Disgust sensitivity predicts the insula and pallidal response to pictures of disgusting foods.

The anterior insula has been implicated in coding disgust from facial, pictorial and olfactory cues, and in the experience of this emotion. Personality research has shown considerable variation in individuals' trait propensity to experience disgust ('disgust sensitivity'). Our study explored the neural expression of this trait, and demonstrates that individual variation in disgust sensitivity is significantly correlated with participants' ventroanterior insular response to viewing pictures of disgusting, but not appetizing or bland, foods.

Individual differences in reward drive predict neural responses to images of food.

A network of interconnected brain regions, including orbitofrontal, ventral striatal, amygdala, and midbrain areas, has been widely implicated in a number of aspects of food reward. However, in humans, sensitivity to reward can vary significantly from one person to the next. Individuals high in this trait experience more frequent and intense food cravings and are more likely to be overweight or develop eating disorders associated with excessive food intake.

Interleaved silent steady state (ISSS) imaging: a new sparse imaging method applied to auditory fMRI.

The acoustic scanner noise that is generated by rapid gradient switching in echo planar imaging (EPI) is an important confounding factor in auditory fMRI. "Sparse imaging" designs overcome the influence of scanner noise on stimulus presentation by acquiring single brain volumes following a silent stimulus presentation period. However, conventional sparse imaging requires assumptions about the time-to-peak of the evoked hemodynamic response and reduces the amount of EPI data which can be acquired and hence statistical power.