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

Wan-Ling Tseng, Laura A Thomas, Elizabeth Harkins, Joel Stoddard, Carlos A Zarate Jr, Daniel S Pine, Ellen Leibenluft, Melissa A Brotman, Wan-Ling Tseng, Laura A Thomas, Elizabeth Harkins, Joel Stoddard, Carlos A Zarate Jr, Daniel S Pine, Ellen Leibenluft, Melissa A Brotman

Abstract

Little is known regarding the neural connectivity and correlates during automatic, unconscious face emotion processing in individuals with bipolar disorder (BD). In this study, 14 adults with BD and 14 healthy volunteers (HV) underwent fMRI scanning while completing an affective priming task with unconsciously perceived and consciously perceived faces (angry, happy, neutral, blank oval). We found that, regardless of awareness level and emotion types, BD patients exhibited diminished functional connectivity between amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) compared to HV. This connectivity finding is present in the absence of activation differences in amygdala. In addition, in medial frontal gyrus, BD patients displayed greater activation while HV displayed less activation to angry and neutral faces compared to blank ovals. These results suggest that aberrant amygdala-vmPFC connectivity and neural dysfunction in areas implicated in appraisal and expression of emotions (medial frontal gyrus) may be the pathophysiological correlates of emotional processing in BD regardless of awareness level.

Trial registration: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT00006177.

Keywords: Backward masking; Bipolar disorder; Face emotion processing; Functional connectivity; Functional neuroimaging.

Conflict of interest statement

The authors disclose no conflicts of interest related to this work.

Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Affective priming paradigm. (A) Non-aware condition. (B) Aware condition.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Diagnosis × Awareness interaction from the whole-brain analysis of variance (ANOVA) of functional connectivity between left amygdala and left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (vlPFC). Note. HV = Healthy Volunteers, BD = Bipolar Disorder. Cluster survived whole-brain correction at p<.05 using 3dClustSim without autocorrelation function. † p<0.10, * p<0.05, *** p<0.001
Figure 3
Figure 3
Diagnosis main effect from the whole-brain ANOVA of functional connectivity between left amygdala and left ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). Note. HV = Healthy Volunteers, BD = Bipolar Disorder. Cluster survived whole-brain correction at p<.05 using 3dClustSim without autocorrelation function. *** p<0.001
Figure 4
Figure 4
Diagnosis × Emotion interaction in the right medial frontal gyrus/anterior cingulate cortex from the whole-brain ANOVA of activation. Note. HV = Healthy Volunteers, BD = Bipolar Disorder. Cluster survived whole-brain correction at p<.05 using 3dClustSim without autocorrelation function. * p<0.05
Figure 5
Figure 5
Diagnosis × Emotion interaction in the right precuneus from the whole-brain ANOVA of activation. Note. HV = Healthy Volunteers, BD = Bipolar Disorder. Cluster survived whole-brain correction at p<.05 using 3dClustSim without autocorrelation function. * p<0.05, ** p<0.01, *** p<0.001

Source: PubMed

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