Functional connectivity during masked and unmasked face emotion processing in bipolar disorder

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Psychiatry
• Cognitive Psychology

Background:

• Understanding the neural basis of emotional processing in bipolar disorder (BD) is crucial.
• Automatic, unconscious processing of facial emotions in BD remains understudied.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate neural connectivity and activation patterns during unconscious and conscious face emotion processing in adults with BD compared to healthy volunteers (HV).

Main Methods:

• Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used.
• An affective priming task with masked and unmasked emotional faces (angry, happy, neutral) was administered to 14 BD patients and 14 HV.

Main Results:

• BD patients exhibited reduced amygdala-ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) functional connectivity compared to HV, irrespective of awareness or emotion type.
• No significant amygdala activation differences were found between groups.
• The medial frontal gyrus showed greater activation in BD patients and less activation in HV when processing angry and neutral faces versus neutral stimuli.

Conclusions:

• Aberrant amygdala-vmPFC connectivity is a potential neural correlate of emotional processing deficits in BD, independent of awareness.
• Dysfunction in the medial frontal gyrus may also contribute to altered emotional appraisal and expression in BD.