How the brain decodes social emotions and anxiety

Summary: The previous temporal lobe (ATL) plays a key role in the interpretation of social hierarchies and facial emotions, offering information about anxiety and mood disorders. A research project used advanced image techniques to overcome the past challenges in the ATL study, revealing its strong activation during social and emotional decisions.

The results suggest that anxiety interrupts the balance between semantic and emotional processing in this region. Continuous work aims to map the ATL connections and understand gender differences in these processes.

Key facts:

The role of ATL: the previous temporal lobe is crucial for the creation of social and emotional meaning. Anxiety Vineta: ATL activity increased in anxious individuals reflects the interrupted emotional interpretation. Strength approach: mapping of structural connections such as the uncontrollating fascicle could discover ways behind anxiety and guilt.

Source: UJI

Understanding how our brain interprets social hierarchy or facial emotions can be key to advance in our knowledge of anxiety and mood disorders.

This is the objective of the project led by the researcher Maya Visser at the University Jaume I in Castelló, who studies the role of the previous temporal lobe (ATL) in the brain network that gives meaning to social and emotional concepts.

The previous temporal lobe (ATL) has been traditionally included due to geometric distortions produced in functional magnetic resonance (FMRI), which have hindered the precise analysis of this region.

However, previous studies of the NFN Group at the Jaume University I have used specific techniques to overcome these limitations and have demonstrated the participation of the ATL in the meaning of processing and in social and emotional decision making.

The project, funded by the 2021 National Plan for scientific research, studies how the previous temporal lobe (ATL) communicates with other brain regions, such as frontal and limbic areas, when we interpret social situations or express emotions.

In addition, it investigates how this connection network can change in people with variable levels of subclinical anxiety, that is, anxiety levels do not reach the threshold for a formal diagnosis but still capable of affecting brain function.

Until now, the preliminary analysis of the project have shown that the top of the anterior temporal lobe (ATL) is activated strongly when people interpret social hierarchies or make decisions based on emotional facial expressions.

It has also been observed that this region of the brain shows greater activation in people with high levels of anxiety, possibly because anxiety is associated with negative affection, the interpretation of social concepts, such as feelings of inferiority when seeing a winner or intense fault when making mistakes.

In such cases, collaboration between the semantic system (located in the ATL) and the emotional system is interrupted. These findings have already been published and are currently under review by specialized scientific journals.

Despite the promising results, important steps remain. It is necessary to complete the analyzes of functional and structural connections between different brain regions, such as the uncinated fascicle, which connects the anterior temporal lobe (ATL) with the orbitofrontal cortex and can play a key role in the processing of anxiety and guilt.

In addition, as a methodological challenge, efforts are being made to obtain a balanced gender sample to allow a precise analysis of gender differences.

Maya Visser is a Ramón y Cajal researcher in the Department of Basic and Clinical Psychology and Psychobiology at the University Jaume I. During her career, she has participated in Neuroimaging projects in the research centers in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Spain, focusing her research on the role of semantic processing in social and emotional behaviors. S

It is part of the neuropsychology and functional neuropsychology research group (NFN), an interdisciplinary team that studies brain mechanisms in healthy and clinical populations through the combination of neuroimaging techniques with experimental designs, applying results to fields such as psychology, neurology, education and marketing.

With this initiative, the Jaume I University reaffirms its commitment to research that combines a fundamental understanding of the human brain with a direct impact on mental health.

Projects like this help us to better understand how we think, feel and live together, and open new perspectives to address the emotional disorders of the roots of thought and meaning.

Financing: This research is part of the PID2021-127516NB-I00 project, funded by MICIU/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and FEDER/EU.

On this research news of social neuroscience

Author: Mari Luz Burgueño
Source: UJI
Contact: Mari Luz Burgueño – UJI
Image: The image is accredited to Neuroscience News

Original research: open access.
“The subjective quality of sleep in healthy adults moderates the associations of sensitivity to punishment and reward with the functional connectivity of the relevant regions for insomnia disorder” by Maya Visser et al. SLEEP

Abstract

Subjective sleep quality in healthy adults moderate sensitivity associations to punishment and reward with the functional connectivity of the relevant regions for insomnia disorder

Chronic unhealthy sleep behaviors are an important risk factor for the appearance of mood and anxiety disorders. However, we still have to understand why some people are more likely than others to affective deregulation caused by sleep interruption.

With preliminary evidence that suggests that brain activity during positive and negative emotional processing could play an important modulated role, we perform functional connectivity analysis of the rest of the entire brain in a large cohort of healthy young adults (n = 155).

Using regions consistently affected in insomnia disorder such as seeds, we investigate the neuronal connectivity patterns related to sleep quality that were insensitive and sensitive to interactions with individual measures to process rewards and punishments, additionally evaluating links with emotional health indices.

Most of the findings reflected the interactions between sleep quality and reinforcement sensitivity, with the opposite associations reported in the good and poor sleep.

One of those connections, the coupling between the precentral gyrus and the posterior insula, was negatively linked to the anxiety of features, with the lowest connectivity values observed in poor sleeping sleeping ones with greater sensitivity to punishment.

In turn, the only finding associated only with the quality of sleep, that is, the coupling between the subgenic cingulada cortex and the thalamus, it was also related to the usual use of emotions of emotions.

As such, the present study provides evidence that reinforcement sensitivity plays an essential role in understanding associations of poor sleep quality with brain connectivity and emotional health, hinting at a potential link that can help explain individual differences in susceptibility to affective deregulation related to sleep.