Fig. 4.

The relationship among insular activation, trait non-reactivity, and trait rumination. Top panel image (left): significant clusters from voxelwise whole-brain analysis revealing a negative correlation between non-reactivity and activation in the left insula while engaging in negative stimuli (negative go) after the mindful breathing task. Top panel scatterplots: results from ROI analyses to illustrate correlation between non-reactivity and left insula activation after mindfulness (middle) and correlation between rumination and left insula activation after stress (right). Bottom panel image (left): significant clusters from whole-brain voxelwise analysis revealing negative correlation between non-reactivity and activation during inhibiting negative stimuli (negative no-go) after the mindful breathing task. Bottom panel scatterplots: results from ROI analyses to illustrate correlation between non-reactivity and left insula activation after mindful breathing (middle) and correlation between rumination and left insula activation after stress (right). Note that the left insula ROI in each scatterplot was the significant cluster in the whole-brain analysis revealing a negative correlation between non-reactivity and activation in the left insula while engaging in both negative go and negative no-go stimuli after the mindful breathing task (top left brain image). Only the voxels of the significant cluster within anatomically defined insula region (Harvard–Oxford probability Atlas with probability of insula >25%) were used as the insula ROI. The mean signal strength within this left insula ROI for each task condition for each subject was calculated using FSL’s featquery tool. The Pearson’s correlation coefficients were computed for the correlation between insular activation and non-reactivity/rumination using a statistical threshold of r > 0.5 and P < 0.05 (two-tailed).