ArticlePsychopharmacology2016
Abnormal medial prefrontal cortex activity in heavy cannabis users during conscious emotional evaluation.
Article in Psychopharmacology, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 25 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
25 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 39 citations in OpenAlex.
- Neuroimaging Impaired Response Inhibition and Salience Attribution in Human Drug Addiction: A Systematic Review.Neuron · 2018Pooled it
- Neuroimaging meta-analysis of cannabis use studies reveals convergent functional alterations in brain regions supporting cognitive control and reward processing.Journal of psychopharmacology (Oxford, England) · 2018Pooled it
- Combining acute alcohol administration with accelerated prefrontal theta burst stimulation: A pilot study of feasibility and inhibitory control.Drug and alcohol dependence reports · 2026Article
- Common and distinct neurofunctional signatures of dynamic naturalistic emotion regulation strategies.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Emotional interference and right prefrontal hemodynamic responses in adult cannabis users: a pilot fNIRS study.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Positive face BOLD response and task-dependent ventral striatal functional connectivity during Go/No-go task among abstinent cannabis-using adolescents and young adults.Frontiers in adolescent medicine · 2026Article
- Cannabis use frequency is associated with emotion dysregulation among persons receiving long-term opioid therapy for chronic pain: A psychophysiological study.Drug and alcohol dependence · 2025Article
- Re-evaluating our focus in addiction: emotional dysregulation is a critical driver of relapse to drug use.Translational psychiatry · 2024Review
- [Cannabis use and cannabis use disorders].Der Nervenarzt · 2024Review
- Adolescent Substance Use Is Associated With Altered Brain Response During Processing of Negative Emotional Stimuli.Journal of studies on alcohol and drugs · 2023Article
- Combining noninvasive brain stimulation with behavioral pharmacology methods to study mechanisms of substance use disorder.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2023Article
- Examining Inhibitory Affective Processing Within the Rostral Anterior Cingulate Cortex Among Abstinent Cannabis-Using Adolescents and Young Adults.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2022Article
- Altered amygdala-cortical connectivity in individuals with Cannabis use disorder.Journal of psychopharmacology (Oxford, England) · 2021Article
- Assessing Aerobic Fitness Level in Relation to Affective and Behavioral Functioning in Emerging Adult Cannabis Users.International journal of mental health and addiction · 2021Article
- Alcohol use disorder and cannabis use disorder symptomatology in adolescents is associated with dysfunction in neural processing of future events.Addiction biology · 2021Article
- Deconstructing the neurobiology of cannabis use disorder.Nature neuroscience · 2020Review
- Reduced Segregation Between Cognitive and Emotional Processes in Cannabis Dependence.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2020Article
- Impaired cognitive performance under psychosocial stress in cannabis-dependent men is associated with attenuated precuneus activityJournal of psychiatry & neuroscience : JPN · 2020Article
- Altered Effective Connectivity of Central Autonomic Network in Response to Negative Facial Expression in Adults With Cannabis Use Disorder.Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging · 2020Article
- Anterior cingulate volume reductions in abstinent adolescent and young adult cannabis users: Association with affective processing deficits.Psychiatry research. Neuroimaging · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
rationaleLong-term heavy cannabis users (cannabis users) who are not acutely intoxicated have diminished subconscious neural responsiveness to affective stimuli.
objectiveThis study sought to determine if abnormal processing extends to the conscious evaluation of emotional stimuli.
methodsFunctional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to examine brain activity as cannabis users (N = 16) and non-cannabis-using controls (N = 17) evaluated and categorized standardized International Affective Picture System (IAPS) stimuli. Individual judgments were used to isolate activity during the evaluation of emotional (i.e., emotional evaluation) or neutral (i.e., neutral evaluation) stimuli. Within- and between-group analyses were performed.
resultsBoth groups judged the same stimuli as emotional and had activations in visual, midbrain, and middle cingulate cortices during emotional evaluation, relative to neutral. Within-group analyses also revealed amygdalar and inferior frontal gyrus activations in controls, but not cannabis users, and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) deactivations in cannabis users, but not controls, during emotional evaluation, relative to neutral. Between-group comparisons found that mPFC activity during positive and negative evaluation was significantly hypoactive in cannabis users, relative to controls.
conclusionsAbnormal neural processing of affective content extends to the level of consciousness in cannabis users. The hypoactive mPFC responses observed resembles the attenuated mPFC responses found during increased non-affective cognitive load in prior research. These findings suggest that abnormal mPFC singling in cannabis users during emotional evaluation might be associated with increased non-affective cognitive load.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.