Pattern differentiation and tuning shift in human sensory cortex underlie long-term threat memory.

The amygdala-prefrontal-cortex circuit has long occupied the center of the threat system, but new evidence has rapidly amassed to implicate threat processing outside this canonical circuit. Through nonhuman research, the sensory cortex has emerged as a critical substrate for long-term threat memory, underpinned by sensory cortical pattern separation/completion and tuning shift. In humans, research has begun to associate the human sensory cortex with long-term threat memory, but the lack of mechanistic insights obscures a direct linkage.

Olfactory-visual integration facilitates perception of subthreshold negative emotion.

A fast growing literature of multisensory emotion integration notwithstanding, the chemical senses, intimately associated with emotion, have been largely overlooked. Moreover, an ecologically highly relevant principle of "inverse effectiveness", rendering maximal integration efficacy with impoverished sensory input, remains to be assessed in emotion integration. Presenting minute, subthreshold negative (vs.

When the sense of smell meets emotion: anxiety-state-dependent olfactory processing and neural circuitry adaptation.

Phylogenetically the most ancient sense, olfaction is characterized by a unique intimacy with the emotion system. However, mechanisms underlying olfaction-emotion interaction remain unclear, especially in an ever-changing environment and dynamic internal milieu. Perturbing the internal state with anxiety induction in human subjects, we interrogated emotion-state-dependent olfactory processing in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study.