In this study, we examined the impact of goal-directed processing on the response to emotional pictures and the impact of emotional pictures on goal-directed processing. Subjects (N=22) viewed neutral or emotional pictures in the presence or absence of a demanding cognitive task. Goal-directed processing disrupted the BOLD response to emotional pictures. In particular, the BOLD response within bilateral amygdala and inferior frontal gyrus decreased during concurrent task performance. Moreover, the presence of both positive and negative distractors disrupted task performance, with reaction times increasing for emotional relative to neutral distractors. Moreover, in line with the suggestion of the importance of lateral frontal regions in emotional regulation [Ochsner, K. N., Ray, R. D., Cooper, J. C., Robertson, E. R., Chopra, S., Gabrieli, J. D., et al. (2004). For better or for worse: neural systems supporting the cognitive down-and up-regulation of negative emotion. NeuroImage, 23(2), 483-499], connectivity analysis revealed positive connectivity between lateral superior frontal cortex and regions of middle frontal cortex previously implicated in emotional suppression [Beauregard, M., Levesque, J., and Bourgouin, P. (2001). Neural correlates of conscious self-regulation of emotion. J. Neurosci., 21 (18), RC165.; Levesque, J., Eugene, F., Joanette, Y., Paquette, V., Mensour, B., Beaudoin, G., et al. (2003). Neural circuitry underlying voluntary suppression of sadness. Biol. Psychiatry, 53 (6), 502-510.;Ohira, H., Nomura, M., Ichikawa, N., Isowa, T., Iidaka, T., Sato, A., et al. (2006). Association of neural and physiological responses during voluntary emotion suppression. NeuroImage, 29 (3), 721-733] and negative connectivity with bilateral amygdala. These data suggest that processes involved in emotional regulation are recruited during task performance in the context of emotional distractors.

Objective-Generalized social phobia involves fear/avoidance, specifically of social situations, whereas generalized anxiety disorder involves intrusive worry about diverse circumstances. It remains unclear the degree to which these two, often comorbid, conditions represent distinct disorders or alternative presentations of a single, core underlying pathology. Functional magnetic resonance imaging assessed the neural response to facial expressions in generalized social phobia and generalized anxiety disorder.Method-Individuals matched on age, IQ, and gender with generalized social phobia without generalized anxiety disorder (N=17), generalized anxiety disorder (N= 17), or no psychopathology (N=17) viewed neutral, fearful, and angry expressions while ostensibly making a simple gender judgment.Results-The patients with generalized social phobia without generalized anxiety disorder showed increased activation to fearful relative to neutral expressions in several regions, including the amygdala, compared to healthy individuals. This increased amygdala response related to selfreported anxiety in patients with generalized social phobia without generalized anxiety disorder. In contrast, patients with generalized anxiety disorder showed significantly less activation to fearful relative to neutral faces compared to the healthy individuals. They did show significantly increased response to angry expressions relative to healthy individuals in a lateral region of the middle frontal gyrus. This increased lateral frontal response related to self-reported anxiety in patients with generalized anxiety disorder.Conclusions-These results suggest that neural circuitry dysfunctions differ in generalized social phobia and generalized anxiety disorder.Generalized social phobia and generalized anxiety disorder are two highly prevalent, chronic, and disabling anxiety disorders (1,2) that are sometimes comorbid. Generalized social phobia involves fear/avoidance, specifically of social situations, whereas generalized anxiety disorder involves intrusive worry about a broader array of everyday life circumstances. Although both have considerable social and economic costs, disagreement exists concerning the degree to which the conditions result from a shared or unique pathophysiology. For example, high rates of comorbidity in cross-sectional and longitudinal studies suggest that the distinction between the two conditions may be relatively subtle at the descriptive level (3,4). On the other hand, data from family-based and therapeutic research suggest the two conditions can be dissociated. Specifically, such dissociation is reflected in patterns of disorder aggregation within families (5), as well as by the fact that generalized anxiety disorder, but not social phobia, responds to most tricyclic antidepressants and to buspirone (6-8). Because no brain-imaging study has directly compared the two conditions, it remains unclear whether the two disorders have dissociable neural correlates.The principal goal of the current study was to inves...

Mindfulness meditation is a set of attention-based, regulatory and self-inquiry training regimes. Although the impact of mindfulness meditation training (MT) on self-regulation is well established, the neural mechanisms supporting such plasticity are poorly understood. MT is thought to act on attention through interoceptive salience and attentional control mechanisms, but until now conflicting evidence from behavioral and neural measures has made it difficult to distinguish the role of these mechanisms. To resolve this question we conducted a fully randomized 6-week longitudinal trial of MT, explicitly controlling for cognitive and treatment effects with an active control group. We measured behavioral metacognition and whole-brain Blood Oxygenation Level Dependent (BOLD) signals using functional MRI during an affective Stroop task before and after intervention. Although both groups improved significantly on a response-inhibition task, only the MT group showed reduced affective Stroop conflict. Moreover, the MT group displayed greater dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) responses during executive processing, consistent with increased recruitment of top-down mechanisms to resolve conflict. In contrast, we did not observe overall group by time interactions on negative affect-related RTs or BOLD responses. However, only participants with the greatest amount of MT practice showed improvements in response-inhibition and increased recruitment of dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), and right anterior insula during negative valence processing. Collectively our findings highlight the importance of active control in MT research, and indicate unique neural mechanisms for progressive stages of mindfulness training.