Self-rated amygdala activity: an auto-biological index of affective distress.
Abstract
Auto-biological beliefs-beliefs about one's own biology-are an understudied component
of personal identity. Research participants who are led to believe they are biologically
vulnerable to affective disorders report more symptoms and less ability to control
their mood; however, little is known about the impact of self-originating beliefs
about risk for psychopathology, and whether such beliefs correspond to empirically
derived estimates of actual vulnerability. Participants in a neuroimaging study (n
= 1256) completed self-report measures of affective symptoms, perceived stress, and
neuroticism, and an emotional face processing task in the scanner designed to elicit
threat responses from the amygdala. A subsample (n = 63) additionally rated their
own perceived neural response to threat (i.e., amygdala activity) compared to peers.
Self-ratings of neural threat response were uncorrelated with actual threat-related
amygdala activity measured via BOLD fMRI. However, self-ratings predicted subjective
distress across a variety of self-report measures. In contrast, in the full sample,
threat-related amygdala activity was uncorrelated with self-report measures of affective
distress. These findings suggest that beliefs about one's own biological threat response-while
unrelated to measured neural activation-may be informative indicators of psychological
functioning.
Type
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https://hdl.handle.net/10161/21879Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1017/pen.2019.1Publication Info
MacDuffie, Katherine E; Knodt, Annchen R; Radtke, Spenser R; Strauman, Timothy J;
& Hariri, Ahmad R (2019). Self-rated amygdala activity: an auto-biological index of affective distress. Personality neuroscience, 2. pp. e1. 10.1017/pen.2019.1. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/21879.This is constructed from limited available data and may be imprecise. To cite this
article, please review & use the official citation provided by the journal.
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Show full item recordScholars@Duke
Timothy J. Strauman
Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience
Professor Strauman's research focuses on the psychological and neurobiological processes
that enable self-regulation, conceptualized in terms of a cognitive/motivational perspective,
as well as the relation between self-regulation and affect. Particular areas of emphasis
include: (1) conceptualizing self-regulation in terms of brain/behavior motivational
systems; (2) the role of self-regulatory cognitive processes in vulnerability to depression
and other disorders; (3) the impact of tre

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