The anterior temporal lobe ( ATL ) is an important tool for understanding social hierarchies and facial emotions and providing insight into anxiety and mood disorders. A study project used developed imaging methods to overcome previous difficulties in studying the ATL, revealing its intense detection when social and emotional decisions were made.
Findings indicate that anxiety interferes with this region’s ability to balance between personal and lexical processing. Current research aims to comprehend ATL links and how gender differences affect these processes.
Important Information:
- ATL’s Role: The frontal temporal lobe is essential for making social and emotional connections.
- Anxiety Link: An increased ATL activity in frightened people indicates a stymied emotional interpretation.
- Potential Research: Understanding the uncinate fasciculus and other fundamental connections may help to explain causes of anxiety and grief.
Origin: UJI
To advance our understanding of anxiety and mood disorders, it may be important to understand how our brains interpret social pyramid or physical emotions.
The project, led by Maya Visser, at the University Jaume I in Castelló, investigates the role of the anterior temporal lobe ( ATL ) in the brain network that gives meaning to social and emotional concepts.
The anterior temporal lobe ( ATL ) has historically been understudied because of the geometric distortions produced by functional magnetic resonance imaging ( fMRI), which have hampered the ability to perform an accurate analysis of this region.
But, NFN group research at the University of Jaume I has used precise methods to overcome these limitations and demonstrate that the ATL is involved in both meaning-processing and social and emotional decisions.
The project investigates how the frontal and limbic regions of the brain communicate with the anterior temporal lobe ( ATL ) when we interpret social situations or express feelings, funded by the 2021 National Plan for Scientific Research.
In contrast, it looks at how mild anxiety, which is the state of the network of connections, does change in people who are not yet at the boundary for a proper diagnosis but also capable of affecting brain function.
The project’s preliminary analyses have so far demonstrated that when people interpret social hierarchies or make decisions based on emotional facial expressions, the upper part of the anterior temporal lobe ( ATL ) is highly activated.
Additionally, it has been discovered that people with high levels of anxiety exhibit greater activation in this area of the brain, perhaps because anxiety is thought to have a bad impact on how social concepts are perceived, such as feeling inferior when seeing a winner or feeling regretful when making mistakes.
In such cases, the interaction between the emotional system and the semantic system ( located in the ATL ) is compromised. These results have already been published, and they are currently being reviewed by professional scientific journals.
Despite the promising outcomes, critical steps must be taken. The uncinate fasciculus, which connects the anterior temporal lobe ( ATL ) with the orbitofrontal cortex and may play a significant role in processing anxiety and guilt, needs to be completed in order to complete the functional and structural analyses of various brain regions.
Also, efforts are being made to obtain a gender-balanced sample as a scientific challenge in order to allow for an accurate analysis of gender differences.
Maya Visser is a researcher at the University Jaume I’s Department of Basic and Clinical Psychology and Psychobiology. She has conducted research on the role of conceptual control in social and emotional behavior throughout her career at research institutes in Spain, the UK, and the Netherlands. S.
He is a member of the multidisciplinary team that integrates neuroimaging techniques with experimental models to study brain systems in both healthy and clinical populations, including those in philosophy, neurology, knowledge, and branding. He is a member of the Neuropsychology and Functional Neuroimaging ( NFN) study group.
With this program, the University of Jaume I once again pledges itself to conducting research that will positively affect mental health while combining a basic understanding of the human brain.
Jobs like these provide new insights into addressing mental problems from the perspective of thought and meaning, and they help us better understand how we think, feel, and sit together.
Funding: This exploration is part of job PID2021-127516NB-I00, funded by MICIU/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and FEDER/UE.
About this information about social neuroscience research
Author: Mari Luz Blanco Burgueo
Source: UJI
Contact: Mari Luz Blanco Burgueño – UJI
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
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Maya Visser and colleagues ‘ study” Personal sleep quality in healthy young people reformers associations of sensitivity to punishment and reward with practical communication of regions appropriate for insomnia problem.” SLEEP
Abstract
Subjective sleep quality in healthy young adults moderates connections between sensitivity to punishment and reward and functional connectivity of areas essential for insomnia disorders.
A significant risk factor for the development of mood and anxiety disorders is chronic, poor sleeping habits. However, we still haven’t fully understood why some people are more susceptible than others to affective dysregulation brought on by sleep disruption.
We conducted whole-brain resting-state functional connectivity analyses in a large cohort of healthy young adults ( N , = , 155 ) with preliminary evidence suggesting that brain activity during both positive and negative emotional processing might play an important modulating role.
We examined sleep quality-related neural connectivity patterns that were sensitive to interactions with individual measures of reward and punishment processing while using regions that have been consistently affected by insomnia as seeds as experiments.
The good and poor sleepers had the opposite associations reported in terms of the majority of the research findings, which were related to interactions between reinforcement sensitivity and sleep quality.
The coupling between the precentral gyrus and the posterior insula, one of these connections, was also negatively related to trait anxiety, with the lowest connectivity values observed in poor sleepers with higher sensitivity to punishment.
The only other factor related to the habitual use of emotion suppression strategies was the coupling between subgenual anterior cingulate cortex and thalamus, which was the only one related to sleep quality.
In this context, the present study provides evidence that reinforcement sensitivity contributes greatly to understanding the connections between poor sleep quality and brain connectivity and emotional well-being, implying a potential link that could help explain how individual differences in susceptibility to sleep-related affective dysregulation.
