Prefrontal-Amygdala Interactions in Social Learning

描述(申请人提供)：这份R01申请建议对人类受试者进行功能性神经成像研究，以阐明前额皮质和杏仁核在面部身份和表情处理中的作用，这些面部身份和表情预测不同的社交结果。在神经成像研究中，面部表情的呈现被证明是特别强大的刺激，可以激活杏仁核和前额叶区域，这些区域参与处理与生物相关的社交线索。此外，这些任务已被证明有助于揭示患有各种情绪障碍(例如，焦虑、抑郁)的患者的异常大脑激活模式。在这里，我们建议进一步发展我们的面部表情任务，以增加我们在处理这些社会相关线索的过程中对皮质-皮质下相互作用的理解。这项工作的作用是，它将提供一个更好的理解决定杏仁核反应的基本规则，并允许我们更好地理解当遇到这样的表达时，杏仁核如何与相互连接的前额叶区域相互作用。拟议的研究包括我们先前工作的程序性扩展，以及纳入一项关于调节经验对大脑结构的影响的新的纵向研究。这项特定的研究建立在我们最近发表的令人兴奋的发现的基础上，该发现表明，杏仁核-前额叶通路的结构完整性可以预测报告的焦虑的个体差异。这里提出的实验对于理解成人大脑对这些无处不在的社交线索的正常反应模式至关重要。这些数据将与补充的发展研究(即儿童和青少年)进行有益的比较，并将服从于将其直接转化为临床人口。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This R01 application proposes functional neuroimaging studies with human subjects to elucidate the role of the prefrontal cortex and amygdala in the processing of facial identities and expressions that predict different social outcomes. Presentations of facial expressions of emotion in neuroimaging studies have proven particularly robust stimuli for activating amygdala and prefrontal regions involved in processing biologically- relevant social cues. Further, these tasks have proven useful for revealing aberrant brain activation patterns in patients with various emotional disorders (e.g., anxiety, depression). Here we propose to further develop our facial expression tasks to increase our understanding of cortical-subcortical interactions during the processing of these socially relevant cues. The utility of this work is that it will provide for a better understanding of the basic rules that determine amygdala responses, and allow us to better understand how the amygdala interacts with reciprocally connected prefrontal areas when such expressions are encountered. The proposed studies comprise programmatic extensions of our previous work as well as incorporate a novel longitudinal study of the effect of regulatory experience on brain structure. This specific study builds off our recent exciting published finding showing that the structural integrity of an amygdala-prefrontal pathway predicts individual differences in reported anxiety. The experiments proposed here are critical for establishing an understanding of the normal pattern of adult human brain responsivity to these ubiquitous social cues. These data will be usefully compared to complementary developmental research (i.e., with children and adolescents) and will be amenable to direct translation to clinical populations.