The deactivation network in brain during acute stress

There is growing evidence from patient and psychoneuroimmunology studies that there is a clear correlation between the psychosocial stress and health state, but the neural mechanism of the correlation remain poorly understood. The deactivations of the limbic system and anterior frontal cortex during acute psychosocial stress were reported in recent studies, and the observed results suggest these brain areas are activated at rest and during nonstressful situations suggesting the deactivation regions during stress play an important role in detrimental health effects of psychosocial stress. However, these studies mostly aim at confining the brain regions that present the decrease of the brain blood flow. The response mode and space-time relation of these regions from overall and dynamic angle are left untouched. In this paper, we exposed human subjects to one mathematic stressor and one comparison task in one functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI; n = 17) experiment and one of the regions of interest (ROIs)-based functional connectivity analyses, within-condition interregional covariance analysis (WICA), is employed to analyze the interaction of the brain regions that show deactivation during different task states. We demonstrate a profound deactivation of limbic system and anterior frontal cortex during mathematic stress and a neural network of deactivation regions, which was modulated by the difficult degree of mathematic tasks.