Cumulative activation during positive and negative events and state anxiety predicts subsequent inertia of amygdala reactivity

Abstract

Inertia, together with intensity and valence, is an important component of emotion. We tested whether positive and negative events generate lingering changes in subsequent brain responses to unrelated threat stimuli and investigated the impact of individual anxiety. We acquired fMRI data while participants watched positive or negative movie-clips and subsequently performed an unrelated task with fearful and neutral faces. We quantified changes in amygdala reactivity to fearful faces as a function of the valence of preceding movies and cumulative neural activity evoked during them. We demonstrate that amygdala responses to emotional movies spill over to subsequent processing of threat information in a valence-specific manner: negative movies enhance later amygdala activation whereas positive movies attenuate it. Critically, the magnitude of such changes is predicted by a measure of cumulative amygdala responses to the preceding positive or negative movies. These effects appear independent of overt attention, are regionally limited to amygdala, with no changes in functional connectivity. Finally, individuals with higher state anxiety displayed stronger modulation of amygdala reactivity by positive movies. These results suggest that intensity and valence of emotional events as well as anxiety levels promote local changes in amygdala sensitivity to threat, highlighting the importance of past experience in shaping future affective reactivity.

The Neurobiology of Dispositional Negativity and Attentional Biases to Threat: Implications for Understanding Anxiety Disorders in Adults and Youth

“…Persistent, contextually inappropriate vigilance or attentional biases to threat-related information may reflect stress-induced sensitization of the amygdala. Recent work in adult humans shows that brief exposure to experimental stressors, such as threat-of-shock or aversive film clips, causes sustained increases in spontaneous amygdala activity (Cousijn et al, 2010) and amplifies amygdala reactivity to subsequent threat-related facial expressions (Pichon, Miendlarzewska, Eryilmaz, & Vuilleumier, 2015; van Marle, Hermans, Qin, & Fernandez, 2009). Acute stressor exposure can produce even longer-lasting changes, on the order of minutes to hours, in amygdala functional connectivity (Vaisvaser et al, 2013; van Marle, Hermans, Qin, & Fernandez, 2010).…”

Cognition as the tip of the emotional iceberg: A neuro-evolutionary perspective

“…Even exogenous attention, which typically operates in a reflexive (rapid and involuntary) manner, can be modulated by top-down factors related to task goals or readiness to respond to particular events (Ansorge et al 2009;Folk et al 1992). Likewise, expectations and affective states influence emotion processing for stimuli outside attention Pichon et al 2015) and can abolish the effect of attention load on emotional response (Cornwell et al 2011). These top-down modulations do not necessarily imply that stimulus processing depends on consciousness and voluntary attention and hence cannot be interpreted against "automaticity" without distinguishing more precisely between different sources of modulation and different components of automaticity.…”

Exposure to negative socio-emotional events induces sustained alteration of resting-state brain networks in the elderly

“…For instance, a slow recovery of amygdala activity (i.e., longer return to baseline level) after negative images was reported in individuals with higher neuroticism 37 . Slower recovery of amygdala activity after emotional videos was furthermore associated with higher anxiety traits and ruminations 19 . Subcortical limbic regions such as the amygdala and striatum also display sustained changes in their functional connectivity with cortical areas in medial PFC and PCC during rest after negative emotions 24 and reward 28 .…”

“…An important marker of maladaptive affective style is "emotional inertia", which denotes the degree to which emotions carry over from one moment to the next 16 . Emotional inertia may reflect unsuccessful recovery mechanisms following the offset of affective events and low resilience to stress, associated with higher risks of depression 17,18 and higher trait anxiety and rumination tendencies 19 . Most studies of emotional inertia employed behavioral measures based on experience sampling methods 16,20 , e.g., requiring participants to report their affective state at different time points and measuring autocorrelations between successive time-points or events 16,21,22 .…”