Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Department of Psychophysiology, National Center of Neurology and Psychiatry, 4-1-1 Ogawa-Higashi Cho, Kodaira, Tokyo, Japan.
Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2013 Mar;8(3):259-66. doi: 10.1093/scan/nss108. Epub 2012 Sep 13.
Studies in psychiatry and cognitive neuroscience have reported an important relationship between individual interoceptive accuracy and anxiety level. This indicates that greater attention to one's bodily state may contribute to the development of intense negative emotions and anxiety disorders. We hypothesized that reactivity in the anterior insular cortex underlies the intensity of interoceptive awareness and anxiety. To elucidate this triadic mechanism, we conducted functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and mediation analyses to examine the relationship between emotional disposition and activation in the anterior insular cortex while participants evaluated their own emotional and bodily states. Our results indicated that right anterior insular activation was positively correlated with individual levels of social anxiety and neuroticism and negatively correlated with agreeableness and extraversion. The results of the mediation analyses revealed that activity in the right anterior insula mediated the activity of neural correlates of interoceptive sensibility and social fear. Our findings suggest that attention to interoceptive sensation affects personality traits through how we feel emotion subjectively in various situations.
精神病学和认知神经科学的研究报告称，个体内脏感觉准确性与焦虑水平之间存在重要关系。这表明，对自身身体状态的更多关注可能会导致强烈的负面情绪和焦虑障碍的发展。我们假设，前岛叶皮层的反应性是内脏知觉和焦虑强度的基础。为了阐明这一三元机制，我们进行了功能磁共振成像（fMRI）和中介分析，以检查参与者评估自身情绪和身体状态时，情绪倾向与前岛叶皮层激活之间的关系。我们的结果表明，右前岛叶的激活与个体社交焦虑和神经质水平呈正相关，与宜人性和外向性呈负相关。中介分析的结果表明，右侧前岛叶的活动介导了内脏感觉和社交恐惧的神经相关活动。我们的研究结果表明，对内脏感觉的关注通过我们在各种情况下主观感受情绪的方式影响个性特征。
