CRC TRR 58 - C01: Separation of rapid bottom-up and top-down processes during human fear acquisition and extinction and their modulation by anxiety risk factors

Basic data for this project

Description

Electrophysiological measures (EEG/MEG) elucidated some aspects of the temporal dynamics of emotional processing. For the ”high road” electrophysiological studies suggest top-down re-entrant modulation of successive sensory pro­cessing from cortical brain regions generating mid latency (>120ms) event related potential or field (ERP/ERF) effects of emotional processing (Amaral et al., 2003; Vuilleumier, 2005). In fact, these ERP effects have been shown for a variety of visual stimuli such as emotional scenes (e.g. Junghöfer et al., 2001), emotional faces (e.g. Schupp et al., 2004), emotional words (Kissler et al., 2007) or emotional hand gestures (Flaisch et al., 2008). Electrophysiological evidence for rapid emotional processing via the subcortical route is less clear but subject of increasing interest. Utilizing classical conditioning of simple visual objects (CS) with emotional scenes Stolarova and colleagues (2006) and Keil and coworkers (2007) recently revealed amplified sen­sory processing of aversively conditioned CS already between 70 and 90ms. Using conditioning of multiple neutral faces with affective odors we were recently able to replicate these rapid amplified sensory processing of affectively conditioned stimuli in this early time interval (figure left). Further­more, using conditioning of tones with emotional sounds we showed corresponding rapid amplified sensory processing already between 20 and 50ms (figure right). Both conditioning studies revealed that the amplified initial sensory pro­cessing were preceded and modulated by highly significant amplified processing of aversively conditioned CS in prefrontal brain regions (PFC).