Re: What are the physiological changes that take place in the body/brain during

Dear Andrew,

Your question about what happen in the brain during sadness has interested 
many people for long time. Recent technical improvement have led to a 
series of studies in which brain activity was observed when a person was 
sad and compared with the activity when the person was not sad. One 
problem with these kinds of studies is that inducing very extreme sadness 
poses an ethical problem. That is, we don’t know exactly what happen in 
the brain in such situations. Nonetheless, some investigation have been 
made with voluntary subjects which were asked to write a short 
autobiographical narrative describing recent events in which they felt sad 
(Liotti et al., 2000). That usually includes the lost of a relative or 
relationship etc. Then, they were installed in a PET scan and injected 
with a radiotracer when viewing their script. This allowed to observed the 
activity of some brain areas. Subjects reported that they actually 
experienced sadness when reading the scripts. Results suggests that 
sadness activate a part of the cingulum and insula; deactivate the right 
prefrontal cortex and to a greater extent the posterior parietal cortex. 
These results were partially supported by another study using similar 
technique (Damasio et al., 2000). In the latter, some other regions were 
also found to be activated, including more “primitive” brain regions like 
the dorsal pons and the middle cerebellum. Surprisingly, no activation of 
the amygdala, a brain region for which there are many evidences for an 
involvement in emotions, were reported. On the other hand, Schneider et 
al. (2000) actually found activation of the amygdala during sadness using 
fMRI. It also worth mentioning that in the study of Liotti et al. (2000), 
subjects were all females and that Damasio et al. (2000) found a 
significant sex difference in that the insula was more activated in 
females than in males. Moreover, Schneider et al. (2000) also reported 
gender differences in activated brain regions (including the amygdala, 
which seems to be more activated in males) during sadness.

As you can see, although some discrepancies exists among recent studies, 
some brains areas seems to be specifically actives during sadness while 
other are more “silent”. These “key” areas probably play important role 
during sadness and surely have influence on some other brain regions as 
well as the body, which in turn send back information to the brain in 
order to maintain homeostasis. Finally, it should also be noted that in 
such activation studies, the protocol is crucial and determine the results 
and that many technical aspects are also very important. For the location 
of brain regions mentioned above, you can look into neuroanatomical 
textbook or atlases.

I hope that help!
Regards,
Eric


Damasio, A.R. et al. 
Subcortical and cortical brain activity during the feeling of self-
generated emotions.
Nat Neurosci 2000 Oct;3(10):1049-56.

Liotti M et al. 
Differential limbic--cortical correlates of sadness and anxiety in healthy 
subjects: implications for affective disorders.
Biol Psychiatry 2000 Jul 1;48(1):30-42.

Schneider F et al. 
Gender differences in regional cerebral activity during sadness.
Hum Brain Mapp 2000 Apr;9(4):226-38.

See also:

Mayberg, H.S. et al.
Reciprocal limbic-cortical function and negative mood: converging PET 
findings in depression and normal sadness.
Am J Psychiatry 1999 May;156(5):675-82.

Reiman E.M.
The application of positron emission tomography to the study of normal and 
pathologic emotions.
J Clin Psychiatry 1997;58 Suppl 16:4-12.

Lane R.D. et al.
Neuroanatomical correlates of happiness, sadness, and disgust.
Am J Psychiatry 1997 Jul;154(7):926-33.