Phylogenetic threats such as spiders evoke our deepest primitive fears. When close or looming, such threats engage evolutionarily conserved monitoring systems and defense reactions that promote self-preservation. With the use of a modified behavioral approach task within functional MRI, we show that, as a tarantula was placed closer to a subject's foot, increased experiences of fear coincided with augmented activity in a cascade of fear-related brain networks including the periaqueductal gray, amygdala, and bed nucleus of the stria terminalis. Activity in the amygdala was also associated with underprediction of the tarantula's threat value and, in addition to the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, with monitoring the tarantula's threat value as indexed by its direction of movement. Conversely, the orbitofrontal cortex was engaged as the tarantula grew more distant, suggesting that this region emits safety signals or expels fear. Our findings fractionate the neurobiological mechanisms associated with basic fear and potentially illuminate the perturbed reactions that characterize clinical phobias.

A functional magnetic resonance imaging study reveals the interactions within the brain that modulate feelings of reward on seeing a similar person win a contest.

Chronic low back pain is a common neurological disorder. The periaqueductal gray (PAG) plays a key role in the descending modulation of pain. In this study, we investigated brain resting state PAG functional connectivity (FC) differences between patients with chronic low back pain (cLBP) in low pain or high pain condition and matched healthy controls (HCs). PAG seed based functional connectivity (FC) analysis of the functional MR imaging data was performed to investigate the difference among the connectivity maps in the cLBP in the low or high pain condition and HC groups as well as within the cLBP at differing endogenous back pain intensities. Results showed that FC between the PAG and the ventral medial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC)/rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC) increased in cLBP patients compared to matched controls. In addition, we also found significant negative correlations between pain ratings and PAG-vmPFC/rACC FC in cLBP patients after pain-inducing maneuver. The duration of cLBP was negatively correlated with PAG-insula and PAG-amygdala FC before pain-inducing maneuver in the patient group. These findings are in line with the impairments of the descending pain modulation reported in patients with cLBP. Our results provide evidence showing that cLBP patients have abnormal FC in PAG centered pain modulation network during rest.

Reduced haemodynamic response in the frontotemporal cortices of patients with major depressive disorder (MDD) has been demonstrated using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Most notably, changes in cortical oxy-haemoglobin during a Japanese phonetic fluency task can differentiate psychiatric patients from healthy controls (HC). However, this paradigm has not been validated in the English language. Therefore, the present work aimed to distinguish patients with MDD from HCs, using haemodynamic response measured during an English letter fluency task. One hundred and five HCs and 105 patients with MDD took part in this study. NIRS signals during the verbal fluency task (VFT) was acquired using a 52-channel system, and changes in oxy-haemoglobin in the frontal and temporal regions were quantified. Depression severity, psychosocial functioning, pharmacotherapy and psychiatric history were noted. Patients with MDD had smaller changes in oxy-haemoglobin in the frontal and temporal cortices than HCs. In both regions of interest, oxy-haemoglobin was not associated with any of the clinical variables studied. 75.2% and 76.5% of patients with MDD were correctly classified using frontal and temporal region oxy-haemoglobin, respectively. Haemodynamic response measured by fNIRS during an English letter fluency task is a promising biomarker for MDD.

Humans often make decisions in stressful situations, for example when the stakes are high and the potential consequences severe, or when the clock is ticking and the task demand is overwhelming. In response, a whole train of biological responses to stress has evolved to allow organisms to make a fight-or-flight response. When under stress, fast and effortless heuristics may dominate over slow and demanding deliberation in making decisions under uncertainty. Here, I review evidence from behavioral studies and neuroimaging research on decision making under stress and propose that stress elicits a switch from an analytic reasoning system to intuitive processes, and predict that this switch is associated with diminished activity in the prefrontal executive control regions and exaggerated activity in subcortical reactive emotion brain areas. Previous studies have shown that when stressed, individuals tend to make more habitual responses than goal-directed choices, be less likely to adjust their initial judgment, and rely more on gut feelings in social situations. It is possible that stress influences the arbitration between the emotion responses in subcortical regions and deliberative processes in the prefrontal cortex, so that final decisions are based on unexamined innate responses. Future research may further test this 'stress induced deliberation-to-intuition' (SIDI) model and examine its underlying neural mechanisms.