Linking Amygdala Persistence to Real-World Emotional Experience and Psychological Well-Being

Abstract

At the intersection of affective neuroscience and psychology, researchers have aimed to understand how individual differences in the neural processing of affective events map onto to real-world emotional experiences and evaluations of well-being.Using a longitudinal dataset from 52 adults in the Midlife in the US (MIDUS) study, we provide an integrative model of affective functioning: less amygdala persistence following negative images predicts greater positive affect in daily life, which in turn predicts greater psychological well-being seven years later. Thus, day-to-day experiences of positive affect comprise a promising intermediate step that links individual differences in neural dynamics to complex judgements of psychological wellbeing.

Increased theta/alpha synchrony in the habenula-prefrontal network with negative emotional stimuli in human patients

“…These activity changes at different time windows may reflect the different neuropsychological processes underlying emotion perception including identification and appraisal of emotional material, production of affective states, and autonomic response regulation and recovery ( Phillips et al, 2003a ). The later effects of increased theta activities in the habenula when the stimuli disappeared were also supported by other literature showing that there can be prolonged effects of negative stimuli in the neural structure involved in emotional processing ( Haas et al, 2008 ; Puccetti et al, 2021 ). In particular, greater sustained patterns of brain activity in the medial PFC when responding to blocks of negative facial expressions were associated with higher scores of neuroticism across participants ( Haas et al, 2008 ).…”

“…In particular, greater sustained patterns of brain activity in the medial PFC when responding to blocks of negative facial expressions were associated with higher scores of neuroticism across participants ( Haas et al, 2008 ). Slower amygdala recovery from negative images also predicts greater trait neuroticism, lower levels of likability of a set of social stimuli (neutral faces), and declined day-to-day psychological well-being ( Schuyler et al, 2014 ; Puccetti et al, 2021 ). This is the first study, to our knowledge, implicating increased theta band activities in the habenula-PFC network in negative emotions in human patients.…”

Anxiety-related frontocortical activity is associated with dampened stressor reactivity in the real world

“…No, mechanistic work in humans, monkeys, and rodents makes it abundantly clear that they are (Fox & Shackman, 2019; Hur et al, 2019). Instead, this work raises the possibility that conventional fMRI measures of emotion perception ( viewing photographs of fearful or angry faces ) and generation ( briefly waiting for aversive stimulation ) are suboptimal probes of the aspects of subcortical function most relevant to everyday affect (i.e., ‘wrong’ assay) (Puccetti et al, 2021; Sicorello et al, 2021). Alternatively, it could be that isolated regional measures of subcortical function are only weakly predictive of conscious feelings of negative affect and, hence, to typical state, trait, and clinical assessments (Brown, Lau, & LeDoux, 2019; Chang et al, 2015; LeDoux & Pine, 2016; Shackman & Fox, 2018).…”

The Neural Representations of Emotional Experiences Are More Similar Than Those of Neutral Experiences

“…The extent to which similarity along emotional dimensions influences perceived similarity between complex experiences is unknown. It is important to understand the effect of emotion on similarity because aberrant similarity perception influences psychological well-being (Puccetti et al, 2021) and is clinically relevant in anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorders (Laufer et al, 2016). For example, after a traumatic event, patients may consider later experiences to be similar to the original fearful one, not because of their ostensible meaning but because of their emotional similarity.…”