Activation of the medial prefrontal cortex and extended amygdala by individual ratings of emotional arousal: a fMRI study.
BACKGROUND
Significant differences between individual responses to emotional stimuli can be important for the study of emotion. We investigated whether incorporating individual ratings of emotional arousal in the analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data improves the detection of activation in the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) and sublenticular extended amygdala (SLEA), areas implicated in the processing of emotional salience.


METHODS
Healthy subjects viewed counterbalanced blocks of aversive, nonaversive, and blank images. Outside the scanner, they rated the intensity of emotional arousal (salience) of each presented picture.


RESULTS
Incorporating the subject's response to each stimulus by using individualized regressors produced more robust activations within MPFC and SLEA compared with a simple boxcar regressor, identical for all subjects.


CONCLUSIONS
Our findings demonstrate that individual behavioral data are useful in improving detection of activation in block-design functional imaging studies.
Phan
K Luan
KL
Department of Psychiatry, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-0118, USA.
Taylor
Stephan F
SF
Welsh
Robert C
RC
Decker
Laura R
LR
Noll
Douglas C
DC
Nichols
Thomas E
TE
Britton
Jennifer C
JC
Liberzon
Israel
I
D000328:Adult; D000679:Amygdala / Q000502:physiology; D001143:Arousal / Q000502:physiology*; D001931:Brain Mapping; D003342:Corpus Striatum / Q000502:physiology; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted; D007206:Individuality; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D009415:Nerve Net / Q000502:physiology; D017397:Prefrontal Cortex / Q000502:physiology*