Background: Dysfunction of central nervous pain processing is assumed to play a key role in primary fibromyalgia (FM) syndrome. This pilot study examined differences of pain processing associated with adopting different interpersonal perspectives.
Methods: Eleven FM patients and 11 healthy controls (HC) were scanned with functional magnetic resonance imaging.
Verbal social interaction plays an important role both in the etiology and treatment of psychiatric disorders. However, the neural basis of social interaction has primarily been studied in the individual brain, neglecting the inter-individual perspective. Here, we show inter-individual neuronal coupling of brain activity during live verbal interaction, by investigating 11 pairs of good female friends who were instructed to speak about autobiographical life events during simultaneous fMRI acquisition.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: Affective dysregulation is a clinical hallmark of borderline personality disorder (BPD). This study used an instructed fear task combined with functional MRI (fMRI) and skin conductance response (SCR) to test hypotheses about mechanisms of disturbed fronto-limbic neural circuitry underlying dysfunctional emotional processing in BPD.
Methods: Female BPD patients and matched control subjects were exposed to two visual stimuli during fMRI scanning and SCR recording.
MR-Encephalography (MREG) is a technique that allows real time observation of functional changes in the brain that appears within 100 msec. The high sampling rate is achieved at the cost of some spatial resolution. The article describes a novel imaging method for fast three-dimensional-MR-encephalography whole brain coverage based on rosette trajectories and the use of multiple small receiver coils.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe ability to pursue moving objects with the eyes is vital to humans. However, it remains unclear how the brain differentiates visual object motion, smooth pursuit eye movements (SPEM), and eye movement-induced relative motion on the retina and where visual-to-oculomotor transformation takes place. To characterize functional differences of SPEM-processing cortical areas, we simultaneously measured functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and smooth pursuit to visual, oculomotor, and visuo-oculomotor stimuli varying the quantity of background dots of the stimuli.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMotion stimuli in one visual hemifield activate human primary visual areas of the contralateral side, but suppress activity of the corresponding ipsilateral regions. While hemifield motion is rare in everyday life, motion in both hemifields occurs regularly whenever we move. Consequently, during motion primary visual regions should simultaneously receive excitatory and inhibitory inputs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCorrective saccades are small eye movements that redirect gaze whenever the actual eye position differs from the desired eye position. In contrast to various forms of saccades including pro-saccades, recentering-saccades or memory guided saccades, corrective saccades have been widely neglected so far. The fMRI correlates of corrective saccades were studied that spontaneously occurred during fixation, pursuit or saccadic tasks.
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