Document Type
Article
Publication Date
12-1-2021
Publication Title
Nature Communications
Department
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences
Abstract
The specific neural systems underlying the subjective feeling of fear are debated in affective neuroscience. Here, we combine functional MRI with machine learning to identify and evaluate a sensitive and generalizable neural signature predictive of the momentary self-reported subjective fear experience across discovery (n = 67), validation (n = 20) and generalization (n = 31) cohorts. We systematically demonstrate that accurate fear prediction crucially requires distributed brain systems, with important contributions from cortical (e.g., prefrontal, midcingulate and insular cortices) and subcortical (e.g., thalamus, periaqueductal gray, basal forebrain and amygdala) regions. We further demonstrate that the neural representation of subjective fear is distinguishable from the representation of conditioned threat and general negative affect. Overall, our findings suggest that subjective fear, which exhibits distinct neural representation with some other aversive states, is encoded in distributed systems rather than isolated ‘fear centers’.
DOI
10.1038/s41467-021-26977-3
Original Citation
Zhou, F., Zhao, W., Qi, Z. et al. A distributed fMRI-based signature for the subjective experience of fear. Nat Commun 12, 6643 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-26977-3
Dartmouth Digital Commons Citation
Zhou, Feng; Zhao, Weihua; Qi, Ziyu; Geng, Yayuan; Yao, Shuxia; Kendrick, Keith M.; Wager, Tor D.; and Becker, Benjamin, "A distributed fMRI-based signature for the subjective experience of fear" (2021). Dartmouth Scholarship. 4115.
https://digitalcommons.dartmouth.edu/facoa/4115
