Neural correlates of anxiety under interrogation in guilt or innocence contexts.

Interrogation elicits anxiety in individuals under scrutiny regardless of their innocence, and thus, anxious responses to interrogation should be differentiated from deceptive behavior in practical lie detection settings. Despite its importance, not many empirical studies have yet been done to separate the effects of interrogation from the acts of lying or guilt state. The present fMRI study attempted to identify neural substrates of anxious responses under interrogation in either innocent or guilt contexts by developing a modified "Doubt" game. Participants in the guilt condition showed higher brain activations in the right central-executive network and bilateral basal ganglia. Regardless of the person's innocence, we observed higher activation of the salience, theory of mind and sensory-motor networks-areas associated with anxiety-related responses in the interrogative condition, compared to the waived conditions. We further explored two different types of anxious responses under interrogation-true detection anxiety in the guilty (true positive) and false detection anxiety in the innocent (false positive). Differential neural responses across these two conditions were captured at the caudate, thalamus, ventral anterior cingulate and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. We conclude that anxiety is a common neural response to interrogation, regardless of an individual's innocence, and that there are detectable differences in neural responses for true positive and false positive anxious responses under interrogation. The results of our study highlight a need to isolate complex cognitive processes involved in the deceptive acts from the emotional and regulatory responses to interrogation in lie detection schemes.

Effective connectivity during working memory and resting states: A DCM study.

Although the relationship between resting-state functional connectivity and task-related activity has been addressed, the relationship between task and resting-state directed or effective connectivity - and its behavioral concomitants - remains elusive. We evaluated effective connectivity under an N-back working memory task in 24 participants using stochastic dynamic causal modelling (DCM) of 7 T fMRI data. We repeated the analysis using resting-state data, from the same subjects, to model connectivity among the same brain regions engaged by the N-back task. This allowed us to: (i) examine the relationship between intrinsic (task-independent) effective connectivity during resting (Arest) and task states (Atask), (ii) cluster phenotypes of task-related changes in effective connectivity (Btask) across participants, (iii) identify edges (Btask) showing high inter-individual effective connectivity differences and (iv) associate reaction times with the similarity between Btask and Arest in these edges. We found a strong correlation between Arest and Atask over subjects but a marked difference between Btask and Arest. We further observed a strong clustering of individuals in terms of Btask, which was not apparent in Arest. The task-related effective connectivity Btask varied highly in the edges from the parietal to the frontal lobes across individuals, so the three groups were clustered mainly by the effective connectivity within these networks. The similarity between Btask and Arest at the edges from the parietal to the frontal lobes was positively correlated with 2-back reaction times. This result implies that a greater change in context-sensitive coupling - from resting-state connectivity - is associated with faster reaction times. In summary, task-dependent connectivity endows resting-state connectivity with a context sensitivity, which predicts the speed of information processing during the N-back task.