Mazzola Viridiana, Arciero Giampiero, Fazio Leonardo, Lanciano Tiziana, Gelao Barbara, Popolizio Teresa, Vuilleumier Patrik, Bondolfi Guido, Bertolino Alessandro
Department of Mental Health, Psychiatry de Liaison, University Hospitals of GenevaGeneva, Switzerland; Laboratory for Behavioral Neurology and Imaging of Cognition, Department of Neurology, University Hospital and Department of Neuroscience, Medical School University of GenevaGeneva, Switzerland.
Department of Mental Health, Psychiatry de Liaison, University Hospitals of GenevaGeneva, Switzerland; Institute of Post-Rationalist Psychology IPRARome, Italy.
Front Behav Neurosci. 2016 Jun 6;10:109. doi: 10.3389/fnbeh.2016.00109. eCollection 2016.
Being in a social world requires an understanding of other people that is co-determined in its meaning by the situation at hand. Therefore, we investigated the underlying neural activation occurring when we encounter someone acting in angry or joyful situation. We hypothesized a dynamic interplay between the right insula, both involved in mapping visceral states associated with emotional experiences and autonomic control, and the bilateral superior temporal gyri (STG), part of the "social brain", when facing angry vs. joyful situations. Twenty participants underwent a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanning session while watching video clips of actors grasping objects in joyful and angry situations. The analyses of functional connectivity, psychophysiological interaction (PPI) and dynamic causal modeling (DCM), all revealed changes in functional connectivity associated with the angry situation. Indeed, the DCM model showed that the modulatory effect of anger increased the ipsilateral forward connection from the right insula to the right STG, while it suppressed the contralateral one. Our findings reveal a critical role played by the right insula when we are engaged in angry situations. In addition, they suggest that facing angry people modulates the effective connectivity between these two nodes associated, respectively, with autonomic responses and bodily movements and human-agent motion recognition. Taken together, these results add knowledge to the current understanding of hierarchical brain network for social cognition.
身处社会环境需要对他人有所理解，而这种理解的意义是由当前情境共同决定的。因此，我们研究了在遇到某人处于愤怒或愉悦情境时所发生的潜在神经激活情况。我们假设，在面对愤怒与愉悦情境时，右侧脑岛（既参与映射与情感体验相关的内脏状态，又参与自主控制）与双侧颞上回（“社会脑”的一部分）之间存在动态相互作用。20名参与者在观看演员在愉悦和愤怒情境中抓取物体的视频片段时，接受了功能磁共振成像（fMRI）扫描。功能连接分析、心理生理交互作用（PPI）和动态因果模型（DCM）均显示，与愤怒情境相关的功能连接发生了变化。事实上，DCM模型表明，愤怒的调节作用增强了从右侧脑岛到右侧颞上回的同侧正向连接，同时抑制了对侧连接。我们的研究结果揭示了右侧脑岛在我们处于愤怒情境时所起的关键作用。此外，研究结果还表明，面对愤怒的人会调节这两个分别与自主反应、身体动作以及人类行为动作识别相关的脑区之间的有效连接。综上所述，这些结果为当前对社会认知的层级脑网络的理解增添了知识。
