Emotional processing and positive affect after acute exercise in healthy older adults

Abstract

The well‐elucidated improvement of mood immediately after exercise in older adults presumably involves adaptations in emotion‐processing brain networks. However, little is known about effects of acute exercise on appetitive and aversive emotion‐related network recruitment in older adults. The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of acute exercise, compared to a seated rest control condition, on pleasant and unpleasant emotion‐related regional activation in healthy older adults. Functional MRI data were acquired from 32 active older adults during blocked presentations of pleasant, neutral and unpleasant images from the International Affective Pictures System. fMRI data were collected after participants completed 30 min of moderate to vigorous intensity cycling or seated rest, performed in a counterbalanced order across separate days in a within‐subject design. The findings suggest three ways that emotional processing in the brain may be different immediately after exercise (relative to immediately after rest): First, reduced demands on emotional regulation during pleasant emotional processing as indicated by lower precuneus activation for pleasant stimuli; second, reduced processing of negative emotional stimuli in visual association areas as indicated by lower activation for unpleasant stimuli in the bilateral fusiform and ITG; third, an increased recruitment in activation associated with regulating/inhibiting unpleasant emotional processing in the bilateral medial superior frontal gyrus (dorsomedial prefrontal cortex), angular gyri, supramarginal gyri, left cerebellar crus I/II and a portion of right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Overall, these findings support that acute exercise in active older adults alters activation in key emotional processing and regulating brain regions.

Differential modulation of resting-state functional connectivity between amygdala and precuneus after acute physical exertion of varying intensity: indications for a role in affective regulation

“…The precuneus is an important hub region of the DMN and is believed to primarily support internally oriented and selfreferential thinking (Northoff et al, 2006). More recently, there was an increasing awareness that the DMN also plays an important role in constructing subjective emotional experiences (Satpute and Lindquist, 2019), and, more specifically, the precuneus has been implicated with emotional regulation strategies via attentional deployment (Ferri et al, 2016;Kommula et al, 2023). On the other hand, DMN functioning was shown to be altered in affective disorders: For example, functional MRI research suggests that major depressive disorder (MDD) in both adults and adolescents is marked by DMN hyperactivity during resting state examination (Ho et al, 2015;Kaiser et al, 2015) and that areas in the DMN are critically involved in rumination (Zhou et al, 2020).…”

“…Recently, our lab has examined the longitudinal effects of aerobic exercise (three times per week over 6 months) and demonstrated increased positive FC with the left temporal pole, as well as increased anticorrelation between the amygdala and the precuneus over time in the intervention group (Maurer et al, 2022), a region that has been implicated in emotional regulation strategies via attentional deployment (Ferri et al, 2016). While this finding would support long-term adaptations of amygdala-DMN interactions, a recent task fMRI study (Kommula et al, 2023) in older adults also observed a reduced activation of the precuneus region during the visual presentation of positive emotional stimuli after 30 min of a continuous moderate-tovigorous intensity exercise bout. Further, a study in young healthy trained men revealed reduced activity of the precuneus during the presentation of fearful faces after 30 min low-intensity continuous exercise (Schmitt et al, 2019).…”

“…Moreover, we expected an intensity-dependent modulation of FC for the amygdala seed region: Following previous observations from continuous exercise schedules (Schmitt et al, 2020), we especially anticipated (ii) post-acute increases of amygdala-insular FC for the high-intensity condition. Based on previous evidence from a longitudinal exercise study (Maurer et al, 2022), we were also interested (iii) whether the training schedules modulate FC between the amygdala and the precuneus [see also: (Schmitt et al, 2019;Kommula et al, 2023)] and the left temporal pole, respectively. Finally, we examined whether (iv) the exercise-related changes in brain FC were associated with the subjective affect measures.…”

Abnormal intrinsic functional hubs and connectivity in patients with post‐stroke depression

“…In addition, the current study found decreased connectivity between the contralesional ANG and the contralesional supramarginal gyrus outside of DMN in PSD patients. Supramarginal gyrus is a key region for emotional and social processing, 98 , 99 , 100 , 101 and part of the neuroanatomical circuitry for sentence comprehension. 102 Previous studies have demonstrated the impairments of connectivity between supramarginal gyrus and DMN in depressed patients.…”