Neural correlates of aversive conditioning: development of a functional imaging paradigm for the investigation of anxiety disorders

AbstractSince its development and theorisation in the 60s, attachment theory has greatly influenced both clinical and developmental psychology suggesting the existence of complex dynamics based on the relationship between an infant and its caregiver, that affects personality traits and interpersonal relationships in adulthood. Many studies have been conducted to explore the association between attachment styles and psychosocial functioning and mental health. By contrast, only a few studies have investigated the neurobiological underpinnings of attachment style, showing mixed results. Therefore, in this review, we described current evidence from structural and functional imaging studies with the final aim to disentangle the neural correlates of attachment style in healthy individuals. Overall, different attachment styles have been correlated with volumetric alterations mainly in the cingulate cortex, amygdala, hippocampus and anterior temporal pole. Consistently, functional imaging studies suggested patterns of activations in fronto-striatal-limbic circuits during the processing of social and attachment-related stimuli. Further studies are needed to clarify the neurobiological signature of attachment style, possibly taking into consideration a wide range of demographic, psychosocial and clinical factors that may mediate the associations between the style of attachment and brain systems (e.g., gender, personality traits, psychosocial functioning, early-life experience).

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Reappraisal of Threat Value: Loss of Blocking in Human Aversive Conditioning

The Spanish Journal of Psychology ◽

10.1017/sjp.2013.84 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 16 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Yannick Boddez ◽

Frank Baeyens ◽

Dirk Hermans ◽

Tom Beckers

Keyword(s):

Anxiety Disorders ◽

Aversive Conditioning ◽

Single Stimulus ◽

Laboratory Model ◽

Threat Appraisal ◽

Value Loss ◽

Specific Fear ◽

Conditioning Event ◽

Insight Into ◽

Gaining Insight

AbstractNon-specificity of fear is a core aspect of what makes anxiety disorders so impairing: Fear does not remain specific to a single stimulus paired with danger, but generalizes to a broad set of stimuli, resulting in a snowballing of threat signals. The blocking procedure can provide a valuable laboratory model for gaining insight into such threat appraisal and generalization processes. We report two experiments in which we induced selective threat appraisal by using a blocking procedure in human aversive conditioning. We subsequently assessed to what extent such selective threat appraisal is sensitive to different kinds of interference. Results illustrate that the maintenance of selective threat appraisal is not guaranteed: Stimuli present during an aversive conditioning event that are initially tagged with a low threat value, can come to be tagged with a higher threat value later on, without additional experience with these stimuli. We argue that such interference in selective threat appraisal might be one of the mechanisms underlying the pathogenesis of non-specific fear.

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Segregation, connectivity, and gradients of deactivation in neural correlates of evidence in social decision making

10.1101/2020.02.04.934836 ◽

2020 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Roberto Viviani ◽

Lisa Dommes ◽

Julia E. Bosch ◽

Karin Labek

Keyword(s):

Decision Making ◽

Social Cognition ◽

Functional Imaging ◽

Predictive Coding ◽

Imaging Study ◽

Neural Correlates ◽

Laboratory Animals ◽

Cortical Function ◽

Cortical Organization ◽

Associative Cortex

AbstractFunctional imaging studies of sensory decision making have detected a signal associated with evidence for decisions that is consistent with data from single-cell recordings in laboratory animals. However, the generality of this finding and its implications on our understanding of the organization of the fMRI signal are not clear. In the present functional imaging study, we investigated decisions in an elementary social cognition domain to identify the neural correlates of evidence, their segregation, connectivity, and their relationship to task deactivations. Besides providing data in support of an evidence-related signal in a social cognition task, we were interested in embedding these neural correlates in models of supramodal associative cortex placed at the top of a hierarchy of processing areas. Participants were asked to decide which of two depicted individuals was saddest based on information rich in sensory features (facial expressions) or through contextual cues suggesting the mental state of others (stylized drawings of mourning individuals). The signal associated with evidence for the decision was located in two distinct networks differentially recruited depending on the information type. Using the largest peaks of the signal associated with evidence as seeds in a database of connectivity data, these two networks were retrieved. Furthermore, the hubs of these networks were located near or along a ribbon of cortex located between task activations and deactivations between areas affected by perceptual priming and the deactivated areas of the default network system. In associative cortex, these findings suggest gradients of progressive relative deactivation as a possible neural correlate of the cortical organization envisaged by structural models of cortical organization and by predictive coding theories of cortical function.

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