Amygdala and prefrontal cortex activity varies with individual differences in the emotional response to psychosocial stress.

Abstract

Stress elicits a variety of psychophysiological responses that show large interindividual variability. Determining the neural mechanisms that mediate individual differences in the emotional response to stress would provide new insight that would have important implications for understanding stress-related disorders. Therefore, the present study examined individual differences in the relationship between brain activity and the emotional response to stress. In the largest stress study to date, 239 participants completed the Montreal Imaging Stress Task (MIST) while heart rate, skin conductance response (SCR), cortisol, self-reported stress, and blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) functional MRI (fMRI) signal responses were measured. The relationship between differential responses (heart rate, SCR, cortisol, and self-reported stress) and differential BOLD fMRI data was analyzed. Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (PFC), dorsomedial PFC, ventromedial PFC, and amygdala activity varied with the behavioral response (i.e., SCR and self-reported stress). These results suggest the PFC and amygdala support processes that are important for the expression and regulation of the emotional response to stress, and that stress-related PFC and amygdala activity underlie interindividual variability in peripheral physiologic measures of the stress response.

Selective suppression of rapid eye movement sleep increases next-day negative affect and amygdala responses to social exclusion

“…The specificity of this effect for REMS highlights the importance of this sleep stage for emotional functioning 22 – 25 . Further, this finding nicely connects previous studies that showed amygdala responses to viewing negative emotional stimuli increased after total sleep deprivation 40 , depended on intact REM sleep in particular 39 , 70 , and correlated with autonomic responses to psychosocial stress 71 . The amygdala is strongly associated with emotional processing 35 , 72 and has anatomical connections to the anterior insula and the ACC 73 , 74 .…”

“…However, the construal of emotional experience is assumed not to rely on activity in single regions, but on the dynamic interaction of various neural systems supporting multiple psychological processes of emotional experience apart from affective salience 80,81 . Hence, amygdala responses to psychosocial stress may not necessarily influence the construal of subjective emotion ratings, that presumably depend on additional networks involving prefrontal cortical regions, as suggested by previous studies 17,71,82 .…”

“…The efficacy of REMS in the present study may have been too limited to surface on the level of emotion ratings later in the morning. In contrast, the altered brain activity in the amygdala could indicate that even small changes in REM sleep can influence brain systems implicated in regulating responses to affectively salient stimuli 35,72 , while they are too small to penetrate the level of subjective experiences, which are reportedly processed further downstream 71,78 . Yet, what speaks against this explanation are findings by Wiesner and colleagues 30 or Morgenthaler and colleagues 79 who applied even more rigorous REM sleep deprivation, achieving a mean REM sleep percentage of around one percent of TST, but nevertheless could not find REM sleep related behavioral effects during emotion recognition tasks.…”

Individual differences in anxiety and automatic amygdala response to fearful faces: A replication and extension of Etkin et al. (2004)

“…The amygdala is involved in the induction of sympathetic nervous system responses and secretion of stress hormones ( Rodrigues et al, 2009 , Orem et al, 2019 ), as well as in the guidance of attention toward emotionally salient stimuli ( Phelps and LeDoux, 2005 , Gamer and Büchel, 2009 ). Therefore, this brain region might be of particular interest when investigating neurobiological underpinnings of implicit anxiety.…”

Ventromedial prefrontal cortex connectivity during and after psychological stress in women

“…In support of the latter proposal, human neuroimaging studies demonstrate that psychological stressors reliably engage the vmPFC and alter its activation (Roy et al, ; van der Werff, van den Berg, Pannekoek, Elzinga, & van der Wee, ; Wager, Waugh et al, ; Wheelock et al, ). Moreover, vmPFC activity changes that are evoked by psychological stressors have been associated with individual differences in self‐reported emotional intensity during and after stressor exposure (Orem et al, ; Tobia et al, ; van der Werff et al, ; Wheelock et al, ; Yang et al, ). Recent analyses examining 270 participants across 18 studies demonstrated that patterns of vmPFC activity are reliably associated with negative affective responding (Kragel, Kano et al, ).…”