Negative emotional stimuli activate a broad network, including the medial prefrontal (mPFC) and anterior cingulate (ACC) cortices. An early influential view dichotomized these regions into dorsal-caudal “cognitive” and ventral-rostral “affective” subdivisions. In this review, we examine a wealth of recent research on negative emotions in animals and humans, using the example of fear/anxiety, and conclude that, contrary to the traditional dichotomy, both subdivisions make key contributions to emotional processing. Specifically, dorsal-caudal regions of the ACC/mPFC are involved in appraisal and expression of negative emotion, while ventral-rostral portions of the ACC/mPFC have a regulatory role with respect to limbic regions involved in generating emotional responses. Moreover, this new framework is broadly consistent with emerging data on other negative and positive emotions.

The well-replicated observation that many people maintain mental health despite exposure to severe psychological or physical adversity has ignited interest in the mechanisms that protect against stress-related mental illness. Focusing on resilience rather than pathophysiology in many ways represents a paradigm shift in clinical-psychological and psychiatric research that has great potential for the development of new prevention and treatment strategies. More recently, research into resilience also arrived in the neurobiological community, posing nontrivial questions about ecological validity and translatability. Drawing on concepts and findings from transdiagnostic psychiatry, emotion research, and behavioral and cognitive neuroscience, we propose a unified theoretical framework for the neuroscientific study of general resilience mechanisms. The framework is applicable to both animal and human research and supports the design and interpretation of translational studies. The theory emphasizes the causal role of stimulus appraisal (evaluation) processes in the generation of emotional responses, including responses to potential stressors. On this basis, it posits that a positive (non-negative) appraisal style is the key mechanism that protects against the detrimental effects of stress and mediates the effects of other known resilience factors. Appraisal style is shaped by three classes of cognitive processes--positive situation classification, reappraisal, and interference inhibition--that can be investigated at the neural level. Prospects for the future development of resilience research are discussed.

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Unconscious motivation in humans is often inferred but rarely demonstrated empirically. We imaged motivational processes, implemented in a paradigm that varied the amount and reportability of monetary rewards for which subjects exerted physical effort. We show that, even when subjects cannot report how much money is at stake, they nevertheless deploy more force for higher amounts. Such a motivational effect is underpinned by engagement of a specific basal forebrain region. Our findings thus reveal this region as a key node in brain circuitry that enables expected rewards to energize behavior, without the need for the subjects' awareness.Humans tend to adapt the degree of effort they expend according to the magnitude of reward they expect. Such a process has been proposed as an operant concept of motivation (1-3). Motivational processes may be obvious, as when a prospector spends days in extreme conditions seeking gold. The popular view is that motivation can also be unconscious, such that a person may be unable to report the goals or rewards that drive a particular behavior. However, empirical evidence on this issue is lacking, and the potential brain mechanisms involved in converting expected rewards into behavioral activation are poorly understood.We developed an experimental paradigm to visualize unconscious motivational processes, using functional magnetic resonance imaging. A classical approach to trigger unconscious processing is subliminal stimulation, which can be implemented by means of masking procedures. The terminology we use in this report is based on a recent taxonomy (4), in which a process is considered subliminal if it is attended but not reportable. Successful brain imaging studies of subliminal processes have focused so far on processing words (5, 6) as well as emotional stimuli (7,8). In our study, the object of masking was an incentive stimulus for a future action, represented by the amount of reward at stake. The question we asked is whether, and how, the human brain energizes behavior in proportion to subliminal incentives.We developed an incentive force task, using money as a reward: a manipulation that is consistently shown to activate reward circuits in the human brain (9-11). The exact level of motivation was manipulated by randomly assigning the amount at stake as one pound or one penny. Pictures of the corresponding coins were displayed on a computer screen at the beginning of each trial, between two screenshots of "mask" images (Fig. 1). The reportabiity * To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: pessigli@ccr.jussieu.fr. Europe PMC Funders Group Europe PMC Funders Author ManuscriptsEurope PMC Funders Author Manuscripts of the monetary stakes depended on their display duration, which could be 17,50, or 100ms. The perception of the first two durations was determined as subliminal in a preliminary behavioral test, where subjects reported not seeing anything other than the mask. The third duration was consistently associated with conscious perception of the stimuli a...

In fear extinction, an animal learns that a conditioned stimulus (CS) no longer predicts a noxious stimulus [unconditioned stimulus (UCS)] to which it had previously been associated, leading to inhibition of the conditioned response (CR). Extinction creates a new CS-noUCS memory trace, competing with the initial fear (CS-UCS) memory. Recall of extinction memory and, hence, CR inhibition at later CS encounters is facilitated by contextual stimuli present during extinction training. In line with theoretical predictions derived from animal studies, we show that, after extinction, a CS-evoked engagement of human ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) and hippocampus is context dependent, being expressed in an extinction, but not a conditioning, context. Likewise, a positive correlation between VMPFC and hippocampal activity is extinction context dependent. Thus, a VMPFC-hippocampal network provides for contextdependent recall of human extinction memory, consistent with a view that hippocampus confers context dependence on VMPFC.

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Psychological resilience refers to the phenomenon that many people are able to adapt to the challenges of life and maintain mental health despite exposure to adversity. This has stimulated research on training programs to foster psychological resilience. We evaluated concepts, methods and designs of 43 randomized controlled trials published between 1979 and 2014 which assessed the efficacy of such training programs and propose standards for future intervention research based on recent developments in the field. We found that concepts, methods and designs in current resilience intervention studies are of limited use to properly assess efficacy of interventions to foster resilience. Major problems are the use of definitions of resilience as trait or a composite of resilience factors, the use of unsuited assessment instruments, and inappropriate study designs. To overcome these challenges, we propose 1) an outcome-oriented definition of resilience, 2) an outcome-oriented assessment of resilience as change in mental health in relation to stressor load, and 3) methodological standards for suitable study designs of future intervention studies. Our proposals may contribute to an improved quality of resilience intervention studies and may stimulate further progress in this growing research field.

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