Department of Psychiatry, Liaison Psychiatry, University Hospitals of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland.
Department of Psychiatry, Faculty of Medicine, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland.
PLoS One. 2020 Feb 13;15(2):e0228404. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0228404. eCollection 2020.
The link between anger and bodily states is readily apparent based on the autonomic and behavioral responses elicited. In everyday life angry people react in different ways, from being agitated with an increased heart rate to remaining silent or detached. Neuroimaging evidence supports the role of mid-posterior insula and midcingulate cortex/MCC as key nodes of a sensorimotor network that predominantly responds to salient stimuli, integration of interoceptive and autonomic information, as well as to awareness of bodily movements for coordinated motion. However, there is still a lack of clarity concerning how interindividual variability in bodily states reactions drives the connectivity within these key nodes in the sensorimotor network during anger processing. Therefore, we investigated whether individual differences in body-centered emotional experience, that is an active (inward prone) or inactive (outward prone) emotion-body connection disposition, would differently affect the information flow within these brain regions. Two groups of participants underwent fMRI scanning session watching video clips of actors performing simple actions with angry and joyful facial expressions. The whole-brain group-by-session interaction analysis showed that the bilateral insula and the right MCC were selectively activated by inward group during the angry session, whereas the outward group activated more the precuneus during the joyful session. Accordingly, dynamic causal modeling analyses (DCM) revealed an excitatory modulatory effect exerted by anger all over the insulae-MCC connectivity in the inward group, whereas in the outward group the modulatory effect exerted was inhibitory. Modeling the variability related to individual differences in body-centered emotional experience allowed to better explain to what extent subjective dispositions contributed to the insular activity and its connectivity. In addition, from the perspective of a hierarchical model of neurovisceral integration, these findings add knowledge to the multiple ways which the insula and MCC dynamically integrate affective and bodily aspects of the human experience.
基于自主和行为反应，愤怒与身体状态之间的联系是显而易见的。在日常生活中，愤怒的人会以不同的方式反应，从心率加快到保持沉默或冷漠。神经影像学证据支持中后岛和中扣带皮层/ MCC 作为一个感觉运动网络的关键节点的作用，该网络主要对显著刺激、内脏和自主信息的整合以及对协调运动的身体运动的意识做出反应。然而，对于个体身体状态反应的变异性如何驱动愤怒处理过程中感觉运动网络中这些关键节点的连接性，仍缺乏清晰的认识。因此，我们研究了个体身体中心情绪体验的差异，即积极（内向倾向）或不活跃（外向倾向）的情绪-身体连接倾向，是否会以不同的方式影响这些大脑区域内的信息流。两组参与者接受 fMRI 扫描，观看演员用愤怒和喜悦的面部表情表演简单动作的视频片段。全脑组-会话交互分析显示，在愤怒会话中，双侧岛叶和右侧 MCC 仅在内向组中被选择性激活，而在外向组中，在快乐会话中更多地激活了楔前叶。相应地，动态因果建模分析（DCM）显示，愤怒对内向组的岛叶-MCC 连接施加了兴奋性调制效应，而在外向组中，调制效应是抑制性的。对与身体中心情绪体验个体差异相关的变异性进行建模，使得可以更好地解释主观倾向在多大程度上有助于岛叶活动及其连接。此外，从神经内脏整合的层次模型的角度来看，这些发现增加了对岛叶和 MCC 动态整合人类体验的情感和身体方面的多种方式的了解。
