TY  - JOUR
A1  - Stoeckel, M. Cornelia
A1  - Esser, Roland W.
A1  - Gamer, Matthias
A1  - Büchel, Christian
A1  - von Leupoldt, Andreas
T1  - Brain Responses during the Anticipation of Dyspnea
JF  - Neural Plasticity
N2  - Dyspnea is common in many cardiorespiratory diseases. Already the anticipation of this aversive symptom elicits fear in many patients resulting in unfavorable health behaviors such as activity avoidance and sedentary lifestyle. This study investigated brain mechanisms underlying these anticipatory processes. We induced dyspnea using resistive-load breathing in healthy subjects during functional magnetic resonance imaging. Blocks of severe and mild dyspnea alternated, each preceded by anticipation periods. Severe dyspnea activated a network of sensorimotor, cerebellar, and limbic areas. The left insular, parietal opercular, and cerebellar cortices showed increased activation already during dyspnea anticipation. Left insular and parietal opercular cortex showed increased connectivity with right insular and anterior cingulate cortex when severe dyspnea was anticipated, while the cerebellum showed increased connectivity with the amygdala. Notably, insular activation during dyspnea perception was positively correlated with midbrain activation during anticipation. Moreover, anticipatory fear was positively correlated with anticipatory activation in right insular and anterior cingulate cortex. The results demonstrate that dyspnea anticipation activates brain areas involved in dyspnea perception. The involvement of emotion-related areas such as insula, anterior cingulate cortex, and amygdala during dyspnea anticipation most likely reflects anticipatory fear and might underlie the development of unfavorable health behaviors in patients suffering from dyspnea.
KW  - brain response
KW  - dyspnea
KW  - cardiorespiratory disease
KW  - anticipation
Y1  - 2016
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-166238
VL  - 2016
IS  - 6434987
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Boll, Sabine
A1  - Bartholomaeus, Marie
A1  - Peter, Ulrike
A1  - Lupke, Ulrike
A1  - Gamer, Matthias
T1  - Attentional mechanisms of social perception are biased in social phobia
JF  - Journal of Anxiety Disorders
N2  - Previous studies of social phobia have reported an increased vigilance to social threat cues but also an avoidance of socially relevant stimuli such as eye gaze. The primary aim of this study was to examine attentional mechanisms relevant for perceiving social cues by means of abnormalities in scanning of facial features in patients with social phobia. In two novel experimental paradigms, patients with social phobia and healthy controls matched on age, gender and education were compared regarding their gazing behavior towards facial cues. The first experiment was an emotion classification paradigm which allowed for differentiating reflexive attentional shifts from sustained attention towards diagnostically relevant facial features. In the second experiment, attentional orienting by gaze direction was assessed in a gaze-cueing paradigm in which non-predictive gaze cues shifted attention towards or away from subsequently presented targets. We found that patients as compared to controls reflexively oriented their attention more frequently towards the eyes of emotional faces in the emotion classification paradigm. This initial hypervigilance for the eye region was observed at very early attentional stages when faces were presented for 150 ms, and persisted when facial stimuli were shown for 3 s. Moreover, a delayed attentional orienting into the direction of eye gaze was observed in individuals with social phobia suggesting a differential time course of eye gaze processing in patients and controls. Our findings suggest that basic mechanisms of early attentional exploration of social cues are biased in social phobia and might contribute to the development and maintenance of the disorder.
KW  - Social anxiety
KW  - Eye gaze
KW  - Vigilance
KW  - Amygdala
KW  - Emotional expression
KW  - Gaze perception
Y1  - 2016
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-189046
VL  - 40
ER  -