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Neural correlates of affect processing and aggression in methamphetamine dependence.

ABSTRACT: Methamphetamine abuse is associated with high rates of aggression but few studies have addressed the contributing neurobiological factors.To quantify aggression, investigate function in the amygdala and prefrontal cortex, and assess relationships between brain function and behavior in methamphetamine-dependent individuals.In a case-control study, aggression and brain activation were compared between methamphetamine-dependent and control participants.Participants were recruited from the general community to an academic research center.Thirty-nine methamphetamine-dependent volunteers (16 women) who were abstinent for 7 to 10 days and 37 drug-free control volunteers (18 women) participated in the study; subsets completed self-report and behavioral measures. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was performed on 25 methamphetamine-dependent and 23 control participants.We measured self-reported and perpetrated aggression and self-reported alexithymia. Brain activation was assessed using fMRI during visual processing of facial affect (affect matching) and symbolic processing (affect labeling), the latter representing an incidental form of emotion regulation.Methamphetamine-dependent participants self-reported more aggression and alexithymia than control participants and escalated perpetrated aggression more following provocation. Alexithymia scores correlated with measures of aggression. During affect matching, fMRI showed no differences between groups in amygdala activation but found lower activation in methamphetamine-dependent than control participants in the bilateral ventral inferior frontal gyrus. During affect labeling, participants recruited the dorsal inferior frontal gyrus and exhibited decreased amygdala activity, consistent with successful emotion regulation; there was no group difference in this effect. The magnitude of decrease in amygdala activity during affect labeling correlated inversely with self-reported aggression in control participants and perpetrated aggression in all participants. Ventral inferior frontal gyrus activation correlated inversely with alexithymia in control participants.Contrary to the hypotheses, methamphetamine-dependent individuals may successfully regulate emotions through incidental means (affect labeling). Instead, low ventral inferior frontal gyrus activity may contribute to heightened aggression by limiting emotional insight.

SUBMITTER: Payer DE

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3447632 | biostudies-literature | 2011 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Neural correlates of affect processing and aggression in methamphetamine dependence.

Payer Doris E DE Lieberman Matthew D MD London Edythe D ED

Archives of general psychiatry 20101101 3

<h4>Context</h4>Methamphetamine abuse is associated with high rates of aggression but few studies have addressed the contributing neurobiological factors.<h4>Objective</h4>To quantify aggression, investigate function in the amygdala and prefrontal cortex, and assess relationships between brain function and behavior in methamphetamine-dependent individuals.<h4>Design</h4>In a case-control study, aggression and brain activation were compared between methamphetamine-dependent and control participan ...[more]

PMID: 21041607

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Project description:There exists growing interest in understanding the dynamics of resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) to establish mechanistic links between individual patterns of spontaneous neural activation and corresponding behavioral measures in both normative and clinical populations. Here we propose and validate a novel approach in which whole-brain rs-fMRI data are mapped to a specific low-dimensional representation-affective valence and arousal processing-prior to dynamic analysis. This mapping process constrains the state space such that both independent validation and visualization of the system's dynamics become tractable. To test this approach, we constructed neural decoding models of affective valence and arousal processing from brain states induced by International Affective Picture Set image stimuli during task-related fMRI in (n = 97) healthy control subjects. We applied these models to decode moment-to-moment affect processing in out-of-sample subjects' rs-fMRI data and computed first and second temporal derivatives of the resultant valence and arousal time-series. Finally, we fit a second set of neural decoding models to these derivatives, which function as neurally constrained ordinary differential equations (ODE) underlying affect processing dynamics. To validate these decodings, we simulated affect processing by numerical integration of the true temporal sequence of neurally decoded derivatives for each subject and demonstrated that these decodings generate significantly less (p < 0.05) group-level simulation error than integration based upon decoded derivatives sampled uniformly randomly from the true temporal sequence. Indeed, simulations of valence and arousal processing were significant for up to four steps of closed-loop simulation (Δt = 2.0 s) for both valence and arousal, respectively. Moreover, neural encoding representations of the ODE decodings include significant clusters of activation within brain regions associated with affective reactivity and regulation. Our work has methodological implications for efforts to identify unique and actionable biomarkers of possible future or current psychopathology, particularly those related to mood and emotional instability.

Dataset Information

Neural correlates of affect processing and aggression in methamphetamine dependence.

Publications

Neural correlates of affect processing and aggression in methamphetamine dependence.

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