investigator?s abstract): This project builds on studies in Davidson?s laboratory that have highlighted the important role of prefrontal cortex and amygdala in the production and regulation of affective reactivity and affective style. This corpus of work has also focused on relations between differences in the central circuitry of emotion and peripheral measures of endocrine, autonomic and immune function. The first study in this project will examine the central and peripheral biology of resilience using subjects from two ongoing longitudinal samples that are being studied in Project 1. Subjects will be selected based upon their life history profile in conjunction with measures of psychological well-being as being either vulnerable or resilient. These individuals will then participate in two laboratory sessions. The first session will consist of a functional MRI (fMRI) session during which w hole brain echo planar images using BOLD contrast will be obtained in an event-related paradigm while subjects view positive, negative and neutral pictures. Structural images will also be obtained at this session for both anatomical localization of the functional data and for morphometric measurement of the hippocampus. The second session will consist of a psychophysiological assessment during which measures of brain electrical activity, impedance cardiography, startle and salivary cortisol will be obtained while subjects anticipate receiving reward or punishment, as well as during a mental stressor task. Vulnerable subjects are predicted to show more right frontal and amygdala activation, greater startle reactivity to threat and slower recovery following punishment, greater cortisol reactivity and increased sympathetic activation. The second study will examine patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and fibromyalgia (FMS) along with matched controls who will be evaluated in Project 2. The study in this part of the project will provide an intensive biological assessment of the changes produced by a mindfulness meditation intervention. The assessment procedure used in Study I will also be used in this study. Subjects will undergo this two-session assessment before, just after, and 6 months following an 8-week mindfulness meditation intervention. The investigators predict that the mindfulness intervention will increase left anterior activation, decrease amygdala reactivity to negative stimuli, improve the recovery following punishment, increase pre-ejection period (PEP, i.e., decrease sympathetic activation) in response to mental stress and decrease cortisol compared with the initial assessment. Moreover, these biological changes are expected to predict improvements in clinical status among the patients.
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