Dispositional pessimism and amygdala activity: a PET study in healthy volunteers

The present study used scores from Seligman's Attribution Style Questionnai re and [O-15] water positron emission tomographic measurements of regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) to investigate the relation between individual d ifferences in dispositional pessimism and amygdala activity. During scannin g 13 healthy non-snake-phobic females passively viewed a snake videotape. U sing one-tailed tests, significant negative correlations were evident betwe en pessimism scores, with low scores reflecting relatively more pessimism, and right (r=-0.60; p=0.014) and left amygdala rCBF (r=-0.53;p=0.032). Thes e results extend previous neuroimaging findings in healthy subjects indicat ing a role for the amygdala in transient negative emotional states, and sug gest that this multimodal brain region also is involved in more durable neg ative affects such as dispositional pessimism. NeuroReport 12:1635-1638 (C) 2001 Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.