Browsing by Author "Lohrenz, Terry"

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    Nonpolitical Images Evoke Neural Predictors of Political Ideology
    (Elsevier, 2014) Ahn, Woo-Young; Kishida, Kenneth T.; Gu, Xiaosi; Lohrenz, Terry; Harvey, Ann; Alford, John R.; Smith, Kevin B.; Yaffe, Gideon; Hibbing, John R.; Dayan, Peter; Montague, P. Read
    Political ideologies summarize dimensions of life that define how a person organizes their public and privateﾠbehavior, including their attitudes associated with sex, family, education, and personal autonomy [1ﾠandﾠ2]. Despite the abstract nature of such sensibilities, fundamental features of political ideology have been found toﾠbe deeply connected to basic biological mechanisms [3, 4, 5, 6ﾠandﾠ7] that may serve to defend against environmental challenges like contamination and physical threat [8, 9, 10, 11ﾠandﾠ12]. These results invite the provocative claim that neural responses to nonpolitical stimuli (like contaminated foodﾠor physical threats) should be highly predictive ofﾠabstract political opinions (like attitudes toward gun control and abortion) [13]. We applied a machine-learningﾠmethod to fMRI data to test the hypotheses that brain responses to emotionally evocative images predict individual scores on a standard political ideology assay. Disgusting images, especially those related to animal-reminder disgust (e.g., mutilated body), generate neural responses that are highly predictive of political orientation even though these neural predictors do not agree with participants' conscious rating of the stimuli. Images from other affective categories do not support such predictions. Remarkably, brain responses to a single disgusting stimulus were sufficient to make accurate predictions about an individual subjectﾒs political ideology. These results provide strong support for the idea that fundamental neural processing differences that emerge under the challenge of emotionally evocative stimuli may serve to structure political beliefs in ways formerly unappreciated.
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    Noradrenaline tracks emotional modulation of attention in human amygdala
    (Elsevier, 2023) Bang, Dan; Luo, Yi; Barbosa, Leonardo S.; Batten, Seth R.; Hadj-Amar, Beniamino; Twomey, Thomas; Melville, Natalie; White, Jason P.; Torres, Alexis; Celaya, Xavier; Ramaiah, Priya; McClure, Samuel M.; Brewer, Gene A.; Bina, Robert W.; Lohrenz, Terry; Casas, Brooks; Chiu, Pearl H.; Vannucci, Marina; Kishida, Kenneth T.; Witcher, Mark R.; Montague, P. Read
    The noradrenaline (NA) system is one of the brain’s major neuromodulatory systems; it originates in a small midbrain nucleus, the locus coeruleus (LC), and projects widely throughout the brain.1,2 The LC-NA system is believed to regulate arousal and attention3,4 and is a pharmacological target in multiple clinical conditions.5,6,7 Yet our understanding of its role in health and disease has been impeded by a lack of direct recordings in humans. Here, we address this problem by showing that electrochemical estimates of sub-second NA dynamics can be obtained using clinical depth electrodes implanted for epilepsy monitoring. We made these recordings in the amygdala, an evolutionarily ancient structure that supports emotional processing8,9 and receives dense LC-NA projections,10 while patients (n = 3) performed a visual affective oddball task. The task was designed to induce different cognitive states, with the oddball stimuli involving emotionally evocative images,11 which varied in terms of arousal (low versus high) and valence (negative versus positive). Consistent with theory, the NA estimates tracked the emotional modulation of attention, with a stronger oddball response in a high-arousal state. Parallel estimates of pupil dilation, a common behavioral proxy for LC-NA activity,12 supported a hypothesis that pupil-NA coupling changes with cognitive state,13,14 with the pupil and NA estimates being positively correlated for oddball stimuli in a high-arousal but not a low-arousal state. Our study provides proof of concept that neuromodulator monitoring is now possible using depth electrodes in standard clinical use.