ArticleNeuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology2015
Effect of parasympathetic stimulation on brain activity during appraisal of fearful expressions.
Article in Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers.
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Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed.
- Post-operative benefits of animal-assisted therapy in pediatric surgery: a randomised study.PloS one · 2015Trial
- Preliminary Evidence on Psychophysiological and Emotional Responses to Different Types of Human-Calf Interaction in Healthy Adults.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2026Article
- Effects of human-dog interactions on brain activation.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Heart Rate Variability Mediates the Association Between Fear of Pain and Pain Perception: An Exploratory Study in Healthy Controls.Journal of clinical medicine · 2026Article
- Comparative evaluation of two behavior guidance techniques in reducing pain perception and anxiety during local anesthesia administration in children: a randomized clinical trial.Journal of dental anesthesia and pain medicine · 2025Article
- Investigating the effects of artificial baroreflex stimulation on pain perception: A comparative study in no-pain and chronic low back pain individuals.The Journal of physiology · 2024Article
- Mapping the emotional homunculus with fMRI.iScience · 2024Article
- Capturing inter-individual variability in stress dynamics with heart rate traces reveals activity in the bilateral hippocampus, amygdala, and insula.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- Sympathetic and parasympathetic central autonomic networks.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- Psychophysiological and emotional effects of human-Dog interactions by activity type: An electroencephalogram study.PloS one · 2024Article
- A rationale for considering heart/brain axis control in neuropsychiatric disease.Mammalian genome : official journal of the International Mammalian Genome Society · 2023Review
- Atypical interoception as a common risk factor for psychopathology: A review.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2021Review
- Effects of acute transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation on emotion recognition in adolescent depression.Psychological medicine · 2021Article
- Observational
- Uncovering complex central autonomic networks at rest: a functional magnetic resonance imaging study on complex cardiovascular oscillations.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2020Article
- Cardiac afferent activity modulates the expression of racial stereotypes.Nature communications · 2017Article
- Combining electroencephalographic activity and instantaneous heart rate for assessing brain-heart dynamics during visual emotional elicitation in healthy subjects.Philosophical transactions. Series A, Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences · 2016Article
- Neurostructural abnormalities associated with axes of emotion dysregulation in generalized anxiety.NeuroImage. Clinical · 2016Article
- Beyond the Medial Regions of Prefrontal Cortex in the Regulation of Fear and Anxiety.Frontiers in systems neuroscience · 2016Review
- Sleep Deprivation Impairs the Human Central and Peripheral Nervous System Discrimination of Social Threat.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2015Article
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Authors and funding
13 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Autonomic nervous system activity is an important component of human emotion. Mental processes influence bodily physiology, which in turn feeds back to influence thoughts and feelings. Afferent cardiovascular signals from arterial baroreceptors in the carotid sinuses are processed within the brain and contribute to this two-way communication with the body. These carotid baroreceptors can be stimulated non-invasively by externally applying focal negative pressure bilaterally to the neck. In an experiment combining functional neuroimaging (fMRI) with carotid stimulation in healthy participants, we tested the hypothesis that manipulating afferent cardiovascular signals alters the central processing of emotional information (fearful and neutral facial expressions). Carotid stimulation, compared with sham stimulation, broadly attenuated activity across cortical and brainstem regions. Modulation of emotional processing was apparent as a significant expression-by-stimulation interaction within left amygdala, where responses during appraisal of fearful faces were selectively reduced by carotid stimulation. Moreover, activity reductions within insula, amygdala, and hippocampus correlated with the degree of stimulation-evoked change in the explicit emotional ratings of fearful faces. Across participants, individual differences in autonomic state (heart rate variability, a proxy measure of autonomic balance toward parasympathetic activity) predicted the extent to which carotid stimulation influenced neural (amygdala) responses during appraisal and subjective rating of fearful faces. Together our results provide mechanistic insight into the visceral component of emotion by identifying the neural substrates mediating cardiovascular influences on the processing of fear signals, potentially implicating central baroreflex mechanisms for anxiolytic treatment targets.
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