Rapid reportHuman fear-related motor neurocircuitry
Section snippets
Participants
Forty-two healthy, right-handed participants (mean age: 28 [std 6]; 16 women) underwent fMRI scanning as part of this study, which was approved by the Weill-Cornell Institutional Review Board.
Dial-up procedure
Immediately prior to scanning, each participant determined the level of electrodermal stimulation to be received during the scan session via a standardized dial-up procedure in which stimulations to the left wrist were increased gradually to a level of intensity experienced by that individual as
SCR and debriefing questionnaire
Analysis of 14 skin conductance tracings (seven traces [out of 21] could not be analyzed due to excessive artifact or no detectable SCRs) revealed significantly larger SCR magnitudes during threat as compared with safety, t(13)=3.23, P=0.007 (two-tailed), Cohen’s d=1.07.
Responses to the post-scan debriefing question “How did you feel when seeing each of the two colors?” were available for 38/42 participants. Thirty-three of 38 participants (86.8%) reported feeling anxious or fearful about
Discussion
Results indicate that brain regions traditionally considered to be involved mainly in motor behavior (dorsal basal ganglia and primary motor cortex) respond robustly and consistently to an experimentally-induced state of conscious fear, while threat-related amygdalar activity is limited to the earliest portion of the experiment. Actual movement is an unlikely explanation for findings because no experimental condition required any motor response. That the experimental paradigm produced
Conclusion
The role of cortical and subcortical neurocircuitry in evolutionarily-conserved motor and other responses to perceived danger deserves additional translational study in animals models, in healthy humans, and in patients suffering from fear-related disorders.
Acknowledgments
This research was supported by NIH grants P50MH058911 and 5R01MH061825. We are grateful to Jude Allen, Josefino Borja, and Wolfgang Engelien for their help with this project.
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