Regular articleSubjective rating of emotionally salient stimuli modulates neural activity
Section snippets
Subjects
Ten healthy subjects were recruited from community advertisements (6 women, 4 men; mean age ± SD 21.2 ± 2.6 years). They were not taking medication and were free of all Axis I psychiatric disorders according to a Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV (First et al., 1996). The purpose and risks of the study were explained to all subjects, who gave written, informed consent to participate, as approved by the local institutional review board.
Experimental design
The experiment consisted of two orthogonal factors:
Behavioral results
On-line ratings demonstrated clear effects of content, with ratings as follows (mean ± SD): NA = 0.91 ± 0.96; AV = −3.7 ± 0.92 (t = 10.9, df = 9, P < 0.0001). Results from the PANAS adjective ratings are depicted in Fig. 1, representing the target emotions of the aversive stimuli (disgusted, sad, shocked, upset, and disturbed). For both RTNG and PSVW, these five target emotions showed clear elevations following AV conditions, compared to NA conditions. Difference scores for AV − NA were as
Discussion
This study investigated the functional anatomic correlates of a simple cognitive task operating upon salient emotional stimuli. There was significantly more activation in the right insula/amygdala and left insula during PSVW, relative to RTNG. Whereas prior work has shown that a cognitive task that directs attention away from emotional aspects of salient stimuli can reduce limbic activity (Liberzon et al., 2000), the current study demonstrated that a simple cognitive task that does not redirect
Acknowledgements
Supported by grants from the National Alliance for Research in Schizophrenia and Depression and the National Institute of Mental Health (K08 MH01258) to S.F.T. The authors gratefully acknowledge assistance in construction of the stimulus sets and data analysis from Greta Lorge and Michael Young. This work was previously presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, November 2000, New Orleans.
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