NEURAL CORRELATES OF LEVELS OF EMOTIONAL AWARENESS - EVIDENCE OF AN INTERACTION BETWEEN EMOTION AND ATTENTION IN THE ANTERIOR CINGULATE CORTEX

Recent functional imaging studies have begun to identify the neural co rrelates of emotion in healthy volunteers. However, studies to date ha ve not differentially addressed the brain areas associated with the pe rception, experience, or expression of emotion during emotional arousa l. To explore the neural correlates of emotional experience, we used p ositron emission tomography (PET) and O-15-water to measure cerebral b lood flow (CBF) in 12 healthy women during film and recall-induced emo tion and correlated CBF changes attributable to emotion with subjects' scores on the Levels of Emotional Awareness Scale (LEAS), a measure o f individual differences in the capacity to experience emotion in a di fferentiated and complex way. A conjunction analysis revealed that the correlations between LEAS and CBF during film and recall-induced emot ion overlapped significantly (z = 3.74, p < 0.001) in Brodmann's area 24 of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). This finding suggests that individual differences in the ability to accurately detect emotional s ignals interoceptively or exteroceptively may at least in part be a fu nction of the degree to which the ACC participates in the experiential processing and response to emotion cues. To the extent that this find ing is consistent with the functions of the ACC involving attention an d response selection, it suggests that this neural correlate of consci ous emotional experience is not exclusive to emotion.