The Experts below are selected from a list of 156 Experts worldwide ranked by ideXlab platform
David Terburg - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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translational neuroscience of basolateral amygdala lesions studies of urbach wiethe Disease
2016Co-Authors: N. Koen, David Terburg, Barak Morgan, Dan J. Stein, J. Fourie, Ron Stoop, J. Van HonkAbstract:Urbach-Wiethe Disease (UWD) is an extremely rare autosomal recessive disorder characterized by mutations in the extracellular matrix protein 1 gene on chromosome 1. Typical clinical manifestations include voice hoarseness in early infancy and neuropsychiatric, laryngeal, and dermatological pathologies later in life. Neuroimaging studies have revealed a pattern of brain calcification often but not exclusively leading to selective bilateral amygdala damage. A large body of work on amygdala lesions in rodents exists, generally employing a subregion model focused on the basolateral amygdala (BLA) and the central-medial amygdala. However, human work usually considers the amygdala as a unified structure, not only complicating the translation of animal findings to humans but also providing a unique opportunity for further research. To compare data from rodent models with human cases and to complement existing data from Europe and North America, a series of investigations was undertaken on UWD subjects with selective BLA damage in the Namaqualand region, South Africa. This review presents key findings from this work, including fear processing, social-economic behavior, and emotional conflict processing. Our findings are broadly consistent with and support rodent models of selective BLA lesions and show that the BLA is integral to processing sensory stimuli and exhibits inhibitory regulation of responses to unconditioned innate fear stimuli. Furthermore, our findings suggest that the human BLA mediates calculative-instrumental economic behaviors and may compromise working memory via competition for attentional resources between the BLA salience detection system and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex working memory system.
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impaired acquisition of classically conditioned fear potentiated startle reflexes in humans with focal bilateral basolateral amygdala damage
2015Co-Authors: David Terburg, Barak Morgan, Dan J. Stein, J. Van Honk, Floris KlumpersAbstract:Based on studies in rodents, the basolateral amygdala (BLA) is considered a key site for experience-dependent neural plasticity underlying the acquisition of conditioned fear responses. In humans, very few studies exist of subjects with selective amygdala lesions and those studies have only implicated the amygdala more broadly leaving the role of amygdala sub-regions underexplored. We tested a rare sample of subjects (N ¼ 4) with unprecedented focal bilateral BLA lesions due to a genetic condition called Urbach–Wiethe Disease. In a classical delay fear conditioning experiment, these subjects showed impaired acquisition of conditioned fear relative to a group of matched control subjects (N ¼ 10) as measured by fear-potentiation of the defensive eye-blink startle reflex. After the experiment, the BLA-damaged cases showed normal declarative memory of the conditioned association. Our findings provide new evidence that the human BLA is essential to drive fast classically conditioned defensive reflexes.
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hypervigilance for fear after basolateral amygdala damage in humans
2012Co-Authors: David Terburg, Barak Morgan, Estrella R Montoya, Helena B Thornton, Ahmad R Hariri, Jaak Panksepp, Ignace T. C. Hooge, Dan J. Stein, Jack Van HonkAbstract:Recent rodent research has shown that the basolateral amygdala (BLA) inhibits unconditioned, or innate, fear. It is, however, unknown whether the BLA acts in similar ways in humans. In a group of five subjects with a rare genetic syndrome, that is, Urbach–Wiethe Disease (UWD), we used a combination of structural and functional neuroimaging, and established focal, bilateral BLA damage, while other amygdala sub-regions are functionally intact. We tested the translational hypothesis that these BLA-damaged UWD-subjects are hypervigilant to facial expressions of fear, which are prototypical innate threat cues in humans. Our data indeed repeatedly confirm fear hypervigilance in these UWD subjects. They show hypervigilant responses to unconsciously presented fearful faces in a modified Stroop task. They attend longer to the eyes of dynamically displayed fearful faces in an eye-tracked emotion recognition task, and in that task recognize facial fear significantly better than control subjects. These findings provide the first direct evidence in humans in support of an inhibitory function of the BLA on the brain's threat vigilance system, which has important implications for the understanding of the amygdala's role in the disorders of fear and anxiety.
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Paradoxical facilitation of working memory after basolateral amygdala damage.
2024Co-Authors: Barak Morgan, David Terburg, Helena B Thornton, Dan J. Stein, J. Van HonkAbstract:Working memory is a vital cognitive capacity without which meaningful thinking and logical reasoning would be impossible. Working memory is integrally dependent upon prefrontal cortex and it has been suggested that voluntary control of working memory, enabling sustained emotion inhibition, was the crucial step in the evolution of modern humans. Consistent with this, recent fMRI studies suggest that working memory performance depends upon the capacity of prefrontal cortex to suppress bottom-up amygdala signals during emotional arousal. However fMRI is not well-suited to definitively resolve questions of causality. Moreover, the amygdala is neither structurally or functionally homogenous and fMRI studies do not resolve which amygdala sub-regions interfere with working memory. Lesion studies on the other hand can contribute unique causal evidence on aspects of brain-behaviour phenomena fMRI cannot "see". To address these questions we investigated working memory performance in three adult female subjects with bilateral basolateral amygdala calcification consequent to Urbach-Wiethe Disease and ten healthy controls. Amygdala lesion extent and functionality was determined by structural and functional MRI methods. Working memory performance was assessed using the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-III digit span forward task. State and trait anxiety measures to control for possible emotional differences between patient and control groups were administered. Structural MRI showed bilateral selective basolateral amygdala damage in the three Urbach-Wiethe Disease subjects and fMRI confirmed intact functionality in the remaining amygdala sub-regions. The three Urbach-Wiethe Disease subjects showed significant working memory facilitation relative to controls. Control measures showed no group anxiety differences. Results are provisionally interpreted in terms of a 'cooperation through competition' networks model that may account for the observed paradoxical functional facilitation effect
J. Van Honk - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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translational neuroscience of basolateral amygdala lesions studies of urbach wiethe Disease
2016Co-Authors: N. Koen, David Terburg, Barak Morgan, Dan J. Stein, J. Fourie, Ron Stoop, J. Van HonkAbstract:Urbach-Wiethe Disease (UWD) is an extremely rare autosomal recessive disorder characterized by mutations in the extracellular matrix protein 1 gene on chromosome 1. Typical clinical manifestations include voice hoarseness in early infancy and neuropsychiatric, laryngeal, and dermatological pathologies later in life. Neuroimaging studies have revealed a pattern of brain calcification often but not exclusively leading to selective bilateral amygdala damage. A large body of work on amygdala lesions in rodents exists, generally employing a subregion model focused on the basolateral amygdala (BLA) and the central-medial amygdala. However, human work usually considers the amygdala as a unified structure, not only complicating the translation of animal findings to humans but also providing a unique opportunity for further research. To compare data from rodent models with human cases and to complement existing data from Europe and North America, a series of investigations was undertaken on UWD subjects with selective BLA damage in the Namaqualand region, South Africa. This review presents key findings from this work, including fear processing, social-economic behavior, and emotional conflict processing. Our findings are broadly consistent with and support rodent models of selective BLA lesions and show that the BLA is integral to processing sensory stimuli and exhibits inhibitory regulation of responses to unconditioned innate fear stimuli. Furthermore, our findings suggest that the human BLA mediates calculative-instrumental economic behaviors and may compromise working memory via competition for attentional resources between the BLA salience detection system and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex working memory system.
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impaired acquisition of classically conditioned fear potentiated startle reflexes in humans with focal bilateral basolateral amygdala damage
2015Co-Authors: David Terburg, Barak Morgan, Dan J. Stein, J. Van Honk, Floris KlumpersAbstract:Based on studies in rodents, the basolateral amygdala (BLA) is considered a key site for experience-dependent neural plasticity underlying the acquisition of conditioned fear responses. In humans, very few studies exist of subjects with selective amygdala lesions and those studies have only implicated the amygdala more broadly leaving the role of amygdala sub-regions underexplored. We tested a rare sample of subjects (N ¼ 4) with unprecedented focal bilateral BLA lesions due to a genetic condition called Urbach–Wiethe Disease. In a classical delay fear conditioning experiment, these subjects showed impaired acquisition of conditioned fear relative to a group of matched control subjects (N ¼ 10) as measured by fear-potentiation of the defensive eye-blink startle reflex. After the experiment, the BLA-damaged cases showed normal declarative memory of the conditioned association. Our findings provide new evidence that the human BLA is essential to drive fast classically conditioned defensive reflexes.
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Paradoxical facilitation of working memory after basolateral amygdala damage.
2024Co-Authors: Barak Morgan, David Terburg, Helena B Thornton, Dan J. Stein, J. Van HonkAbstract:Working memory is a vital cognitive capacity without which meaningful thinking and logical reasoning would be impossible. Working memory is integrally dependent upon prefrontal cortex and it has been suggested that voluntary control of working memory, enabling sustained emotion inhibition, was the crucial step in the evolution of modern humans. Consistent with this, recent fMRI studies suggest that working memory performance depends upon the capacity of prefrontal cortex to suppress bottom-up amygdala signals during emotional arousal. However fMRI is not well-suited to definitively resolve questions of causality. Moreover, the amygdala is neither structurally or functionally homogenous and fMRI studies do not resolve which amygdala sub-regions interfere with working memory. Lesion studies on the other hand can contribute unique causal evidence on aspects of brain-behaviour phenomena fMRI cannot "see". To address these questions we investigated working memory performance in three adult female subjects with bilateral basolateral amygdala calcification consequent to Urbach-Wiethe Disease and ten healthy controls. Amygdala lesion extent and functionality was determined by structural and functional MRI methods. Working memory performance was assessed using the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-III digit span forward task. State and trait anxiety measures to control for possible emotional differences between patient and control groups were administered. Structural MRI showed bilateral selective basolateral amygdala damage in the three Urbach-Wiethe Disease subjects and fMRI confirmed intact functionality in the remaining amygdala sub-regions. The three Urbach-Wiethe Disease subjects showed significant working memory facilitation relative to controls. Control measures showed no group anxiety differences. Results are provisionally interpreted in terms of a 'cooperation through competition' networks model that may account for the observed paradoxical functional facilitation effect
A. Bauer - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Reduced 5-HT2A receptor signaling following selective bilateral amygdala damage
2010Co-Authors: Rene Hurlemann, Thomas E. Schlaepfer, Andreas Matusch, Harald Reich, Nadim Joni Shah, Karl Zilles, Wolfgang Maier, A. BauerAbstract:Neurobiological evidence implicates the amygdala as well as serotonergic (serotonin, 5-HT) signaling via postsynaptic 5-HT2A receptors as essential substrates of anxiety behaviors. Assuming a functional interdependence of these substrates, we hypothesized that a low-fear behavioral phenotype due to bilateral lesion of the amygdala would be associated with significant 5-HT2A receptor changes. Thus, we used [ 18 F]altanserin positron emission tomography (PET) referenced to radioligand plasma levels and corrected for partial volume effects to quantify the spatial distribution of 5-HT2A receptor binding potential (BPP) in a rare patient with Urbach–Wiethe Disease and selective bilateral amygdala calcification damage relative to 10 healthy control subjects. Consistent with our a priori hypothesis, we observed a 70 % global decrease in 5-HT 2A receptor BP P in the Urbach–Wiethe patient relative to controls. Thus, brain abnormalities in this patient are not restricted to the amygdala, but extend to overall 5-HT neurotransmission via 5-HT2A receptors. Our findings provide important insights into the molecular architecture of human anxiety behaviors and suggest the 5-HT 2A receptor as a promising pharmacological target to control pathological anxiety. Keywords: Amygdala; fear; anxiety; serotonin; 5-HT 2A receptor; PET; Urbach-Wiethe diseas
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Reduced 5-HT2A receptor signaling following selective bilateral amygdala damage
2008Co-Authors: Rene Hurlemann, Thomas E. Schlaepfer, Andreas Matusch, Harald Reich, Nadim Joni Shah, Karl Zilles, Wolfgang Maier, A. BauerAbstract:Neurobiological evidence implicates the amygdala as well as serotonergic (serotonin, 5-HT) signaling via postsynaptic 5-HT2A receptors as essential substrates of anxiety behaviors. Assuming a functional interdependence of these substrates, we hypothesized that a low-fear behavioral phenotype due to bilateral lesion of the amygdala would be associated with significant 5-HT2A receptor changes. Thus, we used [18F]altanserin positron emission tomography (PET) referenced to radioligand plasma levels and corrected for partial volume effects to quantify the spatial distribution of 5-HT2A receptor binding potential (BPP) in a rare patient with Urbach–Wiethe Disease and selective bilateral amygdala calcification damage relative to 10 healthy control subjects. Consistent with our a priori hypothesis, we observed a 70% global decrease in 5-HT2A receptor BPP in the Urbach–Wiethe patient relative to controls. Thus, brain abnormalities in this patient are not restricted to the amygdala, but extend to overall 5-HT neurotransmission via 5-HT2A receptors. Our findings provide important insights into the molecular architecture of human anxiety behaviors and suggest the 5-HT2A receptor as a promising pharmacological target to control pathological anxiety.
Rene Hurlemann - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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oxytocin enhances amygdala dependent socially reinforced learning and emotional empathy in humans
2010Co-Authors: Rene Hurlemann, Isabel Dziobek, Alexandra Patin, Oezguer A Onur, Michael X Cohen, Tobias Baumgartner, Sarah Metzler, J Gallinat, Michael Wagner, Wolfgang MaierAbstract:Oxytocin (OT) is becoming increasingly established as a prosocial neuropeptide in humans with therapeutic potential in treatment of social, cognitive, and mood disorders. However, the potential of OT as a general facilitator of human learning and empathy is unclear. The current double-blind experiments on healthy adult male volunteers investigated first whether treatment with intranasal OT enhanced learning performance on a feedback-guided item-category association task where either social (smiling and angry faces) or nonsocial (green and red lights) reinforcers were used, and second whether it increased either cognitive or emotional empathy measured by the Multifaceted Empathy Test. Further experiments investigated whether OT-sensitive behavioral components required a normal functional amygdala. Results in control groups showed that learning performance was improved when social rather than nonsocial reinforcement was used. Intranasal OT potentiated this social reinforcement advantage and greatly increased emotional, but not cognitive, empathy in response to both positive and negative valence stimuli. Interestingly, after OT treatment, emotional empathy responses in men were raised to levels similar to those found in untreated women. Two patients with selective bilateral damage to the amygdala (monozygotic twins with congenital Urbach-Wiethe Disease) were impaired on both OT-sensitive aspects of these learning and empathy tasks, but performed normally on nonsocially reinforced learning and cognitive empathy. Overall these findings provide the first demonstration that OT can facilitate amygdala-dependent, socially reinforced learning and emotional empathy in men.
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Reduced 5-HT2A receptor signaling following selective bilateral amygdala damage
2010Co-Authors: Rene Hurlemann, Thomas E. Schlaepfer, Andreas Matusch, Harald Reich, Nadim Joni Shah, Karl Zilles, Wolfgang Maier, A. BauerAbstract:Neurobiological evidence implicates the amygdala as well as serotonergic (serotonin, 5-HT) signaling via postsynaptic 5-HT2A receptors as essential substrates of anxiety behaviors. Assuming a functional interdependence of these substrates, we hypothesized that a low-fear behavioral phenotype due to bilateral lesion of the amygdala would be associated with significant 5-HT2A receptor changes. Thus, we used [ 18 F]altanserin positron emission tomography (PET) referenced to radioligand plasma levels and corrected for partial volume effects to quantify the spatial distribution of 5-HT2A receptor binding potential (BPP) in a rare patient with Urbach–Wiethe Disease and selective bilateral amygdala calcification damage relative to 10 healthy control subjects. Consistent with our a priori hypothesis, we observed a 70 % global decrease in 5-HT 2A receptor BP P in the Urbach–Wiethe patient relative to controls. Thus, brain abnormalities in this patient are not restricted to the amygdala, but extend to overall 5-HT neurotransmission via 5-HT2A receptors. Our findings provide important insights into the molecular architecture of human anxiety behaviors and suggest the 5-HT 2A receptor as a promising pharmacological target to control pathological anxiety. Keywords: Amygdala; fear; anxiety; serotonin; 5-HT 2A receptor; PET; Urbach-Wiethe diseas
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Reduced 5-HT2A receptor signaling following selective bilateral amygdala damage
2008Co-Authors: Rene Hurlemann, Thomas E. Schlaepfer, Andreas Matusch, Harald Reich, Nadim Joni Shah, Karl Zilles, Wolfgang Maier, A. BauerAbstract:Neurobiological evidence implicates the amygdala as well as serotonergic (serotonin, 5-HT) signaling via postsynaptic 5-HT2A receptors as essential substrates of anxiety behaviors. Assuming a functional interdependence of these substrates, we hypothesized that a low-fear behavioral phenotype due to bilateral lesion of the amygdala would be associated with significant 5-HT2A receptor changes. Thus, we used [18F]altanserin positron emission tomography (PET) referenced to radioligand plasma levels and corrected for partial volume effects to quantify the spatial distribution of 5-HT2A receptor binding potential (BPP) in a rare patient with Urbach–Wiethe Disease and selective bilateral amygdala calcification damage relative to 10 healthy control subjects. Consistent with our a priori hypothesis, we observed a 70% global decrease in 5-HT2A receptor BPP in the Urbach–Wiethe patient relative to controls. Thus, brain abnormalities in this patient are not restricted to the amygdala, but extend to overall 5-HT neurotransmission via 5-HT2A receptors. Our findings provide important insights into the molecular architecture of human anxiety behaviors and suggest the 5-HT2A receptor as a promising pharmacological target to control pathological anxiety.
Dan J. Stein - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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translational neuroscience of basolateral amygdala lesions studies of urbach wiethe Disease
2016Co-Authors: N. Koen, David Terburg, Barak Morgan, Dan J. Stein, J. Fourie, Ron Stoop, J. Van HonkAbstract:Urbach-Wiethe Disease (UWD) is an extremely rare autosomal recessive disorder characterized by mutations in the extracellular matrix protein 1 gene on chromosome 1. Typical clinical manifestations include voice hoarseness in early infancy and neuropsychiatric, laryngeal, and dermatological pathologies later in life. Neuroimaging studies have revealed a pattern of brain calcification often but not exclusively leading to selective bilateral amygdala damage. A large body of work on amygdala lesions in rodents exists, generally employing a subregion model focused on the basolateral amygdala (BLA) and the central-medial amygdala. However, human work usually considers the amygdala as a unified structure, not only complicating the translation of animal findings to humans but also providing a unique opportunity for further research. To compare data from rodent models with human cases and to complement existing data from Europe and North America, a series of investigations was undertaken on UWD subjects with selective BLA damage in the Namaqualand region, South Africa. This review presents key findings from this work, including fear processing, social-economic behavior, and emotional conflict processing. Our findings are broadly consistent with and support rodent models of selective BLA lesions and show that the BLA is integral to processing sensory stimuli and exhibits inhibitory regulation of responses to unconditioned innate fear stimuli. Furthermore, our findings suggest that the human BLA mediates calculative-instrumental economic behaviors and may compromise working memory via competition for attentional resources between the BLA salience detection system and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex working memory system.
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impaired acquisition of classically conditioned fear potentiated startle reflexes in humans with focal bilateral basolateral amygdala damage
2015Co-Authors: David Terburg, Barak Morgan, Dan J. Stein, J. Van Honk, Floris KlumpersAbstract:Based on studies in rodents, the basolateral amygdala (BLA) is considered a key site for experience-dependent neural plasticity underlying the acquisition of conditioned fear responses. In humans, very few studies exist of subjects with selective amygdala lesions and those studies have only implicated the amygdala more broadly leaving the role of amygdala sub-regions underexplored. We tested a rare sample of subjects (N ¼ 4) with unprecedented focal bilateral BLA lesions due to a genetic condition called Urbach–Wiethe Disease. In a classical delay fear conditioning experiment, these subjects showed impaired acquisition of conditioned fear relative to a group of matched control subjects (N ¼ 10) as measured by fear-potentiation of the defensive eye-blink startle reflex. After the experiment, the BLA-damaged cases showed normal declarative memory of the conditioned association. Our findings provide new evidence that the human BLA is essential to drive fast classically conditioned defensive reflexes.
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hypervigilance for fear after basolateral amygdala damage in humans
2012Co-Authors: David Terburg, Barak Morgan, Estrella R Montoya, Helena B Thornton, Ahmad R Hariri, Jaak Panksepp, Ignace T. C. Hooge, Dan J. Stein, Jack Van HonkAbstract:Recent rodent research has shown that the basolateral amygdala (BLA) inhibits unconditioned, or innate, fear. It is, however, unknown whether the BLA acts in similar ways in humans. In a group of five subjects with a rare genetic syndrome, that is, Urbach–Wiethe Disease (UWD), we used a combination of structural and functional neuroimaging, and established focal, bilateral BLA damage, while other amygdala sub-regions are functionally intact. We tested the translational hypothesis that these BLA-damaged UWD-subjects are hypervigilant to facial expressions of fear, which are prototypical innate threat cues in humans. Our data indeed repeatedly confirm fear hypervigilance in these UWD subjects. They show hypervigilant responses to unconsciously presented fearful faces in a modified Stroop task. They attend longer to the eyes of dynamically displayed fearful faces in an eye-tracked emotion recognition task, and in that task recognize facial fear significantly better than control subjects. These findings provide the first direct evidence in humans in support of an inhibitory function of the BLA on the brain's threat vigilance system, which has important implications for the understanding of the amygdala's role in the disorders of fear and anxiety.
-
Paradoxical facilitation of working memory after basolateral amygdala damage.
2024Co-Authors: Barak Morgan, David Terburg, Helena B Thornton, Dan J. Stein, J. Van HonkAbstract:Working memory is a vital cognitive capacity without which meaningful thinking and logical reasoning would be impossible. Working memory is integrally dependent upon prefrontal cortex and it has been suggested that voluntary control of working memory, enabling sustained emotion inhibition, was the crucial step in the evolution of modern humans. Consistent with this, recent fMRI studies suggest that working memory performance depends upon the capacity of prefrontal cortex to suppress bottom-up amygdala signals during emotional arousal. However fMRI is not well-suited to definitively resolve questions of causality. Moreover, the amygdala is neither structurally or functionally homogenous and fMRI studies do not resolve which amygdala sub-regions interfere with working memory. Lesion studies on the other hand can contribute unique causal evidence on aspects of brain-behaviour phenomena fMRI cannot "see". To address these questions we investigated working memory performance in three adult female subjects with bilateral basolateral amygdala calcification consequent to Urbach-Wiethe Disease and ten healthy controls. Amygdala lesion extent and functionality was determined by structural and functional MRI methods. Working memory performance was assessed using the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-III digit span forward task. State and trait anxiety measures to control for possible emotional differences between patient and control groups were administered. Structural MRI showed bilateral selective basolateral amygdala damage in the three Urbach-Wiethe Disease subjects and fMRI confirmed intact functionality in the remaining amygdala sub-regions. The three Urbach-Wiethe Disease subjects showed significant working memory facilitation relative to controls. Control measures showed no group anxiety differences. Results are provisionally interpreted in terms of a 'cooperation through competition' networks model that may account for the observed paradoxical functional facilitation effect
