Dynamic Modulation of Amygdala-hippocampal Connectivity by Emotional Arousal

Overview

Journal J Neurosci

Specialty Neurology

Date 2014 Oct 17

PMID 25319690

Citations 34

Authors

Matthias Fastenrath

David Coynel

Klara Spalek

Annette Milnik

Leo Gschwind

Benno Roozendaal

Andreas Papassotiropoulos

Dominique J F de Quervain

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Positive and negative emotional events are better remembered than neutral events. Studies in animals suggest that this phenomenon depends on the influence of the amygdala upon the hippocampus. In humans, however, it is largely unknown how these two brain structures functionally interact and whether these interactions are similar between positive and negative information. Using dynamic causal modeling of fMRI data in 586 healthy subjects, we show that the strength of the connection from the amygdala to the hippocampus was rapidly and robustly increased during the encoding of both positive and negative pictures in relation to neutral pictures. We also observed an increase in connection strength from the hippocampus to the amygdala, albeit at a smaller scale. These findings indicate that, during encoding, emotionally arousing information leads to a robust increase in effective connectivity from the amygdala to the hippocampus, regardless of its valence.

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