Brain mediators of cardiovascular responses to social threat, Part I: Reciprocal dorsal and ventral sub-regions of the medial prefrontal cortex and heart-rate reactivity

By Tor D. Wager, Christian E. Waugh, Martin A. Lindquist, D. Noll, Barbara L. Fredrickson, Stephan F. Taylor. NeuroImage, 2009

417 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Social threat is a key component of mental “stress” and a potent generator of negative emotions and physiological responses in the body. How the human brain processes social context and drives peripheral physiology, however, is relatively poorly understood. Human neuroimaging and animal studies implicate the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), though this heterogeneous region is likely to contain multiple sub-regions with diverse relationships with physiological reactivity and regulation. We used fMRI combined with a novel multi-level path analysis approach to identify brain mediators of the effects of a public speech preparation task (social evaluative threat, SET) on heart rate (HR). This model provides tests of functional pathways linking experimentally manipulated threat, regional fMRI activity, and physiological output, both across time (within person) and across individuals (between persons). It thus integrates time series connectivity and individual difference analyses in the same path model. The results provide evidence for two dissociable, inversely coupled sub-regions of MPFC that independently mediated HR responses. SET caused activity increases in a more dorsal pregenual cingulate region, whose activity was coupled with HR increases. Conversely, SET caused activity decreases in a right ventromedial/medial orbital region, which were coupled with HR increases. Individual differences in coupling strength in each pathway independently predicted individual differences in HR reactivity. These results underscore both the importance and heterogeneity of MPFC in generating physiological responses to threat.

Subfields: Behavioral Neuroscience, Clinical Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1932cf4da736d54e5d5ae6c82781a7c8f5693ce2

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Citations in the corpus

The brain basis of emotion: A meta-analytic review (2012, positive): “Indeed, in another study examining neural responses during long periods ( 2 minutes) of social evaluative threat, the mPFC was found to stay active for the entire duration of the stress period (Wager et al. 2009b).”
Evaluating Dynamic Bivariate Correlations in Resting-state fMRI: A comparison study and a new approach (2014, positive): “EWMA has previously been applied to neuroimaging data to model unexpected changes in the mean BOLD signal across time (Lindquist and Wager, 2005; Lindquist et al., 2007; Wager et al., 2009).”
Conjoint activity of anterior insular and anterior cingulate cortex: awareness and response (2010, methodology): “The detailed relationship between cingulate activity and behaviourally evoked changes in bodily state continues to be substantiated (e.g. Wager et al. 2009a, b; see also Lane 2008).”
Visceral influences on brain and behavior. (2013, positive): “Human neuroimaging evidence indicates a partial segregation of autonomic control within dorsal anterior and mid cingulate (blood pressure, pupil size, heart rate, electrodermal activity) (Critchley, 2009) Similarly, subgenual cingulate, with ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) appears antisympath”
Dynamic connectivity regression: Determining state-related changes in brain connectivity (2012, methodology): “Experimental Data The data was taken from an anxiety-inducing experiment (Wager et al., 2009a&b; Lindquist and McKeague, 2009).”
An Interoceptive Predictive Coding Model of Conscious Presence (2011, background): “…of autonomic vascular changes through central command (Delgado, 1960) and a parallel, partly reciprocal, system of antisympathetic and parasympathetic efferent drive operates through subgenual cingulate and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (Nagai et al., 2004; Critchley, 2009; Wager et al., 2009).”
A Correspondence between Individual Differences in the Brain's Intrinsic Functional Architecture and the Content and Form of Self-Generated Thoughts (2014, background): “during cardiovascular arousal [77,78] and negative emotional processing [79].”