Autonomic and prefrontal cortex responses to autobiographical recall of emotions

Abstract

The present study combined measures of regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) using positron emission tomography (PET) with measures of the autonomic nervous system using skin conductance (SC), heart rate (HR), and the high frequency band of heart rate variability (HRV) in ten healthy participants who were exposed to autobiographical scripts of memories for three target emotions: anger, happiness, and sadness. According to the results, anger was the only emotion to show a significant increase in sympathetic activity, accompanied by a significant decrease in HRV when compared with a neutral script. Anger was also the only emotion to show significant changes in rCBF in the prefrontal cortex. By contrast, the results for the happy and sad conditions showed no significant increase in sympathetic activity and no changes in rCBF in the prefrontal cortex in comparison with the neutral script. The findings suggest that a relative increase in sympathetic activity with a reciprocal decrease in parasympathetic activity may be necessary to generate frontal activity in autobiographical recall of emotions.

The neural correlates of happiness: A review of PET and fMRI studies using autobiographical recall methods

“…Specifically, whereas George and colleagues (1995) found deactivation in right PFC, Lane and colleagues (1997) reported activation in mPFC. Two studies (George et al, 1996;Lane et al, 1997) showed increased activity in caudate nucleus, and two others Marci et al, 2007) revealed increased activity in ventral striatum. Furthermore, the studies by both Lane et al (1997) and Damasio et al (2000) reported activation in the midbrain and insula.…”

“…The four studies by Lane and his colleagues (Lane et al, 2009;Lane et al, 1997;Lane et al, 1998;Reiman et al, 1997) also contrasted happiness and disgust. However, only two studies (Damasio et al, 2000;Marci, Glick, Loh, & Dougherty, 2007) investigated happiness versus anger, and only one (Damasio et al, 2000) investigated happiness versus fear. Remarkably, we were not able to find any PET studies comparing happy and surprising conditions.…”

“…Indeed, four of the studies (Damasio et al, 2000;George et al, 1996;Lane et al, 1997;Marci et al, 2007) showed activation in caudate nucleus, three in ACC and left PFC (Damasio et al, 2000;George et al, 1996;George et al, 1995), and three in insula (Damasio et al, 2000;George et al, 1996;Lane et al, 1997). Few of the studies investigated disgust, anger, or fear.…”

“…Five of the eight studies (Lane et al, 2009;Lane et al, 1997;Lane et al, 1998;Marci et al, 2007;Reiman et al, 1997) asked participants to listen to prerecorded audio scripts of autobiographical emotional experiences referring to each contrasted condition. In the remaining three studies (Damasio et al, 2000;George, Ketter, Parekh, Herscovitch, & Post, 1996;George et al, 1995), participants were cued to recall and relive personally experienced emotional events they had selected during a preexperimental session.…”

“…In the remaining three studies (Damasio et al, 2000;George, Ketter, Parekh, Herscovitch, & Post, 1996;George et al, 1995), participants were cued to recall and relive personally experienced emotional events they had selected during a preexperimental session. All of the reviewed studies used normal adult participants, but only three (Damasio et al, 2000;George et al, 1996;Marci et al, 2007) recruited participants of both genders.…”