Emotional Information Processing & IED: An fMRI Study

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The specific aim of the proposed project is to examine the relationship between neuroanatomical pathways and emotional information processing deficits among individuals with Intermittent Explosive Disorder (lED). To accomplish this goal. Two groups of individuals: 16 participants with lED and 16 participants who are free of any clinical psychopathology, will be asked to complete two tasks of emotional information processing (the emotional counting stroop and the emotional faces task) during a one-hour functional imaging session. Both tasks will be presented using a block design. Tasks will be counterbalanced across subjects. The emotional counting stroop task will consist of 1-4 words presented on a screen, to which the subject identifies how many words were shown. Four types of words are used: positive (e.g. happy, puppy), neutral (e.g. sink, chair), general negative (e.g. vomit, regret) and anger (e.g. fury, idiot). Words were selected based on previous research. Pilot research by the authors suggest that individuals with lED are slower and less accurate when anger words are shown as compared to neutral words. During the emotional faces task, participants will intermittently be shown faces with angry, neutral, fearful, or happy expressions. During the first two runs they will be asked to identify the gender of the face presented using two 2-button response panels on their right hand. During the latter two runs participants will be asked to note the emotional expression of the pictures, but will not be asked to make a response. Past research has shown that individuals with a number of clinical disorders (e.g. Borderline Personality Disorder, Major Depression) exhibit an impaired ability to identify some types of emotional faces. Participants will then identify the emotional faces outside of the fMRI environment. Recently it has been demonstrated that lED patients are less accurate in identifying emotional faces than control subjects. It is hypothesized that lED subjects will (1) be less accurate at the emotional stroop tasks than control subjects when anger words are presented, (2) be less accurate at identifying emotional faces than control subjects, and (3) show a differential pattern of brain activation to emotional faces and words including increased amygdala activation for fear words and faces and decreased orbitofrontal activity for anger words and faces.