Figure 5

The anterior insula activity in relation to real-time neurofeedback-guided volitional affect regulation. (a) Summary of the analysis method to identify neural correlates of intrinsic neuromodulation in the secondary dataset. Psychophysiological measures of valence (facial electromyography, EMG) and arousal (galvanic skin response, GSR) were recorded concurrently with the fMRI data collection. After preprocessing and motion/physiological noise correction, a General Linear Model was formulated to determine brain regions where BOLD activation during volitional control correlated with each psychophysiological measure (either real-time emotional valence or arousal regressor). (b) Significant clusters in bilateral insula were found to be associated with emotional valence (facial EMG, upper panel) and arousal (GSR, lower panel). FDR-corrected (p < 0.05 cluster-level threshold) effect sizes (i.e., t-values) are color-coded and superimposed on the anatomical MNI template. (c) Violin plots depict effect distribution in the anterior insula; individual beta values are shown as scatter plots within the violin plots, with interquartile ranges represented by black boxes and the median indicated by white dots.