (pACC) has been implicated in human anxiety disorders and depression, but the circuit-level mechanisms underlying these disorders are unclear. In healthy individuals, the pACC is involved in cost-benefit evaluation. We developed a macaque version of an approach-avoidance decision task used to evaluate anxiety and depression in humans and, with multi-electrode recording and cortical microstimulation, we probed pACC function as monkeys performed this task. We found that the macaque pACC has an opponent process-like organization of neurons representing motivationally positive and negative subjective value. Spatial distribution of these two neuronal populations overlapped in the pACC, except in one subzone, where neurons with negative coding were more numerous. Notably, microstimulation in this subzone, but not elsewhere in the pACC, increased negative decision-making, and this negative biasing was blocked by anti-anxiety drug treatment. This cortical zone could be critical for regulating negative emotional valence and anxiety in decision-making.
额前扣带回前部（pACC）在人类焦虑症和抑郁症中起着重要作用，但这些疾病的具体神经回路机制尚不清楚。在健康人群中，pACC 参与成本效益评估。我们开发了一种猕猴版的趋近回避决策任务，用于评估人类的焦虑和抑郁，同时结合多电极记录和皮质微刺激，在猕猴执行该任务时，我们探测了 pACC 的功能。我们发现，猕猴的 pACC 存在一种类似的神经元对立过程，代表动机上的正、负效价。这两种神经元群体的空间分布在 pACC 中重叠，除了一个亚区，其中具有负编码的神经元较多。值得注意的是，刺激该亚区而不是 pACC 的其他区域会增加消极决策，而这种负向偏差可以通过抗焦虑药物治疗来阻断。这个皮质区域可能对调节决策中的负性情绪和焦虑至关重要。
