Faculty Collaboration Database

Disentangling the effects of novelty, valence and trait anxiety in the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, amygdala and hippocampus with high resolution 7T fMRI. Neuroimage 2017 Aug 01;156:293-301

Date

05/16/2017

Pubmed ID

28502843

Pubmed Central ID

PMC5548630

DOI

10.1016/j.neuroimage.2017.05.009

Scopus ID

2-s2.0-85019644144 (requires institutional sign-in at Scopus site)   16 Citations

Abstract

The hippocampus and amygdala exhibit sensitivity to stimulus novelty that is reduced in participants with inhibited temperament, which is related to trait anxiety. Although the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST) is highly connected to the amygdala and is implicated in anxiety, whether the BNST responds to novelty remains unstudied, as well as how trait anxiety may modulate this response. Additionally how novelty, stimulus negativity and trait anxiety interact to affect activity in these areas is also unclear. To address these questions, we presented participants with novel and repeated, fearful and neutral faces, while measuring brain activity via fMRI, and also assessed participants' self-reported trait anxiety. As the small size of the BNST makes assessing its activity at typical fMRI resolution difficult, we employed high resolution 7 Tesla scanning. Our results replicate findings of novelty sensitivity that is independent of valence in the hippocampus. Our results also provide novel evidence for a BNST novelty response toward neutral, but not fearful faces. We also found that the novelty response in the hippocampus and BNST was blunted in participants with high trait anxiety. Additionally, we found left amygdala sensitivity to stimulus negativity that was blunted for high trait anxiety participants. These findings extend past research on the response to novel stimuli in the hippocampus and amygdala at high resolution, and are the first to demonstrate trait anxiety modulated novelty sensitivity in the BNST that is dependent on stimulus valence.

Author List

Pedersen WS, Muftuler LT, Larson CL

Author

Lutfi Tugan Muftuler PhD Professor in the Neurosurgery department at Medical College of Wisconsin

MESH terms used to index this publication - Major topics in bold

Amygdala
Anxiety
Arousal
Female
Hippocampus
Humans
Image Processing, Computer-Assisted
Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Male
Photic Stimulation
Septal Nuclei
Young Adult