The Role of the Subgenual Anterior Cingulate Cortex and Amygdala in Environmental Sensitivity to Infant Crying.

Newborns and infants communicate their needs and physiological states through crying and emotional facial expressions. Little is known about individual differences in responding to infant crying. Several theories suggest that people vary in their environmental sensitivity with some responding generally more and some generally less to environmental stimuli.

Who gets afraid in the MRI-scanner? Neurogenetics of state-anxiety changes during an fMRI experiment.

Experiments using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) play a fundamental role in affective neuroscience. When placed in an MR scanner, some volunteers feel safe and relaxed in this situation, while others experience uneasiness and fear. Little is known about the basis and consequences of such inter-individually different responses to the general experimental fMRI setting.

Structural basis of empathy and the domain general region in the anterior insular cortex.

Empathy is key for healthy social functioning and individual differences in empathy have strong implications for manifold domains of social behavior. Empathy comprises of emotional and cognitive components and may also be closely linked to sensorimotor processes, which go along with the motivation and behavior to respond compassionately to another person's feelings. There is growing evidence for local plastic change in the structure of the healthy adult human brain in response to environmental demands or intrinsic factors.

Pain and emotion in the insular cortex: evidence for functional reorganization in major depression.

Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is among the top causes of disability worldwide and many patients with depression experience pain symptoms. Little is known regarding what makes depressed persons feel like they are in pain. An increasing number of neuroimaging studies show that both physical pain and depression involve the insular cortex.

Variability of fMRI-response patterns at different spatial observation scales.

Functional organization units of the cerebral cortex exist over a wide range of spatial scales, from local circuits to entire cortical areas. In the last decades, scale-space representations of neuroimaging data suited to probe the multi-scale nature of cortical functional organization have been introduced and methodologically elaborated. For this purpose, responses are statistically detected over a range of spatial scales using a family of Gaussian filters, with small filters being related to fine and large filters-to coarse spatial scales.

Time scales of auditory habituation in the amygdala and cerebral cortex.

Habituation is a fundamental form of learning manifested by a decrement of neuronal responses to repeated sensory stimulation. In addition, habituation is also known to occur on the behavioral level, manifested by reduced emotional reactions to repeatedly presented affective stimuli. It is, however, not clear which brain areas show a decline in activity during repeated sensory stimulation on the same time scale as reduced valence and arousal experience and whether these areas can be delineated from other brain areas with habituation effects on faster or slower time scales.

Functional organization of the human anterior insular cortex.

The human insular cortex is involved in a wide range of functions including motor control, language, and homeostatic regulation. Little is known, however, how these functions are topographically organized in the insular cortex and how they are functionally related to the amygdala, which is anatomically connected to the insular cortex. We have investigated these questions by conducting an activation likelihood estimate (ALE) meta-analysis of previously published neuroimaging studies reporting insula effects.

Anatomical specificity of functional amygdala imaging of responses to stimuli with positive and negative emotional valence.

Non-invasive neuroimaging is increasingly used for investigating the human amygdala. Accurate functional localization in the amygdala region is, however, challenging and quantitative data on the anatomical specificity of functional amygdala imaging is lacking. We have therefore retrospectively investigated 114 recently published human functional imaging studies concerned with the amygdala.

Signal quality of simultaneously recorded invasive and non-invasive EEG.

Both invasive and non-invasive electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings from the human brain have an increasingly important role in neuroscience research and are candidate modalities for medical brain-machine interfacing. It is often assumed that the major artifacts that compromise non-invasive EEG, such as caused by blinks and eye movement, are absent in invasive EEG recordings. Quantitative investigations on the signal quality of simultaneously recorded invasive and non-invasive EEG in terms of artifact contamination are, however, lacking.

Movement related activity in the high gamma range of the human EEG.

Electrocorticographic (ECoG) recordings obtained using intracranially implanted electrodes in epilepsy patients indicate that high gamma band (HGB) activity of sensorimotor cortex is focally increased during voluntary movement. These movement related HGB modulations may play an important role in sensorimotor cortex function. It is however currently not clear to what extent this type of neural activity can be detected using non-invasive electroencephalography (EEG) and how similar HGB responses in healthy human subjects are to those observed in epilepsy patients.

Response properties of human amygdala subregions: evidence based on functional MRI combined with probabilistic anatomical maps.

The human amygdala is thought to play a pivotal role in the processing of emotionally significant sensory information. The major subdivisions of the human amygdala-the laterobasal group (LB), the superficial group (SF), and the centromedial group (CM)-have been anatomically delineated, but the functional response properties of these amygdala subregions in humans are still unclear. We combined functional MRI with cyto-architectonically defined probabilistic maps to analyze the response characteristics of amygdala subregions in subjects presented with auditory stimuli.

A rapid sound-action association effect in human insular cortex.

Background: Learning to play a musical piece is a prime example of complex sensorimotor learning in humans. Recent studies using electroencephalography (EEG) and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) indicate that passive listening to melodies previously rehearsed by subjects on a musical instrument evokes differential brain activation as compared with unrehearsed melodies. These changes were already evident after 20-30 minutes of training.