Mood effects on limbic blood flow correlate with emotional self-rating: A PET study with oxygen-15 labeled water

3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) Modulates Cortical and Limbic Brain Activity as Measured by [H215O]-PET in Healthy Humans

“…A decrease in left amygdala rCBF has previously been found to be correlated with feelings of euphoria during psychopharmacological stimulation in healthy subjects (Ketter et al 1996). Furthermore, a number of functional imaging studies reported a positive correlation or association of left amygdalar activity with anxiety or sadness (Schneider et al 1995;Ketter et al 1996;Kalin et al 1997), which is also in tentative agreement with the present, non-significant correlation between CBF in the left amygdala and anxiety-related psychometric scores. Thus, the observed decrease in left amygdalar flow after MDMA could provide a possible neurophysiological substrate for MDMA-induced heightened mood.…”

Dissociable effects of arousal and valence on prefrontal activity indexing emotional evaluation and subsequent memory: an event-related fMRI study

“…Given that medial PFC regions are systematically activated by emotional stimuli, regardless of their valence (for a review, see Phan et al, 2002), PFC involvement could be attributed to its role in the processing of arousal. This notion is consistent with evidence supporting medial PFC involvement in processing emotionally arousing stimuli irrespective of valence (Lane et al, 1997a,b,c;Schneider et al, 1995;Teasdale et al, 1999). On the other hand, there is also evidence suggesting valencerelated specificity in medial PFC (e.g., George et al, 1995;Paradiso et al, 1999b).…”

Risky decisions and response reversal: is there evidence of orbitofrontal cortex dysfunction in psychopathic individuals?

“…For example, psychopathic individuals, like patients with amygdala lesions, show impairments in aversive conditioning and reduced potentiation of startle reflex by visual primes [3,33,40,43]. Functional imaging studies suggest that the amygdala responds to sad and fearful expressions, but not to those depicting anger or disgust [17,54,55,61]. In accordance, both psychopathic individuals and patients with amygdala lesions show impaired processing of fearful and sometimes sad facial expressions [1,13,16,25,39,65,66].…”