Dispositional pessimism and amygdala activity: a PET study in healthy volunteers

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Abstract
The present study used scores from Seligman's Attribution Style Questionnaire and [15O] water positron emission tomographic measurements of regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) to investigate the relation between individual differences in dispositional pessimism and amygdala activity. During scanning 13 healthy non-snake-phobic females passively viewed a snake videotape. Using one-tailed tests, significant negative correlations were evident between pessimism scores, with low scores reflecting relatively more pessimism, and right (r = −0.60;p = 0.014) and left amygdala rCBF (r = −0.53;p = 0.032). These results extend previous neuroimaging findings in healthy subjects indicating a role for the amygdala in transient negative emotional states, and suggest that this multimodal brain region also is involved in more durable negative affects such as dispositional pessimism.