Abstract
Background: Affective disorders are associated with comorbidity of depression and
anxiety symptoms. Positron emission tomography resting-state studies in affective
disorders have generally failed to isolate specific symptom effects. Emotion provocation
studies in healthy volunteers have produced variable results, due to differences in
experimental paradigm and instructions.
Methods: To better delineate the neural correlates of sad mood and anxiety, this study
used autobiographical memory scripts in eight healthy women to generate sadness, anxiety,
or a neutral relaxed state in a within-subject design.
Results: Sadness and anxiety, when contrasted to a neutral emotional state, engaged
a set of distinct paralimbic–cortical regions, with a limited number of common effects.
Sadness was accompanied by specific activations of the subgenual cingulate area (BA)
25 and dorsal insula, specific deactivation of the right prefrontal cortex BA 9, and
more prominent deactivation of the posterior parietal cortex BAs 40/7. Anxiety was
associated with specific activations of the ventral insula, the orbitofrontal and
anterior temporal cortices, specific deactivation of parahippocampal gyri, and more
prominent deactivation of the inferior temporal cortex BAs 20/37.
Conclusions: These findings are interpreted within a model in which sadness and anxiety
are represented by segregated corticolimbic pathways, where a major role is played
by selective dorsal cortical deactivations during sadness, and ventral cortical deactivations in anxiety.
Keywords
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Article info
Publication history
Accepted:
March 2,
2000
Received in revised form:
February 25,
2000
Received:
July 8,
1999
Identification
Copyright
© 2000 Society of Biological Psychiatry. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
