title: Transient and sustained neural responses to death-related linguistic cues.
abstract: Recent research showed that perception of death-related vs death-unrelated linguistic cues produced increased frontoparietal activity but decreased insular activity. This study investigated (i) whether the increased frontoparietal and decreased insular activities are, respectively, associated with transient trial-specific processes of death-related linguistic cues and sustained death-related thought during death-relevance judgments on linguistic cues and (ii) whether the neural activity underlying death-related thought can predict individuals' dispositional death anxiety. Participants were presented with death-related/unrelated words, life-related/unrelated words, and negative-valence/neutral words in separate sessions. Participants were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging while performing death-relevance, life-relevance, and valence judgments on the words, respectively. The contrast of death-related vs death-unrelated words during death-relevance judgments revealed transient increased activity in the left inferior parietal lobule, the right frontal eye field, and the right superior parietal lobule. The contrast of death-relevance judgments vs life-relevance/valence judgments showed decreased activity in the bilateral insula. The sustained insular activity was correlated with dispositional death anxiety, but only in those with weak transient frontoparietal responses to death-related words. Our results dissociate the transient and sustained neural responses to death-related linguistic cues and suggest that the combination of the transient and sustained neural activities can predict dispositional death anxiety.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Peking University, 5 Yiheyuan Road, Beijing 100871, People's Republic of China.
authors.forename: Zhenhao
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Shi
authors.forename: Shihui
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Han
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001931:Brain Mapping; D003463:Cues; D003643:Death; D005260:Female; D005625:Frontal Lobe / Q000098:blood supply / Q000502:physiology*; D007839:Functional Laterality; D006801:Humans; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted; D008037:Linguistics; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D010100:Oxygen / Q000097:blood; D010296:Parietal Lobe / Q000098:blood supply / Q000502:physiology*; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011930:Reaction Time; D013997:Time Factors; D014825:Vocabulary; D055815:Young Adult
chemical_list: D010100:Oxygen