Modulation of brain response to emotional conflict as a function of current mood in bipolar disorder: Preliminary findings from a follow-up state-based fMRI study

Abstract

a b s t r a c tWe used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine affective control longitudinally in a group of patients with bipolar disorder (BD). Participants comprised 12 BD patients who underwent repeated fMRI scans in euthymic (n ¼ 11), depressed (n ¼9), or hypomanic (n ¼9) states, and were compared with 12 age-matched healthy controls. During fMRI, participants performed an emotional face-word interference task with either low or high attentional demands. Relative to healthy controls, patients showed decreased activation of the cognitive control network normally associated with conflict processing, more severely during hypomania than during depression, but regardless of level of task demand in both cases. During euthymia, a decreased response to conflict was observed only during the high load condition. Additionally, unlike healthy participants, patients exhibited deactivation in several key areas in response to emotion-conflict trials -including the rostral anterior cingulate cortex during euthymia, the hippocampus during depression, and the posterior cingulate cortex during hypomania. Our results indicate that the ability of BD patients to recruit control networks when processing affective conflict, and the abnormal suppression of activity in distinct components of the default mode network, may depend on their current clinical state and attentional demand.

Orbital and Medial Prefrontal Cortex Functional Connectivity of Major Depression Vulnerability and Disease

“…The involved dorsal medial PFC region extends from the cingulate sulcus until the dorsal convexity of the superior frontal gyrus at around the intersection of the cognitive and affective part of the medial PFC (40). This region has dense anatomical connections to autonomic centers (41, 42), and has been implicated in assessment salience and affective value of emotional information (43), conflict monitoring in the presence of emotional distractors (40, 44–49) as well as in awareness and regulation of emotional responses (40, 50–52). This affective bias hypothesis is furthermore in agreement with behavioral characteristics observed in people with genetic MD susceptibility and remitted depressed (53, 54) such as difficulty directing attention away from negative stimuli (54), reappraising (55) and suppressing negative distractors (56).…”

The influence of emotional interference on cognitive control: A meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies using the emotional Stroop task

“…Correspondingly, the emotionally neutral words were considered as the “congruent” condition. (2) For ‘type two’ Stroop tasks (emotional “word-face” Stroop tasks) 6, 21, 30 , the condition in which the emotional facial expression differed from the overlaid word’s emotional valence (e.g., the word “happy” with an “angry” face) was treated as the “incongruent” condition, while trials in which the facial expression was similar to the word’s emotional valence (e.g., the word “happy” with a “happy” face) were treated as the “congruent” condition. (3) For ‘type three’ Stroop tasks (“priming” emotional Stroop tasks) 18, 20 , the condition in which the color of the word differed from its lexical meaning (e.g., the word “blue” in red color) was treated as the “incongruent” condition, while trials with the color fitting its lexical meaning (e.g., the word “blue” in blue color) were treated as the “congruent” condition.…”

“…However, in this traditional variant of the task, the emotional word stimuli are not semantically-relevant to the task instructions 28 (e.g., naming the ink color of words, or counting the number of words), which results in only mild emotional interference, as previously shown in healthy subjects 6, 29 . A second emotional Stroop task type is the emotional “word-face” task, in which negative or positive words are overlaid on negative or positive facial expressions 6, 21, 30 . The words are either incongruent or congruent with the emotion expressed by the face stimuli, and participants are asked to identify the emotional expression of the faces while ignoring the overlaid emotionally-charged words or vice versa.…”

Neural Systems Underlying Emotional and Non-emotional Interference Processing: An ALE Meta-Analysis of Functional Neuroimaging Studies

“…Recent years have seen a surge of interest in investigating emotional interference processing, and neuroimaging studies have reported altered emotional and non-emotional interference processing in patients with major depression disorders (Fales et al, 2008; Etkin and Schatzberg, 2011; Chechko et al, 2013), posttraumatic stress disorder (Bremner et al, 2004; Shin et al, 2007), bipolar disorder (Kronhaus et al, 2006; Rey et al, 2014) and so forth. Comparing neural systems engaged in emotional vs. non-emotional interference processing would help differentiate brain areas associated with domain-general control processes from those that are associated with a specific domain, which would aid the interpretation of results from patient studies.…”