Topic: threat processing

In the past decades, functional MRI research has investigated task processing in largely static fashion based on evoked responses during blocked and event-related designs. Despite some progress in naturalistic designs, our understanding of threat processing remains largely limited to those obtained with standard paradigms with limited dynamics. In the present work, we applied Switching Linear Dynamical Systems (SLDS), a framework that estimates a generative model of the data with both states and transitions like HMMs, to uncover the dynamics of threat processing during a continuous threat-of-s

Abnormal reward and threat processing are key players in psychiatric conditions such as eating disorders, addiction or depression. These functions are strongly regulated by the nucleus accumbens shell (NAcSh) which integrates emotional signals to regulate motor output. Historically the NAcSh was thought to consist of 2 pathways: dopamine 1 and 2 receptor-expressing striatal projection neurons (D1, D2-SPNs) which promoted reward and aversive behavior, respectively. Yet recent work has revealed that both cell types can promote either reward or aversion, depending on the NAcSh subregion or input/