Increased BOLD signal in the fusiform gyrus during implicit emotion processing in anorexia nervosa

Abstract

BackgroundThe behavioural literature in anorexia nervosa (AN) has suggested impairments in psychosocial functioning and studies using facial expression processing tasks (FEPT) have reported poorer recognition and slower identification of emotions.MethodsFunctional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used alongside a FEPT, depicting neutral, mildly happy and happy faces, to examine the neural correlates of implicit emotion processing in AN. Participants were instructed to specify the gender of the faces. Levels of depression, anxiety, obsessive–compulsive symptoms and eating disorder behaviour were obtained and principal component analysis (PCA) was performed to acquire uncorrelated variables.ResultsfMRI analysis revealed a greater blood-oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) response in AN in the right fusiform gyrus to all facial expressions. This response showed a linear increase with the happiness of the facial expression and was found to be stronger in those not taking medication. PCA analysis revealed a single component indicating a greater level of general clinical symptoms.ConclusionNeuroimaging findings would suggest that alterations in implicit emotion processing in AN occur during early perceptual processing of social signals and illustrate greater engagement on the FEPT. The lack of separate components using PCA suggests that the questionnaires used might not be suited as predictive measures.

Alteration of spontaneous neuronal activity in young adults with non-clinical depressive symptoms

“…Altered responsiveness to facial emotional stimuli was proposed as one of the biomarkers for the early diagnosis of MDD (Hahn et al, 2011). Evidence from structural MRI (Liao et al, 2013), task-based fMRI (Fonville et al, 2014) and rs-fMRI studies have demonstrated that the functioning or fusiform structure has been altered in MDD patients. Accounting for these findings, our results suggest that the visual recognition network is impaired in nCDSs subjects, and that the increased ALFF in the left fusiform and right cuneus may be due to visual recognition compensation, which indicates that this is the potential pathophysiological mechanism underlying the facial emotion-processing deficits observed in subjects with nCDSs.…”

Functional brain alterations in anorexia nervosa: a scoping review

“…Performance on a central coherence task was associated with reduced activity in the precuneus and increased activation in the fusiform gyrus in one study [31] and reduced task-related activation in the fusiform gyrus and the middle occipital gyrus in another study [32]. Inhibitory processing was associated with reduced activity in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, middle frontal gyrus and posterior cingulate cortex [33], and activation patterns were found to be dependent on the type of stimuli used in the task [34].…”

Blunted neural response to implicit negative facial affect in anorexia nervosa

“…Further, one of the included studies found that reduced response in the lateral and medial PFC to social behaviour at admission to treatment was associated with poorer outcome at discharge (SchulteRüther, Mainz, Fink, Herpertz-Dahlmann, & Konrad, 2012). A recent study investigating implicit processing of happy faces of increasing intensity found greater linear increase in activation of the fusiform gyrus in people with acute AN relative to HCs (Fonville, Giampietro, Surguladze, Williams, & Tchanturia, 2014). Another study, using a more explicit task, found reduced amygdala response in people recovered from AN relative to HCs in response to negative facial expressions when the faces were coupled with the congruent emotion label (Bang, Ro, & Endestad, 2016).…”