Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience
October 2, 2019
F. von Düring, I. Ristow, M. Li et al.
Glutamate concentration in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) modulates brain response during salience processing. In 27 healthy subjects, higher glutamate levels in the dACC balanced the attenuation of deactivation in the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) caused by stimulus salience, such as sexual content or unexpected emotional content. This suggests that glutamate in the dACC plays a regulatory role in how the brain processes salient stimuli.
Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience
December 4, 2018
Chenyi Chen, Yu-Chun Chen, Kuan-Ling Chen et al.
Sant Mat meditators, who practice loving-kindness meditation and follow a vegetarian diet and alcohol-restricted lifestyle, showed lower anxiety scores and distinct amygdala responses compared to novices. Meditators had stronger amygdala reactivity to explicit happy faces than fearful ones, while novices showed the opposite pattern. Amygdala reactivity was reduced in meditators for both implicit fear and happiness. Greater lifetime meditation practice was linked to lower anxiety and weaker amygdala response to fear. Meditators also exhibited stronger positive connectivity between the amygdala and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex for explicit happiness, and more negative connectivity with the insula and medial orbitofrontal cortex for explicit fear. Amygdala reactivity mediated the relationship between meditation experience and trait anxiety.
Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience
October 8, 2018
Gennady G. Knyazev, Ekaterina A. Merkulova, Alexander N. Savostyanov et al.
Cultural mindsets, whether individualistic or collectivistic, can be temporarily activated through priming and influence brain connectivity and social behavior. After collectivism priming, self-related thoughts were linked to increased connectivity between the default mode network (DMN) and the right temporoparietal junction, a region involved in perspective-taking. After individualism priming, such thoughts were linked to increased connectivity with the temporal pole, involved in self/other discrimination. Individual differences in the intensity of self-related thoughts and DMN-temporal pole connectivity after priming predicted behavior in a social interaction task: an individualistic mindset predisposed individuals to more friendly and trustful behavior.
Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience
January 1, 2018
Lucie Bréchet, Petr Grivaz, Baptiste Gauthier et al.
The inferior parietal lobule, particularly the angular gyrus, may be a shared brain region for both bodily self-consciousness—the sense of being located in a body and experiencing the world from a first-person perspective—and episodic autobiographical memory, the conscious reliving of past events. An anatomical overlap in the angular gyrus was found bilaterally when comparing a prior study on spatial aspects of bodily self-consciousness with a new meta-analysis of functional neuroimaging studies on episodic autobiographical memory. No overlap appeared with semantic autobiographical memory, which involves factual knowledge about one's past. These preliminary findings suggest the bilateral angular gyrus is a key structure for both online self-awareness and the re-experiencing of personal memories.
Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience
January 1, 2017
Davide Crivelli, Michela Balconi
The sense of agency—the feeling that 'I am the one causing my actions and their effects'—is fundamental to intentional behavior and social interaction. This mini-review examines evidence from non-invasive brain stimulation (NIBS) studies that target brain regions linked to agency, including the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, cingulate cortex, supplementary motor areas, posterior parietal cortex, and cerebellum. While clinical and imaging studies have identified these regions as part of an agency-related network, their causal roles in integrating sensorimotor information, intentionalization, and action monitoring remain unclear because most evidence is correlational. NIBS techniques can help clarify these causal relationships, potentially improving understanding of how agency functions or fails in complex social contexts.
Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience
January 1, 2016
Britta K. Hölzel, Vincent Brunsch, Tim Gard et al.
Mindfulness training helped maintain sensitivity to learned emotional cues, while controls lost that response. In a pilot study, 46 healthy participants were quasi-randomized to an 8-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) course or a waitlist control group. Before and after the course, they underwent a two-day fear conditioning, extinction learning, and extinction memory protocol. Skin conductance response showed that after MBSR, participants maintained a differential response to conditioned versus non-conditioned stimuli, whereas controls did not. MBSR participants also showed increased fractional anisotropy in the uncinate fasciculus, a white matter tract linked to emotional learning, though the group-by-time interaction was not significant. Changes in this tract correlated with changes in emotional response, suggesting neural plasticity from mindfulness practice.
Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience
January 1, 2009
Jonathan L Brigman, Jessica Ihne, Lisa M Saksida et al.
Subchronic treatment with the psychotomimetic phencyclidine (PCP) in C57BL/6J mice increased visits to a social stimulus but did not increase time spent with it, and increased visits and time spent investigating a novel social stimulus over a familiar one. The treatment did not significantly affect performance on visual discrimination or reversal learning tasks. These findings suggest the mouse subchronic PCP model may be useful for studying social withdrawal aspects of schizophrenia, but the regimen was insufficient to impair the measured cognitive/executive functions in this strain.