Altered task-special connectivity of hippocampus during rt-fMRI neurofeedback training of emotion regulation

Abstract

Real-time functional magnetic resonance imaging neurofeedback (rt-fMRI NF) provides an effective method for emotion regulation, which has the great potential in clinical treatment. Previous studies mainly use functional connection analysis to obtain information transmission between different brain regions. However, When the neurofeedback task changes, the connection between whole brain and a specific seed region is unknown. Psychophysiological interaction (PPI) is the efficient way which can explore the task-specific connection strength under different conditions. In this study, we designed an experiment that used rt-fMRI NF to regulate emotions in healthy people, all the subjects were divided into experimental group and control group. They were provided with the blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) signal from hippocampus or intraparietal sulcus. We performed PPI to analyze connection with left hippocampus under different psychological conditions after NF training for both groups. Results show that when "regulate" compared to "view" in experimental group, the significantly connection areas with left hippocampus were right superior and middle frontal gyrus, cingulate gyrus, temporal lobe, left postcentral and occipital regions, there was no connection significantly in the control group. These results demonstrate the feasibility of using the hippocampus as a feedback brain region for emotion regulation. In general, PPI reveals the interaction between different brain regions and psychological factors, which might be an objective way of assessing the success of neurofeedback.