Neural Control of Vascular Reactions: Impact of Emotion and Attention

Abstract

This study investigated the neural regions involved in blood pressure reactions to negative stimuli and their possible modulation by attention. Twenty-four healthy human subjects (11 females; age ϭ 24.75 Ϯ 2.49 years) participated in an affective perceptual load task that manipulated attention to negative/neutral distractor pictures. fMRI data were collected simultaneously with continuous recording of peripheral arterial blood pressure. A parametric modulation analysis examined the impact of attention and emotion on the relation between neural activation and blood pressure reactivity during the task. When attention was available for processing the distractor pictures, negative pictures resulted in behavioral interference, neural activation in brain regions previously related to emotion, a transient decrease of blood pressure, and a positive correlation between blood pressure response and activation in a network including prefrontal and parietal regions, the amygdala, caudate, and mid-brain. These effects were modulated by attention; behavioral and neural responses to highly negative distractor pictures (compared with neutral pictures) were smaller or diminished, as was the negative blood pressure response when the central task involved high perceptual load. Furthermore, comparing high and low load revealed enhanced activation in frontoparietal regions implicated in attention control. Our results fit theories emphasizing the role of attention in the control of behavioral and neural reactions to irrelevant emotional distracting information. Our findings furthermore extend the function of attention to the control of autonomous reactions associated with negative emotions by showing altered blood pressure reactions to emotional stimuli, the latter being of potential clinical relevance.

The neural networks of subjectively evaluated emotional conflicts

“…In line with previous evidence that suggests that emotion and executive functions share neural processes [Ochsner et al, ; Okon‐Singer et al, , ; Rohr et al, ], our conjunction analysis found STS and IPL to be involved in both the prioritization of either positive or negative cues and subjective conflict evaluation. Greater activity in the STS correlated with subjectively evaluating a conflict as less intense, and also correlated with prioritizing positive over negative cues during the scenes.…”

“…However, it is not yet clear how neural underpinnings differ when positive or negative cues are prioritized regardless of the modality in which they are presented. In addition, accumulating evidence suggests that emotion and executive functions are inherently linked [Ochsner et al, ; Okon‐Singer et al, , ; Rohr et al, ], highlighting the possibility that conflict evaluation, an executive process, and valence prioritization, an emotion process, may rely on shared neural processes.…”

The neurobiology of emotion–cognition interactions: fundamental questions and strategies for future research

“…Converging with other work focused on emotion-related distraction (Bishop, 2007; Etkin, 2012; Bishop and Forster, 2013; Etkin et al, 2013; Okon-Singer et al, 2014a; van Ast et al, 2014), they suggest that degraded performance reflects two processes: (a) increased engagement of regions involved in processing socio-emotional information and orchestrating emotional expressions (e.g., amygdala), and (b) a reduction of delay-spanning activity in frontoparietal cortex.…”

Blood pressure reaction to negative stimuli: Insights from continuous recording and analysis

“…The results demonstrated that among healthy individuals, neurocognitive attention mechanisms modulate BP and neural reactions to aversive stimuli in a network that includes prefrontal, parietal, limbic and brainstem regions previously shown to be related both to emotion control and to BP reactivity. Gupta () suggested that the decline in BP levels shown by Okon‐Singer et al () is due to activation of feedback mechanisms in brain regions associated with emotional processing (Gupta, ). In our study, similar mechanisms may have caused the BP decrease in response to negative‐valenced pictures.…”

“…The pictures were chosen according to valence ratings based on International Affective Norms for participants. Eighty pictures had negative valences ( M : 2.35, SD : 0.84) and 80 pictures had neutral valences ( M : 5.13, SD : 0.51), based on Okon‐Singer et al (). No differences were found between negative and neutral pictures in visual features such as luminance, contrast or dominant spatial frequency.…”