Ventromedial prefrontal cortex connectivity during and after psychological stress in women

Abstract

The ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) integrates sensory, affective, memory‐related, and social information from diverse brain systems to coordinate behavioral and peripheral physiological responses according to contextual demands that are appraised as stressful. However, the functionality of the vmPFC during stressful experiences is not fully understood. Among 40 female participants, the present study evaluated (a) functional connectivity of the vmPFC during exposure to and recovery following an acute psychological stressor, (b) associations among vmPFC functional connectivity, heart rate, and subjective reports of stress across individuals, and (c) whether patterns of vmPFC functional connectivity were associated with distributed brain networks. Results showed that psychological stress increased vmPFC functional connectivity with individual brain areas implicated in stressor processing (e.g., insula, amygdala, anterior cingulate cortex) and decreased connectivity with the posterior cingulate cortex and thalamus. There were no statistical differences in vmPFC connectivity to individual brain areas during recovery, as compared with baseline. Spatial similarity analyses revealed stressor‐evoked increased connectivity of the vmPFC with the so‐called dorsal attention, ventral attention, and frontoparietal networks, as well as decreased connectivity with the default mode network. During recovery, vmPFC connectivity increased with the frontoparietal network. Finally, individual differences in heart rate and perceived stress were associated with vmPFC connectivity to the ventral attention, frontoparietal, and default mode networks. Psychological stress appears to alter network‐level functional connectivity of the vmPFC in a manner that further relates to individual differences in stressor‐evoked cardiovascular and affective reactivity.

Dysregulated functional brain connectivity in response to acute social-evaluative stress in adolescents with PTSD symptoms

“…Another alternative explanation for our amygdala null-result may be the type of stressor we used to induce social-evaluative stress. Social-evaluative stress was previously found to be able to induce stressor-evoked connectivity changes in the amygdala in healthy females (Ginty et al, 2019 ), possibly due to its role in autonomic changes such as HR in response to multiple types of stressors, which we also demonstrated in our participants. Nevertheless, it remains to be investigated how comparable the various paradigms of stress studies are, as social-evaluative stress may not provoke different amygdala responses between those affected and not affected by PTSD in the manner of trauma-related and emotional stimuli, because the latter induce traumatic memory recall.…”

“…Also, some may consider the 2-minute time length of the Stress phase of the social-evaluative stress task too short to exhibit an accurate stress response for PPI analyses. Although our experimental design was previously demonstrated to induce a robust neural and cardiac stress response (Ginty et al, 2019 ; Wager et al, 2009b , 2009a ), Noack, Nolte, Nieratschker, Habel, and Derntl ( 2019 ) stated that social-evaluative threat (SET) has not yet been sufficiently proven to be a well-suited and robust stressor paradigm for the MR scanner – despite its promising purpose – so therefore we recommend using a more extensively validated task for future PTSD-related research. Additionally, home saliva sampling was performed on one day instead of multiple days and on a weekend day, which could have caused variability of the CAR and diurnal cortisol profiles (Stalder et al, 2016 ).…”

“…Nevertheless, as PTSD is associated with problems in social functioning (McLean, Rosenbach, Capaldi, & Foa, 2013 ; Schnurr, Lunney, Bovin, & Marx, 2009 ), it is of interest to investigate whether neural reactivity to this type of stressor is also dysregulated in individuals with PTSD, as was found for other types of stressors. Social-evaluative stressors are potent activators of central and peripheral stress systems (Dickerson & Kemeny, 2004 ; Ginty, Kraynak, Kuan, & Gianaros, 2019 ; Wager et al, 2009a ). Furthermore, in both healthy adult and adolescent populations, involved brain regions and networks largely overlap between reactivity to and recovery from social-evaluative stressors and other types of stressors (Hermans, Henckens, Joëls, & Fernández, 2014 ; Liu et al, 2012 ; Van Oort et al, 2017 ), specifically for the hippocampus, mPFC, and amygdala.…”

A Biologically Inspired Neural Network Model to Gain Insight Into the Mechanisms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Therapy

“…In the model ( Figure 1 ), the PFC unit represents vmPFC or dlPFC, depending on the therapy that is being simulated and receives plastic inputs from the unimodal sensory cortices. These should not be intended to represent direct anatomical projection, but functional indirect connections that are modulated by learning (Bhanji et al, 2019 ; Ginty et al, 2019 ). In Figure 1 , and throughout the article, the weight of the connection between the PFC and amygdala is indicated by ϕ.…”

Life event stress is associated with blunted cardiovascular responding to both personally salient and personally non‐salient laboratory tasks

“…Indeed many blunted reactivity studies show that the magnitude of the biological stress response is independent of the psychological perception of stressfulness (e.g., Bibbey et al, 2013;Heaney et al, 2011) or emotional responses to the task (Campbell & Ehlert, 2012). This trait-like characteristic of reactivity has been demonstrated with cardiovascular reactivity in young adulthood predictive of reactivity in later adulthood (Hassellunud et al, 2010;Sherwood et al, 1997), as well as evidence of consistency in children and adult's hemodynamic responses to different laboratory stressors (Ginty et al, 2013(Ginty et al, , 2019Musante et al, 1994).…”