Gyógyszerészet, farmakogenomika, gyógyszerkutatás és tervezés, gyógyszeres kezelés
Emotional flexibility reflects the ability to adjust the emotional response to the
changing environmental context. To understand how context can trigger a change in
emotional response, i.e., how it can upregulate the initial emotional response or
trigger a shift in the valence of emotional response, we used a task consisting of
picture pairs during functional magnetic resonance imaging sessions. In each pair,
the first picture was a smaller detail (a decontextualized photograph depicting emotions
using primarily facial and postural expressions) from the second (contextualized)
picture, and the neural response to a decontextualized picture was compared with the
same picture in a context. Thirty-one healthy participants (18 females; mean age:
24.44 +/- 3.4) were involved in the study. In general, context (vs. pictures without
context) increased activation in areas involved in facial emotional processing (e.g.,
middle temporal gyrus, fusiform gyrus, and temporal pole) and affective mentalizing
(e.g., precuneus, temporoparietal junction). After excluding the general effect of
context by using an exclusive mask with activation to context vs. no-context, the
automatic shift from positive to negative valence induced by the context was associated
with increased activation in the thalamus, caudate, medial frontal gyrus and lateral
orbitofrontal cortex. When the meaning changed from negative to positive, it resulted
in a less widespread activation pattern, mainly in the precuneus, middle temporal
gyrus, and occipital lobe. Providing context cues to facial information recruited
brain areas that induced changes in the emotional responses and interpretation of
the emotional situations automatically to support emotional flexibility.
