Human amygdalae are involved in various behavioral functions such as affective and stress processing. For these behavioral functions, as well as for psychophysiological arousal including cortisol release, sex differences are reported. Here, we assessed cortisol levels and resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC) of left and right amygdalae in 81 healthy participants (42 women) to investigate potential modulation of amygdala rsFC by sex and cortisol concentration. Our analyses revealed that rsFC of the left amygdala significantly differed between women and men: Women showed stronger rsFC than men between the left amygdala and left middle temporal gyrus, inferior frontal gyrus, postcentral gyrus and hippocampus, regions involved in face processing, inner-speech, fear and pain processing. No stronger connections were detected for men and no sex difference emerged for right amygdala rsFC. Also, an interaction of sex and cortisol appeared: In women, cortisol was negatively associated with rsFC of the amygdalae with striatal regions, mid-orbital frontal gyrus, anterior cingulate gyrus, middle and superior frontal gyri, supplementary motor area and the parietal-occipital sulcus. Contrarily in men, positive associations of cortisol with rsFC of the left amygdala and these structures were observed. Functional decoding analyses revealed an association of the amygdalae and these regions with emotion, reward and memory processing, as well as action execution. Our results suggest that functional connectivity of the amygdalae as well as the regulatory effect of cortisol on brain networks differs between women and men. These sex-differences and the mediating and sex-dependent effect of cortisol on brain communication systems should be taken into account in affective and stress-related neuroimaging research. Thus, more studies including both sexes are required.
Pubmed ID: 27039701 RIS Download
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A community database of published functional and structural neuroimaging experiments with both metadata descriptions of experimental design and activation locations in the form of stereotactic coordinates (x,y,z) in Talairach or MNI space. BrainMap provides not only data for meta-analyses and data mining, but also distributes software and concepts for quantitative integration of neuroimaging data. The goal of BrainMap is to develop software and tools to share neuroimaging results and enable meta-analysis of studies of human brain function and structure in healthy and diseased subjects. It is a tool to rapidly retrieve and understand studies in specific research domains, such as language, memory, attention, reasoning, emotion, and perception, and to perform meta-analyses of like studies. Brainmap contains the following software: # Sleuth: database searches and Talairach coordinate plotting (this application requires a username and password) # GingerALE: performs meta-analyses via the activation likelihood estimation (ALE) method; also converts coordinates between MNI and Talairach spaces using icbm2tal # Scribe: database entry of published functional neuroimaging papers with coordinate results
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