Abstract
Childhood maltreatment (CM) causes early deviations in cognitive and affective processes, leading to future adaptation failures and psychopathology. Specifically, CM has been linked to cognitive distortions, and recent studies have focused on the impact of CM on the higher level of metacognitive beliefs. However, only a few studies have revealed the neural mechanisms underlying the association between altered metacognition and CM. Therefore, this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study investigated the neural correlates of thought–action fusion (TAF) tendency and CM experiences. Overall, 40 young and healthy adults (21 men) participated in this study and underwent fMRI during the TAF task as well as psychological evaluation for CM, TAF tendency, anxiety, and depressive symptoms. During the TAF task, they were asked to read negative (Neg) or neutral (Neu) statements about neutral or close people (CP). Notably, significant activations were found in regions such as the bilateral anterior insula, dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), caudate, thalamus, medial prefrontal cortex, precuneus, and right amygdala in the NegCp > NeuCP contrast. Furthermore, anterior insula and dACC activities were significantly correlated with total scores of CM experiences and TAF. Exaggerated TAF tendency in persons with CM experiences was associated with increased response of the anterior insula and dACC, which are two core hubs of the salience network. Our results therefore seem to suggest insights for a better understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying metacognitive beliefs related to CM experiences.
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The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
We thanks to Mina Choi and members involved in BMRlab to support our experiments.
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This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIP) (No. 2021R1F1A1049460 and 2021R1A2C2004720).
This work was also supported by the basic research program through the Korean Brain Research Institute, funded by the Ministry of Science and Information Communications Technology (ICT) (23-BR-03-01).
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Conception and study design (S.W.L., S.K., Y.C., S.J.L); data acquisition and design statistical analysis (S.W.L., S.K., Y.J.K., Y.C., S.J.L); recruitment (S.W.L., S.J.L); data collection (S.K., Y.J.K); interpretation of results (all authors); drafting the manuscript and revision of subsequent drafts (all authors).
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Lee, S.W., Kim, S., Kim, Y.J. et al. Aberrant function of the salience network related to maltreatment experiences during thought–action fusion. Brain Imaging and Behavior (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11682-023-00845-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11682-023-00845-8