Browsing by Author "Dolcos, Sanda"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    Neurobehavioral Mechanisms of Resilience Against Emotional Distress: An Integrative Brain-Personality-Symptom Approach Using Structural Equation Modeling.
    (Personality neuroscience, 2018-01) Moore, Matthew; Culpepper, Steven; Phan, K Luan; Strauman, Timothy J; Dolcos, Florin; Dolcos, Sanda
    Clarifying individual differences that predict resilience or vulnerability to emotional distress is crucial for identifying etiological factors contributing to affective disturbances, and to promoting emotional well-being. Despite recent progress identifying specific brain regions and personality traits, it remains unclear whether there are common factors underlying the structural aspects of the brain and the personality traits that, in turn, protect against symptoms of emotional distress. In the present study, an integrative structural equation model was developed to examine the associations among (1) a latent construct of Control, representing the volumes of a system of prefrontal cortical (PFC) regions including middle, inferior, and orbital frontal cortices; (2) a latent construct of Resilience personality traits including cognitive reappraisal, positive affectivity, and optimism; and (3) Anxiety and Depression symptoms, in a sample of 85 healthy young adults. Results showed that the latent construct of PFC volumes positively predicted the latent construct of Resilience, which in turn negatively predicted Anxiety. Mediation analysis confirmed that greater latent PFC volume is indirectly associated with lower Anxiety symptoms through greater latent trait Resilience. The model did not show a significant mediation for Depression. These results support the idea that there are common volumetric and personality factors that help protect against symptoms of emotional distress. These findings provide strong evidence that such brain-personality-symptom approaches can provide novel insights with valuable implications for understanding the interaction of these factors in healthy and clinically diagnosed individuals.
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    The impact of anxiety-inducing distraction on cognitive performance: a combined brain imaging and personality investigation.
    (PLoS One, 2010-11-30) Denkova, Ekaterina; Wong, Gloria; Dolcos, Sanda; Sung, Keen; Wang, Lihong; Coupland, Nicholas; Dolcos, Florin
    BACKGROUND: Previous investigations revealed that the impact of task-irrelevant emotional distraction on ongoing goal-oriented cognitive processing is linked to opposite patterns of activation in emotional and perceptual vs. cognitive control/executive brain regions. However, little is known about the role of individual variations in these responses. The present study investigated the effect of trait anxiety on the neural responses mediating the impact of transient anxiety-inducing task-irrelevant distraction on cognitive performance, and on the neural correlates of coping with such distraction. We investigated whether activity in the brain regions sensitive to emotional distraction would show dissociable patterns of co-variation with measures indexing individual variations in trait anxiety and cognitive performance. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Event-related fMRI data, recorded while healthy female participants performed a delayed-response working memory (WM) task with distraction, were investigated in conjunction with behavioural measures that assessed individual variations in both trait anxiety and WM performance. Consistent with increased sensitivity to emotional cues in high anxiety, specific perceptual areas (fusiform gyrus--FG) exhibited increased activity that was positively correlated with trait anxiety and negatively correlated with WM performance, whereas specific executive regions (right lateral prefrontal cortex--PFC) exhibited decreased activity that was negatively correlated with trait anxiety. The study also identified a role of the medial and left lateral PFC in coping with distraction, as opposed to reflecting a detrimental impact of emotional distraction. CONCLUSIONS: These findings provide initial evidence concerning the neural mechanisms sensitive to individual variations in trait anxiety and WM performance, which dissociate the detrimental impact of emotion distraction and the engagement of mechanisms to cope with distracting emotions. Our study sheds light on the neural correlates of emotion-cognition interactions in normal behaviour, which has implications for understanding factors that may influence susceptibility to affective disorders, in general, and to anxiety disorders, in particular.