Neurocognitive processes of linguistic cues related to death

Consciousness of the finiteness of one s personal existence influences human thoughts and behaviors tremendously However the neural substrates underlying the processing of death-related information remain unclear The current study addressed this issue by scanning 20 female adults using functional magnetic resonance imaging in a modified Stroop task that required naming colors of death-related negative-valence and neutral-valence words We found that while both death-related and negative-valence words Increased activity in the precuneus/posterior angulate and lateral frontal cortex relative to neutral-valence words the neural correlate of the processing of death-related words was characterized by decreased activity in bilateral insula relative to both negative-valence and neutral-valence words Moreover the decreased activity in the left insula correlated with subjective ratings of death relevance of death-related words and the decreased activity in the right insula correlated with subjective ratings of arousal Induced by death-related words Our fMRI findings suggest that while both death-related and negative-valence words are associated with enhanced arousal and emotion regulation the processing of linguistic cues related to death is associated with modulations of the activity in the insula that mediates neural representation of the sentient self (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd All rights reservedhttp://gateway.webofknowledge.com/gateway/Gateway.cgi?GWVersion=2&SrcApp=PARTNER_APP&SrcAuth=LinksAMR&KeyUT=WOS:000284017300007&DestLinkType=FullRecord&DestApp=ALL_WOS&UsrCustomerID=8e1609b174ce4e31116a60747a720701Behavioral SciencesNeurosciencesPsychology, ExperimentalSCI(E)PubMedSSCI18ARTICLE123436-34424