Common and differential brain responses in men and women to nonverbal emotional vocalizations by the same and opposite sex.

Nonverbal emotional vocalizations are one of the most elementary ways of communicating in humans. We examined the impact of sex differences on neural responses to laughter and crying produced by the same and opposite sex. Thirty subjects (15 women) underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging during a sex identification task for laughter, crying, and neutral voices. The parahippocampal gyrus was involved in both men and women while hearing laughter of the same sex, suggesting greater positive emotional processing and greater attention toward emotional context in response to laughter of the same sex than of the opposite sex. The posterior cingulate was involved in both men and women while hearing crying of the opposite sex, suggesting that empathic processing may occur more in response to crying of the opposite sex than of the same sex. Furthermore, brain responses to crying of the opposite sex seem to reflect upon men's efforts to perform emotional regulation and women's empathic concerns.

Activation of the occipital cortex and deactivation of the default mode network during working memory in the early blind.

Although blind people heavily depend on working memory to manage daily life without visual information, it is not clear yet whether their working memory processing involves functional reorganization of the memory-related cortical network. To explore functional reorganization of the cortical network that supports various types of working memory processes in the early blind, we investigated activation differences between 2-back tasks and 0-back tasks using fMRI in 10 congenitally blind subjects and 10 sighted subjects. We used three types of stimulus sequences: words for a verbal task, pitches for a non-verbal task, and sound locations for a spatial task. When compared to the sighted, the blind showed additional activations in the occipital lobe for all types of stimulus sequences for working memory and more significant deactivation in the posterior cingulate cortex of the default mode network. The blind had increased effective connectivity from the default mode network to the left parieto-frontal network and from the occipital cortex to the right parieto-frontal network during the 2-back tasks than the 0-back tasks. These findings suggest not only cortical plasticity of the occipital cortex but also reorganization of the cortical network for the executive control of working memory.

Volumetric abnormalities in connectivity-based subregions of the thalamus in patients with chronic schizophrenia.

OBJECTIVE: The thalamus, which consists of multiple subnuclei, has been of particular interest in the study of schizophrenia. This study aimed to identify abnormalities in the connectivity-based subregions of the thalamus in patients with schizophrenia. METHODS: Thalamic volume was measured by a manual tracing on superimposed images of T1-weighted and diffusion tensor images in 30 patients with schizophrenia and 22 normal volunteers. Cortical regional volumes automatically measured by a surface-based approach and thalamic subregional volumes measured by a connectivity-based technique were compared between the two groups and their correlations between the connected regions were calculated in each group. RESULTS: Volume reduction was observed in the bilateral orbitofrontal cortices and the left cingulate gyrus on the cortical side, whereas in subregions connected to the right orbitofrontal cortex and bilateral parietal cortices on the thalamic side. Significant volumetric correlations were identified between the right dorsal prefrontal cortex and its related thalamic subregion and between the left parietal cortex and its related thalamic subregion only in the normal group. CONCLUSIONS: Our results suggest that patients with schizophrenia have a structural deficit in the corticothalamic systems, especially in the orbitofrontal-thalamic system. Our findings may present evidence of corticothalamic connection problems in schizophrenia.