Subcortical Brain Volume, Regional Cortical Thickness, and Cortical Surface Area Across Disorders: Findings From the ENIGMA ADHD, ASD, and OCD Working Groups.

OBJECTIVE: Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) are common neurodevelopmental disorders that frequently co-occur. The authors sought to directly compare these disorders using structural brain imaging data from ENIGMA consortium data. METHODS: Structural T1-weighted whole-brain MRI data from healthy control subjects (N=5,827) and from patients with ADHD (N=2,271), ASD (N=1,777), and OCD (N=2,323) from 151 cohorts worldwide were analyzed using standardized processing protocols. The authors examined subcortical volume, cortical thickness, and cortical surface area differences within a mega-analytical framework, pooling measures extracted from each cohort. Analyses were performed separately for children, adolescents, and adults, using linear mixed-effects models adjusting for age, sex, and site (and intracranial volume for subcortical and surface area measures). RESULTS: No shared differences were found among all three disorders, and shared differences between any two disorders did not survive correction for multiple comparisons. Children with ADHD compared with those with OCD had smaller hippocampal volumes, possibly influenced by IQ. Children and adolescents with ADHD also had smaller intracranial volume than control subjects and those with OCD or ASD. Adults with ASD showed thicker frontal cortices compared with adult control subjects and other clinical groups. No OCD-specific differences were observed across different age groups and surface area differences among all disorders in childhood and adulthood. CONCLUSIONS: The study findings suggest robust but subtle differences across different age groups among ADHD, ASD, and OCD. ADHD-specific intracranial volume and hippocampal differences in children and adolescents, and ASD-specific cortical thickness differences in the frontal cortex in adults, support previous work emphasizing structural brain differences in these disorders.

Lower limb amputees undergo long-distance plasticity in sensorimotor functional connectivity.

Amputation in adults is associated with an extensive remapping of cortical topography in primary and secondary sensorimotor areas. Here, we used tactile residual limb stimulation and 3T functional magnetic resonance imaging in humans to investigate functional connectivity changes in the sensorimotor network of patients with long-term lower limb traumatic amputations with phantom sensation, but without pain. We found a pronounced reduction of inter-hemispheric functional connectivity between homologous sensorimotor cortical regions in amputees, including the primary (S1) and secondary (S2) somatosensory areas, and primary (M1) and secondary (M2) motor areas. We additionally observed an intra-hemispheric increased functional connectivity between primary and secondary somatosensory regions, and between the primary and premotor areas, contralateral to amputation. These functional connectivity changes in specialized small-scale sensory-motor networks improve our understanding of the functional impact of lower limb amputation in the brain. Our findings in a selective group of patients with phantom limb sensations, but without pain suggest that disinhibition of neural inputs following traumatic limb amputation disrupts sensorimotor topology, unbalancing functional brain network organization. These findings step up the description of brain plasticity related with phantom sensations by showing that pain is not critical for sensorimotor network changes after peripheral injury.

Functional dissociation of ventral frontal and dorsomedial default mode network components during resting state and emotional autobiographical recall.

Humans spend a substantial share of their lives mind-wandering. This spontaneous thinking activity usually comprises autobiographical recall, emotional, and self-referential components. While neuroimaging studies have demonstrated that a specific brain "default mode network" (DMN) is consistently engaged by the "resting state" of the mind, the relative contribution of key cognitive components to DMN activity is still poorly understood. Here we used fMRI to investigate whether activity in neural components of the DMN can be differentially explained by active recall of relevant emotional autobiographical memories as compared with the resting state. Our study design combined emotional autobiographical memory, neutral memory and resting state conditions, separated by a serial subtraction control task. Shared patterns of activation in the DMN were observed in both emotional autobiographical and resting conditions, when compared with serial subtraction. Directly contrasting autobiographical and resting conditions demonstrated a striking dissociation within the DMN in that emotional autobiographical retrieval led to stronger activation of the dorsomedial core regions (medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex), whereas the resting state condition engaged a ventral frontal network (ventral striatum, subgenual and ventral anterior cingulate cortices) in addition to the IPL. Our results reveal an as yet unreported dissociation within the DMN. Whereas the dorsomedial component can be explained by emotional autobiographical memory, the ventral frontal one is predominantly associated with the resting state proper, possibly underlying fundamental motivational mechanisms engaged during spontaneous unconstrained ideation.

Voluntary enhancement of neural signatures of affiliative emotion using FMRI neurofeedback.

In Ridley Scott's film "Blade Runner", empathy-detection devices are employed to measure affiliative emotions. Despite recent neurocomputational advances, it is unknown whether brain signatures of affiliative emotions, such as tenderness/affection, can be decoded and voluntarily modulated. Here, we employed multivariate voxel pattern analysis and real-time fMRI to address this question. We found that participants were able to use visual feedback based on decoded fMRI patterns as a neurofeedback signal to increase brain activation characteristic of tenderness/affection relative to pride, an equally complex control emotion. Such improvement was not observed in a control group performing the same fMRI task without neurofeedback. Furthermore, the neurofeedback-driven enhancement of tenderness/affection-related distributed patterns was associated with local fMRI responses in the septohypothalamic area and frontopolar cortex, regions previously implicated in affiliative emotion. This demonstrates that humans can voluntarily enhance brain signatures of tenderness/affection, unlocking new possibilities for promoting prosocial emotions and countering antisocial behavior.

Structural and functional brain rewiring clarifies preserved interhemispheric transfer in humans born without the corpus callosum.

Why do humans born without the corpus callosum, the major interhemispheric commissure, lack the disconnection syndrome classically described in callosotomized patients? This paradox was discovered by Nobel laureate Roger Sperry in 1968, and has remained unsolved since then. To tackle the hypothesis that alternative neural pathways could explain this puzzle, we investigated patients with callosal dysgenesis using structural and functional neuroimaging, as well as neuropsychological assessments. We identified two anomalous white-matter tracts by deterministic and probabilistic tractography, and provide supporting resting-state functional neuroimaging and neuropsychological evidence for their functional role in preserved interhemispheric transfer of complex tactile information, such as object recognition. These compensatory pathways connect the homotopic posterior parietal cortical areas (Brodmann areas 39 and surroundings) via the posterior and anterior commissures. We propose that anomalous brain circuitry of callosal dysgenesis is determined by long-distance plasticity, a set of hardware changes occurring in the developing brain after pathological interference. So far unknown, these pathological changes somehow divert growing axons away from the dorsal midline, creating alternative tracts through the ventral forebrain and the dorsal midbrain midline, with partial compensatory effects to the interhemispheric transfer of cortical function.

You and your kin: Neural signatures of family-based group perception in the subgenual cortex.

Attachment to one's kin as an in-group emerges from a fundamental human motivation and is vital for human survival. Despite important recent advances in the field of social neuroscience, the neural mechanisms underlying family-related in-group perception remain obscure. To examine the neural basis of perceiving family-related in-group boundaries in response to written kinship scenarios, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging in 27 healthy adults and obtained self-report ratings of family-related entitativity, which measures to what degree participants perceive their family as a coherent and distinct group in society. We expected that activity in the subgenual cingulate cortex and septo-hypothalamic region would track individual differences in entitativity. Perceiving one's family as a distinct and cohesive group (high entitativity) was associated with increased subgenual cortex response to kinship scenarios. The subgenual cingulate cortex may represent a key link between kin-related emotional attachment and group perception, providing a neurobiological basis for group belongingness.

Abnormal striatal BOLD responses to reward anticipation and reward delivery in ADHD.

Altered reward processing has been proposed to contribute to the symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The neurobiological mechanism underlying this alteration remains unclear. We hypothesize that the transfer of dopamine release from reward to reward-predicting cues, as normally observed in animal studies, may be deficient in ADHD. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to investigate striatal responses to reward-predicting cues and reward delivery in a classical conditioning paradigm. Data from 14 high-functioning and stimulant-naïve young adults with elevated lifetime symptoms of ADHD (8 males, 6 females) and 15 well-matched controls (8 males, 7 females) were included in the analyses. During reward anticipation, increased blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) responses in the right ventral and left dorsal striatum were observed in controls, but not in the ADHD group. The opposite pattern was observed in response to reward delivery; the ADHD group demonstrated significantly greater BOLD responses in the ventral striatum bilaterally and the left dorsal striatum relative to controls. In the ADHD group, the number of current hyperactivity/impulsivity symptoms was inversely related to ventral striatal responses during reward anticipation and positively associated with responses to reward. The BOLD response patterns observed in the striatum are consistent with impaired predictive dopamine signaling in ADHD, which may explain altered reward-contingent behaviors and symptoms of ADHD.

Real-time fMRI pattern decoding and neurofeedback using FRIEND: an FSL-integrated BCI toolbox.

The demonstration that humans can learn to modulate their own brain activity based on feedback of neurophysiological signals opened up exciting opportunities for fundamental and applied neuroscience. Although EEG-based neurofeedback has been long employed both in experimental and clinical investigation, functional MRI (fMRI)-based neurofeedback emerged as a promising method, given its superior spatial resolution and ability to gauge deep cortical and subcortical brain regions. In combination with improved computational approaches, such as pattern recognition analysis (e.g., Support Vector Machines, SVM), fMRI neurofeedback and brain decoding represent key innovations in the field of neuromodulation and functional plasticity. Expansion in this field and its applications critically depend on the existence of freely available, integrated and user-friendly tools for the neuroimaging research community. Here, we introduce FRIEND, a graphic-oriented user-friendly interface package for fMRI neurofeedback and real-time multivoxel pattern decoding. The package integrates routines for image preprocessing in real-time, ROI-based feedback (single-ROI BOLD level and functional connectivity) and brain decoding-based feedback using SVM. FRIEND delivers an intuitive graphic interface with flexible processing pipelines involving optimized procedures embedding widely validated packages, such as FSL and libSVM. In addition, a user-defined visual neurofeedback module allows users to easily design and run fMRI neurofeedback experiments using ROI-based or multivariate classification approaches. FRIEND is open-source and free for non-commercial use. Processing tutorials and extensive documentation are available.

Altered functional brain connectivity in a non-clinical sample of young adults with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is characterized by symptoms of inattention and hyperactivity/impulsivity that often persist in adulthood. There is a growing consensus that ADHD is associated with abnormal function of diffuse brain networks, but such alterations remain poorly characterized. Using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging, we characterized multivariate (complex network measures), bivariate (network-based statistic), and univariate (regional homogeneity) properties of brain networks in a non-clinical, drug-naive sample of high-functioning young men and women with ADHD (nine males, seven females) and a group of matched healthy controls. Data from our sample allowed the isolation of intrinsic functional connectivity alterations specific to ADHD diagnosis and symptoms that are not related to developmental delays, general cognitive dysfunction, or history of medication use. Multivariate results suggested that frontal, temporal, and occipital cortices were abnormally connected locally as well as with the rest of the brain in individuals with ADHD. Results from the network-based statistic support and extend multivariate results by isolating two brain networks comprising regions between which inter-regional connectivity was significantly altered in the ADHD group; namely, a frontal amygdala-occipital network and a frontal temporal-occipital network. Brain behavior correlations further highlighted the key role of altered orbitofrontal-temporal and frontal-amygdala connectivity for symptoms of inattention and hyperactivity/impulsivity. All univariate properties were similar between groups. Taken together, results from this study show that the diagnosis and the two main symptom dimensions of ADHD are related to altered intrinsic connectivity in orbitofrontal-temporal-occipital and fronto-amygdala-occipital networks. Accordingly, our findings highlight the importance of extending the conceptualization of ADHD beyond segregated fronto-striatal alterations.

A neural signature of affiliative emotion in the human septohypothalamic area.

Comparative studies have established that a number of structures within the rostromedial basal forebrain are critical for affiliative behaviors and social attachment. Lesion and neuroimaging studies concur with the importance of these regions for attachment and the experience of affiliation in humans as well. Yet it remains obscure whether the neural bases of affiliative experiences can be differentiated from the emotional valence with which they are inextricably associated at the experiential level. Here we show, using functional MRI, that kinship-related social scenarios evocative of affiliative emotion induce septal-preoptic-anterior hypothalamic activity that cannot be explained by positive or negative emotional valence alone. Our findings suggest that a phylogenetically conserved ensemble of basal forebrain structures, especially the septohypothalamic area, may play a key role in enabling human affiliative emotion. Our finding of a neural signature of human affiliative experience bears direct implications for the neurobiological mechanisms underpinning impaired affiliative experiences and behaviors in neuropsychiatric conditions.

Identification of psychopathic individuals using pattern classification of MRI images.

BACKGROUND: Psychopathy is a disorder of personality characterized by severe impairments of social conduct, emotional experience, and interpersonal behavior. Psychopaths consistently violate social norms and bring considerable financial, emotional, or physical harm to others and to society as a whole. Recent developments in analysis methods of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), such as voxel-based-morphometry (VBM), have become major tools to understand the anatomical correlates of this disorder. Nevertheless, the identification of psychopathy by neuroimaging or other neurobiological tools (e.g., genetic testing) remains elusive. METHODS/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: The main aim of this study was to develop an approach to distinguish psychopaths from healthy controls, based on the integration between pattern recognition methods and gray matter quantification. We employed support vector machines (SVM) and maximum uncertainty linear discrimination analysis (MLDA), with a feature-selection algorithm. Imaging data from 15 healthy controls and 15 psychopathic individuals (7 women in each group) were analyzed with SPM2 and the optimized VBM preprocessing routines. Participants were scanned with a 1.5 Tesla MRI system. Both SVM and MLDA achieved an overall leave-one-out accuracy of 80%, but SVM mapping was sparser than using MLDA. The superior temporal sulcus/gyrus (bilaterally) was identified as a region containing the most relevant information to separate the two groups. CONCLUSION/SIGNIFICANCE: These results indicate that gray matter quantitative measures contain robust information to predict high psychopathy scores in individual subjects. The methods employed herein might prove useful as an adjunct to the established clinical and neuropsychological measures in patient screening and diagnostic accuracy.

Impairment of prosocial sentiments is associated with frontopolar and septal damage in frontotemporal dementia.

Poets and philosophers have long acknowledged moral sentiments as key motivators of human social behavior. Prosocial sentiments, which include guilt, pity and embarrassment, enable us to care about others and to be concerned about our mistakes. Functional imaging studies have implicated frontopolar, ventromedial frontal and basal forebrain regions in the experience of prosocial sentiments. Patients with lesions of the frontopolar and ventromedial frontal areas were observed to behave inappropriately and less prosocially, which could be attributed to a generalized emotional blunting. Direct experimental evidence for brain regions distinctively associated with moral sentiment impairments is lacking, however. We investigated this issue in patients with the behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia, a disorder in which early and selective impairments of social conduct are consistently observed. Using a novel moral sentiment task, we show that the degree of impairment of prosocial sentiments is associated with the degree of damage to frontopolar cortex and septal area, as assessed with 18-Fluoro-Deoxy-Glucose-Positron Emission Tomography, an established measure of neurodegenerative damage. This effect was dissociable from impairment of other-critical feelings (anger and disgust), which was in turn associated with dorsomedial prefrontal and amygdala dysfunction. Our findings suggest a critical role of the frontopolar cortex and septal region in enabling prosocial sentiments, a fundamental component of moral conscience.

White Matter Changes in OCD Revealed by Diffusion Tensor Imaging.

UNLABELLED: IntroductionThe aim of this study was to investigate white matter (WM) abnormalities in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and its relationship to severity of obsessive-compulsive symptoms. METHODS: Conventional and diffusion tensor imaging were acquired in nine patients with OCD and nine gender- and age-matched healthy volunteers. Changes in fractional anisotropy (FA) and mean diffusivity (MD) were investigated using selected regions of interest (ROIs) analyses and whole brain tract-based spatial statistic analyses. A priori ROIs were placed bilaterally in internal capsule (IC), superior longitudinal fascicule (SLF), cingulate bundle (CB), and corpus calosum (CC). RESULTS: ROIs analyses showed that, as compared to healthy volunteers, patients with OCD exhibited reduced FA values bilaterally in regions of the posterior limb of the IC and in the SLF and increased MD values bilaterally in the posterior limb of the IC, in the left CB, and in the splenium of CC. Voxelwise analysis showed that, as compared to controls, patients with OCD exhibited reduced FA and increased MD in regions of the cortical spinal tract (genu and posterior limb of internal capsule and corona radiata) and the SLF. Severity of OCD correlated with WM alterations in different brain regions, ie, the left (rho=0.70 [MD]) and right (rho=0.70 [MD]) anterior limb of the IC, the left (rho=0.97 [MD]) and right SLF (rho=0.81 [MD]), and the genu of CC (rho=0.66 [MD]; rho=-0.69 [FA]). CONCLUSION: Our findings support the involvement of different WM tracts in OCD and suggest that greater impairment in WM integrity is associated with increased severity of OCD symptoms.

Psychopathy as a disorder of the moral brain: fronto-temporo-limbic grey matter reductions demonstrated by voxel-based morphometry.

Major advances have been made in the understanding of the neurobiology of psychopathy in the past years, yet the distribution and extent of neuroanatomical abnormalities underlying the disorder are still poorly known. It is also unclear if different dimensions of the construct of psychopathy (e.g., emotional callousness, antisocial behavior) correspond to structural abnormalities in distinct regions of the brain. We tested the following hypotheses: (1) psychopathy is related to grey matter reductions in regions of the brain that underlie moral conduct and (2) the severity of psychopathy is related to the degree of structural abnormalities. Optimized voxel-based morphometry and the screening version of the Psychopathy Checklist (PCL: SV) were employed to investigate a matched sample of 15 community psychiatric patients with high PCL: SV scores, and 15 healthy normal volunteers. The analyses controlled for total grey matter, white matter and cerebrospinal fluid volumes. Grey matter reductions were observed in the frontopolar, orbitofrontal and anterior temporal cortices, superior temporal sulcus region, and insula of the patients. The degree of structural abnormalities was significantly related to the interpersonal/affective dimension of psychopathy. The pattern of grey matter reductions in patients with high psychopathy scores comprised a distributed fronto-temporal network which plays a critical role in moral sensibility and behavior.

The self as a moral agent: linking the neural bases of social agency and moral sensitivity.

The human brain is inherently able to understand the world in moral ways, endowing most of us with an intuitive sense of fairness, concern for others, and observance of cultural norms. We have argued that this moral sensitivity ability depends on a sophisticated integration of cognitive, emotional, and motivational mechanisms, which are modulated by individual experience in different cultural milieus. Different lines of investigation on agency and morality have pointed to overlapping neural systems. Therefore, understanding the relationships between morality and agency may provide key insights into the mechanisms underlying human behavior in several clinical and societal settings. We used functional MRI to investigate the contribution of agency and of specific moral emotions to brain activation using action scripts. Results showed that emotionally neutral agency recruited neural networks previously associated with agency, intentionality and moral cognition, encompassing ventral and subgenual sectors of the medial prefrontal cortex (PFC), insula, anterior temporal cortex and superior temporal sulcus (STS). Compared to emotionally neutral agency, different categories of moral emotions led to distinct activation patterns: (1) prosocial emotions (guilt, embarrassment, compassion) activated the anterior medial PFC and STS, with (2) empathic emotions (guilt and compassion) additionally recruiting the mesolimbic pathway; (3) other-critical emotions (disgust and indignation) were associated with activation of the amygdala-parahippocampal and fusiform areas. These findings indicate that agency related to norm-abiding social behaviors of emotionally neutral scripts share neural substrates both with the "default mode" of brain function and with the moral sensitivity network. Additional activation in specific components of this network is elicited by different classes of moral emotions, in agreement with recent integrative models of moral cognition and emotion.

The moral affiliations of disgust: a functional MRI study.

Recent investigations in cognitive neuroscience have shown that ordinary human behavior is guided by emotions that are uniquely human in their experiential and interpersonal aspects. These "moral emotions" contribute importantly to human social behavior and derive from the neurobehavioral reorganization of the basic plan of emotions that pervade mammalian life. Disgust is one prototypic emotion with multiple domains that include viscerosomatic reaction patterns and subjective experiences linked to (a) the sensory properties of a class of natural stimuli, (b) a set of aversive experiences and (c) a unique mode of experiencing morality. In the current investigation, we tested the hypotheses that (a) the experience of disgust devoid of moral connotations ("pure disgust") can be subjectively and behaviorally differentiated from the experience of disgust disguised in the moral emotion of "indignation" and that (b) pure disgust and indignation may have partially overlapping neural substrates. Thirteen normal adult volunteers were investigated with functional magnetic resonance imaging as they read a series of statements depicting scenarios of pure disgust, indignation, and neutral emotion. After the scanning procedure, they assigned one basic and one moral emotion to each stimulus from an array of six basic and seven moral emotions. Results indicated that (a) emotional stimuli may evoke pure disgust with or without indignation, (b) these different aspects of the experience of disgust could be elicited by a set of written statements, and (c) pure disgust and indignation recruited both overlapping and distinct brain regions, mainly in the frontal and temporal lobes. This work underscores the importance of the prefrontal and orbitofrontal cortices in moral judgment and in the automatic attribution of morality to social events. Human disgust encompasses a variety of emotional experiences that are ingrained in frontal, temporal, and limbic networks.

Functional networks in emotional moral and nonmoral social judgments.

Reading daily newspaper articles often evokes opinions and social judgments about the characters and stories. Social and moral judgments rely on the proper functioning of neural circuits concerned with complex cognitive and emotional processes. To examine whether dissociable neural systems mediate emotionally charged moral and nonmoral social judgments, we used a visual sentence verification task in conjunction with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We found that a network comprising the medial orbitofrontal cortex, the temporal pole and the superior temporal sulcus of the left hemisphere was specifically activated by moral judgments. In contrast, judgment of emotionally evocative, but non-moral statements activated the left amygdala, lingual gyri, and the lateral orbital gyrus. These findings provide new evidence that the orbitofrontal cortex has dedicated subregions specialized in processing specific forms of social behavior.

The neural correlates of moral sensitivity: a functional magnetic resonance imaging investigation of basic and moral emotions.

Humans are endowed with a natural sense of fairness that permeates social perceptions and interactions. This moral stance is so ubiquitous that we may not notice it as a fundamental component of daily decision making and in the workings of many legal, political, and social systems. Emotion plays a pivotal role in moral experience by assigning human values to events, objects, and actions. Although the brain correlates of basic emotions have been explored, the neural organization of "moral emotions" in the human brain remains poorly understood. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging and a passive visual task, we show that both basic and moral emotions activate the amygdala, thalamus, and upper midbrain. The orbital and medial prefrontal cortex and the superior temporal sulcus are also recruited by viewing scenes evocative of moral emotions. Our results indicate that the orbital and medial sectors of the prefrontal cortex and the superior temporal sulcus region, which are critical regions for social behavior and perception, play a central role in moral appraisals. We suggest that the automatic tagging of ordinary social events with moral values may be an important mechanism for implicit social behaviors in humans.