Madoka Noriuchi

The Functional Neuroanatomy of Maternal Love: Mother’s Response to Infant’s Attachment Behaviors

BACKGROUND Maternal love, which may be the core of maternal behavior, is essential for the mother-infant attachment relationship and is important for the infants development and mental health. However, little has been known about these neural mechanisms in human mothers. We examined patterns of maternal brain activation in response to infant cues using video clips. METHODS We performed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) measurements while 13 mothers viewed video clips, with no sound, of their own infant and other infants of approximately 16 months of age who demonstrated two different attachment behaviors (smiling at the infants mother and crying for her). RESULTS We found that a limited number of the mothers brain areas were specifically involved in recognition of the mothers own infant, namely orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), periaqueductal gray, anterior insula, and dorsal and ventrolateral parts of putamen. Additionally, we found the strong and specific mothers brain response for the mothers own infants distress. The differential neural activation pattern was found in the dorsal region of OFC, caudate nucleus, right inferior frontal gyrus, dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (PFC), anterior cingulate, posterior cingulate, thalamus, substantia nigra, posterior superior temporal sulcus, and PFC. CONCLUSIONS Our results showed the highly elaborate neural mechanism mediating maternal love and diverse and complex maternal behaviors for vigilant protectiveness.

Altered white matter fractional anisotropy and social impairment in children with autism spectrum disorder.

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have severe difficulties in social interaction and communication, as well as restricted and/or stereotyped patterns of behavior. Previous studies have suggested that abnormal neural connectivity might be associated with higher information processing dysfunction involving social impairment. However, the white matter structure in ASD is poorly understood. To explore this, we conducted a voxel-based, whole-brain diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) analysis to determine fractional anisotropy (FA), λ(1), λ(2) and λ(3) in high-functioning children with ASD compared with age-, gender-, and handedness-matched healthy control participants. We then investigated whether DTI parameters were associated with behaviorally measured social function. We found that FA and λ(1) were significantly lower in the ASD group than in the control group in the white matter around left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), posterior superior temporal sulcus/temporo-parietal junction, right temporal pole, amygdala, superior longitudinal fasciculus, occipitofrontal fasciculus, mid- and left anterior corpus callosum, and mid- and right anterior cingulate cortex. The FA value in the left DLPFC was negatively correlated with the degree of social impairment in children with ASD. Higher λ(1) values were observed in the cerebellar vermis lobules in the ASD group. The white matter alterations in children with ASD were around cortical regions that play important roles in social cognition and information integration. These DTI results and their relationship to social impairment add to evidence of cerebral and cerebellar white matter structural abnormalities in ASD.

Emotional discrimination during viewing unpleasant pictures: timing in human anterior ventrolateral prefrontal cortex and amygdala

The ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC) and amygdala have critical roles in the generation and regulation of unpleasant emotions, and in this study the dynamic neural basis of unpleasant emotion processing was elucidated by using paired-samples permutation t-tests to identify the timing of emotional discrimination in various brain regions. We recorded the temporal dynamics of blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) signals in those brain regions during the viewing of unpleasant pictures by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with high temporal resolution, and we compared the time course of the signal within the volume of interest (VOI) across emotional conditions. Results show that emotional discrimination in the right amygdala precedes that in the left amygdala and that emotional discrimination in both those regions precedes that in the right anterior VLPFC. They support the hypotheses that the right amygdala is part of a rapid emotional stimulus detection system and the left amygdala is specialized for sustained stimulus evaluation and that the right anterior VLPFC is implicated in the integration of viscerosensory information with affective signals between the bilateral anterior VLPFCs and the bilateral amygdalae.

Utility of the Japanese version of the Checklist for Autism in Toddlers for predicting pervasive developmental disorders at age 2

We evaluated the utility of the Japanese version of the Checklist for Autism in Toddlers for predicting pervasive developmental disorders (PDD) among 2‐year‐old children in clinical settings. Confirmed diagnosis revealed that the pass rate on four items (social interest, proto‐imperative pointing, proto‐declarative pointing and joint‐attention) was significantly lower in 52 PDD children than in 48 non‐PDD children, and if abnormal development was reported in two or more items, the sensitivity, specificity, and positive/negative predictive values for PDD diagnosis were 0.85, 0.73, and 0.77/0.81, respectively. This simple screening tool can provide valuable information to clinicians when diagnosing PDD.

The Selfish Brain: What Matters Is My Body, not Yours?

Our behavioral response to our own crisis situations activates an automatic neural mechanism for protecting ourselves, while our response to others’ crisis situations is not always toward saving them. That is, this automatic neural mechanism is implemented in our brain essentially for protecting not others, but the self, based on a biological principle. In this regard, it can be said that we have a type of Selfish Brain mechanism, which works primarily for protecting the self. Here, we focused on bodily unstable situations, and investigated whether the Selfish Brain could be observed or not, by viewing these bodily unstable situations of the self and others, and comparing the neural and behavioral responses, based on a third-person perspective paradigm. We found significant brain activity specific to one’s own bodily crisis, but no significant activity in others’ crisis situations. These self-specific regions included the regions that would be activated during genuine unstable bodily states: the right parieto-insular vestibular cortex, inferior frontal junction, posterior insula, and parabrachial nucleus. These right-lateralized cortical and brainstem regions may mediate vestibular information processing for detection of vestibular anomalies, defensive motor responding (in which the necessary motor responses are automatically prepared/simulated to protect one’s own body), and sympathetic activity, as a form of alarm response during whole-body instability. Furthermore, there were no significant differences between the self and others in terms of subjective feelings. These findings suggest that the Selfish Brain mechanism is integral to our brains, and it works unconsciously and automatically to resolve one’s own crisis.

The Nostalgic Brain: Its Neural Basis and Positive Emotional Role in Resilience

People sometimes experience an emotional state known as ‘nostalgia’, which involves experiencing predominantly positive emotions while remembering autobiographical events. Nostalgia is thought to play an important role in psychological resilience. Here, we examined the brain activity and subjective feelings associated with nostalgic experiences, using childhood-related visual stimuli. We confirmed the presence of nostalgia-related activity in both memory and reward systems, including the hippocampus (HC), substantia nigra/ventral tegmental area (SN/VTA), and ventral striatum (VS). We also found significant HC-VS co-activation, with its strength correlating with individual nostalgia tendencies. Factor analyses showed that two dimensions underlie nostalgia: emotional and personal significance and chronological remoteness, with the former correlating with caudal SN/VTA and left anterior HC activity, and the latter correlating with rostral SN/VTA activity. These findings demonstrate the cooperative activity of memory and reward systems, where each system has a specific role in the construction of the factors that underlie the experience of nostalgia. Based on these findings, we propose a “nostalgia-related network”, and discuss its functions during nostalgic experiences and its effects on human resilience. Furthermore, we discuss the possibility that nostalgia is one of the defensive mechanisms which we developed “towards independence” from a caregiver in childhood. That is, we have an exquisite brain mechanism by which our own memory can stimulate our own reward system in adversity, and recalled memories can be overwritten more positively after nostalgic experiences.

Neural Basis of Maternal Love as a Vital Human Emotion

Maternal love, which may be the core of maternal behavior, is essential for the mother–infant attachment relationship and is important for an infant’s development and mental health. Therefore, maternal love can be considered a vital human emotion. Using video clips, we examined patterns of maternal brain activation in response to infant cues. We performed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) measurements while 13 mothers viewed video clips of their own infants and other infants (all approximately 16 months of age) who demonstrated two different attachment behaviors. We found that a limited number of the mother’s brain areas were specifically involved in maternal love, namely orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), striatum, anterior insula, and periaqueductal gray (PAG). Then, we proposed a schematic model of maternal love, based on integration of the two systems in the OFC: the dopamine reward system (OFC, striatum) and the interoceptive information processing system (OFC, insula, PAG). Additionally, we found a strong and specific brain response in a mother viewing her distressed infant. The neural activation pattern was found in the dorsal OFC (dOFC), the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC), dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC), dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), caudate nucleus, supplementary motor area (SMA), and posterior superior temporal sulcus/temporoparietal junction (pSTS/TPJ). These results showed a highly elaborate neural mechanism, based on the above neural basis of maternal love, mediating the diverse and complex maternal behaviors that mothers engage in when raising and protecting their own infants.

P18-11 The neural mechanisms of warm feeling associated with remote autobiographical memory retrieval — An fMRI study

contrast, control exercises group exhibited greater activation in the right insula, left inferior frontal gyrus, and left superior temporal gyrus for unpleasant stimuli (contrasting unpleasant animals with pleasant/neutral objects) after training than before training. Conclusions: This study confirms previous studies regarding the activation of the insula by emotional stimuli. The amplified activation of insula and PFC after coordination training suggested that coordination exercises might provide a person effective and stable cognitive control of positive emotion. This lends support for a new concept of physical training, such as coordination training influencing the mental condition of a person.

63. An fMRI study of the human body’s gravity center – Self–other difference in the perception of body instability

acute sensory ataxia. The positive anti-Hu antibody suggested that he had anti-Hu-associated paraneoplastic subacute sensory neuropathy. The conventional nerve conduction studies and somatosensory evoked potentials revealed severe sensory neuropathy. For magnetic cerebellar stimulation, the test magnetic stimulus over the left primary motor cortex (M1) was preceded by the conditioning stimulus over the right cerebellum. Motor evoked potential was recorded from the right first dorsal interosseous muscle. The suppressive effect of magnetic cerebellar stimulation on the contralateral M1 was abnormally reduced. The results indicated that cerebellar efferent pathway or dentatothalamocortical pathway was involved in this patient, although cerebellar signs could not be evaluated due to severe sensory neuropathy. Magnetic cerebellar stimulation might be useful to reveal cerebellar dysfunction masked by coexisting sensory ataxia in patients with paraneoplastic sensory neuropathy.