title: Dispositional pessimism and amygdala activity: a PET study in healthy volunteers.
abstract: The present study used scores from Seligman's Attribution Style Questionnaire and [15O] water positron emission tomographic measurements of regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) to investigate the relation between individual differences in dispositional pessimism and amygdala activity. During scanning 13 healthy non-snake-phobic females passively viewed a snake videotape. Using one-tailed tests, significant negative correlations were evident between pessimism scores, with low scores reflecting relatively more pessimism, and right (r=-0.60; p=0.014) and left amygdala rCBF (r=-0.53; p=0.032). These results extend previous neuroimaging findings in healthy subjects indicating a role for the amygdala in transient negative emotional states, and suggest that this multimodal brain region also is involved in more durable negative affects such as dispositional pessimism.
authors.affiliation: Psychiatric Neuroimaging Research Group, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA.
authors.forename: H
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Fischer
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Tillfors
authors.forename: T
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Furmark
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Fredrikson
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000679:Amygdala / Q000098:blood supply / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging* / Q000502:physiology*; D001290:Attitude; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D012016:Reference Values; D012039:Regional Blood Flow; D014055:Tomography, Emission-Computed