Age-differential patterns of brain activation during perception of angry faces

Fischer, Håkan; Sandblom, Johan; Gavazzeni, Joachim; Fransson, Peter; Wright, Christopher I.; Bäckman, Lars

doi:10.1016/j.neulet.2005.06.002

Cited by 108 publications

(96 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…Comparison of the age dependent responses in our own data for the emotional pictures task shows relatively high absolute activity in the amygdala, left parahippocampal gyrus and ventral occipital cortex (BA 18,19) in the youngest group, and left inferior frontal and left temporal gyri (BA 47) in the oldest group. These observations are in agreement with previously demonstrated greater activation in younger versus older individuals in the right amygdala/hippocampus region, whereas older adults demonstrated greater activation in the right anterior-ventral insula cortex in an emotional faces task with the angry versus neutral faces contrast (Fischer et al, 2005).…”

Section: Age and Gender Specific Activationsupporting

confidence: 93%

A rapid fMRI task battery for mapping of visual, motor, cognitive, and emotional function

2006

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A set of sensory, motor, cognitive and emotional tasks were combined in a simple, rapid-presentation task battery and tested on a group of 31, normal, healthy subjects aged 22 to 76. Five tasks were selected on the basis of widespread use in fMRI and their ability to produce robust and reliable regional activations. They were: 1) a visual task designed to activate the occipital cortex; 2) a bimanual motor task designed to activate motor areas; 3) a verb generation task designed to activate speech processing areas; 4) an n-back task designed to activate areas associated with working memory and executive function; and 5) an emotional pictures task designed to provoke strong emotional responses that typically activate limbic structures. Most of the tasks produced reliable activations in individual subjects, and assessments of the distribution and reliability of individual subject activations in each targeted area are provided. The emotional pictures task did not demonstrate adequate sensitivity in a priori target regions, only in the a posteriori defined inferior temporal region. Age and gender specific differences were found in the activation patterns for both the cognitive and emotional tasks. The battery provides a prescribed means for researchers to obtain reliable functional localizers within 20-25 minutes of scanning, which can be used to support more elaborate mapping studies of brain function. The dataset can also serve as reliability metric for new fMRI labs and novice investigators seeking to test their acquisition and analysis techniques with minimal time investment and expense.

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Section: Age and Gender Specific Activationsupporting

confidence: 93%

A rapid fMRI task battery for mapping of visual, motor, cognitive, and emotional function

2006

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“…These anatomic changes in the PFC may respectively relate to diminished executive functioning and working memory (Raz et al, 1999), but enhanced emotional control with aging (Carstensen et al, 2000). The amygdala is also known to exhibit mild atrophy with aging, and functional imaging studies suggest an altered profile of activation in this structure in young vs. elderly subjects (Iidaka et al, 2002;Gunning-Dixon et al, 2003;Mather et al, 2004;Fischer et al, 2005;Tessitore et al, 2005;Wedig et al, 2005;Wright et al, 2006a).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neuroanatomical correlates of personality in the elderly

et al. 2007

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Extraversion and neuroticism are two important and frequently studied dimensions of human personality. They describe individual differences in emotional responding that are quite stable across the adult lifespan. Neuroimaging research has begun to provide evidence that neuroticism and extraversion have specific neuroanatomical correlates within the cerebral cortex and amygdala of young adults. However, these brain areas undergo alterations in size with aging, which may influence the nature of these personality factor-brain structure associations in the elderly. One study in the elderly demonstrated associations between perisylvian cortex structure and measures of self transcendence (Kaasinen et al., 2005), but the neuroanatomical correlates of extraversion and neuroticism, or other measures of the Five Factor Model of personality have not been explored. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the structural correlates of neuroticism and extraversion in healthy elderly subjects (n=29) using neuroanatomic measures of the cerebral cortex and amygdala. We observed that the thickness of specific lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) regions, but not amygdala volume, correlates with measures of extraversion and neuroticism. The results suggest differences in the regional neuroanatomic correlates of specific personality traits with aging. We speculate that this relates to the influences of age-related structural changes in the PFC.

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“…Third, FADE could reflect enhanced emotion regulation strategies by older adults for processing negative stimuli. This is consistent with results from the emotion regulation literature indicating that emotion regulation imposes substantial demands on cognitive control operations , although some studies have failed to provide support for this model (see Fischer et al (2005); ; ).…”

Section: Neurological Findings On Emotion and Attentionsupporting

confidence: 89%

“…In order to minimize the role of cognitive mechanisms involved in processing emotional items, a passive viewing paradigm was administered by Fischer et al (2005). They examined age-related changes in emotional face processing by using a relatively larger sample size than previous studies (24 younger and 22 older adults).…”

Section: Neurological Findings On Emotion Recognitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The emotional ageing brain: cognitive mechanisms and neural networks

Ziaei¹

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Despite well-documented declines in most cognitive domains, some emotional processes appear to be preserved or even enhanced in late adulthood. A good example of this is the information processing bias older adults show towards positive relative to negative emotional stimuli, often referred to as the age-related positivity effect. The present thesis presents a series of experiments that were designed to better understand the mechanisms that contribute to age-related changes in emotional processing, focusing in particular on the role of cognitive mechanisms and neural networks.In Study 1 aimed to identify the underlying cognitive mechanisms of the positivity effect.The primary focus of this study was to explore the role of distractors during the early attention allocation stage, and to also measure how selective attentional processes during encoding influence later memory outcomes for emotional items. The results showed that consistent with prior literature, a memory positivity effect was found among older relative to younger adults. However, of particular interest was the finding that, participants' memory for negative targets was not influenced by the presence of positive distractors. This finding suggests that positive distractors did not automatically capture older adults' attention during encoding for negative items. Importantly, we found that participants' pupillary responses to negative items mediated the relationship between age and the memory positivity effect, indicating that older adults use their cognitive control resources when encoding negative information, perhaps to down regulate the impact of negative emotions on their memory. Collectively, these two findings provide converging support for the cognitive control account of the positivity effect.Study 2 used a similar paradigm to Study 1 to examine the underlying neural networks involved in processing emotional items during working memory encoding among older and younger adults. Results indicated that a cognitive control network that included fronto-parietal regions, was functionally connected to the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex during the encoding of negative items among older adults. This network contributed to performance, both accuracy and response times, in older adults' group. A less distributed network was found for encoding of positive items among older and both items among younger adults. Although older adults recruited a same network that was functionally connected to the amygdala for encoding positive and negative items, younger adults recruited this particular network specifically for encoding negative items. This network facilitated older adults' higher accuracy and faster response times during retrieval. 3Taken together, the results from these functional connectivity analyses suggest that there is differential engagement of brain networks connected to these two regions, which are modulated by the emotional valence. While two separate brain networks underlying the encoding of emotionally valence targets are connected to...

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Age-differential patterns of brain activation during perception of angry faces

Cited by 108 publications

References 24 publications

A rapid fMRI task battery for mapping of visual, motor, cognitive, and emotional function

A rapid fMRI task battery for mapping of visual, motor, cognitive, and emotional function

Neuroanatomical correlates of personality in the elderly

The emotional ageing brain: cognitive mechanisms and neural networks

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