* Disrupted effective connectivity between the amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex in social anxiety disorder during emotion discrimination revealed by dynamic causal modeling for FMRI.
- Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is characterized by over-reactivity of fear-related circuits in social or performance situations and associated with marked social impairment. We used dynamic causal modeling (DCM), a method to evaluate effective connectivity, to test our hypothesis that SAD patients would exhibit dysfunctions in the amygdala-prefrontal emotion regulation network. Thirteen unmedicated SAD patients and 13 matched healthy controls performed a series of facial emotion and object discrimination tasks while undergoing fMRI. The emotion-processing network was identified by a task-related contrast and motivated the selection of the right amygdala, OFC, and DLPFC for DCM analysis. Bayesian model averaging for DCM revealed abnormal connectivity between the OFC and the amygdala in SAD patients. In healthy controls, this network represents a negative feedback loop. In patients, however, positive connectivity from OFC to amygdala was observed, indicating an excitatory connection. As we did not observe a group difference of the modulatory influence of the FACE condition on the OFC to amygdala connection, we assume a context-independent reduction of prefrontal control over amygdalar activation in SAD patients. Using DCM, it was possible to highlight not only the neuronal dysfunction of isolated brain regions, but also the dysbalance of a distributed functional network.
Overview of verb reveal
The verb reveal has 3 senses (first 2 from tagged texts)
1. (34) uncover, bring out, unveil, reveal -- (make visible; "Summer brings out bright clothes"; "He
brings out the best in her")
2. (17) unwrap, disclose, let on, bring out, reveal, discover, expose, divulge, break, give away,
let out -- (make known to the public information that was previously known only to a few people or
that was meant to be kept a secret; "The auction house would not disclose the price at which the van
Gogh had sold"; "The actress won't reveal how old she is"; "bring out the truth"; "he broke the news
to her"; "unwrap the evidence in the murder case")
3. reveal -- (disclose directly or through prophets; "God rarely reveal his plans for Mankind")
--- WordNet end ---