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The most prevalent mental disorders, anxiety and depression, are commonly associated with structural and functional changes in the fronto-limbic brain areas. The clinical trials investigating patients with affective disorders showed different outcome to different treatments such as psychotherapy or pharmacotherapy. It is, however, still unexplored how these interventions approach affect the functional brain. This meta-analysis aims to compare the effects of psychotherapy compared to antidepressant therapy on functional brain activity in anxiety and depression disorders. Twenty-one samples with psychotherapy and seventeen samples with antidepressant therapy were included. The main finding showed an inverse effect of the two treatments on the right paracingulate activity. The patients undergoing psychotherapy showed an increase in the right paracingulate activity while pharmacological treatment led to a decrease of activation of this area. This finding seems to support the recent studies that hypothesize how psychotherapy, through the self-knowledge and the meaning processing, involves a top-down emotional regulation.

These results suggest that clinically recognized pathological use of Internet could be linked to dissociative symptoms.

The aim of the present study was to test whether the eyes of an intact face produced a specific brain response compared to the mouth, nose, or hair and whether their specificity was also maintained in a scrambled face. Fifteen subjects were asked to focus visual attention on global and single elements in intact faces and in their scrambled image. EEG data were recorded from 256-Hydrocel Geodesic Sensor-Net200. Event-related potentials (ERPs) analyses showed a difference between the intact face and the scrambled face from N170 component until 600 ms on the occipito-temporal montage and at 400-600 ms on the frontal montage. Only the eyes showed a difference between conditions (intact/scrambled face) at 500 ms. The most activated source detected by sLORETA was the right middle temporal gyrus (BA21) for both conditions and for all elements. Left BA21 resulted in significantly more activation in response to eyes in the intact face compared to the eyes in the scrambled face at 500 ms. The left BA21 has a central role in high-level visual processing and in understanding others' intentions. These findings suggest a specificity of the eyes and indicate that the eyes play the social and communicative role of comprehending the nonverbal intentions of others only when inserted in an intact face.