Association between trait emotional awareness and dorsal anterior cingulate activity during emotion is arousal-dependent

Abstract

The dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) is commonly thought to subserve primarily cognitive functions, but has been strongly implicated in the allocation of attention to emotional information. In a previous positron emission tomography (PET) study, we observed that women with higher emotional awareness as measured by the Levels of Emotional Awareness Scale (LEAS) showed greater changes in regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) in dACC induced by emotional films and recall. In the current study, we tested whether these effects were due to the processing of any nonneutral stimulus, or were specific to conditions of high emotional arousal. Our results extend the previous finding by demonstrating a positive correlation between emotional awareness and dACC activity only in the context of viewing highly arousing pictures. No such relationship was observed when comparing pleasant or unpleasant pictures to neutral or to each other. We also observed that the relationship between LEAS and dACC activity was present in both sexes but stronger in women than men. These results reinforce the concept that greater trait awareness of one's own emotional experiences is associated with greater engagement of the dACC during emotional arousal, which we suggest may reflect greater attentional processing of emotional information.

Increased Activation of the Supragenual Anterior Cingulate Cortex during Visual Emotional Processing in Male Subjects with High Degrees of Alexithymia: An Event-Related fMRI Study

“…Furthermore, viewing of emotional pictures correlated positively with the individual TAS-20 scores but not with BDI scores in ACC. These results are in accordance with functional imaging studies demonstrating the role of the ACC in emotional processing and emotional consciousness [11,12,41] as well as with findings from lesion studies [14,15,17,18,42]. However, in contrast to Lane et al [9], we observed a stronger activation in the ACC of alexithymic subjects.…”

“…Another model involves dysfunction of the right hemisphere evidenced by the fact that highly alexithymic individuals and patients with right hemisphere lesion show difficulties in recognizing facial expressions of emotions [2,3]. We focus on the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) deficit model [7] since it is supported by functional imaging studies on healthy subjects [8,9,10,11] as well as by lesion studies [12,13,14,15,16] and has been in the focus of neuroimaging studies on alexithymia [4,17,18,19]. According to this model, alexithymia is associated with impoverished conscious experience of emotion caused by an altered function of the ACC.…”

Individual differences in socioaffective skills influence the neural bases of fear processing: The case of alexithymia

“…Lane et al [1997] have conceptualized alexithymia as a poor capacity to consciously experience emotional feelings and coined the term ''blindfeel'' (i.e., the emotional equivalent of blindsight; [Lane et al, 1997]). Furthermore, they speculated it would be associated with an abnormal participation of the ACC during emotional arousal on the basis that the level of activity in dorsal ACC to emotion-inducing stimuli was related to high-emotional awareness [Lane et al, 1998; see also McRae et al, 2008].…”

The neural basis of one's own conscious and unconscious emotional states

“…Conscious experience may also require that the information contained in stage 2 representations be made available to cognitive control structures such as dACC (Shackman et al, 2011) for use in guiding action selection. This notion of consciousness requiring that represented information be made cognitively accessible (possibly through attentional modulation; see Baars, 2002Baars, , 2005Prinz, 2012) may also explain findings relating dACC activity to differing trait levels of emotional awareness (Lane et al, 2011(Lane et al, , 1998McRae et al, 2008).…”