The rapid growth of the literature on neuroimaging in humans has led to major advances in our understanding of human brain function but has also made it increasingly difficult to aggregate and synthesize neuroimaging findings. Here we describe and validate an automated brain-mapping framework that uses text-mining, meta-analysis and machine-learning techniques to generate a large database of mappings between neural and cognitive states. We show that our approach can be used to automatically conduct large-scale, high-quality neuroimaging meta-analyses, address long-standing inferential problems in the neuroimaging literature and support accurate 'decoding' of broad cognitive states from brain activity in both entire studies and individual human subjects. Collectively, our results have validated a powerful and generative framework for synthesizing human neuroimaging data on an unprecedented scale.

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Large-scale automated synthesis of human functional neuroimaging data

Objective: The study of human anxiety disorders has benefited greatly from functional neuroimaging approaches. Individual studies, however, vary greatly in their findings. The authors searched for common and disorder-specific functional neurobiological deficits in several anxiety disorders. The authors also compared these deficits to the neural systems engaged during anticipatory anxiety in healthy subjects. Method: Functional magnetic resonance imaging and positron emission tomography studies of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), social anxiety disorder, specific phobia, and fear conditioning in healthy individuals were compared by quantitative meta-analysis. Included studies compared negative emotional processing to baseline, neutral, or positive emotion conditions. Results: Patients with any of the three disorders consistently showed greater activity than matched comparison subjects in the amygdala and insula, structures linked to negative emotional responses. A similar pattern was observed during f...

/pdf/functional-neuroimaging-of-anxiety-a-meta-analysis-of-22m2awm3e4.pdf

Functional Neuroimaging of Anxiety: A Meta-Analysis of Emotional Processing in PTSD, Social Anxiety Disorder, and Specific Phobia

https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/pdf/S1364-6613(10)00252-4.pdf

Emotional processing in anterior cingulate and medial prefrontal cortex

https://www.heartmathbenelux.com/doc/Thayer%20meta%20analysis%20heart%20rate%20variability%20pfc%20NBR%2012.pdf

A meta-analysis of heart rate variability and neuroimaging studies: implications for heart rate variability as a marker of stress and health.

Cultivation of mindfulness, the nonjudgmental awareness of experiences in the present moment, produces beneficial effects on well-being and ameliorates psychiatric and stress-related symptoms. Mindfulness meditation has therefore increasingly been incorporated into psychotherapeutic interventions. Although the number of publications in the field has sharply increased over the last two decades, there is a paucity of theoretical reviews that integrate the existing literature into a comprehensive theoretical framework. In this article, we explore several components through which mindfulness meditation exerts its effects: (a) attention regulation, (b) body awareness, (c) emotion regulation (including reappraisal and exposure, extinction, and reconsolidation), and (d) change in perspective on the self. Recent empirical research, including practitioners’ self-reports and experimental data, provides evidence supporting these mechanisms. Functional and structural neuroimaging studies have begun to explore the neuroscientific processes underlying these components. Evidence suggests that mindfulness practice is associated with neuroplastic changes in the anterior cingulate cortex, insula, temporo-parietal junction, fronto-limbic network, and default mode network structures. The authors suggest that the mechanisms described here work synergistically, establishing a process of enhanced self-regulation. Differentiating between these components seems useful to guide future basic research and to specifically target areas of development in the treatment of psychological disorders.

How Does Mindfulness Meditation Work? Proposing Mechanisms of Action From a Conceptual and Neural Perspective

Prefrontal-subcortical pathways mediating successful emotion regulation.

Brain mediators of cardiovascular responses to social threat, Part II: Prefrontal-subcortical pathways and relationship with anxiety

Coping with emotions past: the neural bases of regulating affect associated with negative autobiographical memories.

The neuroimaging of emotion.

Peters et al. use intracranial recordings and machine-learning techniques to show that human subjects under-use decision-incongruent evidence in the brain when computing perceptual confidence.

Matthew Davidson

Papers

Prefrontal-subcortical pathways mediating successful emotion regulation.

Brain mediators of cardiovascular responses to social threat, Part II: Prefrontal-subcortical pathways and relationship with anxiety

Coping with emotions past: the neural bases of regulating affect associated with negative autobiographical memories.

The neuroimaging of emotion.

Perceptual confidence neglects decision-incongruent evidence in the brain