Investigating the association of resting-state brain effective connectivity with basic negative emotions

Abstract

Emotions are the foundational elements of mental health. Basic negative emotions have an assertive significant role in personality building while their unrestrained form can lead to mental health disorders and physical illnesses. The self-reported measures of negative emotions are usually associated with persistent feelings and hence may reflect trait-like negative emotions. Examining the association of brain intrinsic effective connectivity with the self-reported basic negative emotions can provide the basis of trait-like personality. The current study focuses on investigating the association of resting-state brain effective connectivity with the self-reported scores of all three basic negative emotions - anger, fear, and sadness. The relationship of effective connectivity with low and high levels of negative emotions was determined. The dataset comprises preprocessed resting-state fMRI scans and NIH emotion battery for self-reported basic emotions scores, of 1079 young healthy adults from Human Connectome Project (HCP). Subject-specific effective connectivity was discovered using spectral dynamic causal modelling, and the group-level effective connectivity association with the three basic emotions were examined using parametric empirical Bayes. The results revealed that the limbic-cortical connectivity from right amygdala (rAMG) to posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) could be the potential biomarker for heightened self-report negative emotions and hence could reflect trait-like personality related to negative emotions. The high anger-affect and high sadness have the strongest negative association with the inhibitory connection of rAMG to PCC while high fear-affect have the strongest negative association with inhibitory left anterior insula to PCC connectivity along with the second strongest negative association with inhibitory rAMG to PCC connectivity. The results of these association analyses may be used for the comparative analysis of causal brain connectivity in mental health disorders and may also represent the trait-like personality related to negative emotions.