Don't worry, be happy - Neural correlates of the influence of musically induced mood on self-evaluation.

Self-evaluation affects one's own mental state, social interactions and everyday life. Mood, in turn, has an impact on self-evaluation. However, the influence of mood on self-evaluation at the neural level has barely been examined. In this fMRI study, the interaction of mood and self-perception was investigated in 20 healthy participants. Happy, sad and neutral music was presented while participants were instructed to immerse themselves in the mood of the music and to rate how well presented traits characterized themselves. In a lexical control condition, subjects had to count a specific letter in the word. Behavioral data reflected successful mood induction. While self-ascription of positive traits was unaffected by mood, self-ascription of negative characteristics was decreased by negative affect. A positive correlation was found between self-worth scores and the difference in the amount of self-ascribed positive versus negative traits during negative mood induction. At the neural level, amygdalo-hippocampal, superior and middle temporal structures were differently involved in self-evaluation (vs. lexical processing) depending on the mood. While activation of the amygdalo-hippocampal complex was found during sad in comparison to both happy and neutral mood, superior/middle temporal gyrus (STG/MTG) activation was only found when contrasting sad vs. neutral mood. Further, a correlation analysis with self-worth ratings revealed a positive relation to STG activation during self-ascription of trait adjectives in sad compared to neutral mood. Our results underscore the importance of the current emotional state for self-evaluation and identify some neural correlates of this effect. Our findings in healthy research participants suggest a compensatory mechanism during sad mood induction to maintain a positive self-image, which is supported by activation of limbic and fronto-temporal cortex. Studies in clinically depressed populations could reveal whether this compensatory mechanism is aberrant.

Me, myself and I: temporal dysfunctions during self-evaluation in patients with schizophrenia.

Self-concept is deeply affected in schizophrenia. Positive symptoms in particular are related to disturbed self/other distinctions. The neural networks underlying self-evaluation in schizophrenia have barely been investigated. The study reported here involved 13 patients with schizophrenia and 13 matched controls. During functional MRI, participants decided in three conditions whether the presented positive and negative personality traits characterized themselves, an intimate person, or included a certain letter. Based on the responses, each experimental condition was designed using a flexible factorial model. Controls and patients showed a similar behavioral pattern during self-evaluation, with group comparison revealing decreased activation in patients in the left inferior temporal gyrus and both temporal poles during self-ascription of traits, and in the anterior medial prefrontal cortex during evaluation of an intimate person. In patients, positive symptoms correlated positively with brain activation in the left parahippocampus during trait self-ascription. Hence, while evaluating themselves, schizophrenia patients revealed decreased activation in areas related to self-awareness overlapping with networks involved in theory of mind, empathy and social knowledge. Moreover, patients' brain activation during self-reflection was affected by the current positive symptomatology. The close interaction between self and other highlights the clinical and social relevance of self-processing deficits in schizophrenia.

Evidence for gender-specific endophenotypes in high-functioning autism spectrum disorder during empathy.

Despite remarkable behavioral gender differences in patients with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and growing evidence for a diminished male : female ratio for the putative "male disorder" ASD, aspects of gender are not addressed accordingly in ASD research. Our study aims at filling this gap by exploring empathy abilities in a group of 28 patients with high-functioning ASD and 28 gender-, age- and education-matched non-autistic subjects, for the first time by means of functional neuroimaging (fMRI). In an event-related fMRI paradigm, emotional ("E") and neutral ("N") video clips presented actors telling self-related short stories. After each clip, participants were asked to indicate their own emotion and its intensity as well as the emotion and intensity perceived for the actor. Behaviorally, we found significantly less empathic responses in the overall ASD group compared with non-autistic subjects, and inadequate emotion recognition for the neutral clips in the female ASD group compared with healthy women. Neurally, increased activation of the bilateral medial frontal gyrus was found in male patients compared with female patients, a pattern which was not present in the non-autistic group. Additionally, autistic women exhibited decreased activation of midbrain and limbic regions compared with non-autistic women, whereas there was no significant difference within the male group. While we did not find a fundamental empathic deficit in autistic patients, our data propose different ways of processing empathy in autistic men and women, suggesting stronger impairments in cognitive aspects of empathy/theory of mind for men, and alterations of social reciprocity for women.

Neural correlates of moral reasoning in autism spectrum disorder.

In our study, we tried to clarify whether patients with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) reveal different moral decision patterns as compared to healthy subjects and whether common social interaction difficulties in ASD are reflected in altered brain activation during different aspects of moral reasoning. 28 patients with high-functioning ASD and 28 healthy subjects matched for gender, age and education took part in an event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging study. Participants were confronted with textual dilemma situations followed by proposed solutions to which they could agree or disagree. On a neural level, moral decision making was associated with activation in anterior medial prefrontal regions, the temporo-parietal junction and the precuneus for both groups. However, while patients and healthy controls did not exhibit significant behavioral differences, ASD patients showed decreased activation in limbic regions, particularly the amygdala, as well as increased activation in the anterior and the posterior cingulate gyrus during moral reasoning. Alterations of brain activation in patients might thus indicate specific impairments in empathy. However, activation increases in brain regions associated with the 'default mode network' and self-referential cognition also provide evidence for an altered way of patients' cerebral processing with regard to decision making based on social information.