The Integration of Negative Affect, Pain, and Cognitive Control in the Cingulate Cortex

By A. Shackman, T. Salomons, H. Slagter, Andrew S. Fox, J. Winter, Richard J. Davidson. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2011

2,006 citations recorded by the source corpus.

It has been argued that emotion, pain and cognitive control are functionally segregated in distinct subdivisions of the cingulate cortex. However, recent observations encourage a fundamentally different view. Imaging studies demonstrate that negative affect, pain and cognitive control activate an overlapping region of the dorsal cingulate — the anterior midcingulate cortex (aMCC). Anatomical studies reveal that the aMCC constitutes a hub where information about reinforcers can be linked to motor centres responsible for expressing affect and executing goal-directed behaviour. Computational modelling and other kinds of evidence suggest that this intimacy reflects control processes that are common to all three domains. These observations compel a reconsideration of the dorsal cingulate's contribution to negative affect and pain.

Subfields: Behavioral Neuroscience, Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/71fcfd6beb3837dbe9c28226b56cb08c7a2ff2fe

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Behavioral Neuroscience

In Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience

In Cognitive Neuroscience

Citations in the corpus

Organisation of executive functions: Hemispheric asymmetries (2012, background): “…nuclei (Van der Werf, Witter, & Groenewegen, 2002), as revealed in animal work, this region is welllocated to play the role of an interface between cognition and motor output by distributing energetic resources to other brain regions involved in the task at hand (Paus, 2001; Shackman et al., 2011).”
The Five “A”s of Meaning Maintenance: Finding Meaning in the Theories of Sense-Making (2012, background): “The ACC, in other words, is involved in both cognition and emotion (Bush, Luu, & Posner, 2000; Shackman et al., 2011) and is associated with sympathetic nervous system activation that follows the detection of inconsistencies between experience and expectation, in the same manner as this arousal mani”
The neural basis of empathy. (2012, background): “A recent meta-analysis of 939 studies showed overlapping activations in dACC/aMCC during negative affect, pain, and cognitive control (Shackman et al. 2011).”
Being Left Out: Neurobiological Correlates of Social Rejection and their Developmental Trajectory (2011, neutral): “Second, we hypothesized that the continuous experience of being excluded (exclusion game) would elicit stronger activity in the dACC and the insula; both regions are believed to be implicated in expectancy violations, pain processing and negative affect (e.g., Eisenberger & Lieberman, 2004; Etkin et”
Great expectations: neural computations underlying the use of social norms in decision-making. (2011, result): “This interpretation is highly consistent with a recent proposal that this region is involved in processing both negative affect and cognitive control (Shackman et al., 2011).”
Threat and defense: From anxiety to approach (2014, background): “At the neural level, cognitive dissonance threats activate the ACC component of the BIS (Kitayama, Chua, Tompson, & Han, 2013; Van Veen, Krug, Schooler, & Carter, 2009).”
Emotion and the Prefrontal Cortex: An Integrative Review (2017, methodology): “…Dixon & Christoff, 2014; Haber & Behrens, 2014; Lane et al., 2015; McDannald et al., 2012; Ochsner & Gross, 2005; Ochsner & Gross, 2014; Rolls, 2004; Rudebeck & Murray, 2014; Rushworth et al., 2011; Shackman et al., 2011; Sharpe & Schoenbaum, 2016; Vogt, 2009b; Wager et al., 2008; Wallis, 2007).”
The expected value of control: An integrative theory of anterior cingulate cortex function (2013, neutral): “…to the dACC in order to appropriately modify processing to influence internal autonomic states as well as changes in overt behavior, including emotional expressions (Bush et al., 2000; Craig, 2009; Medford and Critchley, 2010; Shackman et al., 2011; Singer et al., 2009; Ullsperger et al., 2010).”
Differential pattern of functional brain plasticity after compassion and empathy training. (2014, background): “The observed activation increases in DLPFC and middle temporal gyrus align with previous findings on emotion regulation (Kalisch, 2009), cognitive control (Beckmann et al., 2009; Mansouri et al., 2009; Shackman et al., 2011) and pain processing (Beckmann et al., 2009; Shackman et al., 2011).”
Common and differential neural networks of emotion regulation by Detachment, Reinterpretation, Distraction, and Expressive Suppression: A comparative fMRI investigation (2014, background): “Recent findings additionally emphasize the importance of the dACC (or anterior middle cingulate cortex, respectively) for linking information about reinforcers (feedback) to motor regions responsible for expressing affect and executing goal-directed behavior (Shackman et al., 2011).”