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Scientific article
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English

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

Contributors

Pichon, Swann Jean Antoine; Miendlarzewska, Ewa; Eryilmaz, Hamdi; Vuilleumier, Patrik

Published in

Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, vol. 10, no. 2, p. 180-190

Publication date

2015

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.

UNIGE affiliation entities

UNIGE research groups

Funding

  • Autre - the Academic Society of Geneva (Fund Foremane)
  • Swiss National Science Foundation - NCCR sciences affectives

Citation (ISO format)

PICHON, Swann Jean Antoine et al. Cumulative activation during positive and negative events and state anxiety predicts subsequent inertia of amygdala reactivity. In: Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 2015, vol. 10, n° 2, p. 180–190. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsu044

Main files (1)

Article (Published version)

Identifiers

Additional URL for this publication

http://scan.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2014/05/09/scan.nsu044

Journal ISSN

1749-5016
805views
280downloads

Technical informations

Creation

12/09/2014 10:01:00

First validation

12/09/2014 10:01:00

Update

16/10/2024 17:35:08

Status update

30/03/2023 10:27:35

Last indexation

06/02/2025 14:59:27
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