The following are the supplementary data related to this art

The following are the supplementary data related to this article.
Author Contributions
Conflicts of Interest
Acknowledgments This work was supported by grant R01 AI098132 (R.L.G.) awarded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The transgenic mouse and DNA sequencing facilities were supported by NCI CCSG CA23168 to the Purdue University Center for Cancer Research. The Brain and Body Donation Program was supported by National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, U24NS072026 National Brain and Tissue Resource for Parkinson\'s Disease and Related Disorders; National Institute on Aging, P30 AG19610 Arizona Alzheimer\'s Disease Core Center; Arizona Department of Health Services, Arizona Alzheimer\'s Consortium; Arizona Biomedical Research Commission, Arizona Parkinson\'s disease Consortium; and the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson\'s Research.
Introduction According to the literature, serotonin plays a crucial role in affective processing (Ren et al., 2013) as well as in regulating the biological rhythms of sleep, mood, and appetite (Monti and Jantos, 2008, Monti, 2011). Affective disorders induced by OF-1 supplier stem damage may be related to an altered neurotransmitter balance (Hurley et al., 2010). According to recent meta-analytic reviews, the serotonin transporter promoter variant has been found to be implicated in depression (Karg et al., 2011; Sharpley et al., 2014; Artigas, 2015). Additionally, serotonin transporter binding potential in the vicinity of the pons was reduced in people with bipolar disorders (Cannon et al., 2007). The basis pontis, however, is a crucial correlate in patients with pathological laughing and crying (PLC) episodes (Lee et al., 2003; Arif et al., 2005; Parvizi et al., 2009). The above pieces of clinical evidence indicate that the pons could be an important affective processing node. However, the current literature on the human affective processing network focuses largely on cortico-limbic correlates (Shah et al., 2012) and their inter-connectivity. These correlates include the limbic system, orbital, medial and lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) (Price and Drevets, 2010). In vivo activity of the pons during affective perception has never been reported. This study fills an important gap in the literature on the activity of the pons and its involvement in the perception of affective stimuli. To provide independent yet complementary information (Touroutoglou et al., 2014) on the role of the pons in affective processing, a multimodal approach was employed in this study to confirm the functional and structural connectivity between the pons and other correlates. We hypothesized that the viewing of affective stimuli would be associated with significant blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) signals at the pons because of the role of serotonergic neurons in affective processing. The observed significant activation of the pons was followed by a series of structural and functional connectivity studies. First, we verified the meaning of the connectivity between the seed region in the pons (the region of the pons showing significant activation while viewing affective stimuli) and the cortico-limbic affective processing network using the small-world (SW) connectivity method for data collected from the diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) scanning paradigm. The small-world network is characterized by regions highly connected to adjacent regions combined with fewer steps of information transfer from one region to another. This optimal wiring enables rapid and efficient information transfer with minimized connectivity cost. After confirming the significance of the SW connectivity, we investigated the functional and structural connectivity of the seed region and other cortical limbic regions using resting-state functional imaging data and the tractography built upon by DTI data. Given the lack of any previous literature on the connectivity of the pons and other affective processing correlates, we tested the null hypothesis of no significant functional and structural connectivity between the pons and the cortico-limbic affective correlates. Last but not least, to understand the meaningful role played by the activated pons region in affective processing, we examined whether the structural and functional connectivity between the pons and the other affective correlates was positively correlated with the following: 1. the affect states, measured by the Chinese Affect Scale (CAS) (Hamid and Cheng, 1996) and 2. emotional reactivity, measured by the Emotional Reactivity Scale (ERS) (Nock et al., 2008). To control for reward sensitivity to facial emotions, we used the international affective stimuli instead (Lang et al., 2008).