Negative affect and craving during abstinence from smoking are both linked to default mode network connectivity.

Background: Negative affect and craving during abstinence from cigarettes predict resumption of smoking. Therefore, understanding their neural substrates may guide development of new interventions. Negative affect and craving have traditionally been linked to functions of the brain's threat and reward networks, respectively.

An affective neuroscience model of boosting resilience in adults.

Although research has identified dozens of behavioral and psychosocial strategies for boosting resilience in adults, little is known about the common underlying pathways. A comprehensive review of these strategies using an affective neuroscience approach indicates three distinct general routes to resilience: 1) down-regulating the negative (e.g.

Common prefrontal regions activate during self-control of craving, emotion, and motor impulses in smokers.

It has been posited that self-regulation of behaviors, emotions, and temptations may all rely on a common resource. Recent reviews suggest this common resource may include the inferior frontal cortex (IFC). However, to our knowledge no single functional neuroimaging study has tested this hypothesis.

Striatal dopamine D₂/D₃ receptors mediate response inhibition and related activity in frontostriatal neural circuitry in humans.

Impulsive behavior is thought to reflect a traitlike characteristic that can have broad consequences for an individual's success and well-being, but its neurobiological basis remains elusive. Although striatal dopamine D₂-like receptors have been linked with impulsive behavior and behavioral inhibition in rodents, a role for D₂-like receptor function in frontostriatal circuits mediating inhibitory control in humans has not been shown. We investigated this role in a study of healthy research participants who underwent positron emission tomography with the D₂/D₃ dopamine receptor ligand [¹⁸F]fallypride and BOLD fMRI while they performed the Stop-signal Task, a test of response inhibition.

Mindful attention reduces neural and self-reported cue-induced craving in smokers.

An emerging body of research suggests that mindfulness-based interventions may be beneficial for smoking cessation and the treatment of other addictive disorders. One way that mindfulness may facilitate smoking cessation is through the reduction of craving to smoking cues. The present work considers whether mindful attention can reduce self-reported and neural markers of cue-induced craving in treatment seeking smokers.

Subjective responses to emotional stimuli during labeling, reappraisal, and distraction.

Although multiple neuroimaging studies suggest that affect labeling (i.e., putting feelings into words) can dampen affect-related responses in the amygdala, the consequences of affect labeling have not been examined in other channels of emotional responding.

Different forms of self-control share a neurocognitive substrate.

Psychological and neurocognitive studies have suggested that different kinds of self-control may share a common psychobiological component. If this is true, performance in affective and nonaffective inhibitory control tasks in the same individuals should be correlated and should rely upon integrity of this region. To test this hypothesis, we acquired high-resolution magnetic resonance images from 44 healthy and 43 methamphetamine-dependent subjects.

Effect of modafinil on learning and task-related brain activity in methamphetamine-dependent and healthy individuals.

Methamphetamine (MA)-dependent individuals exhibit deficits in cognition and prefrontal cortical function. Therefore, medications that improve cognition in these subjects may improve the success of therapy for their addiction, especially when cognitive behavioral therapies are used. Modafinil has been shown to improve cognitive performance in neuropsychiatric patients and healthy volunteers.

Impulsive choice and altruistic punishment are correlated and increase in tandem with serotonin depletion.

Human cooperation may partly depend on the presence of individuals willing to incur personal costs to punish noncooperators. The psychological factors that motivate such 'altruistic punishment' are not fully understood; some have argued that altruistic punishment is a deliberate act of norm enforcement that requires self-control, while others claim that it is an impulsive act driven primarily by emotion. In the current study, we addressed this question by examining the relationship between impulsive choice and altruistic punishment in the ultimatum game.

The lasting effect of words on feelings: words may facilitate exposure effects to threatening images.

Previous studies have shown that mere words, particularly affective words, can dampen emotional responses. However, the effect of affective labels on emotional responding in the long term is unknown. The authors examined whether repeated exposure to aversive images would lead to more reduction in autonomic reactivity a week later if the images were exposed with single-word labels than without labels.

Serotonin modulates behavioral reactions to unfairness.

Serotonin (5-HT) has long been implicated in social behavior and impulsivity, but the mechanisms through which it modulates self-control remain unclear. We observed the effects of manipulating 5-HT function on behavior in the ultimatum game, where players must decide whether to accept or reject fair or unfair monetary offers from another player. Participants with depleted 5-HT levels rejected a greater proportion of unfair offers, but not fair offers, without showing changes in mood, fairness judgment, basic reward processing, or response inhibition.

The sunny side of fairness: preference for fairness activates reward circuitry (and disregarding unfairness activates self-control circuitry).

Little is known about the positive emotional impact of fairness or the process of resolving conflict between fairness and financial interests. In past research, fairness has covaried with monetary payoff, such that the mental processes underlying preference for fairness and those underlying preference for greater monetary outcome could not be distinguished. We examined self-reported happiness and neural responses to fair and unfair offers while controlling for monetary payoff.

Fairness and cooperation are rewarding: evidence from social cognitive neuroscience.

To motivate their consumers or employees, corporations often offer monetary incentives, such as cash-back deals or salary bonuses. However, human behavior is not solely driven by material outcome; fairness and equity matter as well. In a recent neuroimaging study, fair offers led to higher happiness ratings and increased activity in several reward regions of the brain compared with unfair offers of equal monetary value.

An fMRI study of causal judgments.

The capacity to evaluate causal relations is fundamental to human cognition, and yet little is known of its neurocognitive underpinnings. A functional magnetic resonance imaging study was performed to investigate an hypothesized dissociation between the use of semantic knowledge to evaluate specifically causal relations in contrast to general associative relations. Identical pairs of words were judged for causal or associative relations in different blocks of trials.

Alexithymia, interhemispheric transfer, and right hemispheric specialization: a critical review.

Background: One neural model of alexithymia relates the condition to poor interhemispheric transfer, while another model associates it with a disturbance in right hemisphere activity.

Methods: The available empirical evidence directly relating alexithymia to a deficit in interhemispheric transfer and/or in right hemisphere activity is critically reviewed.

Results: The interhemispheric transfer studies have related alexithymia to a deficit in transfer, but the nature and directionality of the transfer deficit have yet to be determined.