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Affective responses across psychiatric disorders-A dimensional approach
Claudia Hägele1, Eva Friedel1, Florian Schlagenhauf2
1Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Charité-Universitätsmedizin, Campus Mitte, Berlin, Germany.
Neuroscience Letters
|May 1, 2016
Summary
Emotion processing in the brain appears consistent across various psychiatric disorders, including alcohol dependence, schizophrenia, and major depressive disorder. Neuroimaging studies found similar brain activation patterns regardless of diagnosis, suggesting a common neural basis for emotional responses.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Psychiatry
- Cognitive Psychology
Background:
- Understanding psychiatric disorders requires identifying core symptom signatures.
- Emotion processing is a key area for investigating neurobiological correlates in mental health conditions.
- Research is needed to determine if emotion processing deficits transcend specific diagnostic categories.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the neurobiological correlates of emotion processing across diverse psychiatric disorders.
- To assess differences in emotion processing between diagnostic groups and healthy controls.
- To identify if psychopathological correlates of emotion processing exist independently of diagnostic categories.
Main Methods:
- Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to study 135 patients with various psychiatric disorders and 40 healthy controls.
- Participants viewed affectively positive, aversive, and neutral images from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS).
- Analyses included between-group comparisons, correlations with self-rated mood, and amygdala functional connectivity.
Main Results:
- Consistent activation of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, middle temporal gyrus, and precuneus was observed during pleasant stimuli processing across all participants.
- Significant activation of the amygdala and middle temporal gyrus occurred during aversive stimuli processing, irrespective of diagnostic group.
- No significant interactions with diagnostic group or correlations with depression/anxiety scores were found in activated clusters or amygdala connectivity.
Conclusions:
- Emotion processing in response to positive and aversive stimuli is consistently observed in limbic and prefrontal brain areas across psychiatric diagnoses.
- The study did not find a dimensional psychopathological correlate of these neural activation patterns that transcends diagnostic categories.
- These findings suggest a shared neural basis for basic emotion processing in major psychiatric disorders.
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