Whole brain correlates of individual differences in skin conductance responses during discriminative fear conditioning to social cues

Abstract

Understanding the neural basis for individual differences in the skin conductance response (SCR) during discriminative fear conditioning may inform on our understanding of autonomic regulation in fear-related psychopathology. Previous region-of-interest (ROI) analyses have implicated the amygdala in regulating conditioned SCR, but whole brain analyses are lacking. This study examined correlations between individual differences in SCR during discriminative fear conditioning to social stimuli and neural activity throughout the brain, by using data from a large functional magnetic resonance imaging study of twins (N = 285 individuals). Results show that conditioned SCR correlates with activity in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex/anterior midcingulate cortex, anterior insula, bilateral temporoparietal junction, right frontal operculum, bilateral dorsal premotor cortex, right superior parietal lobe, and midbrain. A ROI analysis additionally showed a positive correlation between amygdala activity and conditioned SCR in line with previous reports. We suggest that the observed whole brain correlates of SCR belong to a large-scale midcingulo-insular network related to salience detection and autonomic-interoceptive processing. Altered activity within this network may underlie individual differences in conditioned SCR and autonomic aspects of psychopathology.

Keywords

• fear learning
• autonomic activity
• electrodermal activity
• EDA
• fMRI
• salience network