Prefrontal-Amygdala Interactions in Social Learning

描述（由申请人提供）：该R 01申请提出了对人类受试者的功能性神经成像研究，以阐明前额叶皮层和杏仁核在预测不同社会结果的面部身份和表情处理中的作用。在神经影像学研究中，情绪的面部表情的呈现被证明是激活杏仁核和前额叶区域的特别强大的刺激，这些区域参与处理生物相关的社会线索。此外，这些任务已被证明可用于揭示患有各种情绪障碍（例如，焦虑、抑郁）。在这里，我们建议进一步发展我们的面部表情任务，以增加我们的理解皮层皮层下的相互作用，在处理这些社会相关的线索。这项工作的效用是，它将提供一个更好的理解的基本规则，确定杏仁核的反应，并允许我们更好地了解如何杏仁核与连接的前额叶区时，遇到这样的表达相互作用。拟议的研究包括我们以前的工作的程序扩展，以及纳入一个新的纵向研究的监管经验对大脑结构的影响。这项具体的研究建立在我们最近发表的令人兴奋的发现基础上，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焦虑的个体差异。这里提出的实验是至关重要的，以建立一个成年人的大脑对这些无处不在的社会线索的反应的正常模式的理解。这些数据将被有效地与补充发展研究（即，儿童和青少年），并将适合于直接转化为临床人群。

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.