Acute neural effects of the mood stabiliser lamotrigine on emotional processing in healthy volunteers: a randomised control trial.

Lamotrigine is an effective mood stabiliser, largely used for the management and prevention of depression in bipolar disorder. The neuropsychological mechanisms by which lamotrigine acts to relieve symptoms as well as its neural effects on emotional processing remain unclear. The primary objective of this current study was to investigate the impact of an acute dose of lamotrigine on the neural response to a well-characterised fMRI task probing implicit emotional processing relevant to negative bias.

A temperature-controlled cooling system for accurate quantitative post-mortem MRI.

Purpose: To develop a temperature-controlled cooling system to facilitate accurate quantitative post-mortem MRI and enable scanning of unfixed tissue.

Methods: A water cooling system was built and integrated with a 7T scanner to minimize temperature drift during MRI scans. The system was optimized for operational convenience and rapid deployment to ensure efficient workflow, which is critical for scanning unfixed post-mortem samples.

Self-modulation of motor cortex activity after stroke: a randomized controlled trial.

Real-time functional MRI neurofeedback allows individuals to self-modulate their ongoing brain activity. This may be a useful tool in clinical disorders that are associated with altered brain activity patterns. Motor impairment after stroke has previously been associated with decreased laterality of motor cortex activity.

Study Protocol: The Heart and Brain Study.

Background: It is well-established that what is good for the heart is good for the brain. Vascular factors such as hypertension, diabetes, and high cholesterol, and genetic factors such as the apolipoprotein E4 allele increase the risk of developing both cardiovascular disease and dementia. However, the mechanisms underlying the heart-brain association remain unclear.

Remote, Automated, and MRI-Compatible Administration of Interoceptive Inspiratory Resistive Loading.

Research on how humans perceive sensory inputs from their bodies ("interoception") has been rapidly gaining momentum, with interest across a host of disciplines from physiology through to psychiatry. However, studying interoceptive processes is not without significant challenges, and many methods utilized to access internal states have been largely devoted to capturing and relating naturally occurring variations in interoceptive signals (such as heartbeats) to measures of how the brain processes these signals. An alternative procedure involves the controlled perturbation of specific interoceptive axes.

Maintenance of Voluntary Self-regulation Learned through Real-Time fMRI Neurofeedback.

Neurofeedback based on real-time functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is an emerging technique that allows for learning voluntary control over brain activity. Such brain training has been shown to cause specific behavioral or cognitive enhancements, and even therapeutic effects in neurological and psychiatric patient populations. However, for clinical applications it is important to know if learned self-regulation can be maintained over longer periods of time and whether it transfers to situations without neurofeedback.

Fear Spreading Across Senses: Visual Emotional Events Alter Cortical Responses to Touch, Audition, and Vision.

Attention and perception are potentiated for emotionally significant stimuli, promoting efficient reactivity and survival. But does such enhancement extend to stimuli simultaneously presented across different sensory modalities? We used functional magnetic resonance imaging in humans to examine the effects of visual emotional signals on concomitant sensory inputs in auditory, somatosensory, and visual modalities. First, we identified sensory areas responsive to task-irrelevant tones, touches, or flickers, presented bilaterally while participants attended to either a neutral or a fearful face.

Learning Control Over Emotion Networks Through Connectivity-Based Neurofeedback.

Most mental functions are associated with dynamic interactions within functional brain networks. Thus, training individuals to alter functional brain networks might provide novel and powerful means to improve cognitive performance and emotions. Using a novel connectivity-neurofeedback approach based on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we show for the first time that participants can learn to change functional brain networks.

Negative emotions facilitate isometric force through activation of prefrontal cortex and periaqueductal gray.

Emotions are considered to modulate action readiness. Previous studies have demonstrated increased force production following exposure to emotionally arousing visual stimuli; however the neural mechanisms underlying how precise force output is controlled within varying emotional contexts remain poorly understood. To identify the neural correlates of emotion-modulated motor behaviour, twenty-two participants produced a submaximal isometric precision-grip contraction while viewing pleasant, unpleasant, neutral or blank images (without visual feedback of force output).

Gender differences in the neural network of facial mimicry of smiles--An rTMS study.

Under theories of embodied emotion, exposure to a facial expression triggers facial mimicry. Facial feedback is then used to recognize and judge the perceived expression. However, the neural bases of facial mimicry and of the use of facial feedback remain poorly understood.

Brain systems underlying encounter expectancy bias in spider phobia.

Spider-phobic individuals are characterized by exaggerated expectancies to be faced with spiders (so-called encounter expectancy bias). Whereas phobic responses have been linked to brain systems mediating fear, little is known about how the recruitment of these systems relates to exaggerated expectancies of threat. We used fMRI to examine spider-phobic and control participants while they imagined visiting different locations in a forest after having received background information about the likelihood of encountering different animals (spiders, snakes, and birds) at these locations.

The neural basis of age-related changes in motor imagery of gait: an fMRI study.

Background: Aging is often associated with modifications of gait. Recent studies have revealed a strong relationship between gait and executive functions in healthy and pathological aging. We hypothesized that modification of gait due to aging may be related to changes in frontal lobe function.

Connectivity-based neurofeedback: dynamic causal modeling for real-time fMRI.

Neurofeedback based on real-time fMRI is an emerging technique that can be used to train voluntary control of brain activity. Such brain training has been shown to lead to behavioral effects that are specific to the functional role of the targeted brain area. However, real-time fMRI-based neurofeedback so far was limited to mainly training localized brain activity within a region of interest.

Associative and semantic memory deficits in amnestic mild cognitive impairment as revealed by functional magnetic resonance imaging.

Objective: To identify the neural underpinnings of cognitive deficits associated with memory problems in amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI).

Background: Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is increasingly used to assess patients with aMCI and could potentially help predict conversion to Alzheimer disease, but imaging results so far have been inconsistent in identifying brain activation patterns in aMCI. There is an immediate need to identify the neural substrates of different memory components that are affected by aMCI.

The influence of individual motor imagery ability on cerebral recruitment during gait imagery.

Motor imagery (MI) is often used in combination with neuroimaging techniques to study the cognitive control of gait. However, imagery ability (IA) varies widely across individuals, potentially influencing the pattern of cerebral recruitment during MI. The aim of the current study was to investigate this effect of IA on the neural correlates of gait control using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

Persistent affective biases in human amygdala response following implicit priming with negative emotion concepts.

To what extent do past experiences shape our behaviors, perceptions, and thoughts even without explicit knowledge of these influences? Behavioral research has demonstrated that various cognitive processes can be influenced by conceptual representations implicitly primed during a preceding and unrelated task. Here we investigated whether emotion processing might also be influenced by prior incidental exposure to negative semantic material and which neural substrates would mediate these effects. During a first (priming) task, participants performed a variant of the hangman game with either negative or neutral emotion-laden words.