Seventy-nine 3-year olds and their mothers participated in a laboratory-based task to assess maternal hostility. Mothers also reported their behavioral regulation of their child. Seven years later, functional magnetic resonance imaging data were acquired while viewing emotional faces and completing a reward processing task. Maternal hostility predicted more negative amygdala connectivity during exposure to sad relative to neutral faces with frontal and parietal regions as well as more negative left ventral striatal connectivity during monetary gain relative to loss feedback with the right posterior orbital frontal cortex and right inferior frontal gyrus. In contrast, maternal regulation predicted enhanced cingulo-frontal connectivity during monetary gain relative to loss feedback. Results suggest parenting is associated with alterations in emotion and reward processing circuitry 7-8 years later.

No abstract

To support perception, visual cortex transforms sensory-related input, creating neural activity patterns that represent features of the sensory world. These cortical input-output transformations can potentially be strongly influenced by local, recurrent connections between neurons, yet how recurrent connections affect transformations has been unclear. Here we study recurrent influences in mouse V1 by stimulating excitatory neurons and using simulations to determine which features of connectivity can explain the observations. We find that strong visual stimuli suppress many neurons, resulting in a salt-and-pepper pattern of neurons with suppressed and elevated firing. Stimulating excitatory cells optogenetically produces a similar salt-and-pepper pattern of suppression. Cells with suppressed firing are distributed across the cortex, though there is a surround region a few hundred microns from the stimulation center where suppressed neurons outnumber excited neurons. A balanced-state cortical model, with strong heterogeneous recurrent coupling and variability in neurons' inputs, replicates the observed firing rate distributions and dynamics, and also explains prior reports of suppression from single-cell stimulation. Together, the results show this cortical suppression arises via a recurrent network mechanism: excitatory input produces a diverse pattern of neural responses that is substantially different than the pattern of inputs.

Negative emotionality (NE) refers to individual differences in the propensity to experience and react with negative emotions and is associated with increased risk of psychological disorder. However, research on the neural bases of NE has focused almost exclusively on amygdala activity during emotional face processing. This study broadened this framework by examining the relationship between observed NE in early childhood and subsequent neural responses to emotional faces in both the amygdala and the fusiform face area (FFA) in a late childhood/early adolescent sample. Measures of NE were obtained from children at age 3 using laboratory observations, and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data were collected when these children were between the ages of 9 and 12 while performing a visual stimulus identity matching task with houses and emotional faces as stimuli. Multiple regression analyses revealed that higher NE at age 3 is associated with significantly greater activation in the left amygdala and left FFA but lower functional connectivity between these two regions during the face conditions. These findings suggest that those with higher early NE have subsequent alterations in both activity and connectivity within an extended network during face processing.