Cingulate Cortex Flashcards
The Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC) is involved in…
• integration of visceral, attentional and emotional information;
• generation of subjective feelings, i.e., conscious emotion experience (connections with insula);
• emotion regulation (connections with PFC);
• representation of autonomic arousal and generation of autonomic changes (connections with PFC);
• monitoring of conflict between the current functional state of the organism and any new information with potential affective consequences;
• pain anticipation and analgesia, pain control, social pain
Activity in the ACC is enhanced when…
attending to heartbeat timing (relative to an exteroceptive “note” task)→ interoceptive awareness
Individual differences in intensity of emotional experience reflect
variation in sensitivity to internal bodily responses, indeed influential theories of human emotion
argue that subjective feeling states involve representation of bodily responses elicited by emotional event
Whats the conjoint activity of anterior insular and anterior cingulate cortices?
anterior insular and anterior cingulate cortices are crucial, firstly, for the production of subjective feelings and, secondly, for co-ordinating appropriate responses to internal and external events.
It is argued that feeling states emerge from the raw data of sensory (including interoceptive) inputs and are integrated through representations in conscious awareness.
What did functional neuroimaging studies of alexithymia show?
Alexithymia is the reduced capacity for fantasizing, identifying, verbalizing, and thinking about emotions. Neuro imaging studies have consistently shown reduced activation of ACC in response to emotionally relevant stimuli in presence of alexithymia
Which are the evidences about relationships between activity in dorsal ACC and changes in different measures of autonomic arousal during cognitive, motor and emotional tasks?
Significant correlations between activity in dorsal ACC and changes in different measures of autonomic arousal during cognitive (mental arithmetic), motor (physical exercise), and emotional tasks→ effort-related activity independent of task modality; control of integrated states of autonomic arousal during volitional behaviors.
Unfortunately, neuroimaging studies do not address causality, i.e., whether the activity in ACC
(and related regions) is involved, generates and/or represents the peripheral autonomic response
The ACC is necessary for…
the appropriate generation of autonomic arousal during effortful cognitive and physical work
What’s the pain?
Pain can be conceived as a multidimensional experience arising from the conjoint activation of
physiologically and anatomically distinct but interacting CNS structures each separately mediating
sensory discriminative, affective, and cognitive aspects of pain
Which are the brain areas involved in pain?
- Thalamus, SI, SII: sensory
- INS, ACC: affective/motivational
- dLPFC: cognitive
Were do affective and sensory components of pain are encoded?
Affective and sensory components of pain are encoded in different regions of the cingulate cortex
Affective component: pACC
Sensory component: PCC
What’s the source of the pain of social rejection?
activity in the pACC is increased during social exclusion, and correlates with the level of experienced distress
What do experience of social and physical pain have in common?
The experience of social and physical pain share a common neuroanatomical basis
Because of the importance of social bonds for the survival of most mammalian species, the social
attachment system may have adopted the neural computations of the ACC, involved in pain and conflict detection processes, to promote the goal of social connectedness
ACC conflict detection
the dorsal ACC is more sensitive to conflict in the cognitive domain, whereas the rostral ACC is more activated in response to emotional interference
