Inhibited and Uninhibited Infants "Grown Up": Adult Amygdalar Response to Novelty

Abstract

Infants with an inhibited temperament tend to develop into children who avoid people, objects, and situations that are novel or unfamiliar, whereas uninhibited children spontaneously approach novel persons, objects, and situations. Behavioral and physiological features of these two temperamental categories are moderately stable from infancy into early adolescence and have been hypothesized to be due, in part, to variation in amygdalar responses to novelty. We found that adults who had been categorized in the second year of life as inhibited, compared with those previously categorized as uninhibited, showed greater functional MRI signal response within the amygdala to novel versus familiar faces.

Neuroanatomical correlates of personality in the elderly

“…These studies primarily point to associations between specific regions of the PFC -including orbitofrontal and dorsolateral regions -or amygdala, and extraversion and neuroticism. This is consistent with earlier functional imaging studies showing associations between extraversion, neuroticism or related measures and the activities of the PFC and amygdala during resting states (Johnson et al, 1999), or in response to specific activation procedures (Canli et al, 2001;Canli et al, 2002;Zald et al, 2002;Gusnard et al, 2003;Schwartz et al, 2003;Canli et al, 2004;Gray et al, 2005). However, the structure (and function) of the PFC and amygdala are altered with aging, and it remains uncertain how this effect may influence the relationships between these structures with extraversion and neuroticism.…”

“…The structure and function of the amygdala have been associated with measures of extraversion and neutroticism (Johnson et al, 1999;Canli et al, 2002;Omura et al, 2005) as well as with uninhibited and inhibited temperaments (Schwartz et al, 2003). However, we did not find any significant relationship between amygdala volume and these two personality factors in the current study of elderly individuals, or in an earlier study on young subjects (Wright et al, 2006b).…”

Shyness and emotion‐processing skills in preschoolers: a 6‐month longitudinal study

“…In a later study, that group found that, in response to stimuli depicting negative facial emotions, individuals with a genetic marker for shyness had a different pattern of event-related potentials than did those without the marker (Battaglia et al, 2005). This finding and others are consistent with theorizing within neuroscience that shyness and the processing of direct expressions of emotion}particularly negative emotions such as anger}-should be related because both are mediated, in large part, by the same brain structures and functions (Schwartz, Wright, Shin, Kagan, & Rauch, 2003;Wahlen, 1998). …”

The association of anxiety disorders and obsessive compulsive personality disorder with anorexia nervosa: Evidence from a family study with discussion of nosological and neurodevelopmental implications

“…An area of research we believe to have particular relevance to our findings is the affective neuroscience perspective on motivated behavior, a literature that has strongly implicated dysfunction in neural circuits mediating anxiety and fear learning in a range of pathological anxiety states. Specifically, in both human and animals studies, a wide range of anxiety phenotypes have been linked to overactivity of the amygdala, a key structure mediating innate fear proneness and the acquisition of learned fear, and of the hippocampus, which mediates the organism's defensive adaptation to novelty and plays a critical role in emotional memory 21,[26][27][28] ; dysfunction in frontal systems that regulate amygdala activation by threatening stimuli 29,30 ; altered morphometry in brain areas underlying the regulation of anxiety and fear-related behaviors 29,[31][32][33][34][35] ; and specific genetic variants that moderate the engagement of these circuits by threat stimuli. 36 Accordingly, behavioral manifestations of amygdaloid and hippocampal structures that are hypersensitive, or abnormally modulated-biased attention to novelty and threat, inhibition of appetitive behavior upon confrontation by novel or aversive environments, enhancement of fear learning, and poor retention of fear extinction (see Gray and McNaughton, 21 and Lang et al 22 for background)-may be a heuristic framework for exploring genetic and neurobiological underpinnings of the anxious premorbid temperament and anxiety-related diagnostic features of AN.…”