Villalta-Gil Victoria, Hinton Kendra E, Landman Bennett A, Yvernault Benjamin C, Perkins Scott F, Katsantonis Allison S, Sellani Courtney L, Lahey Benjamin B, Zald David H
Department of Psychological Sciences, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37240, USA.
Department of Psychological Sciences, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37240, USA.
Neuroimage. 2017 Feb 1;146:312-319. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2016.11.038. Epub 2016 Nov 26.
The amygdala (AMG) has been repeatedly implicated in the processing of threatening and negatively valenced stimuli and multiple fMRI paradigms have reported personality, genetic, and psychopathological associations with individual differences in AMG activation in these paradigms. Yet the interchangeability of activations in these probes has not been established, thus it remains unclear if we can interpret AMG responses on specific tasks as general markers of its reactivity. In this study we aimed to assess if different tasks that have been widely used within the Affective Neuroscience literature consistently recruit the AMG.
Thirty-two young healthy subjects completed four fMRI tasks that have all been previously shown to probe the AMG during processing of threatening stimuli: the Threat Face Matching (TFM), the Cued Aversive Picture (CAP), the Aversive and Erotica Pictures (AEP) and the Screaming Lady paradigm (SLp) tasks. Contrasts testing response to aversive stimuli relative to baseline or neutral stimuli were generated and correlations between activations in the AMG were calculated across tasks were performed for ROIs of the AMG.
The TFM, CAP and AEP, but not the SLp, successfully recruit the AMG, among other brain regions, especially when contrasts were against baseline or nonsocial stimuli. Conjunction analysis across contrasts showed that visual cortices (VisCtx) were also consistently recruited. Correlation analysis between the extracted data for right and left AMG did not yield significant associations across tasks. By contrast, the extracted signal in VisCtx showed significant associations across tasks (range r=0.511-r=0.630).
Three of the four paradigms revealed significant AMG reactivity, but individual differences in the magnitudes of AMG reactivity were not correlated across paradigms. By contrast, VisCtx activation appears to be a better candidate than the AMG as a measure of individual differences with convergent validity across negative emotion processing paradigms.
杏仁核（AMG）反复被认为与威胁性和负性情绪刺激的处理有关，多种功能磁共振成像（fMRI）范式报告了人格、基因和精神病理学与这些范式中AMG激活的个体差异之间的关联。然而，这些探针中激活的互换性尚未得到证实，因此，我们是否能够将特定任务中的AMG反应解释为其反应性的一般标志物仍不清楚。在本研究中，我们旨在评估情感神经科学文献中广泛使用的不同任务是否一致地激活AMG。
32名年轻健康受试者完成了四项fMRI任务，这些任务先前均已显示在处理威胁性刺激时可探测AMG：威胁面孔匹配（TFM）、提示厌恶图片（CAP）、厌恶与色情图片（AEP）以及尖叫女士范式（SLp）任务。生成了相对于基线或中性刺激对厌恶刺激反应的对比，并计算了AMG激活之间的相关性，对AMG的感兴趣区域进行了跨任务分析。
TFM、CAP和AEP任务成功激活了AMG以及其他脑区，尤其是当对比针对基线或非社会刺激时。跨对比的联合分析表明，视觉皮层（VisCtx）也始终被激活。左右AMG提取数据之间的相关性分析在各任务中未产生显著关联。相比之下，VisCtx中提取的信号在各任务中显示出显著关联（范围r = 0.511 - r = 0.630）。
四项范式中的三项显示出显著的AMG反应性，但AMG反应性大小的个体差异在各范式之间不相关。相比之下，VisCtx激活似乎比AMG更适合作为跨负性情绪处理范式具有聚合效度的个体差异测量指标。
