The perception of emotion in body expressions.

PubMed

de Gelder, B; de Borst, A W; Watson, R

2015-01-01

During communication, we perceive and express emotional information through many different channels, including facial expressions, prosody, body motion, and posture. Although historically the human body has been perceived primarily as a tool for actions, there is now increased understanding that the body is also an important medium for emotional expression. Indeed, research on emotional body language is rapidly emerging as a new field in cognitive and affective neuroscience. This article reviews how whole-body signals are processed and understood, at the behavioral and neural levels, with specific reference to their role in emotional communication. The first part of this review outlines brain regions and spectrotemporal dynamics underlying perception of isolated neutral and affective bodies, the second part details the contextual effects on body emotion recognition, and final part discusses body processing on a subconscious level. More specifically, research has shown that body expressions as compared with neutral bodies draw upon a larger network of regions responsible for action observation and preparation, emotion processing, body processing, and integrative processes. Results from neurotypical populations and masking paradigms suggest that subconscious processing of affective bodies relies on a specific subset of these regions. Moreover, recent evidence has shown that emotional information from the face, voice, and body all interact, with body motion and posture often highlighting and intensifying the emotion expressed in the face and voice. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Emotional intelligence moderates the relationship between regional gray matter volume in the bilateral temporal pole and critical thinking disposition.

PubMed

Yao, Xiaonan; Yuan, Shuge; Yang, Wenjing; Chen, Qunlin; Wei, Dongtao; Hou, Yuling; Zhang, Lijie; Qiu, Jiang; Yang, Dong

2018-04-01

Critical thinking enables people to form sound beliefs and provides a basis for emotional life. Research has indicated that individuals with better critical thinking disposition can better recognize and regulate their emotions, though the neuroanatomical mechanisms involved in this process remain to be elucidated. Further, the influence of emotional intelligence on the relationship between brain structure and critical thinking disposition has not been examined. The present study utilized voxel-based morphometry (VBM) to investigate the neural structures underlying critical thinking disposition in a large sample of college students (N = 296). Regional gray matter volume (rGMV) in the bilateral temporal pole, which reflects an individual's ability to process social and emotional information, was negatively correlated with critical thinking disposition. In addition, rGMV in bilateral para hippocampal regions -regions involved in contextual association/emotional regulation-exhibited negative correlation with critical thinking disposition. Further analysis revealed that emotional intelligence moderated the relationship between rGMV of the temporal pole and critical thinking disposition. Specifically, critical thinking disposition was associated with decreased GMV of the temporal pole for individuals who have relatively higher emotional intelligence rather than lower emotional intelligence. The results of the present study indicate that people who have higher emotional intelligence exhibit more effective and automatic processing of emotional information and tend to be strong critical thinkers.

Sentence processing in anterior superior temporal cortex shows a social-emotional bias.

PubMed

Mellem, Monika S; Jasmin, Kyle M; Peng, Cynthia; Martin, Alex

2016-08-01

The anterior region of the left superior temporal gyrus/superior temporal sulcus (aSTG/STS) has been implicated in two very different cognitive functions: sentence processing and social-emotional processing. However, the vast majority of the sentence stimuli in previous reports have been of a social or social-emotional nature suggesting that sentence processing may be confounded with semantic content. To evaluate this possibility we had subjects read word lists that differed in phrase/constituent size (single words, 3-word phrases, 6-word sentences) and semantic content (social-emotional, social, and inanimate objects) while scanned in a 7T environment. This allowed us to investigate if the aSTG/STS responded to increasing constituent structure (with increased activity as a function of constituent size) with or without regard to a specific domain of concepts, i.e., social and/or social-emotional content. Activity in the left aSTG/STS was found to increase with constituent size. This region was also modulated by content, however, such that social-emotional concepts were preferred over social and object stimuli. Reading also induced content type effects in domain-specific semantic regions. Those preferring social-emotional content included aSTG/STS, inferior frontal gyrus, posterior STS, lateral fusiform, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and amygdala, regions included in the "social brain", while those preferring object content included parahippocampal gyrus, retrosplenial cortex, and caudate, regions involved in object processing. These results suggest that semantic content affects higher-level linguistic processing and should be taken into account in future studies. Copyright © 2016. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Neural activity, neural connectivity, and the processing of emotionally valenced information in older adults: links with life satisfaction.

PubMed

Waldinger, Robert J; Kensinger, Elizabeth A; Schulz, Marc S

2011-09-01

This study examines whether differences in late-life well-being are linked to how older adults encode emotionally valenced information. Using fMRI with 39 older adults varying in life satisfaction, we examined how viewing positive and negative images would affect activation and connectivity of an emotion-processing network. Participants engaged most regions within this network more robustly for positive than for negative images, but within the PFC this effect was moderated by life satisfaction, with individuals higher in satisfaction showing lower levels of activity during the processing of positive images. Participants high in satisfaction showed stronger correlations among network regions-particularly between the amygdala and other emotion processing regions-when viewing positive, as compared with negative, images. Participants low in satisfaction showed no valence effect. Findings suggest that late-life satisfaction is linked with how emotion-processing regions are engaged and connected during processing of valenced information. This first demonstration of a link between neural recruitment and late-life well-being suggests that differences in neural network activation and connectivity may account for the preferential encoding of positive information seen in some older adults.

Neural Activity, Neural Connectivity, and the Processing of Emotionally-Valenced Information in Older Adults: Links with Life Satisfaction

PubMed Central

Waldinger, Robert J.; Kensinger, Elizabeth A.; Schulz, Marc S.

2013-01-01

This study examines whether differences in late-life well-being are linked to how older adults encode emotionally-valenced information. Using fMRI with 39 older adults varying in life satisfaction, we examined how viewing positive and negative images affected activation and connectivity of an emotion-processing network. Participants engaged most regions within this network more robustly for positive than for negative images, but within the PFC this effect was moderated by life satisfaction, with individuals higher in satisfaction showing lower levels of activity during the processing of positive images. Participants high in satisfaction showed stronger correlations among network regions – particularly between the amygdala and other emotion processing regions – when viewing positive as compared to negative images. Participants low in satisfaction showed no valence effect. Findings suggest that late-life satisfaction is linked with how emotion-processing regions are engaged and connected during processing of valenced information. This first demonstration of a link between neural recruitment and late-life well-being suggests that differences in neural network activation and connectivity may account for the preferential encoding of positive information seen in some older adults. PMID:21590504

Age and gender modulate the neural circuitry supporting facial emotion processing in adults with major depressive disorder.

PubMed

Briceño, Emily M; Rapport, Lisa J; Kassel, Michelle T; Bieliauskas, Linas A; Zubieta, Jon-Kar; Weisenbach, Sara L; Langenecker, Scott A

2015-03-01

Emotion processing, supported by frontolimbic circuitry known to be sensitive to the effects of aging, is a relatively understudied cognitive-emotional domain in geriatric depression. Some evidence suggests that the neurophysiological disruption observed in emotion processing among adults with major depressive disorder (MDD) may be modulated by both gender and age. Therefore, the present study investigated the effects of gender and age on the neural circuitry supporting emotion processing in MDD. Cross-sectional comparison of fMRI signal during performance of an emotion processing task. Outpatient university setting. One hundred adults recruited by MDD status, gender, and age. Participants underwent fMRI while completing the Facial Emotion Perception Test. They viewed photographs of faces and categorized the emotion perceived. Contrast for fMRI was of face perception minus animal identification blocks. Effects of depression were observed in precuneus and effects of age in a number of frontolimbic regions. Three-way interactions were present between MDD status, gender, and age in regions pertinent to emotion processing, including frontal, limbic, and basal ganglia. Young women with MDD and older men with MDD exhibited hyperactivation in these regions compared with their respective same-gender healthy comparison (HC) counterparts. In contrast, older women and younger men with MDD exhibited hypoactivation compared to their respective same-gender HC counterparts. This the first study to report gender- and age-specific differences in emotion processing circuitry in MDD. Gender-differential mechanisms may underlie cognitive-emotional disruption in older adults with MDD. The present findings have implications for improved probes into the heterogeneity of the MDD syndrome. Copyright © 2015 American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

In sync: gamma oscillations and emotional memory

PubMed Central

Headley, Drew B.; Paré, Denis

2013-01-01

Emotional experiences leave vivid memories that can last a lifetime. The emotional facilitation of memory has been attributed to the engagement of diffusely projecting neuromodulatory systems that enhance the consolidation of synaptic plasticity in regions activated by the experience. This process requires the propagation of signals between brain regions, and for those signals to induce long-lasting synaptic plasticity. Both of these demands are met by gamma oscillations, which reflect synchronous population activity on a fast timescale (35–120 Hz). Regions known to participate in the formation of emotional memories, such as the basolateral amygdala, also promote gamma-band activation throughout cortical and subcortical circuits. Recent studies have demonstrated that gamma oscillations are enhanced during emotional situations, coherent between regions engaged by salient stimuli, and predict subsequent memory for cues associated with aversive stimuli. Furthermore, neutral stimuli that come to predict emotional events develop enhanced gamma oscillations, reflecting altered processing in the brain, which may underpin how past emotional experiences color future learning and memory. PMID:24319416

In sync: gamma oscillations and emotional memory.

PubMed

Headley, Drew B; Paré, Denis

2013-11-21

Emotional experiences leave vivid memories that can last a lifetime. The emotional facilitation of memory has been attributed to the engagement of diffusely projecting neuromodulatory systems that enhance the consolidation of synaptic plasticity in regions activated by the experience. This process requires the propagation of signals between brain regions, and for those signals to induce long-lasting synaptic plasticity. Both of these demands are met by gamma oscillations, which reflect synchronous population activity on a fast timescale (35-120 Hz). Regions known to participate in the formation of emotional memories, such as the basolateral amygdala, also promote gamma-band activation throughout cortical and subcortical circuits. Recent studies have demonstrated that gamma oscillations are enhanced during emotional situations, coherent between regions engaged by salient stimuli, and predict subsequent memory for cues associated with aversive stimuli. Furthermore, neutral stimuli that come to predict emotional events develop enhanced gamma oscillations, reflecting altered processing in the brain, which may underpin how past emotional experiences color future learning and memory.

Emotional Picture and Word Processing: An fMRI Study on Effects of Stimulus Complexity

PubMed Central

Schlochtermeier, Lorna H.; Kuchinke, Lars; Pehrs, Corinna; Urton, Karolina; Kappelhoff, Hermann; Jacobs, Arthur M.

2013-01-01

Neuroscientific investigations regarding aspects of emotional experiences usually focus on one stimulus modality (e.g., pictorial or verbal). Similarities and differences in the processing between the different modalities have rarely been studied directly. The comparison of verbal and pictorial emotional stimuli often reveals a processing advantage of emotional pictures in terms of larger or more pronounced emotion effects evoked by pictorial stimuli. In this study, we examined whether this picture advantage refers to general processing differences or whether it might partly be attributed to differences in visual complexity between pictures and words. We first developed a new stimulus database comprising valence and arousal ratings for more than 200 concrete objects representable in different modalities including different levels of complexity: words, phrases, pictograms, and photographs. Using fMRI we then studied the neural correlates of the processing of these emotional stimuli in a valence judgment task, in which the stimulus material was controlled for differences in emotional arousal. No superiority for the pictorial stimuli was found in terms of emotional information processing with differences between modalities being revealed mainly in perceptual processing regions. While visual complexity might partly account for previously found differences in emotional stimulus processing, the main existing processing differences are probably due to enhanced processing in modality specific perceptual regions. We would suggest that both pictures and words elicit emotional responses with no general superiority for either stimulus modality, while emotional responses to pictures are modulated by perceptual stimulus features, such as picture complexity. PMID:23409009

Investigating emotion in moral cognition: a review of evidence from functional neuroimaging and neuropsychology.

PubMed

Young, Liane; Koenigs, Michael

2007-01-01

Human moral decision-making has long been a topic of philosophical debate, and, more recently, a topic for empirical investigation. Central to this investigation is the extent to which emotional processes underlie our decisions about moral right and wrong. Neuroscience offers a unique perspective on this question by addressing whether brain regions associated with emotional processing are involved in moral cognition. We conduct a narrative review of neuroscientific studies focused on the role of emotion in morality. Specifically, we describe evidence implicating the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPC), a brain region known to be important for emotional processing. Functional imaging studies demonstrate VMPC activation during tasks probing moral cognition. Studies of clinical populations, including patients with VMPC damage, reveal an association between impairments in emotional processing and impairments in moral judgement and behaviour. Considered together, these studies indicate that not only are emotions engaged during moral cognition, but that emotions, particularly those mediated by VMPC, are in fact critical for human morality.

Cognitive neuroscience of social emotions and implications for psychopathology: examining embarrassment, guilt, envy, and schadenfreude.

PubMed

Jankowski, Kathryn F; Takahashi, Hidehiko

2014-05-01

Social emotions are affective states elicited during social interactions and integral for promoting socially appropriate behaviors and discouraging socially inappropriate ones. Social emotion-processing deficits significantly impair interpersonal relationships, and play distinct roles in the manifestation and maintenance of clinical symptomatology. Elucidating the neural correlates of discrete social emotions can serve as a window to better understanding and treating neuropsychiatric disorders. Moral cognition and social emotion-processing broadly recruit a fronto-temporo-subcortical network, supporting empathy, perspective-taking, self-processing, and reward-processing. The present review specifically examines the neural correlates of embarrassment, guilt, envy, and schadenfreude. Embarrassment and guilt are self-conscious emotions, evoked during negative evaluation following norm violations and supported by a fronto-temporo-posterior network. Embarrassment is evoked by social transgressions and recruits greater anterior temporal regions, representing conceptual social knowledge. Guilt is evoked by moral transgressions and recruits greater prefrontal regions, representing perspective-taking and behavioral change demands. Envy and schadenfreude are fortune-of-other emotions, evoked during social comparison and supported by a prefronto-striatal network. Envy represents displeasure in others' fortunes, and recruits increased dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, representing cognitive dissonance, and decreased reward-related striatal regions. Schadenfreude represents pleasure in others' misfortunes, and recruits reduced empathy-related insular regions and increased reward-related striatal regions. Implications for psychopathology and treatment design are discussed. © 2014 The Authors. Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences © 2014 Japanese Society of Psychiatry and Neurology.

Neural bases of different cognitive strategies for facial affect processing in schizophrenia.

PubMed

Fakra, Eric; Salgado-Pineda, Pilar; Delaveau, Pauline; Hariri, Ahmad R; Blin, Olivier

2008-03-01

To examine the neural basis and dynamics of facial affect processing in schizophrenic patients as compared to healthy controls. Fourteen schizophrenic patients and fourteen matched controls performed a facial affect identification task during fMRI acquisition. The emotional task included an intuitive emotional condition (matching emotional faces) and a more cognitively demanding condition (labeling emotional faces). Individual analysis for each emotional condition, and second-level t-tests examining both within-, and between-group differences, were carried out using a random effects approach. Psychophysiological interactions (PPI) were tested for variations in functional connectivity between amygdala and other brain regions as a function of changes in experimental conditions (labeling versus matching). During the labeling condition, both groups engaged similar networks. During the matching condition, schizophrenics failed to activate regions of the limbic system implicated in the automatic processing of emotions. PPI revealed an inverse functional connectivity between prefrontal regions and the left amygdala in healthy volunteers but there was no such change in patients. Furthermore, during the matching condition, and compared to controls, patients showed decreased activation of regions involved in holistic face processing (fusiform gyrus) and increased activation of regions associated with feature analysis (inferior parietal cortex, left middle temporal lobe, right precuneus). Our findings suggest that schizophrenic patients invariably adopt a cognitive approach when identifying facial affect. The distributed neocortical network observed during the intuitive condition indicates that patients may resort to feature-based, rather than configuration-based, processing and may constitute a compensatory strategy for limbic dysfunction.

Processing of Emotional Distraction is both Automatic and Modulated by Attention: Evidence from an Event-Related fMRI Investigation

PubMed Central

Shafer, A.T.; Matveychuk, D.; Penney, T.; O’Hare, A.J.; Stokes, J.; Dolcos, F.

2015-01-01

Traditionally, emotional stimuli have been thought to be automatically processed via a bottom-up automatic “capture of attention” mechanism. Recently, this view has been challenged by evidence that emotion processing depends on the availability of attentional resources. Although these two views are not mutually exclusive, direct evidence reconciling them is lacking. One limitation of previous investigations supporting the traditional or competing views is that they have not systematically investigated the impact of emotional charge of task-irrelevant distraction in conjunction with manipulations of attentional demands. Using event-related fMRI, we investigated the nature of emotion-cognition interactions in a perceptual discrimination task with emotional distraction, by manipulating both the emotional charge of the distracting information and the demands of the main task. Findings suggest that emotion processing is both automatic and modulated by attention, but emotion and attention were only found to interact when finer assessments of emotional charge (comparison of most vs. least emotional conditions) were considered along with an effective manipulation of processing load (high vs. low). The study also identified brain regions reflecting the detrimental impact of emotional distraction on performance as well as regions involved in helping with such distraction. Activity in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (PFC) and ventrolateral PFC was linked to a detrimental impact of emotional distraction, whereas the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and lateral occiptal cortex were involved in helping with emotional distraction. These findings demonstrate that task-irrelevant emotion processing is subjective to both the emotional content of distraction and the level of attentional demand. PMID:22332805

Prior perceptual processing enhances the effect of emotional arousal on the neural correlates of memory retrieval

PubMed Central

Dew, Ilana T. Z.; Ritchey, Maureen; LaBar, Kevin S.; Cabeza, Roberto

2014-01-01

A fundamental idea in memory research is that items are more likely to be remembered if encoded with a semantic, rather than perceptual, processing strategy. Interestingly, this effect has been shown to reverse for emotionally arousing materials, such that perceptual processing enhances memory for emotional information or events. The current fMRI study investigated the neural mechanisms of this effect by testing how neural activations during emotional memory retrieval are influenced by the prior encoding strategy. Participants incidentally encoded emotional and neutral pictures under instructions to attend to either semantic or perceptual properties of each picture. Recognition memory was tested two days later. fMRI analyses yielded three main findings. First, right amygdalar activity associated with emotional memory strength was enhanced by prior perceptual processing. Second, prior perceptual processing of emotional pictures produced a stronger effect on recollection- than familiarity-related activations in the right amygdala and left hippocampus. Finally, prior perceptual processing enhanced amygdalar connectivity with regions strongly associated with retrieval success, including hippocampal/parahippocampal regions, visual cortex, and ventral parietal cortex. Taken together, the results specify how encoding orientations yield alterations in brain systems that retrieve emotional memories. PMID:24380867

Distinct frontal regions subserve evaluation of linguistic and emotional aspects of speech intonation.

PubMed

Wildgruber, D; Hertrich, I; Riecker, A; Erb, M; Anders, S; Grodd, W; Ackermann, H

2004-12-01

In addition to the propositional content of verbal utterances, significant linguistic and emotional information is conveyed by the tone of speech. To differentiate brain regions subserving processing of linguistic and affective aspects of intonation, discrimination of sentences differing in linguistic accentuation and emotional expressiveness was evaluated by functional magnetic resonance imaging. Both tasks yielded rightward lateralization of hemodynamic responses at the level of the dorsolateral frontal cortex as well as bilateral thalamic and temporal activation. Processing of linguistic and affective intonation, thus, seems to be supported by overlapping neural networks comprising partially right-sided brain regions. Comparison of hemodynamic activation during the two different tasks, however, revealed bilateral orbito-frontal responses restricted to the affective condition as opposed to activation of the left lateral inferior frontal gyrus confined to evaluation of linguistic intonation. These findings indicate that distinct frontal regions contribute to higher level processing of intonational information depending on its communicational function. In line with other components of language processing, discrimination of linguistic accentuation seems to be lateralized to the left inferior-lateral frontal region whereas bilateral orbito-frontal areas subserve evaluation of emotional expressiveness.

Preprocessing of emotional visual information in the human piriform cortex.

PubMed

Schulze, Patrick; Bestgen, Anne-Kathrin; Lech, Robert K; Kuchinke, Lars; Suchan, Boris

2017-08-23

This study examines the processing of visual information by the olfactory system in humans. Recent data point to the processing of visual stimuli by the piriform cortex, a region mainly known as part of the primary olfactory cortex. Moreover, the piriform cortex generates predictive templates of olfactory stimuli to facilitate olfactory processing. This study fills the gap relating to the question whether this region is also capable of preprocessing emotional visual information. To gain insight into the preprocessing and transfer of emotional visual information into olfactory processing, we recorded hemodynamic responses during affective priming using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Odors of different valence (pleasant, neutral and unpleasant) were primed by images of emotional facial expressions (happy, neutral and disgust). Our findings are the first to demonstrate that the piriform cortex preprocesses emotional visual information prior to any olfactory stimulation and that the emotional connotation of this preprocessing is subsequently transferred and integrated into an extended olfactory network for olfactory processing.

Contribution of fronto-striatal regions to emotional valence and repetition under cognitive conflict.

PubMed

Chun, Ji-Won; Park, Hae-Jeong; Kim, Dai Jin; Kim, Eosu; Kim, Jae-Jin

2017-07-01

Conflict processing mediated by fronto-striatal regions may be influenced by emotional properties of stimuli. This study aimed to examine the effects of emotion repetition on cognitive control in a conflict-provoking situation. Twenty-one healthy subjects were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging while performing a sequential cognitive conflict task composed of emotional stimuli. The regional effects were analyzed according to the repetition or non-repetition of cognitive congruency and emotional valence between the preceding and current trials. Post-incongruence interference in error rate and reaction time was significantly smaller than post-congruence interference, particularly under repeated positive and non-repeated positive, respectively, and post-incongruence interference, compared to post-congruence interference, increased activity in the ACC, DLPFC, and striatum. ACC and DLPFC activities were significantly correlated with error rate or reaction time in some conditions, and fronto-striatal connections were related to the conflict processing heightened by negative emotion. These findings suggest that the repetition of emotional stimuli adaptively regulates cognitive control and the fronto-striatal circuit may engage in the conflict adaptation process induced by emotion repetition. Both repetition enhancement and repetition suppression of prefrontal activity may underlie the relationship between emotion and conflict adaptation. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The human body odor compound androstadienone increases neural conflict coupled to higher behavioral costs during an emotional Stroop task.

PubMed

Hornung, Jonas; Kogler, Lydia; Erb, Michael; Freiherr, Jessica; Derntl, Birgit

2018-05-01

The androgen derivative androstadienone (AND) is a substance found in human sweat and thus may act as human chemosignal. With the current experiment, we aimed to explore in which way AND affects interference processing during an emotional Stroop task which used human faces as target and emotional words as distractor stimuli. This was complemented by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to unravel the neural mechanism of AND-action. Based on previous accounts we expected AND to increase neural activation in areas commonly implicated in evaluation of emotional face processing and to change neural activation in brain regions linked to interference processing. For this aim, a total of 80 healthy individuals (oral contraceptive users, luteal women, men) were tested twice on two consecutive days with an emotional Stroop task using fMRI. Our results suggest that AND increases interference processing in brain areas that are heavily recruited during emotional conflict. At the same time, correlation analyses revealed that this neural interference processing was paralleled by higher behavioral costs (response times) with higher interference related brain activation under AND. Furthermore, AND elicited higher activation in regions implicated in emotional face processing including right fusiform gyrus, inferior frontal gyrus and dorsomedial cortex. In this connection, neural activation was not coupled to behavioral outcome. Furthermore, despite previous accounts of increased hypothalamic activation under AND, we were not able to replicate this finding and discuss possible reasons for this discrepancy. To conclude, AND increased interference processing in regions heavily recruited during emotional conflict which was coupled to higher costs in resolving emotional conflicts with stronger interference-related brain activation under AND. At the moment it remains unclear whether these effects are due to changes in conflict detection or resolution. However, evidence most consistently suggests that AND does not draw attention to the most potent socio-emotional information (human faces) but rather highlights representations of emotional words. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Decoding auditory spatial and emotional information encoding using multivariate versus univariate techniques.

PubMed

Kryklywy, James H; Macpherson, Ewan A; Mitchell, Derek G V

2018-04-01

Emotion can have diverse effects on behaviour and perception, modulating function in some circumstances, and sometimes having little effect. Recently, it was identified that part of the heterogeneity of emotional effects could be due to a dissociable representation of emotion in dual pathway models of sensory processing. Our previous fMRI experiment using traditional univariate analyses showed that emotion modulated processing in the auditory 'what' but not 'where' processing pathway. The current study aims to further investigate this dissociation using a more recently emerging multi-voxel pattern analysis searchlight approach. While undergoing fMRI, participants localized sounds of varying emotional content. A searchlight multi-voxel pattern analysis was conducted to identify activity patterns predictive of sound location and/or emotion. Relative to the prior univariate analysis, MVPA indicated larger overlapping spatial and emotional representations of sound within early secondary regions associated with auditory localization. However, consistent with the univariate analysis, these two dimensions were increasingly segregated in late secondary and tertiary regions of the auditory processing streams. These results, while complimentary to our original univariate analyses, highlight the utility of multiple analytic approaches for neuroimaging, particularly for neural processes with known representations dependent on population coding.

Lateralization of Visuospatial Attention across Face Regions Varies with Emotional Prosody

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Thompson, Laura A.; Malloy, Daniel M.; LeBlanc, Katya L.

2009-01-01

It is well-established that linguistic processing is primarily a left-hemisphere activity, while emotional prosody processing is lateralized to the right hemisphere. Does attention, directed at different regions of the talker's face, reflect this pattern of lateralization? We investigated visuospatial attention across a talker's face with a…

Dopamine modulation of emotional processing in cortical and subcortical neural circuits: evidence for a final common pathway in schizophrenia?

PubMed

Laviolette, Steven R

2007-07-01

The neural regulation of emotional perception, learning, and memory is essential for normal behavioral and cognitive functioning. Many of the symptoms displayed by individuals with schizophrenia may arise from fundamental disturbances in the ability to accurately process emotionally salient sensory information. The neurotransmitter dopamine (DA) and its ability to modulate neural regions involved in emotional learning, perception, and memory formation has received considerable research attention as a potential final common pathway to account for the aberrant emotional regulation and psychosis present in the schizophrenic syndrome. Evidence from both human neuroimaging studies and animal-based research using neurodevelopmental, behavioral, and electrophysiological techniques have implicated the mesocorticolimbic DA circuit as a crucial system for the encoding and expression of emotionally salient learning and memory formation. While many theories have examined the cortical-subcortical interactions between prefrontal cortical regions and subcortical DA substrates, many questions remain as to how DA may control emotional perception and learning and how disturbances linked to DA abnormalities may underlie the disturbed emotional processing in schizophrenia. Beyond the mesolimbic DA system, increasing evidence points to the amygdala-prefrontal cortical circuit as an important processor of emotionally salient information and how neurodevelopmental perturbances within this circuitry may lead to dysregulation of DAergic modulation of emotional processing and learning along this cortical-subcortical emotional processing circuit.

Oxytocin differentially alters resting state functional connectivity between amygdala subregions and emotional control networks: Inverse correlation with depressive traits.

PubMed

Eckstein, Monika; Markett, Sebastian; Kendrick, Keith M; Ditzen, Beate; Liu, Fang; Hurlemann, Rene; Becker, Benjamin

2017-04-01

The hypothalamic neuropeptide oxytocin (OT) has received increasing attention for its role in modulating social-emotional processes across species. Previous studies on using intranasal-OT in humans point to a crucial engagement of the amygdala in the observed neuromodulatory effects of OT under task and rest conditions. However, the amygdala is not a single homogenous structure, but rather a set of structurally and functionally heterogeneous nuclei that show distinct patterns of connectivity with limbic and frontal emotion-processing regions. To determine potential differential effects of OT on functional connectivity of the amygdala subregions, 79 male participants underwent resting-state fMRI following randomized intranasal-OT or placebo administration. In line with previous studies OT increased the connectivity of the total amygdala with dorso-medial prefrontal regions engaged in emotion regulation. In addition, OT enhanced coupling of the total amygdala with cerebellar regions. Importantly, OT differentially altered the connectivity of amygdala subregions with distinct up-stream cortical nodes, particularly prefrontal/parietal, and cerebellar down-stream regions. OT-induced increased connectivity with cerebellar regions were largely driven by effects on the centromedial and basolateral subregions, whereas increased connectivity with prefrontal regions were largely mediated by right superficial and basolateral subregions. OT decreased connectivity of the centromedial subregions with core hubs of the emotional face processing network in temporal, occipital and parietal regions. Preliminary findings suggest that effects on the superficial amygdala-prefrontal pathway were inversely associated with levels of subclinical depression, possibly indicating that OT modulation may be blunted in the context of increased pathological load. Together, the present findings suggest a subregional-specific modulatory role of OT on amygdala-centered emotion processing networks in humans. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Rapid processing of emotional expressions without conscious awareness.

PubMed

Smith, Marie L

2012-08-01

Rapid accurate categorization of the emotional state of our peers is of critical importance and as such many have proposed that facial expressions of emotion can be processed without conscious awareness. Typically, studies focus selectively on fearful expressions due to their evolutionary significance, leaving the subliminal processing of other facial expressions largely unexplored. Here, I investigated the time course of processing of 3 facial expressions (fearful, disgusted, and happy) plus an emotionally neutral face, during objectively unaware and aware perception. Participants completed the challenging "which expression?" task in response to briefly presented backward-masked expressive faces. Although participant's behavioral responses did not differentiate between the emotional content of the stimuli in the unaware condition, activity over frontal and occipitotemporal (OT) brain regions indicated an emotional modulation of the neuronal response. Over frontal regions this was driven by negative facial expressions and was present on all emotional trials independent of later categorization. Whereas the N170 component, recorded on lateral OT electrodes, was enhanced for all facial expressions but only on trials that would later be categorized as emotional. The results indicate that emotional faces, not only fearful, are processed without conscious awareness at an early stage and highlight the critical importance of considering categorization response when studying subliminal perception.

Association between Ability Emotional Intelligence and Left Insula during Social Judgment of Facial Emotions.

PubMed

Quarto, Tiziana; Blasi, Giuseppe; Maddalena, Chiara; Viscanti, Giovanna; Lanciano, Tiziana; Soleti, Emanuela; Mangiulli, Ivan; Taurisano, Paolo; Fazio, Leonardo; Bertolino, Alessandro; Curci, Antonietta

2016-01-01

The human ability of identifying, processing and regulating emotions from social stimuli is generally referred as Emotional Intelligence (EI). Within EI, Ability EI identifies a performance measure assessing individual skills at perceiving, using, understanding and managing emotions. Previous models suggest that a brain "somatic marker circuitry" (SMC) sustains emotional sub-processes included in EI. Three primary brain regions are included: the amygdala, the insula and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). Here, our aim was to investigate the relationship between Ability EI scores and SMC activity during social judgment of emotional faces. Sixty-three healthy subjects completed a test measuring Ability EI and underwent fMRI during a social decision task (i.e. approach or avoid) about emotional faces with different facial expressions. Imaging data revealed that EI scores are associated with left insula activity during social judgment of emotional faces as a function of facial expression. Specifically, higher EI scores are associated with greater left insula activity during social judgment of fearful faces but also with lower activity of this region during social judgment of angry faces. These findings indicate that the association between Ability EI and the SMC activity during social behavior is region- and emotion-specific.

Emotion processing in Parkinson's disease: an EEG spectral power study.

PubMed

Yuvaraj, R; Murugappan, M; Omar, Mohd Iqbal; Ibrahim, Norlinah Mohamed; Sundaraj, Kenneth; Mohamad, Khairiyah; Satiyan, M

2014-07-01

Although an emotional deficit is a common finding in Parkinson's disease (PD), its neurobiological mechanism on emotion recognition is still unknown. This study examined the emotion processing deficits in PD patients using electroencephalogram (EEG) signals in response to multimodal stimuli. EEG signals were investigated on both positive and negative emotions in 14 PD patients and 14 aged-matched normal controls (NCs). The relative power (i.e., ratio of EEG signal power in each frequency band compared to the total EEG power) was computed over three brain regions: the anterior (AF3, F7, F3, F4, F8 and AF4), central (FC5 and FC6) and posterior (T7, P7, O1, O2, P8 and T8) regions for theta (4-8 Hz), alpha (8-13 Hz), beta (13-30 Hz) and gamma (30-60 Hz) frequency sub-bands, respectively. Behaviorally, PD patients showed decreased performance in classifying emotional stimuli as measured by subjective ratings. EEG power at theta, alpha, beta, and gamma bands in all regions were significantly different between the NC and PD groups during both the emotional tasks, with p-values less than 0.05. Furthermore, an increase of relative spectral powers in the theta and gamma bands and a decrease of relative powers in the alpha and beta bands were observed for PD patients compared with NCs during emotional information processing. The results suggest the possibility of the existence of a distinctive neurobiological substrate of PD patients during emotional information processing. Also, these distributed spectral powers in different frequency bands might provide meaningful information about emotional processing in PD patients.

Non-verbal emotion communication training induces specific changes in brain function and structure

PubMed Central

Kreifelts, Benjamin; Jacob, Heike; Brück, Carolin; Erb, Michael; Ethofer, Thomas; Wildgruber, Dirk

2013-01-01

The perception of emotional cues from voice and face is essential for social interaction. However, this process is altered in various psychiatric conditions along with impaired social functioning. Emotion communication trainings have been demonstrated to improve social interaction in healthy individuals and to reduce emotional communication deficits in psychiatric patients. Here, we investigated the impact of a non-verbal emotion communication training (NECT) on cerebral activation and brain structure in a controlled and combined functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and voxel-based morphometry study. NECT-specific reductions in brain activity occurred in a distributed set of brain regions including face and voice processing regions as well as emotion processing- and motor-related regions presumably reflecting training-induced familiarization with the evaluation of face/voice stimuli. Training-induced changes in non-verbal emotion sensitivity at the behavioral level and the respective cerebral activation patterns were correlated in the face-selective cortical areas in the posterior superior temporal sulcus and fusiform gyrus for valence ratings and in the temporal pole, lateral prefrontal cortex and midbrain/thalamus for the response times. A NECT-induced increase in gray matter (GM) volume was observed in the fusiform face area. Thus, NECT induces both functional and structural plasticity in the face processing system as well as functional plasticity in the emotion perception and evaluation system. We propose that functional alterations are presumably related to changes in sensory tuning in the decoding of emotional expressions. Taken together, these findings highlight that the present experimental design may serve as a valuable tool to investigate the altered behavioral and neuronal processing of emotional cues in psychiatric disorders as well as the impact of therapeutic interventions on brain function and structure. PMID:24146641

Non-verbal emotion communication training induces specific changes in brain function and structure.

PubMed

Kreifelts, Benjamin; Jacob, Heike; Brück, Carolin; Erb, Michael; Ethofer, Thomas; Wildgruber, Dirk

2013-01-01

The perception of emotional cues from voice and face is essential for social interaction. However, this process is altered in various psychiatric conditions along with impaired social functioning. Emotion communication trainings have been demonstrated to improve social interaction in healthy individuals and to reduce emotional communication deficits in psychiatric patients. Here, we investigated the impact of a non-verbal emotion communication training (NECT) on cerebral activation and brain structure in a controlled and combined functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and voxel-based morphometry study. NECT-specific reductions in brain activity occurred in a distributed set of brain regions including face and voice processing regions as well as emotion processing- and motor-related regions presumably reflecting training-induced familiarization with the evaluation of face/voice stimuli. Training-induced changes in non-verbal emotion sensitivity at the behavioral level and the respective cerebral activation patterns were correlated in the face-selective cortical areas in the posterior superior temporal sulcus and fusiform gyrus for valence ratings and in the temporal pole, lateral prefrontal cortex and midbrain/thalamus for the response times. A NECT-induced increase in gray matter (GM) volume was observed in the fusiform face area. Thus, NECT induces both functional and structural plasticity in the face processing system as well as functional plasticity in the emotion perception and evaluation system. We propose that functional alterations are presumably related to changes in sensory tuning in the decoding of emotional expressions. Taken together, these findings highlight that the present experimental design may serve as a valuable tool to investigate the altered behavioral and neuronal processing of emotional cues in psychiatric disorders as well as the impact of therapeutic interventions on brain function and structure.

Emotional Cues during Simultaneous Face and Voice Processing: Electrophysiological Insights

PubMed Central

Liu, Taosheng; Pinheiro, Ana; Zhao, Zhongxin; Nestor, Paul G.; McCarley, Robert W.; Niznikiewicz, Margaret A.

2012-01-01

Both facial expression and tone of voice represent key signals of emotional communication but their brain processing correlates remain unclear. Accordingly, we constructed a novel implicit emotion recognition task consisting of simultaneously presented human faces and voices with neutral, happy, and angry valence, within the context of recognizing monkey faces and voices task. To investigate the temporal unfolding of the processing of affective information from human face-voice pairings, we recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) to these audiovisual test stimuli in 18 normal healthy subjects; N100, P200, N250, P300 components were observed at electrodes in the frontal-central region, while P100, N170, P270 were observed at electrodes in the parietal-occipital region. Results indicated a significant audiovisual stimulus effect on the amplitudes and latencies of components in frontal-central (P200, P300, and N250) but not the parietal occipital region (P100, N170 and P270). Specifically, P200 and P300 amplitudes were more positive for emotional relative to neutral audiovisual stimuli, irrespective of valence, whereas N250 amplitude was more negative for neutral relative to emotional stimuli. No differentiation was observed between angry and happy conditions. The results suggest that the general effect of emotion on audiovisual processing can emerge as early as 200 msec (P200 peak latency) post stimulus onset, in spite of implicit affective processing task demands, and that such effect is mainly distributed in the frontal-central region. PMID:22383987

Modulation of the composite face effect by unintended emotion cues.

PubMed

Gray, Katie L H; Murphy, Jennifer; Marsh, Jade E; Cook, Richard

2017-04-01

When upper and lower regions from different emotionless faces are aligned to form a facial composite, observers 'fuse' the two halves together, perceptually. The illusory distortion induced by task-irrelevant ('distractor') halves hinders participants' judgements about task-relevant ('target') halves. This composite-face effect reveals a tendency to integrate feature information from disparate regions of intact upright faces, consistent with theories of holistic face processing. However, observers frequently perceive emotion in ostensibly neutral faces, contrary to the intentions of experimenters. This study sought to determine whether this 'perceived emotion' influences the composite-face effect. In our first experiment, we confirmed that the composite effect grows stronger as the strength of distractor emotion increased. Critically, effects of distractor emotion were induced by weak emotion intensities, and were incidental insofar as emotion cues hindered image matching, not emotion labelling per se . In Experiment 2, we found a correlation between the presence of perceived emotion in a set of ostensibly neutral distractor regions sourced from commonly used face databases, and the strength of illusory distortion they induced. In Experiment 3, participants completed a sequential matching composite task in which half of the distractor regions were rated high and low for perceived emotion, respectively. Significantly stronger composite effects were induced by the high-emotion distractor halves. These convergent results suggest that perceived emotion increases the strength of the composite-face effect induced by supposedly emotionless faces. These findings have important implications for the study of holistic face processing in typical and atypical populations.

Attribution of emotions to body postures: an independent component analysis study of functional connectivity in autism.

PubMed

Libero, Lauren E; Stevens, Carl E; Kana, Rajesh K

2014-10-01

The ability to interpret others' body language is a vital skill that helps us infer their thoughts and emotions. However, individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have been found to have difficulty in understanding the meaning of people's body language, perhaps leading to an overarching deficit in processing emotions. The current fMRI study investigates the functional connectivity underlying emotion and action judgment in the context of processing body language in high-functioning adolescents and young adults with autism, using an independent components analysis (ICA) of the fMRI time series. While there were no reliable group differences in brain activity, the ICA revealed significant involvement of occipital and parietal regions in processing body actions; and inferior frontal gyrus, superior medial prefrontal cortex, and occipital cortex in body expressions of emotions. In a between-group analysis, participants with autism, relative to typical controls, demonstrated significantly reduced temporal coherence in left ventral premotor cortex and right superior parietal lobule while processing emotions. Participants with ASD, on the other hand, showed increased temporal coherence in left fusiform gyrus while inferring emotions from body postures. Finally, a positive predictive relationship was found between empathizing ability and the brain areas underlying emotion processing in ASD participants. These results underscore the differential role of frontal and parietal brain regions in processing emotional body language in autism. Copyright © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Auditory attention enhances processing of positive and negative words in inferior and superior prefrontal cortex.

PubMed

Wegrzyn, Martin; Herbert, Cornelia; Ethofer, Thomas; Flaisch, Tobias; Kissler, Johanna

2017-11-01

Visually presented emotional words are processed preferentially and effects of emotional content are similar to those of explicit attention deployment in that both amplify visual processing. However, auditory processing of emotional words is less well characterized and interactions between emotional content and task-induced attention have not been fully understood. Here, we investigate auditory processing of emotional words, focussing on how auditory attention to positive and negative words impacts their cerebral processing. A Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study manipulating word valence and attention allocation was performed. Participants heard negative, positive and neutral words to which they either listened passively or attended by counting negative or positive words, respectively. Regardless of valence, active processing compared to passive listening increased activity in primary auditory cortex, left intraparietal sulcus, and right superior frontal gyrus (SFG). The attended valence elicited stronger activity in left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and left SFG, in line with these regions' role in semantic retrieval and evaluative processing. No evidence for valence-specific attentional modulation in auditory regions or distinct valence-specific regional activations (i.e., negative > positive or positive > negative) was obtained. Thus, allocation of auditory attention to positive and negative words can substantially increase their processing in higher-order language and evaluative brain areas without modulating early stages of auditory processing. Inferior and superior frontal brain structures mediate interactions between emotional content, attention, and working memory when prosodically neutral speech is processed. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Retrieval of Emotional Memories

PubMed Central

Buchanan, Tony W.

2008-01-01

Long-term memories are influenced by the emotion experienced during learning as well as by the emotion experienced during memory retrieval. The present article reviews the literature addressing the effects of emotion on retrieval, focusing on the cognitive and neurological mechanisms that have been revealed. The reviewed research suggests that the amygdala, in combination with the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex, plays an important role in the retrieval of memories for emotional events. The neural regions necessary for online emotional processing also influence emotional memory retrieval, perhaps through the reexperience of emotion during the retrieval process. PMID:17723029

Lost for emotion words: What motor and limbic brain activity reveals about autism and semantic theory

PubMed Central

Moseley, Rachel L.; Shtyrov, Yury; Mohr, Bettina; Lombardo, Michael V.; Baron-Cohen, Simon; Pulvermüller, Friedemann

2015-01-01

Autism spectrum conditions (ASC) are characterised by deficits in understanding and expressing emotions and are frequently accompanied by alexithymia, a difficulty in understanding and expressing emotion words. Words are differentially represented in the brain according to their semantic category and these difficulties in ASC predict reduced activation to emotion-related words in limbic structures crucial for affective processing. Semantic theories view ‘emotion actions’ as critical for learning the semantic relationship between a word and the emotion it describes, such that emotion words typically activate the cortical motor systems involved in expressing emotion actions such as facial expressions. As ASC are also characterised by motor deficits and atypical brain structure and function in these regions, motor structures would also be expected to show reduced activation during emotion-semantic processing. Here we used event-related fMRI to compare passive processing of emotion words in comparison to abstract verbs and animal names in typically-developing controls and individuals with ASC. Relatively reduced brain activation in ASC for emotion words, but not matched control words, was found in motor areas and cingulate cortex specifically. The degree of activation evoked by emotion words in the motor system was also associated with the extent of autistic traits as revealed by the Autism Spectrum Quotient. We suggest that hypoactivation of motor and limbic regions for emotion word processing may underlie difficulties in processing emotional language in ASC. The role that sensorimotor systems and their connections might play in the affective and social-communication difficulties in ASC is discussed. PMID:25278250

Effects of emotional valence and three-dimensionality of visual stimuli on brain activation: an fMRI study.

PubMed

Dores, A R; Almeida, I; Barbosa, F; Castelo-Branco, M; Monteiro, L; Reis, M; de Sousa, L; Caldas, A Castro

2013-01-01

Examining changes in brain activation linked with emotion-inducing stimuli is essential to the study of emotions. Due to the ecological potential of techniques such as virtual reality (VR), inspection of whether brain activation in response to emotional stimuli can be modulated by the three-dimensional (3D) properties of the images is important. The current study sought to test whether the activation of brain areas involved in the emotional processing of scenarios of different valences can be modulated by 3D. Therefore, the focus was made on the interaction effect between emotion-inducing stimuli of different emotional valences (pleasant, unpleasant and neutral valences) and visualization types (2D, 3D). However, main effects were also analyzed. The effect of emotional valence and visualization types and their interaction were analyzed through a 3 × 2 repeated measures ANOVA. Post-hoc t-tests were performed under a ROI-analysis approach. The results show increased brain activation for the 3D affective-inducing stimuli in comparison with the same stimuli in 2D scenarios, mostly in cortical and subcortical regions that are related to emotional processing, in addition to visual processing regions. This study has the potential of clarify brain mechanisms involved in the processing of emotional stimuli (scenarios' valence) and their interaction with three-dimensionality.

The endocannabinoid system and emotional processing: a pharmacological fMRI study with ∆9-tetrahydrocannabinol.

PubMed

Bossong, Matthijs G; van Hell, Hendrika H; Jager, Gerry; Kahn, René S; Ramsey, Nick F; Jansma, J Martijn

2013-12-01

Various psychiatric disorders such as major depression are associated with abnormalities in emotional processing. Evidence indicating involvement of the endocannabinoid system in emotional processing, and thus potentially in related abnormalities, is increasing. In the present study, we examined the role of the endocannabinoid system in processing of stimuli with a positive and negative emotional content in healthy volunteers. A pharmacological functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study was conducted with a placebo-controlled, cross-over design, investigating effects of the endocannabinoid agonist ∆9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) on brain function related to emotional processing in 11 healthy subjects. Performance and brain activity during matching of stimuli with a negative ('fearful faces') or a positive content ('happy faces') were assessed after placebo and THC administration. After THC administration, performance accuracy was decreased for stimuli with a negative but not for stimuli with a positive emotional content. Our task activated a network of brain regions including amygdala, orbital frontal gyrus, hippocampus, parietal gyrus, prefrontal cortex, and regions in the occipital cortex. THC interacted with emotional content, as activity in this network was reduced for negative content, while activity for positive content was increased. These results indicate that THC administration reduces the negative bias in emotional processing. This adds human evidence to support the hypothesis that the endocannabinoid system is involved in modulation of emotional processing. Our findings also suggest a possible role for the endocannabinoid system in abnormal emotional processing, and may thus be relevant for psychiatric disorders such as major depression. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier B.V. and ECNP. All rights reserved.

Infants and adults have similar regional functional brain organization for the perception of emotions.

PubMed

Rotem-Kohavi, N; Oberlander, T F; Virji-Babul, N

2017-05-22

An infant's ability to perceive emotional facial expressions is critical for developing social skills. Infants are tuned to faces from early in life, however the functional organization of the brain that supports the processing of emotional faces in infants is still not well understood. We recorded electroencephalography (EEG) brain responses in 8-10 month old infants and adults and applied graph theory analysis on the functional connections to compare the network organization at the global and the regional levels underlying the perception of negative and positive dynamic facial expressions (happiness and sadness). We first show that processing of dynamic emotional faces occurs across multiple brain regions in both infants and adults. Across all brain regions, at the global level, network density was higher in the infant group in comparison with adults suggesting that the overall brain organization in relation to emotion perception is still immature in infancy. In contrast, at the regional levels, the functional characteristics of the frontal and parietal nodes were similar between infants and adults, suggesting that functional regional specialization for emotion perception is already established at this age. In addition, in both groups the occipital, parietal and temporal nodes appear to have the strongest influence on information flow within the network. These results suggest that while the global organization for the emotion perception of sad and happy emotions is still under development, the basic functional network organization at the regional level is already in place early in infancy. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Neural processing of food and emotional stimuli in adolescent and adult anorexia nervosa patients.

PubMed

Horndasch, Stefanie; Roesch, Julie; Forster, Clemens; Dörfler, Arnd; Lindsiepe, Silja; Heinrich, Hartmut; Graap, Holmer; Moll, Gunther H; Kratz, Oliver

2018-01-01

A constant preoccupation with food and restrictive eating are main symptoms of anorexia nervosa (AN). Imaging studies revealed aberrant neural activation patterns in brain regions processing hedonic and reward reactions as well as-potentially aversive-emotions. An imbalance between so called "bottom-up" and "top-down" control areas is discussed. The present study is focusing on neural processing of disease-specific food stimuli and emotional stimuli and its developmental course in adolescent and adult AN patients and could offer new insight into differential mechanisms underlying shorter or more chronic disease. 33 adolescents aged 12-18 years (15 AN patients, 18 control participants) and 32 adult women (16 AN patients, 16 control participants) underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI, 3T high-field scanner) while watching pictures of high and low-calorie food and affective stimuli. Afterwards, they rated subjective valence of each picture. FMRI data analysis was performed using a region of interest based approach. Pictures of high-calorie food items were rated more negatively by AN patients. Differences in activation between patients and controls were found in "bottom up" and "top down" control areas for food stimuli and in several emotion processing regions for affective stimuli which were more pronounced in adolescents than in adults. A differential pattern was seen for food stimuli compared to generally emotion eliciting stimuli. Adolescents with AN show reduced processing of affective stimuli and enhanced activation of regions involved in "bottom up" reward processing and "top down" control as well as the insula with regard to food stimuli with a focus on brain regions which underlie changes during adolescent development. In adults less clear and less specific activation differences were present, pointing towards a high impact that regions undergoing maturation might have on AN symptoms.

The effects of DAT1 genotype on fMRI activation in an emotional go/no-go task.

PubMed

Brown, Brenna K; Murrell, Jill; Karne, Harish; Anand, Amit

2017-02-01

Dopaminergic brain circuits participate in emotional processing and impulsivity. The dopamine transporter (DAT) modulates dopamine reuptake. A variable number tandem repeat (VNTR) in the dopamine transporter gene (DAT1) affects DAT expression. The influence of DAT1 genotype on neural activation during emotional processing and impulse inhibition has not been examined. Forty-two healthy subjects were classified as 9DAT (n = 17) or 10DAT (n = 25) based on DAT1 genotype (9DAT = 9R/9R and 9R/10R; 10DAT = 10R/10R). Subjects underwent fMRI during non-emotional and emotional go/no-go tasks. Subjects were instructed to inhibit responses to letters, happy faces, or sad faces in separate blocks. Accuracy and reaction time did not differ between groups. Within group results showed activation in regions previously implicated in emotional processing and response inhibition. Between groups results showed increased activation in 9DAT individuals during inhibition. During letter inhibition, 9DAT individuals exhibited greater activation in right inferior parietal regions. During sad inhibition, 9DAT Individuals exhibited greater activation in frontal, posterior cingulate, precuneus, right cerebellar, left paracentral, and right occipital brain regions. The interaction between DAT genotype and response type in sad versus letter stimuli showed increased activation in 9DAT individuals during sad no-go responses in the anterior cingulate cortex, extending into frontal-orbital regions. 9DAT individuals have greater activation than 10DAT individuals during neutral and sad inhibition, showing that genotypic variation influencing basal dopamine levels can alter the neural basis of emotional processing and response inhibition. This may indicate that 9R carriers exert more effort to overcome increased basal dopamine activation when inhibiting responses in emotional contexts.

Efficacy of identifying neural components in the face and emotion processing system in schizophrenia using a dynamic functional localizer.

PubMed

Arnold, Aiden E G F; Iaria, Giuseppe; Goghari, Vina M

2016-02-28

Schizophrenia is associated with deficits in face perception and emotion recognition. Despite consistent behavioural results, the neural mechanisms underlying these cognitive abilities have been difficult to isolate, in part due to differences in neuroimaging methods used between studies for identifying regions in the face processing system. Given this problem, we aimed to validate a recently developed fMRI-based dynamic functional localizer task for use in studies of psychiatric populations and specifically schizophrenia. Previously, this functional localizer successfully identified each of the core face processing regions (i.e. fusiform face area, occipital face area, superior temporal sulcus), and regions within an extended system (e.g. amygdala) in healthy individuals. In this study, we tested the functional localizer success rate in 27 schizophrenia patients and in 24 community controls. Overall, the core face processing regions were localized equally between both the schizophrenia and control group. Additionally, the amygdala, a candidate brain region from the extended system, was identified in nearly half the participants from both groups. These results indicate the effectiveness of a dynamic functional localizer at identifying regions of interest associated with face perception and emotion recognition in schizophrenia. The use of dynamic functional localizers may help standardize the investigation of the facial and emotion processing system in this and other clinical populations. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

Symptom-specific amygdala hyperactivity modulates motor control network in conversion disorder.

PubMed

Hassa, Thomas; Sebastian, Alexandra; Liepert, Joachim; Weiller, Cornelius; Schmidt, Roger; Tüscher, Oliver

2017-01-01

Initial historical accounts as well as recent data suggest that emotion processing is dysfunctional in conversion disorder patients and that this alteration may be the pathomechanistic neurocognitive basis for symptoms in conversion disorder. However, to date evidence of direct interaction of altered negative emotion processing with motor control networks in conversion disorder is still lacking. To specifically study the neural correlates of emotion processing interacting with motor networks we used a task combining emotional and sensorimotor stimuli both separately as well as simultaneously during functional magnetic resonance imaging in a well characterized group of 13 conversion disorder patients with functional hemiparesis and 19 demographically matched healthy controls. We performed voxelwise statistical parametrical mapping for a priori regions of interest within emotion processing and motor control networks. Psychophysiological interaction (PPI) was used to test altered functional connectivity of emotion and motor control networks. Only during simultaneous emotional stimulation and passive movement of the affected hand patients displayed left amygdala hyperactivity. PPI revealed increased functional connectivity in patients between the left amygdala and the (pre-)supplemental motor area and the subthalamic nucleus, key regions within the motor control network. These findings suggest a novel mechanistic direct link between dysregulated emotion processing and motor control circuitry in conversion disorder.

Association with emotional information alters subsequent processing of neutral faces

PubMed Central

Riggs, Lily; Fujioka, Takako; Chan, Jessica; McQuiggan, Douglas A.; Anderson, Adam K.; Ryan, Jennifer D.

2014-01-01

The processing of emotional as compared to neutral information is associated with different patterns in eye movement and neural activity. However, the ‘emotionality’ of a stimulus can be conveyed not only by its physical properties, but also by the information that is presented with it. There is very limited work examining the how emotional information may influence the immediate perceptual processing of otherwise neutral information. We examined how presenting an emotion label for a neutral face may influence subsequent processing by using eye movement monitoring (EMM) and magnetoencephalography (MEG) simultaneously. Participants viewed a series of faces with neutral expressions. Each face was followed by a unique negative or neutral sentence to describe that person, and then the same face was presented in isolation again. Viewing of faces paired with a negative sentence was associated with increased early viewing of the eye region and increased neural activity between 600 and 1200 ms in emotion processing regions such as the cingulate, medial prefrontal cortex, and amygdala, as well as posterior regions such as the precuneus and occipital cortex. Viewing of faces paired with a neutral sentence was associated with increased activity in the parahippocampal gyrus during the same time window. By monitoring behavior and neural activity within the same paradigm, these findings demonstrate that emotional information alters subsequent visual scanning and the neural systems that are presumably invoked to maintain a representation of the neutral information along with its emotional details. PMID:25566024

DHEA Enhances Emotion Regulation Neurocircuits and Modulates Memory for Emotional Stimuli

PubMed Central

Sripada, Rebecca K; Marx, Christine E; King, Anthony P; Rajaram, Nirmala; Garfinkel, Sarah N; Abelson, James L; Liberzon, Israel

2013-01-01

Dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) is a neurosteroid with anxiolytic, antidepressant, and antiglucocorticoid properties. It is endogenously released in response to stress, and may reduce negative affect when administered exogenously. Although there have been multiple reports of DHEA's antidepressant and anxiolytic effects, no research to date has examined the neural pathways involved. In particular, brain imaging has not been used to link neurosteroid effects to emotion neurocircuitry. To investigate the brain basis of DHEA's impact on emotion modulation, patients were administered 400 mg of DHEA (N=14) or placebo (N=15) and underwent 3T fMRI while performing the shifted-attention emotion appraisal task (SEAT), a test of emotional processing and regulation. Compared with placebo, DHEA reduced activity in the amygdala and hippocampus, enhanced connectivity between the amygdala and hippocampus, and enhanced activity in the rACC. These activation changes were associated with reduced negative affect. DHEA reduced memory accuracy for emotional stimuli, and also reduced activity in regions associated with conjunctive memory encoding. These results demonstrate that DHEA reduces activity in regions associated with generation of negative emotion and enhances activity in regions linked to regulatory processes. Considering that activity in these regions is altered in mood and anxiety disorders, our results provide initial neuroimaging evidence that DHEA may be useful as a pharmacological intervention for these conditions and invite further investigation into the brain basis of neurosteroid emotion regulatory effects. PMID:23552182

Emotion processing in words: a test of the neural re-use hypothesis using surface and intracranial EEG.

PubMed

Ponz, Aurélie; Montant, Marie; Liegeois-Chauvel, Catherine; Silva, Catarina; Braun, Mario; Jacobs, Arthur M; Ziegler, Johannes C

2014-05-01

This study investigates the spatiotemporal brain dynamics of emotional information processing during reading using a combination of surface and intracranial electroencephalography (EEG). Two different theoretical views were opposed. According to the standard psycholinguistic perspective, emotional responses to words are generated within the reading network itself subsequent to semantic activation. According to the neural re-use perspective, brain regions that are involved in processing emotional information contained in other stimuli (faces, pictures, smells) might be in charge of the processing of emotional information in words as well. We focused on a specific emotion-disgust-which has a clear locus in the brain, the anterior insula. Surface EEG showed differences between disgust and neutral words as early as 200 ms. Source localization suggested a cortical generator of the emotion effect in the left anterior insula. These findings were corroborated through the intracranial recordings of two epileptic patients with depth electrodes in insular and orbitofrontal areas. Both electrodes showed effects of disgust in reading as early as 200 ms. The early emotion effect in a brain region (insula) that responds to specific emotions in a variety of situations and stimuli clearly challenges classic sequential theories of reading in favor of the neural re-use perspective.

Eat your troubles away: electrocortical and experiential correlates of food image processing are related to emotional eating style and emotional state.

PubMed

Blechert, Jens; Goltsche, Julia E; Herbert, Beate M; Wilhelm, Frank H

2014-02-01

Emotional eating, a trait-like style of food intake in response to negative emotion states, represents an important aspect of overeating and eating related psychopathology. The mechanisms of emotional eating both on experiential and neuronal levels are not well delineated. We recorded event related potentials (ERPs) while individuals with high or low emotional eating style (HEE, n=25; LEE, n=20) viewed and rated pictures of high-caloric food during neutral state vs. negative idiosyncratic emotion induction. Craving ratings increased in HEE and decreased in LEE during negative relative to neutral states. ERPs to food pictures showed an enhanced late positive potential (LPP) over parieto-occipital regions for HEE compared to LEE. Emotional state modulated food picture evoked ERPs over right frontal regions in HEE only. This suggests that appetitive food processing is susceptible to both concurrent emotion and habitual eating style which is of relevance for overeating in healthy and abnormal eating. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Investigating the Neural Correlates of Emotion–Cognition Interaction Using an Affective Stroop Task

PubMed Central

Raschle, Nora M.; Fehlbaum, Lynn V.; Menks, Willeke M.; Euler, Felix; Sterzer, Philipp; Stadler, Christina

2017-01-01

The human brain has the capacity to integrate various sources of information and continuously adapts our behavior according to situational needs in order to allow a healthy functioning. Emotion–cognition interactions are a key example for such integrative processing. However, the neuronal correlates investigating the effects of emotion on cognition remain to be explored and replication studies are needed. Previous neuroimaging studies have indicated an involvement of emotion and cognition related brain structures including parietal and prefrontal cortices and limbic brain regions. Here, we employed whole brain event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during an affective number Stroop task and aimed at replicating previous findings using an adaptation of an existing task design in 30 healthy young adults. The Stroop task is an indicator of cognitive control and enables the quantification of interference in relation to variations in cognitive load. By the use of emotional primes (negative/neutral) prior to Stroop task performance, an emotional variation is added as well. Behavioral in-scanner data showed that negative primes delayed and disrupted cognitive processing. Trials with high cognitive demand furthermore negatively influenced cognitive control mechanisms. Neuronally, the emotional primes consistently activated emotion-related brain regions (e.g., amygdala, insula, and prefrontal brain regions) while Stroop task performance lead to activations in cognition networks of the brain (prefrontal cortices, superior temporal lobe, and insula). When assessing the effect of emotion on cognition, increased cognitive demand led to decreases in neural activation in response to emotional stimuli (negative > neutral) within prefrontal cortex, amygdala, and insular cortex. Overall, these results suggest that emotional primes significantly impact cognitive performance and increasing cognitive demand leads to reduced neuronal activation in emotion related brain regions, and therefore support previous findings investigating emotion–cognition interaction in healthy adults. Moreover, emotion and cognition seem to be tightly related to each other, as indicated by shared neural networks involved in both of these processes. Emotion processing, cognitive control, and their interaction are crucial for healthy functioning and a lack thereof is related to psychiatric disorders such as, disruptive behavior disorders. Future studies may investigate the neural characteristics of children and adolescents with disruptive behavior disorders. PMID:28919871

No differences in emotion recognition strategies in children with autism spectrum disorder: evidence from hybrid faces.

PubMed

Evers, Kris; Kerkhof, Inneke; Steyaert, Jean; Noens, Ilse; Wagemans, Johan

2014-01-01

Emotion recognition problems are frequently reported in individuals with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD). However, this research area is characterized by inconsistent findings, with atypical emotion processing strategies possibly contributing to existing contradictions. In addition, an attenuated saliency of the eyes region is often demonstrated in ASD during face identity processing. We wanted to compare reliance on mouth versus eyes information in children with and without ASD, using hybrid facial expressions. A group of six-to-eight-year-old boys with ASD and an age- and intelligence-matched typically developing (TD) group without intellectual disability performed an emotion labelling task with hybrid facial expressions. Five static expressions were used: one neutral expression and four emotional expressions, namely, anger, fear, happiness, and sadness. Hybrid faces were created, consisting of an emotional face half (upper or lower face region) with the other face half showing a neutral expression. Results showed no emotion recognition problem in ASD. Moreover, we provided evidence for the existence of top- and bottom-emotions in children: correct identification of expressions mainly depends on information in the eyes (so-called top-emotions: happiness) or in the mouth region (so-called bottom-emotions: sadness, anger, and fear). No stronger reliance on mouth information was found in children with ASD.

Association between Ability Emotional Intelligence and Left Insula during Social Judgment of Facial Emotions

PubMed Central

Quarto, Tiziana; Blasi, Giuseppe; Maddalena, Chiara; Viscanti, Giovanna; Lanciano, Tiziana; Soleti, Emanuela; Mangiulli, Ivan; Taurisano, Paolo; Fazio, Leonardo; Bertolino, Alessandro; Curci, Antonietta

2016-01-01

The human ability of identifying, processing and regulating emotions from social stimuli is generally referred as Emotional Intelligence (EI). Within EI, Ability EI identifies a performance measure assessing individual skills at perceiving, using, understanding and managing emotions. Previous models suggest that a brain “somatic marker circuitry” (SMC) sustains emotional sub-processes included in EI. Three primary brain regions are included: the amygdala, the insula and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). Here, our aim was to investigate the relationship between Ability EI scores and SMC activity during social judgment of emotional faces. Sixty-three healthy subjects completed a test measuring Ability EI and underwent fMRI during a social decision task (i.e. approach or avoid) about emotional faces with different facial expressions. Imaging data revealed that EI scores are associated with left insula activity during social judgment of emotional faces as a function of facial expression. Specifically, higher EI scores are associated with greater left insula activity during social judgment of fearful faces but also with lower activity of this region during social judgment of angry faces. These findings indicate that the association between Ability EI and the SMC activity during social behavior is region- and emotion-specific. PMID:26859495

Positive and negative symptom scores are correlated with activation in different brain regions during facial emotion perception in schizophrenia patients: a voxel-based sLORETA source activity study.

PubMed

Kim, Do-Won; Kim, Han-Sung; Lee, Seung-Hwan; Im, Chang-Hwan

2013-12-01

Schizophrenia is one of the most devastating of all mental illnesses, and has dimensional characteristics that include both positive and negative symptoms. One problem reported in schizophrenia patients is that they tend to show deficits in face emotion processing, on which negative symptoms are thought to have stronger influence. In this study, four event-related potential (ERP) components (P100, N170, N250, and P300) and their source activities were analyzed using EEG data acquired from 23 schizophrenia patients while they were presented with facial emotion picture stimuli. Correlations between positive and negative syndrome scale (PANSS) scores and source activations during facial emotion processing were calculated to identify the brain areas affected by symptom scores. Our analysis demonstrates that PANSS positive scores are negatively correlated with major areas of the left temporal lobule for early ERP components (P100, N170) and with the right middle frontal lobule for a later component (N250), which indicates that positive symptoms affect both early face processing and facial emotion processing. On the other hand, PANSS negative scores are negatively correlated with several clustered regions, including the left fusiform gyrus (at P100), most of which are not overlapped with regions showing correlations with PANSS positive scores. Our results suggest that positive and negative symptoms affect independent brain regions during facial emotion processing, which may help to explain the heterogeneous characteristics of schizophrenia. © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Neural circuitry of emotion regulation: Effects of appraisal, attention, and cortisol administration.

PubMed

Ma, Sean T; Abelson, James L; Okada, Go; Taylor, Stephan F; Liberzon, Israel

2017-04-01

Psychosocial well-being requires effective regulation of emotional responding in context of threat or stress. Neuroimaging studies have focused on instructed, volitional regulation (e.g., reappraisal or distancing), largely ignoring implicit regulation that does not involve purposeful effort to alter emotional experience. These implicit processes may or may not involve the same neural pathways as explicit regulatory strategies. We examined the neurobiology of implicit emotional regulation processes and the impact of the stress hormone cortisol on these processes. Our study task employed composite pictures of faces and places to examine neural activity during implicit emotional processing (of emotional faces), while these responses were implicitly regulated by attention shift away from the emotionally evocative stimuli, and while subjects reflectively appraised their own emotional response to them. Subjects completed the task in an fMRI scanner after random assignment to receive placebo or hydrocortisone (HCT), an orally administered version of cortisol. Implicit emotional processing activated insula/IFG, dACC/dMPFC, midbrain and amygdala. With attention shifting, we saw diminished signal in emotion generating/response regions (e.g., amygdala) and increased activations in task specific attention regions like parahippocampus. With appraisal of emotions, we observed robust activations in medial prefrontal areas, where activation is also seen in instructed reappraisal studies. We observed no main effects of HCT administration on brain, but males and females showed opposing neural effects in prefrontal areas. The data suggest that different types of emotion regulation utilize overlapping circuits, but with some strategy specific activation. Further study of the dimorphic sex response to cortisol is needed.

The evolving neurobiology of gut feelings.

PubMed

Mayer, E A; Naliboff, B; Munakata, J

2000-01-01

The bi-directional communication between limbic regions and the viscera play a central role in the generation and expression of emotional responses and associated emotional feelings. The response of different viscera to distinct, emotion-specific patterns of autonomic output is fed back to the brain, in particular to the cingulofrontal convergence region. Even though this process unfolds largely without conscious awareness, it plays an important role in emotional function and may influence rational decision making in the healthy individual. Alterations in this bi-directional process such as peripheral pathologies within the gut or alterations at the brain level may explain the close association between certain affective disorders and functional visceral syndromes.

Functional variation of the dopamine D2 receptor gene is associated with emotional control as well as brain activity and connectivity during emotion processing in humans

PubMed Central

Blasi, Giuseppe; Bianco, Luciana Lo; Taurisano, Paolo; Gelao, Barbara; Romano, Raffaella; Fazio, Leonardo; Papazacharias, Apostolos; Di Giorgio, Annabella; Caforio, Grazia; Rampino, Antonio; Masellis, Rita; Papp, Audrey; Ursini, Gianluca; Sinibaldi, Lorenzo; Popolizio, Teresa; Sadee, Wolfgang; Bertolino, Alessandro

2010-01-01

Personality traits related to emotion processing are, at least in part, heritable and genetically determined. Dopamine D2 receptor signaling is involved in modulation of emotional behavior and activity of associated brain regions such as the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex. An intronic single nucleotide polymorphism within the D2 receptor gene (DRD2, rs1076560, guanine>thymine - G>T) shifts splicing of the two protein isoforms (D2 short, D2S, mainly presynaptic, and D2 long, D2L) and has been associated with modulation of memory performance and brain activity. Here, our aim was to investigate the association of DRD2 rs1076560 genotype with personality traits of emotional stability and with brain physiology during processing of emotionally relevant stimuli. DRD2 genotype and Big Five Questionnaire scores were evaluated in 134 healthy subjects demonstrating that GG subjects have reduced ‘emotion control’ compared with GT subjects. fMRI in a sample of 24 individuals indicated greater amygdala activity during implicit processing and greater dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) response during explicit processing of facial emotional stimuli in GG subjects compared with GT. Other results also demonstrate an interaction between DRD2 genotype and facial emotional expression on functional connectivity of both amygdala and dorsolateral prefrontal regions with overlapping medial prefrontal areas. Moreover, rs1076560 genotype is associated with differential relationships between amygdala/DLPFC functional connectivity and emotion control scores. These results suggest that genetically determined D2 signaling may explain part of personality traits related to emotion processing and individual variability in specific brain responses to emotionally relevant inputs. PMID:19940176

Functional variation of the dopamine D2 receptor gene is associated with emotional control as well as brain activity and connectivity during emotion processing in humans.

PubMed

Blasi, Giuseppe; Lo Bianco, Luciana; Taurisano, Paolo; Gelao, Barbara; Romano, Raffaella; Fazio, Leonardo; Papazacharias, Apostolos; Di Giorgio, Annabella; Caforio, Grazia; Rampino, Antonio; Masellis, Rita; Papp, Audrey; Ursini, Gianluca; Sinibaldi, Lorenzo; Popolizio, Teresa; Sadee, Wolfgang; Bertolino, Alessandro

2009-11-25

Personality traits related to emotion processing are, at least in part, heritable and genetically determined. Dopamine D(2) receptor signaling is involved in modulation of emotional behavior and activity of associated brain regions such as the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex. An intronic single nucleotide polymorphism within the D(2) receptor gene (DRD2) (rs1076560, guanine > thymine or G > T) shifts splicing of the two protein isoforms (D(2) short, mainly presynaptic, and D(2) long) and has been associated with modulation of memory performance and brain activity. Here, our aim was to investigate the association of DRD2 rs1076560 genotype with personality traits of emotional stability and with brain physiology during processing of emotionally relevant stimuli. DRD2 genotype and Big Five Questionnaire scores were evaluated in 134 healthy subjects demonstrating that GG subjects have reduced "emotion control" compared with GT subjects. Functional magnetic resonance imaging in a sample of 24 individuals indicated greater amygdala activity during implicit processing and greater dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) response during explicit processing of facial emotional stimuli in GG subjects compared with GT. Other results also demonstrate an interaction between DRD2 genotype and facial emotional expression on functional connectivity of both amygdala and dorsolateral prefrontal regions with overlapping medial prefrontal areas. Moreover, rs1076560 genotype is associated with differential relationships between amygdala/DLPFC functional connectivity and emotion control scores. These results suggest that genetically determined D(2) signaling may explain part of personality traits related to emotion processing and individual variability in specific brain responses to emotionally relevant inputs.

Dissociable patterns of medial prefrontal and amygdala activity to face identity versus emotion in bipolar disorder.

PubMed

Keener, M T; Fournier, J C; Mullin, B C; Kronhaus, D; Perlman, S B; LaBarbara, E; Almeida, J C; Phillips, M L

2012-09-01

Individuals with bipolar disorder demonstrate abnormal social function. Neuroimaging studies in bipolar disorder have shown functional abnormalities in neural circuitry supporting face emotion processing, but have not examined face identity processing, a key component of social function. We aimed to elucidate functional abnormalities in neural circuitry supporting face emotion and face identity processing in bipolar disorder. Twenty-seven individuals with bipolar disorder I currently euthymic and 27 healthy controls participated in an implicit face processing, block-design paradigm. Participants labeled color flashes that were superimposed on dynamically changing background faces comprising morphs either from neutral to prototypical emotion (happy, sad, angry and fearful) or from one identity to another identity depicting a neutral face. Whole-brain and amygdala region-of-interest (ROI) activities were compared between groups. There was no significant between-group difference looking across both emerging face emotion and identity. During processing of all emerging emotions, euthymic individuals with bipolar disorder showed significantly greater amygdala activity. During facial identity and also happy face processing, euthymic individuals with bipolar disorder showed significantly greater amygdala and medial prefrontal cortical activity compared with controls. This is the first study to examine neural circuitry supporting face identity and face emotion processing in bipolar disorder. Our findings of abnormally elevated activity in amygdala and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) during face identity and happy face emotion processing suggest functional abnormalities in key regions previously implicated in social processing. This may be of future importance toward examining the abnormal self-related processing, grandiosity and social dysfunction seen in bipolar disorder.

Implicit and Explicit Attention to Pictures and Words: An fMRI-Study of Concurrent Emotional Stimulus Processing.

PubMed

Flaisch, Tobias; Imhof, Martin; Schmälzle, Ralf; Wentz, Klaus-Ulrich; Ibach, Bernd; Schupp, Harald T

2015-01-01

The present study utilized functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the neural processing of concurrently presented emotional stimuli under varying explicit and implicit attention demands. Specifically, in separate trials, participants indicated the category of either pictures or words. The words were placed over the center of the pictures and the picture-word compound-stimuli were presented for 1500 ms in a rapid event-related design. The results reveal pronounced main effects of task and emotion: the picture categorization task prompted strong activations in visual, parietal, temporal, frontal, and subcortical regions; the word categorization task evoked increased activation only in left extrastriate cortex. Furthermore, beyond replicating key findings regarding emotional picture and word processing, the results point to a dissociation of semantic-affective and sensory-perceptual processes for words: while emotional words engaged semantic-affective networks of the left hemisphere regardless of task, the increased activity in left extrastriate cortex associated with explicitly attending to words was diminished when the word was overlaid over an erotic image. Finally, we observed a significant interaction between Picture Category and Task within dorsal visual-associative regions, inferior parietal, and dorsolateral, and medial prefrontal cortices: during the word categorization task, activation was increased in these regions when the words were overlaid over erotic as compared to romantic pictures. During the picture categorization task, activity in these areas was relatively decreased when categorizing erotic as compared to romantic pictures. Thus, the emotional intensity of the pictures strongly affected brain regions devoted to the control of task-related word or picture processing. These findings are discussed with respect to the interplay of obligatory stimulus processing with task-related attentional control mechanisms.

Implicit and Explicit Attention to Pictures and Words: An fMRI-Study of Concurrent Emotional Stimulus Processing

PubMed Central

Flaisch, Tobias; Imhof, Martin; Schmälzle, Ralf; Wentz, Klaus-Ulrich; Ibach, Bernd; Schupp, Harald T.

2015-01-01

The present study utilized functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the neural processing of concurrently presented emotional stimuli under varying explicit and implicit attention demands. Specifically, in separate trials, participants indicated the category of either pictures or words. The words were placed over the center of the pictures and the picture-word compound-stimuli were presented for 1500 ms in a rapid event-related design. The results reveal pronounced main effects of task and emotion: the picture categorization task prompted strong activations in visual, parietal, temporal, frontal, and subcortical regions; the word categorization task evoked increased activation only in left extrastriate cortex. Furthermore, beyond replicating key findings regarding emotional picture and word processing, the results point to a dissociation of semantic-affective and sensory-perceptual processes for words: while emotional words engaged semantic-affective networks of the left hemisphere regardless of task, the increased activity in left extrastriate cortex associated with explicitly attending to words was diminished when the word was overlaid over an erotic image. Finally, we observed a significant interaction between Picture Category and Task within dorsal visual-associative regions, inferior parietal, and dorsolateral, and medial prefrontal cortices: during the word categorization task, activation was increased in these regions when the words were overlaid over erotic as compared to romantic pictures. During the picture categorization task, activity in these areas was relatively decreased when categorizing erotic as compared to romantic pictures. Thus, the emotional intensity of the pictures strongly affected brain regions devoted to the control of task-related word or picture processing. These findings are discussed with respect to the interplay of obligatory stimulus processing with task-related attentional control mechanisms. PMID:26733895

Neural circuitry of emotional and cognitive conflict revealed through facial expressions.

PubMed

Chiew, Kimberly S; Braver, Todd S

2011-03-09

Neural systems underlying conflict processing have been well studied in the cognitive realm, but the extent to which these overlap with those underlying emotional conflict processing remains unclear. A novel adaptation of the AX Continuous Performance Task (AX-CPT), a stimulus-response incompatibility paradigm, was examined that permits close comparison of emotional and cognitive conflict conditions, through the use of affectively-valenced facial expressions as the response modality. Brain activity was monitored with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during performance of the emotional AX-CPT. Emotional conflict was manipulated on a trial-by-trial basis, by requiring contextually pre-cued facial expressions to emotional probe stimuli (IAPS images) that were either affectively compatible (low-conflict) or incompatible (high-conflict). The emotion condition was contrasted against a matched cognitive condition that was identical in all respects, except that probe stimuli were emotionally neutral. Components of the brain cognitive control network, including dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC), showed conflict-related activation increases in both conditions, but with higher activity during emotion conditions. In contrast, emotion conflict effects were not found in regions associated with affective processing, such as rostral ACC. These activation patterns provide evidence for a domain-general neural system that is active for both emotional and cognitive conflict processing. In line with previous behavioural evidence, greatest activity in these brain regions occurred when both emotional and cognitive influences additively combined to produce increased interference.

Neural Circuitry of Emotional and Cognitive Conflict Revealed through Facial Expressions

PubMed Central

Chiew, Kimberly S.; Braver, Todd S.

2011-01-01

Background Neural systems underlying conflict processing have been well studied in the cognitive realm, but the extent to which these overlap with those underlying emotional conflict processing remains unclear. A novel adaptation of the AX Continuous Performance Task (AX-CPT), a stimulus-response incompatibility paradigm, was examined that permits close comparison of emotional and cognitive conflict conditions, through the use of affectively-valenced facial expressions as the response modality. Methodology/Principal Findings Brain activity was monitored with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during performance of the emotional AX-CPT. Emotional conflict was manipulated on a trial-by-trial basis, by requiring contextually pre-cued facial expressions to emotional probe stimuli (IAPS images) that were either affectively compatible (low-conflict) or incompatible (high-conflict). The emotion condition was contrasted against a matched cognitive condition that was identical in all respects, except that probe stimuli were emotionally neutral. Components of the brain cognitive control network, including dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC), showed conflict-related activation increases in both conditions, but with higher activity during emotion conditions. In contrast, emotion conflict effects were not found in regions associated with affective processing, such as rostral ACC. Conclusions/Significance These activation patterns provide evidence for a domain-general neural system that is active for both emotional and cognitive conflict processing. In line with previous behavioural evidence, greatest activity in these brain regions occurred when both emotional and cognitive influences additively combined to produce increased interference. PMID:21408006

Processing of food, body and emotional stimuli in anorexia nervosa: a systematic review and meta-analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging studies.

PubMed

Zhu, Yikang; Hu, Xiaochen; Wang, Jijun; Chen, Jue; Guo, Qian; Li, Chunbo; Enck, Paul

2012-11-01

The characteristics of the cognitive processing of food, body and emotional information in patients with anorexia nervosa (AN) are debatable. We reviewed functional magnetic resonance imaging studies to assess whether there were consistent neural basis and networks in the studies to date. Searching PubMed, Ovid, Web of Science, The Cochrane Library and Google Scholar between January 1980 and May 2012, we identified 17 relevant studies. Activation likelihood estimation was used to perform a quantitative meta-analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging studies. For both food stimuli and body stimuli, AN patients showed increased hemodynamic response in the emotion-related regions (frontal, caudate, uncus, insula and temporal) and decreased activation in the parietal region. Although no robust brain activation has been found in response to emotional stimuli, emotion-related neural networks are involved in the processing of food and body stimuli among AN. It suggests that negative emotional arousal is related to cognitive processing bias of food and body stimuli in AN. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and Eating Disorders Association.

Multiple mechanisms of consciousness: the neural correlates of emotional awareness.

PubMed

Amting, Jayna M; Greening, Steven G; Mitchell, Derek G V

2010-07-28

Emotional stimuli, including facial expressions, are thought to gain rapid and privileged access to processing resources in the brain. Despite this access, we are conscious of only a fraction of the myriad of emotion-related cues we face everyday. It remains unclear, therefore, what the relationship is between activity in neural regions associated with emotional representation and the phenomenological experience of emotional awareness. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging and binocular rivalry to delineate the neural correlates of awareness of conflicting emotional expressions in humans. Behaviorally, fearful faces were significantly more likely to be perceived than disgusted or neutral faces. Functionally, increased activity was observed in regions associated with facial expression processing, including the amygdala and fusiform gyrus during emotional awareness. In contrast, awareness of neutral faces and suppression of fearful faces were associated with increased activity in dorsolateral prefrontal and inferior parietal cortices. The amygdala showed increased functional connectivity with ventral visual system regions during fear awareness and increased connectivity with perigenual prefrontal cortex (pgPFC; Brodmann's area 32/10) when fear was suppressed. Despite being prioritized for awareness, emotional items were associated with reduced activity in areas considered critical for consciousness. Contributions to consciousness from bottom-up and top-down neural regions may be additive, such that increased activity in specialized regions within the extended ventral visual system may reduce demands on a frontoparietal system important for awareness. The possibility is raised that interactions between pgPFC and the amygdala, previously implicated in extinction, may also influence whether or not an emotional stimulus is accessible to consciousness.

Sex-related differences in neural activity during emotion regulation.

PubMed

Mak, Amanda K Y; Hu, Zhi-guo; Zhang, John X X; Xiao, Zhuangwei; Lee, Tatia M C

2009-11-01

The sex disparity in the development of depression has long been an important research topic, but the sex-related differences in neural activity during emotion regulation have been less thoroughly studied. It was hypothesized that, during the regulation of emotion, there would be more activation in the prefrontal regions implicated in cognitive processing for males, while there would be more activation in the prefrontal regions implicated in affective processing for females. This fMRI study recruited 12 females and 12 males who were required to view or to regulate the negative and positive emotion induced by some emotion-arousing pictures. During the regulation of negative emotion, both males and females had stronger activation in the left anterior cingulate gyrus, but males showed more activation in the prefrontal regions in general, including the left dorsolateral and lateral orbitofrontal gyrus as well as the right anterior cingulate gyrus, while females only showed stronger activation in the left medial orbitofrontal gyrus. For the regulation of positive emotion, both males and females showed stronger activation in the left dorsomedial prefrontal gyrus, but males were found to also have stronger activity in the left lateral orbitofrontal gyrus. It was concluded that there are common as well as sex-specific sets of brain regions involved in regulating negative and positive emotion, and the findings may have significant implications for females' vulnerability to developing depression.

Cerebral processing of auditory stimuli in patients with irritable bowel syndrome

PubMed Central

Andresen, Viola; Poellinger, Alexander; Tsrouya, Chedwa; Bach, Dominik; Stroh, Albrecht; Foerschler, Annette; Georgiewa, Petra; Schmidtmann, Marco; van der Voort, Ivo R; Kobelt, Peter; Zimmer, Claus; Wiedenmann, Bertram; Klapp, Burghard F; Monnikes, Hubert

2006-01-01

AIM: To determine by brain functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) whether cerebral processing of non-visceral stimuli is altered in irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) patients compared with healthy subjects. To circumvent spinal viscerosomatic convergence mechanisms, we used auditory stimulation, and to identify a possible influence of psychological factors the stimuli differed in their emotional quality. METHODS: In 8 IBS patients and 8 controls, fMRI measurements were performed using a block design of 4 auditory stimuli of different emotional quality (pleasant sounds of chimes, unpleasant peep (2000 Hz), neutral words, and emotional words). A gradient echo T2*-weighted sequence was used for the functional scans. Statistical maps were constructed using the general linear model. RESULTS: To emotional auditory stimuli, IBS patients relative to controls responded with stronger deactivations in a greater variety of emotional processing regions, while the response patterns, unlike in controls, did not differentiate between distressing or pleasant sounds. To neutral auditory stimuli, by contrast, only IBS patients responded with large significant activations. CONCLUSION: Altered cerebral response patterns to auditory stimuli in emotional stimulus-processing regions suggest that altered sensory processing in IBS may not be specific for visceral sensation, but might reflect generalized changes in emotional sensitivity and affective reactivity, possibly associated with the psychological comorbidity often found in IBS patients. PMID:16586541

Functional Brain Activation to Emotional and non-Emotional Faces in Healthy Children: Evidence for Developmentally Undifferentiated Amygdala Function During the School Age Period

PubMed Central

Pagliaccio, David; Luby, Joan L.; Gaffrey, Michael S.; Belden, Andrew C.; Botteron, Kelly N.; Harms, Michael P.; Barch, Deanna M.

2013-01-01

The amygdala is a key region in emotion processing. Particularly, fMRI studies have demonstrated that the amygdala is active during the viewing of emotional faces. Previous research has consistently found greater amygdala responses to fearful faces as compared to neutral faces in adults, convergent with a focus in the animal literature on the amygdala's role in fear processing. Studies have found that the amygdala also responds differentially to other facial emotion types in adults. Yet, the literature regarding when this differential amygdala responsivity develops is limited and mixed. Thus, the goal of current study was to examine amygdala responses to emotional and neutral faces in a relatively large sample of healthy school age children (N = 52). While the amygdala was active in response to emotional and neutral faces, the results do not support the hypothesis that the amygdala responds differentially to emotional faces in 7 – 12 year old children. Nonetheless, amygdala activity was correlated with the severity of subclinical depression symptoms and emotional regulation skills. Additionally, sex differences were observed in frontal, temporal, and visual regions as well as effects of pubertal development in visual regions. These findings suggest important differences in amygdala reactivity in childhood. PMID:23636982

Distinct pathways of neural coupling for different basic emotions.

PubMed

Tettamanti, Marco; Rognoni, Elena; Cafiero, Riccardo; Costa, Tommaso; Galati, Dario; Perani, Daniela

2012-01-16

Emotions are complex events recruiting distributed cortical and subcortical cerebral structures, where the functional integration dynamics within the involved neural circuits in relation to the nature of the different emotions are still unknown. Using fMRI, we measured the neural responses elicited by films representing basic emotions (fear, disgust, sadness, happiness). The amygdala and the associative cortex were conjointly activated by all basic emotions. Furthermore, distinct arrays of cortical and subcortical brain regions were additionally activated by each emotion, with the exception of sadness. Such findings informed the definition of three effective connectivity models, testing for the functional integration of visual cortex and amygdala, as regions processing all emotions, with domain-specific regions, namely: i) for fear, the frontoparietal system involved in preparing adaptive motor responses; ii) for disgust, the somatosensory system, reflecting protective responses against contaminating stimuli; iii) for happiness: medial prefrontal and temporoparietal cortices involved in understanding joyful interactions. Consistently with these domain-specific models, the results of the effective connectivity analysis indicate that the amygdala is involved in distinct functional integration effects with cortical networks processing sensorimotor, somatosensory, or cognitive aspects of basic emotions. The resulting effective connectivity networks may serve to regulate motor and cognitive behavior based on the quality of the induced emotional experience. Copyright © 2011. Published by Elsevier Inc.

Recruitment of Language-, Emotion- and Speech-Timing Associated Brain Regions for Expressing Emotional Prosody: Investigation of Functional Neuroanatomy with fMRI

PubMed Central

Mitchell, Rachel L. C.; Jazdzyk, Agnieszka; Stets, Manuela; Kotz, Sonja A.

2016-01-01

We aimed to progress understanding of prosodic emotion expression by establishing brain regions active when expressing specific emotions, those activated irrespective of the target emotion, and those whose activation intensity varied depending on individual performance. BOLD contrast data were acquired whilst participants spoke non-sense words in happy, angry or neutral tones, or performed jaw-movements. Emotion-specific analyses demonstrated that when expressing angry prosody, activated brain regions included the inferior frontal and superior temporal gyri, the insula, and the basal ganglia. When expressing happy prosody, the activated brain regions also included the superior temporal gyrus, insula, and basal ganglia, with additional activation in the anterior cingulate. Conjunction analysis confirmed that the superior temporal gyrus and basal ganglia were activated regardless of the specific emotion concerned. Nevertheless, disjunctive comparisons between the expression of angry and happy prosody established that anterior cingulate activity was significantly higher for angry prosody than for happy prosody production. Degree of inferior frontal gyrus activity correlated with the ability to express the target emotion through prosody. We conclude that expressing prosodic emotions (vs. neutral intonation) requires generic brain regions involved in comprehending numerous aspects of language, emotion-related processes such as experiencing emotions, and in the time-critical integration of speech information. PMID:27803656

Neural dynamics underlying emotional transmissions between individuals

PubMed Central

Levit-Binnun, Nava; Hendler, Talma; Lerner, Yulia

2017-01-01

Abstract Emotional experiences are frequently shaped by the emotional responses of co-present others. Research has shown that people constantly monitor and adapt to the incoming social–emotional signals, even without face-to-face interaction. And yet, the neural processes underlying such emotional transmissions have not been directly studied. Here, we investigated how the human brain processes emotional cues which arrive from another, co-attending individual. We presented continuous emotional feedback to participants who viewed a movie in the scanner. Participants in the social group (but not in the control group) believed that the feedback was coming from another person who was co-viewing the same movie. We found that social–emotional feedback significantly affected the neural dynamics both in the core affect and in the medial pre-frontal regions. Specifically, the response time-courses in those regions exhibited increased similarity across recipients and increased neural alignment with the timeline of the feedback in the social compared with control group. Taken in conjunction with previous research, this study suggests that emotional cues from others shape the neural dynamics across the whole neural continuum of emotional processing in the brain. Moreover, it demonstrates that interpersonal neural alignment can serve as a neural mechanism through which affective information is conveyed between individuals. PMID:28575520

The Perception of Dynamic and Static Facial Expressions of Happiness and Disgust Investigated by ERPs and fMRI Constrained Source Analysis

PubMed Central

Trautmann-Lengsfeld, Sina Alexa; Domínguez-Borràs, Judith; Escera, Carles; Herrmann, Manfred; Fehr, Thorsten

2013-01-01

A recent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study by our group demonstrated that dynamic emotional faces are more accurately recognized and evoked more widespread patterns of hemodynamic brain responses than static emotional faces. Based on this experimental design, the present study aimed at investigating the spatio-temporal processing of static and dynamic emotional facial expressions in 19 healthy women by means of multi-channel electroencephalography (EEG), event-related potentials (ERP) and fMRI-constrained regional source analyses. ERP analysis showed an increased amplitude of the LPP (late posterior positivity) over centro-parietal regions for static facial expressions of disgust compared to neutral faces. In addition, the LPP was more widespread and temporally prolonged for dynamic compared to static faces of disgust and happiness. fMRI constrained source analysis on static emotional face stimuli indicated the spatio-temporal modulation of predominantly posterior regional brain activation related to the visual processing stream for both emotional valences when compared to the neutral condition in the fusiform gyrus. The spatio-temporal processing of dynamic stimuli yielded enhanced source activity for emotional compared to neutral conditions in temporal (e.g., fusiform gyrus), and frontal regions (e.g., ventromedial prefrontal cortex, medial and inferior frontal cortex) in early and again in later time windows. The present data support the view that dynamic facial displays trigger more information reflected in complex neural networks, in particular because of their changing features potentially triggering sustained activation related to a continuing evaluation of those faces. A combined fMRI and EEG approach thus provides an advanced insight to the spatio-temporal characteristics of emotional face processing, by also revealing additional neural generators, not identifiable by the only use of an fMRI approach. PMID:23818974

Specificity of regional brain activity in anxiety types during emotion processing.

PubMed

Engels, Anna S; Heller, Wendy; Mohanty, Aprajita; Herrington, John D; Banich, Marie T; Webb, Andrew G; Miller, Gregory A

2007-05-01

The present study tested the hypothesis that anxious apprehension involves more left- than right-hemisphere activity and that anxious arousal is associated with the opposite pattern. Behavioral and fMRI responses to threat stimuli in an emotional Stroop task were examined in nonpatient groups reporting anxious apprehension, anxious arousal, or neither. Reaction times were longer for negative than for neutral words. As predicted, brain activation distinguished anxious groups in a left inferior frontal region associated with speech production and in a right-hemisphere inferior temporal area. Addressing a second hypothesis about left-frontal involvement in emotion, distinct left frontal regions were associated with anxious apprehension versus processing of positive information. Results support the proposed distinction between the two types of anxiety and resolve an inconsistency about the role of left-frontal activation in emotion and psychopathology.

Cerebral Correlates of Emotional and Action Appraisals During Visual Processing of Emotional Scenes Depending on Spatial Frequency: A Pilot Study.

PubMed

Campagne, Aurélie; Fradcourt, Benoit; Pichat, Cédric; Baciu, Monica; Kauffmann, Louise; Peyrin, Carole

2016-01-01

Visual processing of emotional stimuli critically depends on the type of cognitive appraisal involved. The present fMRI pilot study aimed to investigate the cerebral correlates involved in the visual processing of emotional scenes in two tasks, one emotional, based on the appraisal of personal emotional experience, and the other motivational, based on the appraisal of the tendency to action. Given that the use of spatial frequency information is relatively flexible during the visual processing of emotional stimuli depending on the task's demands, we also explored the effect of the type of spatial frequency in visual stimuli in each task by using emotional scenes filtered in low spatial frequency (LSF) and high spatial frequencies (HSF). Activation was observed in the visual areas of the fusiform gyrus for all emotional scenes in both tasks, and in the amygdala for unpleasant scenes only. The motivational task induced additional activation in frontal motor-related areas (e.g. premotor cortex, SMA) and parietal regions (e.g. superior and inferior parietal lobules). Parietal regions were recruited particularly during the motivational appraisal of approach in response to pleasant scenes. These frontal and parietal activations, respectively, suggest that motor and navigation processes play a specific role in the identification of the tendency to action in the motivational task. Furthermore, activity observed in the motivational task, in response to both pleasant and unpleasant scenes, was significantly greater for HSF than for LSF scenes, suggesting that the tendency to action is driven mainly by the detailed information contained in scenes. Results for the emotional task suggest that spatial frequencies play only a small role in the evaluation of unpleasant and pleasant emotions. Our preliminary study revealed a partial distinction between visual processing of emotional scenes during identification of the tendency to action, and during identification of personal emotional experiences. It also illustrates flexible use of the spatial frequencies contained in scenes depending on their emotional valence and on task demands.

Significant grey matter changes in a region of the orbitofrontal cortex in healthy participants predicts emotional dysregulation

PubMed Central

Ekman, Carl Johan; Klahr, Johanna; Tigerström, Lars; Rydén, Göran; Johansson, Anette G. M.; Sellgren, Carl; Golkar, Armita; Olsson, Andreas; Öhman, Arne; Ingvar, Martin; Landén, Mikael

2016-01-01

The traditional concept of ‘categorical’ psychiatric disorders has been challenged as many of the symptoms display a continuous distribution in the general population. We suggest that this is the case for emotional dysregulation, a key component in several categorical psychiatric disorder constructs. We used voxel-based magnetic resonance imaging morphometry in healthy human subjects (n = 87) to study how self-reported subclinical symptoms associated with emotional dysregulation relate to brain regions assumed to be critical for emotion regulation. To measure a pure emotional dysregulation, we also corrected for subclinical symptoms of non-emotional attentional dysregulation. We show that such subclinical emotional symptoms correlate negatively with the grey matter volume of lateral orbitofrontal cortex bilaterally—a region assumed to be critical for emotion regulation and dysfunctional in psychiatric disorders involving emotional dysregulation. Importantly, this effect is mediated both by a decrease in volume associated with emotional dysregulation and an increase in volume due to non-emotional attentional dysregulation. Exploratory analysis suggests that other regions involved in emotional processing such as insula and ventral striatum also show a similar reduction in grey matter volume mirroring clinical disorders associated with emotional dysregulation. Our findings support the concept of continuous properties in psychiatric symptomatology. PMID:26078386

Dissimilar processing of emotional facial expressions in human and monkey temporal cortex

PubMed Central

Zhu, Qi; Nelissen, Koen; Van den Stock, Jan; De Winter, François-Laurent; Pauwels, Karl; de Gelder, Beatrice; Vanduffel, Wim; Vandenbulcke, Mathieu

2013-01-01

Emotional facial expressions play an important role in social communication across primates. Despite major progress made in our understanding of categorical information processing such as for objects and faces, little is known, however, about how the primate brain evolved to process emotional cues. In this study, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to compare the processing of emotional facial expressions between monkeys and humans. We used a 2 × 2 × 2 factorial design with species (human and monkey), expression (fear and chewing) and configuration (intact versus scrambled) as factors. At the whole brain level, selective neural responses to conspecific emotional expressions were anatomically confined to the superior temporal sulcus (STS) in humans. Within the human STS, we found functional subdivisions with a face-selective right posterior STS area that also responded selectively to emotional expressions of other species and a more anterior area in the right middle STS that responded specifically to human emotions. Hence, we argue that the latter region does not show a mere emotion-dependent modulation of activity but is primarily driven by human emotional facial expressions. Conversely, in monkeys, emotional responses appeared in earlier visual cortex and outside face-selective regions in inferior temporal cortex that responded also to multiple visual categories. Within monkey IT, we also found areas that were more responsive to conspecific than to non-conspecific emotional expressions but these responses were not as specific as in human middle STS. Overall, our results indicate that human STS may have developed unique properties to deal with social cues such as emotional expressions. PMID:23142071

Brain activation associated with pride and shame.

PubMed

Roth, Lilian; Kaffenberger, Tina; Herwig, Uwe; Brühl, Annette B

2014-01-01

Self-referential emotions such as shame/guilt and pride provide evaluative information about persons themselves. In addition to emotional aspects, social and self-referential processes play a role in self-referential emotions. Prior studies have rather focused on comparing self-referential and other-referential processes of one valence, triggered mostly by external stimuli. In the current study, we aimed at investigating the valence-specific neural correlates of shame/guilt and pride, evoked by the remembrance of a corresponding autobiographical event during functional magnetic resonance imaging. A total of 25 healthy volunteers were studied. The task comprised a negative (shame/guilt), a positive (pride) and a neutral condition (expecting the distractor). Each condition was initiated by a simple cue, followed by the remembrance and finished by a distracting picture. Pride and shame/guilt conditions both activated typical emotion-processing circuits including the amygdala, insula and ventral striatum, as well as self-referential brain regions such as the bilateral dorsomedial prefrontal cortex. Comparing the two emotional conditions, emotion-processing circuits were more activated by pride than by shame, possibly due to either hedonic experiences or stronger involvement of the participants in positive self-referential emotions due to a self-positivity bias. However, the ventral striatum was similarly activated by pride and shame/guilt. In the whole-brain analysis, both self-referential emotion conditions activated medial prefrontal and posterior cingulate regions, corresponding to the self-referential aspect and the autobiographical evocation of the respective emotions. Autobiographically evoked self-referential emotions activated basic emotional as well as self-referential circuits. Except for the ventral striatum, emotional circuits were more active with pride than with shame.

Electroencephalographic dynamics of musical emotion perception revealed by independent spectral components.

PubMed

Lin, Yuan-Pin; Duann, Jeng-Ren; Chen, Jyh-Horng; Jung, Tzyy-Ping

2010-04-21

This study explores the electroencephalographic (EEG) correlates of emotional experience during music listening. Independent component analysis and analysis of variance were used to separate statistically independent spectral changes of the EEG in response to music-induced emotional processes. An independent brain process with equivalent dipole located in the fronto-central region exhibited distinct δ-band and θ-band power changes associated with self-reported emotional states. Specifically, the emotional valence was associated with δ-power decreases and θ-power increases in the frontal-central area, whereas the emotional arousal was accompanied by increases in both δ and θ powers. The resultant emotion-related component activations that were less interfered by the activities from other brain processes complement previous EEG studies of emotion perception to music.

The emotion paradox in the aging brain.

PubMed

Mather, Mara

2012-03-01

This paper reviews age differences in emotion processing and how they may relate to age-related changes in the brain. Compared with younger adults, older adults react less to negative situations, ignore irrelevant negative stimuli better, and remember relatively more positive than negative information. Older adults' ability to insulate their thoughts and emotional reactions from negative situations is likely due to a number of factors, such as being less influenced by interoceptive cues, selecting different emotion regulation strategies, having less age-related decline in prefrontal regions associated with emotional control than in other prefrontal regions, and engaging in emotion regulation strategies as a default mode in their everyday lives. Healthy older adults' avoidance of processing negative stimuli may contribute to their well-maintained emotional well-being. However, when cardiovascular disease leads to additional prefrontal white matter damage, older adults have fewer cognitive control mechanisms available to regulate their emotions, making them more vulnerable to depression. In general, although age-related changes in the brain help shape emotional experience, shifts in preferred strategies and goal priorities are also important influences. © 2012 New York Academy of Sciences.

The emotion paradox in the aging brain

PubMed Central

Mather, Mara

2012-01-01

This paper reviews age differences in emotion processing and how they may relate to age-related changes in the brain. Compared with younger adults, older adults react less to negative situations, ignore irrelevant negative stimuli better, and remember relatively more positive than negative information. Older adults’ ability to insulate their thoughts and emotional reactions from negative situations is likely due to a number of factors, such as being less influenced by interoceptive cues, selecting different emotion regulation strategies, having less age-related decline in prefrontal regions associated with emotional control than in other prefrontal regions, and engaging in emotion regulation strategies as a default mode in their everyday lives. Healthy older adults’ avoidance of processing negative stimuli may contribute to their well-maintained emotional well-being. However, when cardiovascular disease leads to additional prefrontal white matter damage, older adults have fewer cognitive control mechanisms available to regulate their emotions, making them more vulnerable to depression. In general, while age-related changes in the brain help shape emotional experience, shifts in preferred strategies and goal priorities are also important influences. PMID:22409159

Neural processing of food and emotional stimuli in adolescent and adult anorexia nervosa patients

PubMed Central

Forster, Clemens; Dörfler, Arnd; Lindsiepe, Silja; Heinrich, Hartmut; Graap, Holmer; Moll, Gunther H.; Kratz, Oliver

2018-01-01

Background A constant preoccupation with food and restrictive eating are main symptoms of anorexia nervosa (AN). Imaging studies revealed aberrant neural activation patterns in brain regions processing hedonic and reward reactions as well as–potentially aversive–emotions. An imbalance between so called “bottom-up” and “top-down” control areas is discussed. The present study is focusing on neural processing of disease-specific food stimuli and emotional stimuli and its developmental course in adolescent and adult AN patients and could offer new insight into differential mechanisms underlying shorter or more chronic disease. Methods 33 adolescents aged 12–18 years (15 AN patients, 18 control participants) and 32 adult women (16 AN patients, 16 control participants) underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI, 3T high-field scanner) while watching pictures of high and low-calorie food and affective stimuli. Afterwards, they rated subjective valence of each picture. FMRI data analysis was performed using a region of interest based approach. Results Pictures of high-calorie food items were rated more negatively by AN patients. Differences in activation between patients and controls were found in “bottom up” and “top down” control areas for food stimuli and in several emotion processing regions for affective stimuli which were more pronounced in adolescents than in adults. Conclusion A differential pattern was seen for food stimuli compared to generally emotion eliciting stimuli. Adolescents with AN show reduced processing of affective stimuli and enhanced activation of regions involved in “bottom up” reward processing and “top down” control as well as the insula with regard to food stimuli with a focus on brain regions which underlie changes during adolescent development. In adults less clear and less specific activation differences were present, pointing towards a high impact that regions undergoing maturation might have on AN symptoms. PMID:29579064

The effect of strategies, goals and stimulus material on the neural mechanisms of emotion regulation: A meta-analysis of fMRI studies.

PubMed

Morawetz, Carmen; Bode, Stefan; Derntl, Birgit; Heekeren, Hauke R

2017-01-01

Emotion regulation comprises all extrinsic and intrinsic control processes whereby people monitor, evaluate and modify the occurrence, intensity and duration of emotional reactions. Here we sought to quantitatively summarize the existing neuroimaging literature to investigate a) whether different emotion regulation strategies are based on different or the same neural networks; b) which brain regions in particular support the up- and down-regulation of emotions, respectively; and c) to which degree the neural networks realising emotion regulation depend on the stimulus material used to elicit emotions. The left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC), the anterior insula and the supplementary motor area were consistently activated independent of the regulation strategy. VLPFC and posterior cingulate cortex were the main regions consistently found to be recruited during the up-regulation as well as the down-regulation of emotion. The down-regulation compared to the up-regulation of emotions was associated with more right-lateralized activity while up-regulating emotions more strongly modulated activity in the ventral striatum. Finally, the process of emotion regulation appeared to be unaffected by stimulus material. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Sex differences in brain activation to emotional stimuli: a meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies.

PubMed

Stevens, Jennifer S; Hamann, Stephan

2012-06-01

Substantial sex differences in emotional responses and perception have been reported in previous psychological and psychophysiological studies. For example, women have been found to respond more strongly to negative emotional stimuli, a sex difference that has been linked to an increased risk of depression and anxiety disorders. The extent to which such sex differences are reflected in corresponding differences in regional brain activation remains a largely unresolved issue, however, in part because relatively few neuroimaging studies have addressed this issue. Here, by conducting a quantitative meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies, we were able to substantially increase statistical power to detect sex differences relative to prior studies, by combining emotion studies which explicitly examined sex differences with the much larger number of studies that examined only women or men. We used an activation likelihood estimation approach to characterize sex differences in the likelihood of regional brain activation elicited by emotional stimuli relative to non-emotional stimuli. We examined sex differences separately for negative and positive emotions, in addition to examining all emotions combined. Sex differences varied markedly between negative and positive emotion studies. The majority of sex differences favoring women were observed for negative emotion, whereas the majority of the sex differences favoring men were observed for positive emotion. This valence-specificity was particularly evident for the amygdala. For negative emotion, women exhibited greater activation than men in the left amygdala, as well as in other regions including the left thalamus, hypothalamus, mammillary bodies, left caudate, and medial prefrontal cortex. In contrast, for positive emotion, men exhibited greater activation than women in the left amygdala, as well as greater activation in other regions including the bilateral inferior frontal gyrus and right fusiform gyrus. These meta-analysis findings indicate that the amygdala, a key region for emotion processing, exhibits valence-dependent sex differences in activation to emotional stimuli. The greater left amygdala response to negative emotion for women accords with previous reports that women respond more strongly to negative emotional stimuli, as well as with hypothesized links between increased neurobiological reactivity to negative emotion and increased prevalence of depression and anxiety disorders in women. The finding of greater left amygdala activation for positive emotional stimuli in men suggests that greater amygdala responses reported previously for men for specific types of positive stimuli may also extend to positive stimuli more generally. In summary, this study extends efforts to characterize sex differences in brain activation during emotion processing by providing the largest and most comprehensive quantitative meta-analysis to date, and for the first time examining sex differences as a function of positive vs. negative emotional valence. The current findings highlight the importance of considering sex as a potential factor modulating emotional processing and its underlying neural mechanisms, and more broadly, the need to consider individual differences in understanding the neurobiology of emotion. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Prefrontal activation in response to emotional words in patients with bipolar disorder and major depressive disorder.

PubMed

Matsubara, Toshio; Matsuo, Koji; Nakashima, Mami; Nakano, Masayuki; Harada, Kenichiro; Watanuki, Toshio; Egashira, Kazuteru; Watanabe, Yoshifumi

2014-01-15

Abnormal emotional processing is involved in the pathophysiology of bipolar disorder (BD) and major depressive disorder (MDD). However, whether the neural mechanism underlying this deficit is a trait characteristic of BD and MDD is unclear. The aim of this study was to elucidate the similarities and differences in processing of emotional stimuli between patients with BD and MDD in remission, using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Thirty-two patients (16 with BD and 16 with MDD) and 20 healthy control subjects matched for age, sex, handedness, and years of education were included. An emotional Stroop task, including happy, sad, and threat words, was used. The relative oxygenated and deoxygenated hemoglobin concentration ([oxy-Hb] and [deoxy-Hb]) changes in the frontal region were measured using 52-channels of NIRS. During the threat task, compared to healthy control subjects, patients with BD showed significantly increased [oxy-Hb] in the left inferior frontal region whereas patients with MDD showed significantly increased [oxy-Hb] in the left middle frontal region. During the happy task, compared to healthy control subjects, patients with BD showed significantly decreased [oxy-Hb] in the middle frontal region in both hemispheres. Moreover, patients with BD exhibited decreased [oxy-Hb] and increased [deoxy-Hb] in the superior frontal and middle frontal regions compared to MDD in response to the happy stimulus. No significant differences in [oxy-Hb] or [deoxy-Hb] were seen between the groups during the sad task. These results suggest that abnormal neural responses to emotional stimuli in patients with mood disorders in remission may be a trait characteristic, that negative emotional stimuli are associated with similar prefrontal responses, and that positive emotional stimuli are associated with different prefrontal responses in patients with BD and MDD. These findings indicate that different neural circuits play a role in emotional processing in BD and MDD; this may aid the elucidation of the pathophysiology of these two disorders. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Neural correlates of emotional regulation while viewing films.

PubMed

Shimamura, Arthur P; Marian, Diane E; Haskins, Andrew L

2013-03-01

Negative and arousal-inducing film clips were used to assess the neural correlates of emotional expression and suppression. Compared to viewing neutral clips, both negative (disgusting) and arousal (action) clips activated primarily posterior regions in the parietal and occipital cortex when participants were instructed to express their emotions. When instructed to suppress their emotions while viewing negative clips, a broad frontoparietal network was activated that included lateral, medial, and orbital regions in the prefrontal cortex as well as lateral and medial regions of the posterior parietal cortex. The suppression of arousal clips also activated prefrontal and parietal regions, though not to the same extent as the suppression of negative clips. The findings demonstrate the potency of using movies to engage emotional processes and highlight a broad frontoparietal network that is engaged during the suppression of negative film clips.

Neural processing of emotions in traumatized children treated with Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing therapy: a hdEEG study

PubMed Central

Trentini, Cristina; Pagani, Marco; Fania, Piercarlo; Speranza, Anna Maria; Nicolais, Giampaolo; Sibilia, Alessandra; Inguscio, Lucio; Verardo, Anna Rita; Fernandez, Isabel; Ammaniti, Massimo

2015-01-01

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy has been proven efficacious in restoring affective regulation in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) patients. However, its effectiveness on emotion processing in children with complex trauma has yet to be explored. High density electroencephalography (hdEEG) was used to investigate the effects of EMDR on brain responses to adults’ emotions on children with histories of early maltreatment. Ten school-aged children were examined before (T0) and within one month after the conclusion of EMDR (T1). hdEEGs were recorded while children passively viewed angry, afraid, happy, and neutral faces. Clinical scales were administered at the same time. Correlation analyses were performed to detect brain regions whose activity was linked to children’s traumatic symptom-related and emotional-adaptive problem scores. In all four conditions, hdEEG showed similar significantly higher activity on the right medial prefrontal and fronto-temporal limbic regions at T0, shifting toward the left medial and superior temporal regions at T1. Moreover, significant correlations were found between clinical scales and the same regions whose activity significantly differed between pre- and post-treatment. These preliminary results demonstrate that, after EMDR, children suffering from complex trauma show increased activity in areas implicated in high-order cognitive processing when passively viewing pictures of emotional expressions. These changes are associated with the decrease of depressive and traumatic symptoms, and with the improvement of emotional-adaptive functioning over time. PMID:26594183

Cholinergic enhancement modulates neural correlates of selective attention and emotional processing.

PubMed

Bentley, Paul; Vuilleumier, Patrik; Thiel, Christiane M; Driver, Jon; Dolan, Raymond J

2003-09-01

Neocortical cholinergic afferents are proposed to influence both selective attention and emotional processing. In a study of healthy adults we used event-related fMRI while orthogonally manipulating attention and emotionality to examine regions showing effects of cholinergic modulation by the anticholinesterase physostigmine. Either face or house pictures appeared at task-relevant locations, with the alternative picture type at irrelevant locations. Faces had either neutral or fearful expressions. Physostigmine increased relative activity within the anterior fusiform gyrus for faces at attended, versus unattended, locations, but decreased relative activity within the posterolateral occipital cortex for houses in attended, versus unattended, locations. A similar pattern of regional differences in the effect of physostigmine on cue-evoked responses was also present in the absence of stimuli. Cholinergic enhancement augmented the relative neuronal response within the middle fusiform gyrus to fearful faces, whether at attended or unattended locations. By contrast, physostigmine influenced responses in the orbitofrontal, intraparietal and cingulate cortices to fearful faces when faces occupied task-irrelevant locations. These findings suggest that acetylcholine may modulate both selective attention and emotional processes through independent, region-specific effects within the extrastriate cortex. Furthermore, cholinergic inputs to the frontoparietal cortex may influence the allocation of attention to emotional information.

Gender Differences in Emotion Regulation: An fMRI Study of Cognitive Reappraisal.

PubMed

McRae, Kateri; Ochsner, Kevin N; Mauss, Iris B; Gabrieli, John J D; Gross, James J

2008-04-01

Despite strong popular conceptions of gender differences in emotionality and striking gender differences in the prevalence of disorders thought to involve emotion dysregulation, the literature on the neural bases of emotion regulation is nearly silent regarding gender differences (Gross, 2007; Ochsner & Gross, in press). The purpose of the present study was to address this gap in the literature. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we asked male and female participants to use a cognitive emotion regulation strategy (reappraisal) to down-regulate their emotional responses to negatively valenced pictures. Behaviorally, men and women evidenced comparable decreases in negative emotion experience. Neurally, however, gender differences emerged. Compared with women, men showed (a) lesser increases in prefrontal regions that are associated with reappraisal, (b) greater decreases in the amygdala, which is associated with emotional responding, and (c) lesser engagement of ventral striatal regions, which are associated with reward processing. We consider two non-competing explanations for these differences. First, men may expend less effort when using cognitive regulation, perhaps due to greater use of automatic emotion regulation. Second, women may use positive emotions in the service of reappraising negative emotions to a greater degree. We then consider the implications of gender differences in emotion regulation for understanding gender differences in emotional processing in general, and gender differences in affective disorders.

Gender Differences in Emotion Regulation: An fMRI Study of Cognitive Reappraisal

PubMed Central

McRae, Kateri; Ochsner, Kevin N.; Mauss, Iris B.; Gabrieli, John J. D.; Gross, James J.

2009-01-01

Despite strong popular conceptions of gender differences in emotionality and striking gender differences in the prevalence of disorders thought to involve emotion dysregulation, the literature on the neural bases of emotion regulation is nearly silent regarding gender differences (Gross, 2007; Ochsner & Gross, in press). The purpose of the present study was to address this gap in the literature. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we asked male and female participants to use a cognitive emotion regulation strategy (reappraisal) to down-regulate their emotional responses to negatively valenced pictures. Behaviorally, men and women evidenced comparable decreases in negative emotion experience. Neurally, however, gender differences emerged. Compared with women, men showed (a) lesser increases in prefrontal regions that are associated with reappraisal, (b) greater decreases in the amygdala, which is associated with emotional responding, and (c) lesser engagement of ventral striatal regions, which are associated with reward processing. We consider two non-competing explanations for these differences. First, men may expend less effort when using cognitive regulation, perhaps due to greater use of automatic emotion regulation. Second, women may use positive emotions in the service of reappraising negative emotions to a greater degree. We then consider the implications of gender differences in emotion regulation for understanding gender differences in emotional processing in general, and gender differences in affective disorders. PMID:29743808

Different brain activity in response to emotional faces alone and augmented by contextual information.

PubMed

Lee, Kyung Hwa; Siegle, Greg J

2014-11-01

This study examined the extent to which emotional face stimuli differ from the neural reactivity associated with more ecological contextually augmented stimuli. Participants were scanned when they viewed contextually rich pictures depicting both emotional faces and context, and pictures of emotional faces presented alone. Emotional faces alone were more strongly associated with brain activity in paralimbic and social information processing regions, whereas emotional faces augmented by context were associated with increased and sustained activity in regions potentially representing increased complexity and subjective emotional experience. Furthermore, context effects were modulated by emotional intensity and valence. These findings suggest that cortical elaboration that is apparent in contextually augmented stimuli may be missed in studies of emotional faces alone, whereas emotional faces may more selectively recruit limbic reactivity. Copyright © 2014 Society for Psychophysiological Research.

Dissociable meta-analytic brain networks contribute to coordinated emotional processing.

PubMed

Riedel, Michael C; Yanes, Julio A; Ray, Kimberly L; Eickhoff, Simon B; Fox, Peter T; Sutherland, Matthew T; Laird, Angela R

2018-06-01

Meta-analytic techniques for mining the neuroimaging literature continue to exert an impact on our conceptualization of functional brain networks contributing to human emotion and cognition. Traditional theories regarding the neurobiological substrates contributing to affective processing are shifting from regional- towards more network-based heuristic frameworks. To elucidate differential brain network involvement linked to distinct aspects of emotion processing, we applied an emergent meta-analytic clustering approach to the extensive body of affective neuroimaging results archived in the BrainMap database. Specifically, we performed hierarchical clustering on the modeled activation maps from 1,747 experiments in the affective processing domain, resulting in five meta-analytic groupings of experiments demonstrating whole-brain recruitment. Behavioral inference analyses conducted for each of these groupings suggested dissociable networks supporting: (1) visual perception within primary and associative visual cortices, (2) auditory perception within primary auditory cortices, (3) attention to emotionally salient information within insular, anterior cingulate, and subcortical regions, (4) appraisal and prediction of emotional events within medial prefrontal and posterior cingulate cortices, and (5) induction of emotional responses within amygdala and fusiform gyri. These meta-analytic outcomes are consistent with a contemporary psychological model of affective processing in which emotionally salient information from perceived stimuli are integrated with previous experiences to engender a subjective affective response. This study highlights the utility of using emergent meta-analytic methods to inform and extend psychological theories and suggests that emotions are manifest as the eventual consequence of interactions between large-scale brain networks. © 2018 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Implicit and explicit processing of emotional facial expressions in Parkinson's disease.

PubMed

Wagenbreth, Caroline; Wattenberg, Lena; Heinze, Hans-Jochen; Zaehle, Tino

2016-04-15

Besides motor problems, Parkinson's disease (PD) is associated with detrimental emotional and cognitive functioning. Deficient explicit emotional processing has been observed, whilst patients also show impaired Theory of Mind (ToM) abilities. However, it is unclear whether this PD patients' ToM deficit is based on an inability to infer otherś emotional states or whether it is due to explicit emotional processing deficits. We investigated implicit and explicit emotional processing in PD with an affective priming paradigm in which we used pictures of human eyes for emotional primes and a lexical decision task (LDT) with emotional connoted words for target stimuli. Sixteen PD patients and sixteen matched healthy controls performed a LTD combined with an emotional priming paradigm providing emotional information through the facial eye region to assess implicit emotional processing. Second, participants explicitly evaluated the emotional status of eyes and words used in the implicit task. Compared to controls implicit emotional processing abilities were generally preserved in PD with, however, considerable alterations for happiness and disgust processing. Furthermore, we observed a general impairment of patients for explicit evaluation of emotional stimuli, which was augmented for the rating of facial expressions. This is the first study reporting results for affective priming with facial eye expressions in PD patients. Our findings indicate largely preserved implicit emotional processing, with a specific altered processing of disgust and happiness. Explicit emotional processing was considerably impaired for semantic and especially for facial stimulus material. Poor ToM abilities in PD patients might be based on deficient explicit emotional processing, with preserved ability to implicitly infer other people's feelings. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Neural Mechanisms of Emotion.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Derryberry, Douglas; Tucker, Don M.

1992-01-01

Views neural mechanisms of emotion from an evolutionary perspective, seeing them distributed across the brainstem, limbic, paralimbic, and neocortical regions. Discusses descending and ascending connections among these levels in relation to three types of emotional processes: peripheral effects on patterned bodily responses, central effects on…

Origin of Emotion Effects on ERP Correlates of Emotional Word Processing: The Emotion Duality Approach.

PubMed

Imbir, Kamil Konrad; Jarymowicz, Maria Teresa; Spustek, Tomasz; Kuś, Rafał; Żygierewicz, Jarosław

2015-01-01

We distinguish two evaluative systems which evoke automatic and reflective emotions. Automatic emotions are direct reactions to stimuli whereas reflective emotions are always based on verbalized (and often abstract) criteria of evaluation. We conducted an electroencephalography (EEG) study in which 25 women were required to read and respond to emotional words which engaged either the automatic or reflective system. Stimulus words were emotional (positive or negative) and neutral. We found an effect of valence on an early response with dipolar fronto-occipital topography; positive words evoked a higher amplitude response than negative words. We also found that topographically specific differences in the amplitude of the late positive complex were related to the system involved in processing. Emotional stimuli engaging the automatic system were associated with significantly higher amplitudes in the left-parietal region; the response to neutral words was similar regardless of the system engaged. A different pattern of effects was observed in the central region, neutral stimuli engaging the reflective system evoked a higher amplitudes response whereas there was no system effect for emotional stimuli. These differences could not be reduced to effects of differences between the arousing properties and concreteness of the words used as stimuli.

Origin of Emotion Effects on ERP Correlates of Emotional Word Processing: The Emotion Duality Approach

PubMed Central

Imbir, Kamil Konrad; Jarymowicz, Maria Teresa; Spustek, Tomasz; Kuś, Rafał; Żygierewicz, Jarosław

2015-01-01

We distinguish two evaluative systems which evoke automatic and reflective emotions. Automatic emotions are direct reactions to stimuli whereas reflective emotions are always based on verbalized (and often abstract) criteria of evaluation. We conducted an electroencephalography (EEG) study in which 25 women were required to read and respond to emotional words which engaged either the automatic or reflective system. Stimulus words were emotional (positive or negative) and neutral. We found an effect of valence on an early response with dipolar fronto-occipital topography; positive words evoked a higher amplitude response than negative words. We also found that topographically specific differences in the amplitude of the late positive complex were related to the system involved in processing. Emotional stimuli engaging the automatic system were associated with significantly higher amplitudes in the left-parietal region; the response to neutral words was similar regardless of the system engaged. A different pattern of effects was observed in the central region, neutral stimuli engaging the reflective system evoked a higher amplitudes response whereas there was no system effect for emotional stimuli. These differences could not be reduced to effects of differences between the arousing properties and concreteness of the words used as stimuli. PMID:25955719

Role of emotional processing in depressive responses to sex-hormone manipulation: a pharmacological fMRI study

PubMed Central

Henningsson, S; Madsen, K H; Pinborg, A; Heede, M; Knudsen, G M; Siebner, H R; Frokjaer, V G

2015-01-01

Sex-hormone fluctuations may increase risk for developing depressive symptoms and alter emotional processing as supported by observations in menopausal and pre- to postpartum transition. In this double-blinded, placebo-controlled study, we used blood−oxygen level dependent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate if sex-steroid hormone manipulation with a gonadotropin-releasing hormone agonist (GnRHa) influences emotional processing. Fifty-six healthy women were investigated twice: at baseline (follicular phase of menstrual cycle) and 16±3 days post intervention. At both sessions, fMRI-scans during exposure to faces expressing fear, anger, happiness or no emotion, depressive symptom scores and estradiol levels were acquired. The fMRI analyses focused on regions of interest for emotional processing. As expected, GnRHa initially increased and subsequently reduced estradiol to menopausal levels, which was accompanied by an increase in subclinical depressive symptoms relative to placebo. Women who displayed larger GnRHa-induced increase in depressive symptoms had a larger increase in both negative and positive emotion-elicited activity in the anterior insula. When considering the post-GnRHa scan only, depressive responses were associated with emotion-elicited activity in the anterior insula and amygdala. The effect on regional activity in anterior insula was not associated with the estradiol net decline, only by the GnRHa-induced changes in mood. Our data implicate enhanced insula recruitment during emotional processing in the emergence of depressive symptoms following sex-hormone fluctuations. This may correspond to the emotional hypersensitivity frequently experienced by women postpartum. PMID:26624927

Early neural activation during facial affect processing in adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

PubMed

Leung, Rachel C; Pang, Elizabeth W; Cassel, Daniel; Brian, Jessica A; Smith, Mary Lou; Taylor, Margot J

2015-01-01

Impaired social interaction is one of the hallmarks of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Emotional faces are arguably the most critical visual social stimuli and the ability to perceive, recognize, and interpret emotions is central to social interaction and communication, and subsequently healthy social development. However, our understanding of the neural and cognitive mechanisms underlying emotional face processing in adolescents with ASD is limited. We recruited 48 adolescents, 24 with high functioning ASD and 24 typically developing controls. Participants completed an implicit emotional face processing task in the MEG. We examined spatiotemporal differences in neural activation between the groups during implicit angry and happy face processing. While there were no differences in response latencies between groups across emotions, adolescents with ASD had lower accuracy on the implicit emotional face processing task when the trials included angry faces. MEG data showed atypical neural activity in adolescents with ASD during angry and happy face processing, which included atypical activity in the insula, anterior and posterior cingulate and temporal and orbitofrontal regions. Our findings demonstrate differences in neural activity during happy and angry face processing between adolescents with and without ASD. These differences in activation in social cognitive regions may index the difficulties in face processing and in comprehension of social reward and punishment in the ASD group. Thus, our results suggest that atypical neural activation contributes to impaired affect processing, and thus social cognition, in adolescents with ASD.

Activation of the subthalamic region during emotional processing in Parkinson disease.

PubMed

Kühn, A A; Hariz, M I; Silberstein, P; Tisch, S; Kupsch, A; Schneider, G-H; Limousin-Dowsey, P; Yarrow, K; Brown, P

2005-09-13

To elucidate the involvement of the human subthalamic nucleus (STN) region in the processing or transmission of emotional information. Local field potentials (LFPs) were recorded from this region in 10 patients with Parkinson disease (PD) undergoing bilateral implantation of the STN for high-frequency stimulation. LFP recordings were made while patients viewed pleasant and unpleasant emotionally arousing and neutral pictures. A significant decrease (event-related desynchronization [ERD]) in the local alpha power (8 to 12 Hz) was found for all stimulus categories starting at about 0.5 seconds after stimulus presentation. However, 1 to 2 seconds poststimulus, the ERD was larger in trials of pleasant (mean ERD: 21.6 +/- 2.8%; p < 0.009) and unpleasant (mean ERD: 15.0 +/- 4.2%; p = 0.018) stimuli compared with neutral stimuli (mean ERD: 4.4 +/- 4.2%). The delayed modulation of alpha activity recorded from the area of the subthalamic nucleus in PD may reflect the processing or transmission of information related to emotional stimuli. "Limbic" activation in the region of the subthalamic nucleus may explain why high-frequency stimulation of the subthalamic nucleus alters affect in some patients with PD.

Distributed neural system for emotional intelligence revealed by lesion mapping.

PubMed

Barbey, Aron K; Colom, Roberto; Grafman, Jordan

2014-03-01

Cognitive neuroscience has made considerable progress in understanding the neural architecture of human intelligence, identifying a broadly distributed network of frontal and parietal regions that support goal-directed, intelligent behavior. However, the contributions of this network to social and emotional aspects of intellectual function remain to be well characterized. Here we investigated the neural basis of emotional intelligence in 152 patients with focal brain injuries using voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping. Latent variable modeling was applied to obtain measures of emotional intelligence, general intelligence and personality from the Mayer, Salovey, Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT), the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale and the Neuroticism-Extroversion-Openness Inventory, respectively. Regression analyses revealed that latent scores for measures of general intelligence and personality reliably predicted latent scores for emotional intelligence. Lesion mapping results further indicated that these convergent processes depend on a shared network of frontal, temporal and parietal brain regions. The results support an integrative framework for understanding the architecture of executive, social and emotional processes and make specific recommendations for the interpretation and application of the MSCEIT to the study of emotional intelligence in health and disease.

Distributed neural system for emotional intelligence revealed by lesion mapping

PubMed Central

Colom, Roberto; Grafman, Jordan

2014-01-01

Cognitive neuroscience has made considerable progress in understanding the neural architecture of human intelligence, identifying a broadly distributed network of frontal and parietal regions that support goal-directed, intelligent behavior. However, the contributions of this network to social and emotional aspects of intellectual function remain to be well characterized. Here we investigated the neural basis of emotional intelligence in 152 patients with focal brain injuries using voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping. Latent variable modeling was applied to obtain measures of emotional intelligence, general intelligence and personality from the Mayer, Salovey, Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT), the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale and the Neuroticism-Extroversion-Openness Inventory, respectively. Regression analyses revealed that latent scores for measures of general intelligence and personality reliably predicted latent scores for emotional intelligence. Lesion mapping results further indicated that these convergent processes depend on a shared network of frontal, temporal and parietal brain regions. The results support an integrative framework for understanding the architecture of executive, social and emotional processes and make specific recommendations for the interpretation and application of the MSCEIT to the study of emotional intelligence in health and disease. PMID:23171618

Working memory for social cues recruits orbitofrontal cortex and amygdala: a functional magnetic resonance imaging study of delayed matching to sample for emotional expressions.

PubMed

LoPresti, Matthew L; Schon, Karin; Tricarico, Marisa D; Swisher, Jascha D; Celone, Kim A; Stern, Chantal E

2008-04-02

During everyday interactions, we continuously monitor and maintain information about different individuals and their changing emotions in memory. Yet to date, working memory (WM) studies have primarily focused on mechanisms for maintaining face identity, but not emotional expression, and studies investigating the neural basis of emotion have focused on transient activity, not delay related activity. The goal of this functional magnetic resonance imaging study was to investigate WM for two critical social cues: identity and emotion. Subjects performed a delayed match-to-sample task that required them to match either the emotional expression or the identity of a face after a 10 s delay. Neuroanatomically, our predictions focused on the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and the amygdala, as these regions have previously been implicated in emotional processing and long-term memory, and studies have demonstrated sustained OFC and medial temporal lobe activity during visual WM. Consistent with previous studies, transient activity during the sample period representing emotion and identity was found in the superior temporal sulcus and inferior occipital cortex, respectively. Sustained delay-period activity was evident in OFC, amygdala, and hippocampus, for both emotion and identity trials. These results suggest that, although initial processing of emotion and identity is accomplished in anatomically segregated temporal and occipital regions, sustained delay related memory for these two critical features is held by the OFC, amygdala and hippocampus. These regions share rich connections, and have been shown previously to be necessary for binding features together in long-term memory. Our results suggest a role for these regions in active maintenance as well.

Adaptation to Vocal Expressions Reveals Multistep Perception of Auditory Emotion

PubMed Central

Maurage, Pierre; Rouger, Julien; Latinus, Marianne; Belin, Pascal

2014-01-01

The human voice carries speech as well as important nonlinguistic signals that influence our social interactions. Among these cues that impact our behavior and communication with other people is the perceived emotional state of the speaker. A theoretical framework for the neural processing stages of emotional prosody has suggested that auditory emotion is perceived in multiple steps (Schirmer and Kotz, 2006) involving low-level auditory analysis and integration of the acoustic information followed by higher-level cognition. Empirical evidence for this multistep processing chain, however, is still sparse. We examined this question using functional magnetic resonance imaging and a continuous carry-over design (Aguirre, 2007) to measure brain activity while volunteers listened to non-speech-affective vocalizations morphed on a continuum between anger and fear. Analyses dissociated neuronal adaptation effects induced by similarity in perceived emotional content between consecutive stimuli from those induced by their acoustic similarity. We found that bilateral voice-sensitive auditory regions as well as right amygdala coded the physical difference between consecutive stimuli. In contrast, activity in bilateral anterior insulae, medial superior frontal cortex, precuneus, and subcortical regions such as bilateral hippocampi depended predominantly on the perceptual difference between morphs. Our results suggest that the processing of vocal affect recognition is a multistep process involving largely distinct neural networks. Amygdala and auditory areas predominantly code emotion-related acoustic information while more anterior insular and prefrontal regions respond to the abstract, cognitive representation of vocal affect. PMID:24920615

Adaptation to vocal expressions reveals multistep perception of auditory emotion.

PubMed

Bestelmeyer, Patricia E G; Maurage, Pierre; Rouger, Julien; Latinus, Marianne; Belin, Pascal

2014-06-11

The human voice carries speech as well as important nonlinguistic signals that influence our social interactions. Among these cues that impact our behavior and communication with other people is the perceived emotional state of the speaker. A theoretical framework for the neural processing stages of emotional prosody has suggested that auditory emotion is perceived in multiple steps (Schirmer and Kotz, 2006) involving low-level auditory analysis and integration of the acoustic information followed by higher-level cognition. Empirical evidence for this multistep processing chain, however, is still sparse. We examined this question using functional magnetic resonance imaging and a continuous carry-over design (Aguirre, 2007) to measure brain activity while volunteers listened to non-speech-affective vocalizations morphed on a continuum between anger and fear. Analyses dissociated neuronal adaptation effects induced by similarity in perceived emotional content between consecutive stimuli from those induced by their acoustic similarity. We found that bilateral voice-sensitive auditory regions as well as right amygdala coded the physical difference between consecutive stimuli. In contrast, activity in bilateral anterior insulae, medial superior frontal cortex, precuneus, and subcortical regions such as bilateral hippocampi depended predominantly on the perceptual difference between morphs. Our results suggest that the processing of vocal affect recognition is a multistep process involving largely distinct neural networks. Amygdala and auditory areas predominantly code emotion-related acoustic information while more anterior insular and prefrontal regions respond to the abstract, cognitive representation of vocal affect. Copyright © 2014 Bestelmeyer et al.

Reduced emotion processing efficiency in healthy males relative to females

PubMed Central

Rapport, Lisa J.; Briceno, Emily M.; Haase, Brennan D.; Vederman, Aaron C.; Bieliauskas, Linas A.; Welsh, Robert C.; Starkman, Monica N.; McInnis, Melvin G.; Zubieta, Jon-Kar; Langenecker, Scott A.

2014-01-01

This study examined sex differences in categorization of facial emotions and activation of brain regions supportive of those classifications. In Experiment 1, performance on the Facial Emotion Perception Test (FEPT) was examined among 75 healthy females and 63 healthy males. Females were more accurate in the categorization of fearful expressions relative to males. In Experiment 2, 3T functional magnetic resonance imaging data were acquired for a separate sample of 21 healthy females and 17 healthy males while performing the FEPT. Activation to neutral facial expressions was subtracted from activation to sad, angry, fearful and happy facial expressions. Although females and males demonstrated activation in some overlapping regions for all emotions, many regions were exclusive to females or males. For anger, sad and happy, males displayed a larger extent of activation than did females, and greater height of activation was detected in diffuse cortical and subcortical regions. For fear, males displayed greater activation than females only in right postcentral gyri. With one exception in females, performance was not associated with activation. Results suggest that females and males process emotions using different neural pathways, and these differences cannot be explained by performance variations. PMID:23196633

Down-Regulation of Negative Emotional Processing by Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation: Effects of Personality Characteristics

PubMed Central

Peña-Gómez, Cleofé; Vidal-Piñeiro, Dídac; Clemente, Immaculada C.; Pascual-Leone, Álvaro; Bartrés-Faz, David

2011-01-01

Evidence from neuroimaging and electrophysiological studies indicates that the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) is a core region in emotional processing, particularly during down-regulation of negative emotional conditions. However, emotional regulation is a process subject to major inter-individual differences, some of which may be explained by personality traits. In the present study we used transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over the left DLPFC to investigate whether transiently increasing the activity of this region resulted in changes in the ratings of positive, neutral and negative emotional pictures. Results revealed that anodal, but not cathodal, tDCS reduced the perceived degree of emotional valence for negative stimuli, possibly due to an enhancement of cognitive control of emotional expression. We also aimed to determine whether personality traits (extraversion and neuroticism) might condition the impact of tDCS. We found that individuals with higher scores on the introversion personality dimension were more permeable than extraverts to the modulatory effects of the stimulation. The present study underlines the role of the left DLPFC in emotional regulation, and stresses the importance of considering individual personality characteristics as a relevant variable, although replication is needed given the limited sample size of our study. PMID:21829522

Intact brain processing of musical emotions in autism spectrum disorder, but more cognitive load and arousal in happy vs. sad music.

PubMed

Gebauer, Line; Skewes, Joshua; Westphael, Gitte; Heaton, Pamela; Vuust, Peter

2014-01-01

Music is a potent source for eliciting emotions, but not everybody experience emotions in the same way. Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show difficulties with social and emotional cognition. Impairments in emotion recognition are widely studied in ASD, and have been associated with atypical brain activation in response to emotional expressions in faces and speech. Whether these impairments and atypical brain responses generalize to other domains, such as emotional processing of music, is less clear. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we investigated neural correlates of emotion recognition in music in high-functioning adults with ASD and neurotypical adults. Both groups engaged similar neural networks during processing of emotional music, and individuals with ASD rated emotional music comparable to the group of neurotypical individuals. However, in the ASD group, increased activity in response to happy compared to sad music was observed in dorsolateral prefrontal regions and in the rolandic operculum/insula, and we propose that this reflects increased cognitive processing and physiological arousal in response to emotional musical stimuli in this group.

Disturbance in the neural circuitry underlying positive emotional processing in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). An fMRI study.

PubMed

Jatzko, Alexander; Schmitt, Andrea; Demirakca, Traute; Weimer, Erik; Braus, Dieter F

2006-03-01

This study was designed to investigate the circuitry underlying movie-induced positive emotional processing in subjects with chronic PTSD. Ten male subjects with chronic PTSD and ten matched controls were studied. In an fMRI-paradigm a sequence of a wellknown Walt Disney cartoon with positive emotional valence was shown. PTSD subjects showed an increased activation in the right posterior temporal, precentral and superior frontal cortex. Controls recruited more emotion-related regions bilateral in the temporal pole and areas of the left fusiform and parahippocampal gyrus. This pilot study is the first to reveal alterations in the processing of positive emotions in PTSD possibly reflecting a neuronal correlate of the symptom of emotional numbness in PTSD.

Common and distinct neural correlates of facial emotion processing in social anxiety disorder and Williams syndrome: A systematic review and voxel-based meta-analysis of functional resonance imaging studies.

PubMed

Binelli, C; Subirà, S; Batalla, A; Muñiz, A; Sugranyés, G; Crippa, J A; Farré, M; Pérez-Jurado, L; Martín-Santos, R

2014-11-01

Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) and Williams-Beuren Syndrome (WS) are two conditions which seem to be at opposite ends in the continuum of social fear but show compromised abilities in some overlapping areas, including some social interactions, gaze contact and processing of facial emotional cues. The increase in the number of neuroimaging studies has greatly expanded our knowledge of the neural bases of facial emotion processing in both conditions. However, to date, SAD and WS have not been compared. We conducted a systematic review of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies comparing SAD and WS cases to healthy control participants (HC) using facial emotion processing paradigms. Two researchers conducted comprehensive PubMed/Medline searches to identify all fMRI studies of facial emotion processing in SAD and WS. The following search key-words were used: "emotion processing"; "facial emotion"; "social anxiety"; "social phobia"; "Williams syndrome"; "neuroimaging"; "functional magnetic resonance"; "fMRI" and their combinations, as well as terms specifying individual facial emotions. We extracted spatial coordinates from each study and conducted two separate voxel-wise activation likelihood estimation meta-analyses, one for SAD and one for WS. Twenty-two studies met the inclusion criteria: 17 studies of SAD and five of WS. We found evidence for both common and distinct patterns of neural activation. Limbic engagement was common to SAD and WS during facial emotion processing, although we observed opposite patterns of activation for each disorder. Compared to HC, SAD cases showed hyperactivation of the amygdala, the parahippocampal gyrus and the globus pallidus. Compared to controls, participants with WS showed hypoactivation of these regions. Differential activation in a number of regions specific to either condition was also identified: SAD cases exhibited greater activation of the insula, putamen, the superior temporal gyrus, medial frontal regions and the cuneus, while WS subjects showed decreased activation in the inferior region of the parietal lobule. The identification of limbic structures as a shared correlate and the patterns of activation observed for each condition may reflect the aberrant patterns of facial emotion processing that the two conditions share, and may contribute to explaining part of the underlying neural substrate of exaggerated/diminished fear responses to social cues that characterize SAD and WS respectively. We believe that insights from WS and the inclusion of this syndrome as a control group in future experimental studies may improve our understanding of the neural correlates of social fear in general, and of SAD in particular. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Neural network of cognitive emotion regulation — An ALE meta-analysis and MACM analysis

PubMed Central

Kohn, N.; Eickhoff, S.B.; Scheller, M.; Laird, A.R.; Fox, P.T.; Habel, U.

2016-01-01

Cognitive regulation of emotions is a fundamental prerequisite for intact social functioning which impacts on both well being and psychopathology. The neural underpinnings of this process have been studied intensively in recent years, without, however, a general consensus. We here quantitatively summarize the published literature on cognitive emotion regulation using activation likelihood estimation in fMRI and PET (23 studies/479 subjects). In addition, we assessed the particular functional contribution of identified regions and their interactions using quantitative functional inference and meta-analytic connectivity modeling, respectively. In doing so, we developed a model for the core brain network involved in emotion regulation of emotional reactivity. According to this, the superior temporal gyrus, angular gyrus and (pre) supplementary motor area should be involved in execution of regulation initiated by frontal areas. The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex may be related to regulation of cognitive processes such as attention, while the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex may not necessarily reflect the regulatory process per se, but signals salience and therefore the need to regulate. We also identified a cluster in the anterior middle cingulate cortex as a region, which is anatomically and functionally in an ideal position to influence behavior and subcortical structures related to affect generation. Hence this area may play a central, integrative role in emotion regulation. By focusing on regions commonly active across multiple studies, this proposed model should provide important a priori information for the assessment of dysregulated emotion regulation in psychiatric disorders. PMID:24220041

Oxytocin Reduces Face Processing Time but Leaves Recognition Accuracy and Eye-Gaze Unaffected.

PubMed

Hubble, Kelly; Daughters, Katie; Manstead, Antony S R; Rees, Aled; Thapar, Anita; van Goozen, Stephanie H M

2017-01-01

Previous studies have found that oxytocin (OXT) can improve the recognition of emotional facial expressions; it has been proposed that this effect is mediated by an increase in attention to the eye-region of faces. Nevertheless, evidence in support of this claim is inconsistent, and few studies have directly tested the effect of oxytocin on emotion recognition via altered eye-gaze Methods: In a double-blind, within-subjects, randomized control experiment, 40 healthy male participants received 24 IU intranasal OXT and placebo in two identical experimental sessions separated by a 2-week interval. Visual attention to the eye-region was assessed on both occasions while participants completed a static facial emotion recognition task using medium intensity facial expressions. Although OXT had no effect on emotion recognition accuracy, recognition performance was improved because face processing was faster across emotions under the influence of OXT. This effect was marginally significant (p<.06). Consistent with a previous study using dynamic stimuli, OXT had no effect on eye-gaze patterns when viewing static emotional faces and this was not related to recognition accuracy or face processing time. These findings suggest that OXT-induced enhanced facial emotion recognition is not necessarily mediated by an increase in attention to the eye-region of faces, as previously assumed. We discuss several methodological issues which may explain discrepant findings and suggest the effect of OXT on visual attention may differ depending on task requirements. (JINS, 2017, 23, 23-33).

EEG and EMG responses to emotion-evoking stimuli processed without conscious awareness.

PubMed

Wexler, B E; Warrenburg, S; Schwartz, G E; Janer, L D

1992-12-01

Dichotic stimulus pairs were constructed with one word that was emotionally neutral and another that evoked either negative or positive feelings. Temporal and spectral overlap between the members of each pair was so great that the two words fused into a single auditory percept. Subjects were consciously aware of hearing only one word from most pairs; sometimes the emotion-evoking word was heard consciously, other times the neutral word was heard consciously. Subjects were instructed to let their thoughts wander in response to the word they heard, during which time EEG alpha activity over left and right frontal regions, and muscle activity (EMG) in the corrugator ("frowning") and zygomatic ("smiling") regions were recorded. Both EEG and EMG provided evidence of emotion-specific responses to stimuli that were processed without conscious awareness. Moreover both suggested relatively greater right hemisphere activity with unconscious rather than conscious processing.

Developmental Continuity and Stability of Emotional Availability in the Family: Two Ages and Two Genders in Child-Mother Dyads from Two Regions in Three Countries

PubMed Central

Bornstein, Marc H.; Suwalsky, Joan T. D.; Putnick, Diane L.; Gini, Motti; Venuti, Paola; de Falco, Simona; Heslington, Marianne; de Galperín, Celia Zingman

2010-01-01

This study employs an intra-national and cross-national, prospective and longitudinal design to examine age, gender, region, and country variation in group mean-level continuity and individual-differences stability of emotional availability in child-mother dyads. Altogether, 220 Argentine, Italian, and U.S. American metropolitan and rural residence mothers and their daughters and sons were observed at home when children were 5 and 20 months of age. Similar patterns of continuity and discontinuity of emotional availability from 5 to 20 months were observed across regions and countries, but not between genders. Stability of emotional availability from 5 to 20 months was moderate and similar across genders, regions, and countries. Universal and gender-specific developmental processes in child-mother emotional availability as revealed in intra- and cross-national study are discussed. PMID:20824179

Unpacking the neural associations of emotion and judgment in emotion-congruent judgment

PubMed Central

Beer, Jennifer S.

2012-01-01

The current study takes a new approach to understand the neural systems that support emotion-congruent judgment. The bulk of previous neural research has inferred emotional influences on judgment from disadvantageous judgments or non-random individual differences. The current study manipulated the influence of emotional information on judgments of stimuli that were equivocally composed of positive and negative attributes. Emotion-congruent processing was operationalized in two ways: neural activation significantly associated with primes that lead to emotionally congruent judgments and neural activation significantly associated with judgments that were preceded by emotionally congruent primes. Distinct regions of medial orbitofrontal cortex were associated with these patterns of emotion-congruent processing. Judgments that were incongruent with preceding primes were associated with dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, ventrolateral prefrontal cortex and lateral orbitofrontal cortex activity. The current study demonstrates a new approach to investigate the neural systems associated with emotion-congruent judgment. The findings suggest that medial OFC may support attentional processes that underlie emotion-congruent judgment. PMID:21511825

Neuroimaging social emotional processing in women: fMRI study of script-driven imagery

PubMed Central

Dozois, David J. A.; Neufeld, Richard W. J.; Densmore, Maria; Stevens, Todd K.; Lanius, Ruth A.

2011-01-01

Emotion theory emphasizes the distinction between social vs non-social emotional-processing (E-P) although few functional neuroimaging studies have examined whether the neural systems that mediate social vs non-social E-P are similar or distinct. The present fMRI study of script-driven imagery in 20 women demonstrates that social E-P, independent of valence, more strongly recruits brain regions involved in social- and self-referential processing, specifically the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate/precuneus, bilateral temporal poles, bilateral temporoparietal junction and right amygdala. Functional response within brain regions involved in E-P was also significantly more pronounced during negatively relative to positively valenced E-P. Finally, the effect for social E-P was increased for positive relative to negative stimuli in many of these same regions. Future research directions for social and affective neuroscience are discussed. PMID:20525743

Cerebral Correlates of Emotional and Action Appraisals During Visual Processing of Emotional Scenes Depending on Spatial Frequency: A Pilot Study

PubMed Central

Campagne, Aurélie; Fradcourt, Benoit; Pichat, Cédric; Baciu, Monica; Kauffmann, Louise; Peyrin, Carole

2016-01-01

Visual processing of emotional stimuli critically depends on the type of cognitive appraisal involved. The present fMRI pilot study aimed to investigate the cerebral correlates involved in the visual processing of emotional scenes in two tasks, one emotional, based on the appraisal of personal emotional experience, and the other motivational, based on the appraisal of the tendency to action. Given that the use of spatial frequency information is relatively flexible during the visual processing of emotional stimuli depending on the task’s demands, we also explored the effect of the type of spatial frequency in visual stimuli in each task by using emotional scenes filtered in low spatial frequency (LSF) and high spatial frequencies (HSF). Activation was observed in the visual areas of the fusiform gyrus for all emotional scenes in both tasks, and in the amygdala for unpleasant scenes only. The motivational task induced additional activation in frontal motor-related areas (e.g. premotor cortex, SMA) and parietal regions (e.g. superior and inferior parietal lobules). Parietal regions were recruited particularly during the motivational appraisal of approach in response to pleasant scenes. These frontal and parietal activations, respectively, suggest that motor and navigation processes play a specific role in the identification of the tendency to action in the motivational task. Furthermore, activity observed in the motivational task, in response to both pleasant and unpleasant scenes, was significantly greater for HSF than for LSF scenes, suggesting that the tendency to action is driven mainly by the detailed information contained in scenes. Results for the emotional task suggest that spatial frequencies play only a small role in the evaluation of unpleasant and pleasant emotions. Our preliminary study revealed a partial distinction between visual processing of emotional scenes during identification of the tendency to action, and during identification of personal emotional experiences. It also illustrates flexible use of the spatial frequencies contained in scenes depending on their emotional valence and on task demands. PMID:26757433

Sex differences in functional activation patterns revealed by increased emotion processing demands.

PubMed

Hall, Geoffrey B C; Witelson, Sandra F; Szechtman, Henry; Nahmias, Claude

2004-02-09

Two [O(15)] PET studies assessed sex differences regional brain activation in the recognition of emotional stimuli. Study I revealed that the recognition of emotion in visual faces resulted in bilateral frontal activation in women, and unilateral right-sided activation in men. In study II, the complexity of the emotional face task was increased through tje addition of associated auditory emotional stimuli. Men again showed unilateral frontal activation, in this case to the left; whereas women did not show bilateral frontal activation, but showed greater limbic activity. These results suggest that when processing broader cross-modal emotional stimuli, men engage more in associative cognitive strategies while women draw more on primary emotional references.

Distraction decreases prefrontal oxygenation: A NIRS study.

PubMed

Ozawa, Sachiyo; Hiraki, Kazuo

2017-04-01

When near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) is used to measure emotion-related cerebral blood flow (CBF) changes in the prefrontal cortex regions, the functional distinction of CBF changes is often difficult because NIRS is unable to measure neural activity in deeper brain regions that play major roles in emotional processing. The CBF changes could represent cognitive control of emotion and emotional responses to emotional materials. Supposing that emotion-related CBF changes in the prefrontal cortex regions during distraction are emotional responses, we examined whether oxygenated hemoglobin (oxyHb) decreases. Attention-demanding tasks cause blood flow decreases, and we thus compared the effects of visually paced tapping with different tempos, on distraction. The results showed that the oxyHb level induced by emotional stimulation decreased with fast-tempo tapping significantly more than slow-tempo tapping in ventral medial prefrontal cortex regions. Moreover, a Global-Local task following tapping showed significantly greater local-minus-global response time (RT) difference scores in the fast- and mid-tempo condition compared with those in the slow-tempo, suggesting an increased attentional focus, and decreased negative emotion. The overall findings indicate that oxyHb changes in a relatively long distraction task, as measured by NIRS, are associated with emotional responses, and oxyHb can be decreased by successfully performing attention-demanding distraction tasks. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The impact of emotional involvement on online service buying decisions: an event-related potentials perspective

PubMed Central

Wang, Jing; Han, Weiwei

2015-01-01

When examining a buying process, changes in human brain signals and their event-related potential (ERP) components can be considered a reflection of the consumers’ emotions. In this experiment, participants were shown 12 products and related services that were available for purchase. After recording ERP components, we used a questionnaire to measure the individuals’ emotional involvement toward the services (i.e. the same services shown in the stimuli) of the 12 products to measure the emotional valence of the services. The emotional ERP components and the late positive potential (LPP) were elicited under the service conditions and distributed over the left frontal regions. We determined that the services may evoke an LPP and that services with a high emotional value may evoke a larger LPP, which suggests that positive emotion may be measured using the LPP amplitude in the left frontal regions. This result helps elucidate whether positive emotions are stimulated during the product-service system decision-making process and helps understand the emotional valences of different services. Our analysis of the emotional motivation of the consumer suggests that the LPP may be useful as an emotional indicator for measuring consumers’ evaluation of services that provides a neural view of product-service system buying decisions. PMID:26457370

The impact of emotional involvement on online service buying decisions: an event-related potentials perspective.

PubMed

Zhao, Meina; Wang, Jing; Han, Weiwei

2015-12-02

When examining a buying process, changes in human brain signals and their event-related potential (ERP) components can be considered a reflection of the consumers' emotions. In this experiment, participants were shown 12 products and related services that were available for purchase. After recording ERP components, we used a questionnaire to measure the individuals' emotional involvement toward the services (i.e. the same services shown in the stimuli) of the 12 products to measure the emotional valence of the services. The emotional ERP components and the late positive potential (LPP) were elicited under the service conditions and distributed over the left frontal regions. We determined that the services may evoke an LPP and that services with a high emotional value may evoke a larger LPP, which suggests that positive emotion may be measured using the LPP amplitude in the left frontal regions. This result helps elucidate whether positive emotions are stimulated during the product-service system decision-making process and helps understand the emotional valences of different services. Our analysis of the emotional motivation of the consumer suggests that the LPP may be useful as an emotional indicator for measuring consumers' evaluation of services that provides a neural view of product-service system buying decisions.

Factor analysis of regional brain activation in bipolar and healthy individuals reveals a consistent modular structure.

PubMed

Fleck, David E; Welge, Jeffrey A; Eliassen, James C; Adler, Caleb M; DelBello, Melissa P; Strakowski, Stephen M

2018-07-01

The neurophysiological substrates of cognition and emotion, as seen with fMRI, are generally explained using modular structures. The present study was designed to probe the modular structure of cognitive-emotional processing in bipolar and healthy individuals using factor analysis and compare the results with current conceptions of the neurophysiology of bipolar disorder. Exploratory factor analysis was used to assess patterns of covariation among brain regions-of-interest activated during the Continuous Performance Task with Emotional and Neutral Distractors in healthy and bipolar individuals without a priori constraints on the number or composition of latent factors. Results indicated a common cognitive-emotional network consisting of prefrontal, medial temporal, limbic, parietal, anterior cingulate and posterior cingulate modules. However, reduced brain activation to emotional stimuli in the frontal, medial temporal and limbic modules was apparent in the bipolar relative to the healthy group, potentially accounting for emotional dysregulation in bipolar disorder. This study is limited by a relatively small sample size recruited at a single site. The results have yet to be validated on a larger independent sample. Although the modular structure of cognitive-emotional processing is similar in bipolar and healthy individuals, activation in response to emotional/neutral cues varies. These findings are not only consistent with recent conceptions of mood regulation in bipolar disorder, but also suggest that regional activation can be considered within tighter modular structures without compromising data interpretation. This demonstration may serve as a template for data reduction in future region-of-interest analyses to increase statistical power. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The Impact of Emotional States on Cognitive Control Circuitry and Function.

PubMed

Cohen, Alexandra O; Dellarco, Danielle V; Breiner, Kaitlyn; Helion, Chelsea; Heller, Aaron S; Rahdar, Ahrareh; Pedersen, Gloria; Chein, Jason; Dyke, Jonathan P; Galvan, Adriana; Casey, B J

2016-03-01

Typically in the laboratory, cognitive and emotional processes are studied separately or as a stream of fleeting emotional stimuli embedded within a cognitive task. Yet in life, thoughts and actions often occur in more lasting emotional states of arousal. The current study examines the impact of emotions on actions using a novel behavioral paradigm and functional neuroimaging to assess cognitive control under sustained states of threat (anticipation of an aversive noise) and excitement (anticipation of winning money). Thirty-eight healthy adult participants were scanned while performing an emotional go/no-go task with positive (happy faces), negative (fearful faces), and neutral (calm faces) emotional cues, under threat or excitement. Cognitive control performance was enhanced during the excited state relative to a nonarousing control condition. This enhanced performance was paralleled by heightened activity of frontoparietal and frontostriatal circuitry. In contrast, under persistent threat, cognitive control was diminished when the valence of the emotional cue conflicted with the emotional state. Successful task performance in this conflicting emotional condition was associated with increased activity in the posterior cingulate cortex, a default mode network region implicated in complex processes such as processing emotions in the context of self and monitoring performance. This region showed positive coupling with frontoparietal circuitry implicated in cognitive control, providing support for a role of the posterior cingulate cortex in mobilizing cognitive resources to improve performance. These findings suggest that emotional states of arousal differentially modulate cognitive control and point to the potential utility of this paradigm for understanding effects of situational and pathological states of arousal on behavior.

Face processing regions are sensitive to distinct aspects of temporal sequence in facial dynamics.

PubMed

Reinl, Maren; Bartels, Andreas

2014-11-15

Facial movement conveys important information for social interactions, yet its neural processing is poorly understood. Computational models propose that shape- and temporal sequence sensitive mechanisms interact in processing dynamic faces. While face processing regions are known to respond to facial movement, their sensitivity to particular temporal sequences has barely been studied. Here we used fMRI to examine the sensitivity of human face-processing regions to two aspects of directionality in facial movement trajectories. We presented genuine movie recordings of increasing and decreasing fear expressions, each of which were played in natural or reversed frame order. This two-by-two factorial design matched low-level visual properties, static content and motion energy within each factor, emotion-direction (increasing or decreasing emotion) and timeline (natural versus artificial). The results showed sensitivity for emotion-direction in FFA, which was timeline-dependent as it only occurred within the natural frame order, and sensitivity to timeline in the STS, which was emotion-direction-dependent as it only occurred for decreased fear. The occipital face area (OFA) was sensitive to the factor timeline. These findings reveal interacting temporal sequence sensitive mechanisms that are responsive to both ecological meaning and to prototypical unfolding of facial dynamics. These mechanisms are temporally directional, provide socially relevant information regarding emotional state or naturalness of behavior, and agree with predictions from modeling and predictive coding theory. Copyright © 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

General and emotion-specific alterations to cognitive control in women with a history of childhood abuse.

PubMed

Mackiewicz Seghete, Kristen L; Kaiser, Roselinde H; DePrince, Anne P; Banich, Marie T

2017-01-01

Although limited, the literature suggests alterations in activation of cognitive control regions in adults and adolescents with a history of childhood abuse. The current study examined whether such alterations are increased in the face of emotionally-distracting as compared to emotionally neutral information, and whether such alterations occur in brain regions that exert cognitive control in a more top-down sustained manner or a more bottom-up transient manner. Participants were young adult women (ages 23-30): one group with a history of childhood physical or sexual abuse (N = 15) and one with no trauma exposure (N = 17), as assessed through the Trauma History Questionnaire and a two-stage interview adapted from the National Crime Victims Survey. Participants underwent fMRI scanning while completing hybrid block/event-related versions of a classic color-word and an emotional Stroop paradigm (threat and positive words). This paradigm allowed us to examine both sustained (activation persisting across blocks) and transient (event-specific activation) aspects of cognitive control. Women with a history of childhood abuse demonstrated decreased recruitment of frontal-parietal regions involved in cognitive control and enhanced recruitment of a ventral attention surveillance network during blocks of both versions of the Stroop task. Additionally, they had less suppression of brain regions involved in self-referential processes for threat blocks, but greater suppression of these regions for positive blocks. Severity of avoidance symptoms was associated with sustained activation in lateral prefrontal regions, whereas hyperarousal/re-experiencing symptoms were associated with sustained activity in temporal regions. No differential effects were observed for transient control. Results suggest exposure to childhood abuse is associated with blunted recruitment of brain regions supporting task-set maintenance but hypervigilance for task-irrelevant information, regardless of whether distractors are emotionally neutral or emotional. Exposure to childhood abuse is also associated with less suppression of default mode brain regions associated with self-referential processing in the face of irrelevant threat information, but heightened ability to suppress similar processing for irrelevant positive information.

Fear across the senses: brain responses to music, vocalizations and facial expressions

PubMed Central

Angulo-Perkins, Arafat; Peretz, Isabelle; Concha, Luis; Armony, Jorge L.

2015-01-01

Intrinsic emotional expressions such as those communicated by faces and vocalizations have been shown to engage specific brain regions, such as the amygdala. Although music constitutes another powerful means to express emotions, the neural substrates involved in its processing remain poorly understood. In particular, it is unknown whether brain regions typically associated with processing ‘biologically relevant’ emotional expressions are also recruited by emotional music. To address this question, we conducted an event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging study in 47 healthy volunteers in which we directly compared responses to basic emotions (fear, sadness and happiness, as well as neutral) expressed through faces, non-linguistic vocalizations and short novel musical excerpts. Our results confirmed the importance of fear in emotional communication, as revealed by significant blood oxygen level-dependent signal increased in a cluster within the posterior amygdala and anterior hippocampus, as well as in the posterior insula across all three domains. Moreover, subject-specific amygdala responses to fearful music and vocalizations were correlated, consistent with the proposal that the brain circuitry involved in the processing of musical emotions might be shared with the one that have evolved for vocalizations. Overall, our results show that processing of fear expressed through music, engages some of the same brain areas known to be crucial for detecting and evaluating threat-related information. PMID:24795437

Fear across the senses: brain responses to music, vocalizations and facial expressions.

PubMed

Aubé, William; Angulo-Perkins, Arafat; Peretz, Isabelle; Concha, Luis; Armony, Jorge L

2015-03-01

Intrinsic emotional expressions such as those communicated by faces and vocalizations have been shown to engage specific brain regions, such as the amygdala. Although music constitutes another powerful means to express emotions, the neural substrates involved in its processing remain poorly understood. In particular, it is unknown whether brain regions typically associated with processing 'biologically relevant' emotional expressions are also recruited by emotional music. To address this question, we conducted an event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging study in 47 healthy volunteers in which we directly compared responses to basic emotions (fear, sadness and happiness, as well as neutral) expressed through faces, non-linguistic vocalizations and short novel musical excerpts. Our results confirmed the importance of fear in emotional communication, as revealed by significant blood oxygen level-dependent signal increased in a cluster within the posterior amygdala and anterior hippocampus, as well as in the posterior insula across all three domains. Moreover, subject-specific amygdala responses to fearful music and vocalizations were correlated, consistent with the proposal that the brain circuitry involved in the processing of musical emotions might be shared with the one that have evolved for vocalizations. Overall, our results show that processing of fear expressed through music, engages some of the same brain areas known to be crucial for detecting and evaluating threat-related information. © The Author (2014). Published by Oxford University Press. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.

Emotion triggers executive attention: anterior cingulate cortex and amygdala responses to emotional words in a conflict task.

PubMed

Kanske, Philipp; Kotz, Sonja A

2011-02-01

Coherent behavior depends on attentional control that detects and resolves conflict between opposing actions. The current functional magnetic resonance imaging study tested the hypothesis that emotion triggers attentional control to speed up conflict processing in particularly salient situations. Therefore, we presented emotionally negative and neutral words in a version of the flanker task. In response to conflict, we found activation of the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and of the amygdala for emotional stimuli. When emotion and conflict coincided, a region in the ventral ACC was activated, which resulted in faster conflict processing in reaction times. Emotion also increased functional connectivity between the ventral ACC and activation of the dorsal ACC and the amygdala in conflict trials. These data suggest that the ventral ACC integrates emotion and conflict and prioritizes the processing of conflict in emotional trials. This adaptive mechanism ensures rapid detection and resolution of conflict in potentially threatening situations signaled by emotional stimuli. Copyright © 2010 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

Development of Emotional Face Processing in Premature and Full-Term Infants.

PubMed

Carbajal-Valenzuela, Cintli Carolina; Santiago-Rodríguez, Efraín; Quirarte, Gina L; Harmony, Thalía

2017-03-01

The rate of premature births has increased in the past 2 decades. Ten percent of premature birth survivors develop motor impairment, but almost half exhibit later sensorial, cognitive, and emotional disabilities attributed to white matter injury and decreased volume of neuronal structures. The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that premature and full-term infants differ in their development of emotional face processing. A comparative longitudinal study was conducted in premature and full-term infants at 4 and 8 months of age. The absolute power of the electroencephalogram was analyzed in both groups during 5 conditions of an emotional face processing task: positive, negative, neutral faces, non-face, and rest. Differences between the conditions of the task at 4 months were limited to rest versus non-rest comparisons in both groups. Eight-month-old term infants had increases ( P ≤ .05) in absolute power in the left occipital region at the frequency of 10.1 Hz and in the right occipital region at 3.5, 12.8, and 16.0 Hz when shown a positive face in comparison with a neutral face. They also showed increases in absolute power in the left occipital region at 1.9 Hz and in the right occipital region at 2.3 and 3.5 Hz with positive compared to non-face stimuli. In contrast, positive, negative, and neutral faces elicited the same responses in premature infants. In conclusion, our study provides electrophysiological evidence that emotional face processing develops differently in premature than in full-term infants, suggesting that premature birth alters mechanisms of brain development, such as the myelination process, and consequently affects complex cognitive functions.

Regulatory brain development: balancing emotion and cognition.

PubMed

Perlman, Susan B; Pelphrey, Kevin A

2010-01-01

Emotion regulation is a critical aspect of children's social development, yet few studies have examined the brain mechanisms involved in its development. Theoretical accounts have conceptualized emotion regulation as relying on prefrontal control of limbic regions, specifying the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) as a key brain region. Functional magnetic resonance imaging in 5- to 11-year-olds during emotion regulation and processing of emotionally expressive faces revealed that older children preferentially recruited the more dorsal “cognitive” areas of the ACC, while younger children preferentially engaged the more ventral “emotional” areas. Additionally, children with more fearful temperaments exhibited more ventral ACC activity while less fearful children exhibited increased activity in the dorsal ACC. These findings provide insight into a potential neurobiological mechanism underlying well-documented behavioral and cognitive changes from more emotional to more cognitive regulatory strategies with increasing age, as well as individual differences in this developmental process as a function of temperament. Our results hold important implications for our understanding of normal development and should also help to inform our understanding and management of emotional disorders. © 2010 Psychology Press

Attention to emotion modulates fMRI activity in human right superior temporal sulcus.

PubMed

Narumoto, J; Okada, T; Sadato, N; Fukui, K; Yonekura, Y

2001-10-01

A parallel neural network has been proposed for processing various types of information conveyed by faces including emotion. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we tested the effect of the explicit attention to the emotional expression of the faces on the neuronal activity of the face-responsive regions. Delayed match to sample procedure was adopted. Subjects were required to match the visually presented pictures with regard to the contour of the face pictures, facial identity, and emotional expressions by valence (happy and fearful expressions) and arousal (fearful and sad expressions). Contour matching of the non-face scrambled pictures was used as a control condition. The face-responsive regions that responded more to faces than to non-face stimuli were the bilateral lateral fusiform gyrus (LFG), the right superior temporal sulcus (STS), and the bilateral intraparietal sulcus (IPS). In these regions, general attention to the face enhanced the activities of the bilateral LFG, the right STS, and the left IPS compared with attention to the contour of the facial image. Selective attention to facial emotion specifically enhanced the activity of the right STS compared with attention to the face per se. The results suggest that the right STS region plays a special role in facial emotion recognition within distributed face-processing systems. This finding may support the notion that the STS is involved in social perception.

Task difficulty modulates brain activation in the emotional oddball task.

PubMed

Siciliano, Rachel E; Madden, David J; Tallman, Catherine W; Boylan, Maria A; Kirste, Imke; Monge, Zachary A; Packard, Lauren E; Potter, Guy G; Wang, Lihong

2017-06-01

Previous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have reported that task-irrelevant, emotionally salient events can disrupt target discrimination, particularly when attentional demands are low, while others demonstrate alterations in the distracting effects of emotion in behavior and neural activation in the context of attention-demanding tasks. We used fMRI, in conjunction with an emotional oddball task, at different levels of target discrimination difficulty, to investigate the effects of emotional distractors on the detection of subsequent targets. In addition, we distinguished different behavioral components of target detection representing decisional, nondecisional, and response criterion processes. Results indicated that increasing target discrimination difficulty led to increased time required for both the decisional and nondecisional components of the detection response, as well as to increased target-related neural activation in frontoparietal regions. The emotional distractors were associated with activation in ventral occipital and frontal regions and dorsal frontal regions, but this activation was attenuated with increased difficulty. Emotional distraction did not alter the behavioral measures of target detection, but did lead to increased target-related frontoparietal activation for targets following emotional images as compared to those following neutral images. This latter effect varied with target discrimination difficulty, with an increased influence of the emotional distractors on subsequent target-related frontoparietal activation in the more difficult discrimination condition. This influence of emotional distraction was in addition associated specifically with the decisional component of target detection. These findings indicate that emotion-cognition interactions, in the emotional oddball task, vary depending on the difficulty of the target discrimination and the associated limitations on processing resources. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

[Spatiotemporal pattern analysis of event-related potentials elicited by emotional Stroop task].

PubMed

Liu, Qi; Liu, Ling; He, Hui; Zhou, Shu

2007-05-01

To investigate the spatiotemporal pattern of event-related potentials (ERPs) induced by emotional Stroop task. The ERPs of 19 channels were recorded from 13 healthy subjects while performing emotional Stroop task by pressing the buttons representing the colors in which the words denoting different emotions were displayed. A repeated-measures factorial design was adopted with three levels (word valence: positive, neutral and negative). The result of ERP analysis was presented in the form of statistical parametric mapping (SPM) of F value. No significant difference was found in either reaction time or accuracy. The SPM of ERPs suggested significant emotional valence effects in the occipital region (200-220 ms), the left and central frontal regions (270-300 ms), and the bilateral temporal and parietal cortex (560-580 and 620-630 ms, respectively). Processing of task-irrelevant emotional valence information involves the dynamic operation of extensive brain regions. The ERPs are more sensitive than the behavioral indices in emotional evaluation.

On the analysis of EEG power, frequency and asymmetry in Parkinson's disease during emotion processing.

PubMed

Yuvaraj, Rajamanickam; Murugappan, Murugappan; Mohamed Ibrahim, Norlinah; Iqbal, Mohd; Sundaraj, Kenneth; Mohamad, Khairiyah; Palaniappan, Ramaswamy; Mesquita, Edgar; Satiyan, Marimuthu

2014-04-09

While Parkinson's disease (PD) has traditionally been described as a movement disorder, there is growing evidence of disruption in emotion information processing associated with the disease. The aim of this study was to investigate whether there are specific electroencephalographic (EEG) characteristics that discriminate PD patients and normal controls during emotion information processing. EEG recordings from 14 scalp sites were collected from 20 PD patients and 30 age-matched normal controls. Multimodal (audio-visual) stimuli were presented to evoke specific targeted emotional states such as happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise and disgust. Absolute and relative power, frequency and asymmetry measures derived from spectrally analyzed EEGs were subjected to repeated ANOVA measures for group comparisons as well as to discriminate function analysis to examine their utility as classification indices. In addition, subjective ratings were obtained for the used emotional stimuli. Behaviorally, PD patients showed no impairments in emotion recognition as measured by subjective ratings. Compared with normal controls, PD patients evidenced smaller overall relative delta, theta, alpha and beta power, and at bilateral anterior regions smaller absolute theta, alpha, and beta power and higher mean total spectrum frequency across different emotional states. Inter-hemispheric theta, alpha, and beta power asymmetry index differences were noted, with controls exhibiting greater right than left hemisphere activation. Whereas intra-hemispheric alpha power asymmetry reduction was exhibited in patients bilaterally at all regions. Discriminant analysis correctly classified 95.0% of the patients and controls during emotional stimuli. These distributed spectral powers in different frequency bands might provide meaningful information about emotional processing in PD patients.

Midbrain-Driven Emotion and Reward Processing in Alcoholism

PubMed Central

Müller-Oehring, E M; Jung, Y-C; Sullivan, E V; Hawkes, W C; Pfefferbaum, A; Schulte, T

2013-01-01

Alcohol dependence is associated with impaired control over emotionally motivated actions, possibly associated with abnormalities in the frontoparietal executive control network and midbrain nodes of the reward network associated with automatic attention. To identify differences in the neural response to alcohol-related word stimuli, 26 chronic alcoholics (ALC) and 26 healthy controls (CTL) performed an alcohol-emotion Stroop Match-to-Sample task during functional MR imaging. Stroop contrasts were modeled for color-word incongruency (eg, word RED printed in green) and for alcohol (eg, BEER), positive (eg, HAPPY) and negative (eg, MAD) emotional word content relative to congruent word conditions (eg, word RED printed in red). During color-Stroop processing, ALC and CTL showed similar left dorsolateral prefrontal activation, and CTL, but not ALC, deactivated posterior cingulate cortex/cuneus. An interaction revealed a dissociation between alcohol-word and color-word Stroop processing: ALC activated midbrain and parahippocampal regions more than CTL when processing alcohol-word relative to color-word conditions. In ALC, the midbrain region was also invoked by negative emotional Stroop words thereby showing significant overlap of this midbrain activation for alcohol-related and negative emotional processing. Enhanced midbrain activation to alcohol-related words suggests neuroadaptation of dopaminergic midbrain systems. We speculate that such tuning is normally associated with behavioral conditioning to optimize responses but here contributed to automatic bias to alcohol-related stimuli. PMID:23615665

Midbrain-driven emotion and reward processing in alcoholism.

PubMed

Müller-Oehring, E M; Jung, Y-C; Sullivan, E V; Hawkes, W C; Pfefferbaum, A; Schulte, T

2013-09-01

Alcohol dependence is associated with impaired control over emotionally motivated actions, possibly associated with abnormalities in the frontoparietal executive control network and midbrain nodes of the reward network associated with automatic attention. To identify differences in the neural response to alcohol-related word stimuli, 26 chronic alcoholics (ALC) and 26 healthy controls (CTL) performed an alcohol-emotion Stroop Match-to-Sample task during functional MR imaging. Stroop contrasts were modeled for color-word incongruency (eg, word RED printed in green) and for alcohol (eg, BEER), positive (eg, HAPPY) and negative (eg, MAD) emotional word content relative to congruent word conditions (eg, word RED printed in red). During color-Stroop processing, ALC and CTL showed similar left dorsolateral prefrontal activation, and CTL, but not ALC, deactivated posterior cingulate cortex/cuneus. An interaction revealed a dissociation between alcohol-word and color-word Stroop processing: ALC activated midbrain and parahippocampal regions more than CTL when processing alcohol-word relative to color-word conditions. In ALC, the midbrain region was also invoked by negative emotional Stroop words thereby showing significant overlap of this midbrain activation for alcohol-related and negative emotional processing. Enhanced midbrain activation to alcohol-related words suggests neuroadaptation of dopaminergic midbrain systems. We speculate that such tuning is normally associated with behavioral conditioning to optimize responses but here contributed to automatic bias to alcohol-related stimuli.

How the amygdala affects emotional memory by altering brain network properties.

PubMed

Hermans, Erno J; Battaglia, Francesco P; Atsak, Piray; de Voogd, Lycia D; Fernández, Guillén; Roozendaal, Benno

2014-07-01

The amygdala has long been known to play a key role in supporting memory for emotionally arousing experiences. For example, classical fear conditioning depends on neural plasticity within this anterior medial temporal lobe region. Beneficial effects of emotional arousal on memory, however, are not restricted to simple associative learning. Our recollection of emotional experiences often includes rich representations of, e.g., spatiotemporal context, visceral states, and stimulus-response associations. Critically, such memory features are known to bear heavily on regions elsewhere in the brain. These observations led to the modulation account of amygdala function, which postulates that amygdala activation enhances memory consolidation by facilitating neural plasticity and information storage processes in its target regions. Rodent work in past decades has identified the most important brain regions and neurochemical processes involved in these modulatory actions, and neuropsychological and neuroimaging work in humans has produced a large body of convergent data. Importantly, recent methodological developments make it increasingly realistic to monitor neural interactions underlying such modulatory effects as they unfold. For instance, functional connectivity network modeling in humans has demonstrated how information exchanges between the amygdala and specific target regions occur within the context of large-scale neural network interactions. Furthermore, electrophysiological and optogenetic techniques in rodents are beginning to make it possible to quantify and even manipulate such interactions with millisecond precision. In this paper we will discuss that these developments will likely lead to an updated view of the amygdala as a critical nexus within large-scale networks supporting different aspects of memory processing for emotionally arousing experiences. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Individual Differences in Typical Reappraisal Use Predict Amygdala and Prefrontal Responses

PubMed Central

Drabant, Emily M.; McRae, Kateri; Manuck, Stephen B.; Hariri, Ahmad R.; Gross, James J.

2010-01-01

Background Participants who are instructed to use reappraisal to downregulate negative emotion show decreased amygdala responses and increased prefrontal responses. However, it is not known whether individual differences in the tendency to use reappraisal manifests in similar neural responses when individuals are spontaneously confronted with negative situations. Such spontaneous emotion regulation might play an important role in normal and pathological responses to the emotional challenges of everyday life. Methods Fifty-six healthy women completed a blood oxygenation-level dependent functional magnetic resonance imaging challenge paradigm involving the perceptual processing of emotionally negative facial expressions. Participants also completed measures of typical emotion regulation use, trait anxiety, and neuroticism. Results Greater use of reappraisal in everyday life was related to decreased amygdala activity and increased prefrontal and parietal activity during the processing of negative emotional facial expressions. These associations were not attributable to variation in trait anxiety, neuroticism, or the use of another common form of emotion regulation, namely suppression. Conclusions These findings suggest that, like instructed reappraisal, individual differences in reappraisal use are associated with decreased activation in ventral emotion generative regions and increased activation in prefrontal control regions in response to negative stimuli. Such individual differences in emotion regulation might predict successful coping with emotional challenges as well as the onset of affective disorders. PMID:18930182

Prefrontal Cortex, Emotion, and Approach/Withdrawal Motivation

PubMed Central

Spielberg, Jeffrey M.; Stewart, Jennifer L.; Levin, Rebecca L.; Miller, Gregory A.; Heller, Wendy

2010-01-01

This article provides a selective review of the literature and current theories regarding the role of prefrontal cortex, along with some other critical brain regions, in emotion and motivation. Seemingly contradictory findings have often appeared in this literature. Research attempting to resolve these contradictions has been the basis of new areas of growth and has led to more sophisticated understandings of emotional and motivational processes as well as neural networks associated with these processes. Progress has, in part, depended on methodological advances that allow for increased resolution in brain imaging. A number of issues are currently in play, among them the role of prefrontal cortex in emotional or motivational processes. This debate fosters research that will likely lead to further refinement of conceptualizations of emotion, motivation, and the neural processes associated with them. PMID:20574551

Prefrontal Cortex, Emotion, and Approach/Withdrawal Motivation.

PubMed

Spielberg, Jeffrey M; Stewart, Jennifer L; Levin, Rebecca L; Miller, Gregory A; Heller, Wendy

2008-01-01

This article provides a selective review of the literature and current theories regarding the role of prefrontal cortex, along with some other critical brain regions, in emotion and motivation. Seemingly contradictory findings have often appeared in this literature. Research attempting to resolve these contradictions has been the basis of new areas of growth and has led to more sophisticated understandings of emotional and motivational processes as well as neural networks associated with these processes. Progress has, in part, depended on methodological advances that allow for increased resolution in brain imaging. A number of issues are currently in play, among them the role of prefrontal cortex in emotional or motivational processes. This debate fosters research that will likely lead to further refinement of conceptualizations of emotion, motivation, and the neural processes associated with them.

Emotion and attention interactions in social cognition: brain regions involved in processing anger prosody.

PubMed

Sander, David; Grandjean, Didier; Pourtois, Gilles; Schwartz, Sophie; Seghier, Mohamed L; Scherer, Klaus R; Vuilleumier, Patrik

2005-12-01

Multiple levels of processing are thought to be involved in the appraisal of emotionally relevant events, with some processes being engaged relatively independently of attention, whereas other processes may depend on attention and current task goals or context. We conducted an event-related fMRI experiment to examine how processing angry voice prosody, an affectively and socially salient signal, is modulated by voluntary attention. To manipulate attention orthogonally to emotional prosody, we used a dichotic listening paradigm in which meaningless utterances, pronounced with either angry or neutral prosody, were presented simultaneously to both ears on each trial. In two successive blocks, participants selectively attended to either the left or right ear and performed a gender-decision on the voice heard on the target side. Our results revealed a functional dissociation between different brain areas. Whereas the right amygdala and bilateral superior temporal sulcus responded to anger prosody irrespective of whether it was heard from a to-be-attended or to-be-ignored voice, the orbitofrontal cortex and the cuneus in medial occipital cortex showed greater activation to the same emotional stimuli when the angry voice was to-be-attended rather than to-be-ignored. Furthermore, regression analyses revealed a strong correlation between orbitofrontal regions and sensitivity on a behavioral inhibition scale measuring proneness to anxiety reactions. Our results underscore the importance of emotion and attention interactions in social cognition by demonstrating that multiple levels of processing are involved in the appraisal of emotionally relevant cues in voices, and by showing a modulation of some emotional responses by both the current task-demands and individual differences.

Brain correlates of musical and facial emotion recognition: evidence from the dementias.

PubMed

Hsieh, S; Hornberger, M; Piguet, O; Hodges, J R

2012-07-01

The recognition of facial expressions of emotion is impaired in semantic dementia (SD) and is associated with right-sided brain atrophy in areas known to be involved in emotion processing, notably the amygdala. Whether patients with SD also experience difficulty recognizing emotions conveyed by other media, such as music, is unclear. Prior studies have used excerpts of known music from classical or film repertoire but not unfamiliar melodies designed to convey distinct emotions. Patients with SD (n = 11), Alzheimer's disease (n = 12) and healthy control participants (n = 20) underwent tests of emotion recognition in two modalities: unfamiliar musical tunes and unknown faces as well as volumetric MRI. Patients with SD were most impaired with the recognition of facial and musical emotions, particularly for negative emotions. Voxel-based morphometry showed that the labelling of emotions, regardless of modality, correlated with the degree of atrophy in the right temporal pole, amygdala and insula. The recognition of musical (but not facial) emotions was also associated with atrophy of the left anterior and inferior temporal lobe, which overlapped with regions correlating with standardized measures of verbal semantic memory. These findings highlight the common neural substrates supporting the processing of emotions by facial and musical stimuli but also indicate that the recognition of emotions from music draws upon brain regions that are associated with semantics in language. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Neural correlates of processing "self-conscious" vs. "basic" emotions.

PubMed

Gilead, Michael; Katzir, Maayan; Eyal, Tal; Liberman, Nira

2016-01-29

Self-conscious emotions are prevalent in our daily lives and play an important role in both normal and pathological behavior. Despite their immense significance, the neural substrates that are involved in the processing of such emotions are surprisingly under-studied. In light of this, we conducted an fMRI study in which participants thought of various personal events which elicited feelings of negative and positive self-conscious (i.e., guilt, pride) or basic (i.e., anger, joy) emotions. We performed a conjunction analysis to investigate the neural correlates associated with processing events that are related to self-conscious vs. basic emotions, irrespective of valence. The results show that processing self-conscious emotions resulted in activation within frontal areas associated with self-processing and self-control, namely, the mPFC extending to the dACC, and within the lateral-dorsal prefrontal cortex. Processing basic emotions resulted in activation throughout relatively phylogenetically-ancient regions of the cortex, namely in visual and tactile processing areas and in the insular cortex. Furthermore, self-conscious emotions differentially activated the mPFC such that the negative self-conscious emotion (guilt) was associated with a more dorsal activation, and the positive self-conscious emotion (pride) was associated with a more ventral activation. We discuss how these results shed light on the nature of mental representations and neural systems involved in self-reflective and affective processing. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Serotonin and the neural processing of facial emotions in adults with autism: an fMRI study using acute tryptophan depletion.

PubMed

Daly, Eileen M; Deeley, Quinton; Ecker, Christine; Craig, Michael; Hallahan, Brian; Murphy, Clodagh; Johnston, Patrick; Spain, Debbie; Gillan, Nicola; Brammer, Michael; Giampietro, Vincent; Lamar, Melissa; Page, Lisa; Toal, Fiona; Cleare, Anthony; Surguladze, Simon; Murphy, Declan G M

2012-10-01

People with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) have lifelong deficits in social behavior and differences in behavioral as well as neural responses to facial expressions of emotion. The biological basis to this is incompletely understood, but it may include differences in the role of neurotransmitters such as serotonin, which modulate facial emotion processing in health. While some individuals with ASD have significant differences in the serotonin system, to our knowledge, no one has investigated its role during facial emotion processing in adults with ASD and control subjects using acute tryptophan depletion (ATD) and functional magnetic resonance imaging. To compare the effects of ATD on brain responses to primary facial expressions of emotion in men with ASD and healthy control subjects. Double-blind, placebo-controlled, crossover trial of ATD and functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure brain activity during incidental processing of disgust, fearful, happy, and sad facial expressions. Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, and South London and Maudsley National Health Service Foundation Trust, England. Fourteen men of normal intelligence with autism and 14 control subjects who did not significantly differ in sex, age, or overall intelligence. Blood oxygenation level-dependent response to facial expressions of emotion. Brain activation was differentially modulated by ATD depending on diagnostic group and emotion type within regions of the social brain network. For example, processing of disgust faces was associated with interactions in medial frontal and lingual gyri, whereas processing of happy faces was associated with interactions in middle frontal gyrus and putamen. Modulation of the processing of facial expressions of emotion by serotonin significantly differs in people with ASD compared with control subjects. The differences vary with emotion type and occur in social brain regions that have been shown to be associated with group differences in serotonin synthesis/receptor or transporter density.

Emotional intelligence is associated with reduced insula responses to masked angry faces.

PubMed

Alkozei, Anna; Killgore, William D S

2015-07-08

High levels of emotional intelligence (EI) have been associated with increased success in the workplace, greater quality of personal relationships, and enhanced wellbeing. Evidence suggests that EI is mediated extensively by the interplay of key emotion regions including the amygdala, insula, and ventromedial prefrontal cortex, among others. The insula, in particular, is important for processing interoceptive and somatic cues that are interpreted as emotional responses. We investigated the association between EI and functional brain responses within the aforementioned neurocircuitry in response to subliminal presentations of social threat. Fifty-four healthy adults completed the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT) and underwent functional magnetic brain imaging while viewing subliminal presentations of faces displaying anger, using a backward masked facial affect paradigm to minimize conscious awareness of the expressed emotion. In response to masked angry faces, the total MSCEIT scores correlated negatively with a cluster of activation located within the left insula, but not with activation in any other region of interest. Considering the insula's role in the processing of interoceptive emotional cues, the results suggest that greater EI is associated with reduced emotional visceral reactivity and/or more accurate interoceptive prediction when confronted with stimuli indicative of social threat.

Brain Activity and Network Interactions in the Impact of Internal Emotional Distraction.

PubMed

Iordan, A D; Dolcos, S; Dolcos, F

2018-06-14

Emotional distraction may come from the external world and from our mind, as internal distraction. Although external emotional distraction has been extensively investigated, less is known about the mechanisms associated with the impact of internal emotional distraction on cognitive performance, and those involved in coping with such distraction. These issues were investigated using a working memory task with emotional distraction, where recollected unpleasant autobiographical memories served as internal emotional distraction. Emotion regulation was manipulated by instructing participants to focus their attention either on or away from the emotional aspects of their memories. Behaviorally, focusing away from emotion was associated with better working memory performance than focusing on the recollected emotions. Functional MRI data showed reduced response in brain regions associated with the salience network, coupled with greater recruitment of executive prefrontal and memory-related temporoparietal regions, and with increased frontoparietal connectivity, when subjects focused on nonemotional contextual details of their memories. Finally, temporal dissociations were also identified between regions involved in self-referential (showing faster responses) versus context-related processing (showing delayed responses). These findings demonstrate that focused attention is an effective regulation strategy in coping with internal distraction, and are relevant for understanding clinical conditions where coping with distressing memories is dysfunctional.

A voxel-based lesion study on facial emotion recognition after penetrating brain injury

PubMed Central

Dal Monte, Olga; Solomon, Jeffrey M.; Schintu, Selene; Knutson, Kristine M.; Strenziok, Maren; Pardini, Matteo; Leopold, Anne; Raymont, Vanessa; Grafman, Jordan

2013-01-01

The ability to read emotions in the face of another person is an important social skill that can be impaired in subjects with traumatic brain injury (TBI). To determine the brain regions that modulate facial emotion recognition, we conducted a whole-brain analysis using a well-validated facial emotion recognition task and voxel-based lesion symptom mapping (VLSM) in a large sample of patients with focal penetrating TBIs (pTBIs). Our results revealed that individuals with pTBI performed significantly worse than normal controls in recognizing unpleasant emotions. VLSM mapping results showed that impairment in facial emotion recognition was due to damage in a bilateral fronto-temporo-limbic network, including medial prefrontal cortex (PFC), anterior cingulate cortex, left insula and temporal areas. Beside those common areas, damage to the bilateral and anterior regions of PFC led to impairment in recognizing unpleasant emotions, whereas bilateral posterior PFC and left temporal areas led to impairment in recognizing pleasant emotions. Our findings add empirical evidence that the ability to read pleasant and unpleasant emotions in other people's faces is a complex process involving not only a common network that includes bilateral fronto-temporo-limbic lobes, but also other regions depending on emotional valence. PMID:22496440

The neural basis of emotions varies over time: different regions go with onset- and offset-bound processes underlying emotion intensity.

PubMed

Résibois, Maxime; Verduyn, Philippe; Delaveau, Pauline; Rotgé, Jean-Yves; Kuppens, Peter; Van Mechelen, Iven; Fossati, Philippe

2017-08-01

According to theories of emotion dynamics, emotions unfold across two phases in which different types of processes come to the fore: emotion onset and emotion offset. Differences in onset-bound processes are reflected by the degree of explosiveness or steepness of the response at onset, and differences in offset-bound processes by the degree of accumulation or intensification of the subsequent response. Whether onset- and offset-bound processes have distinctive neural correlates and, hence, whether the neural basis of emotions varies over time, still remains unknown. In the present fMRI study, we address this question using a recently developed paradigm that allows to disentangle explosiveness and accumulation. Thirty-one participants were exposed to neutral and negative social feedback, and asked to reflect on its contents. Emotional intensity while reading and thinking about the feedback was measured with an intensity profile tracking approach. Using non-negative matrix factorization, the resulting profile data were decomposed in explosiveness and accumulation components, which were subsequently entered as continuous regressors of the BOLD response. It was found that the neural basis of emotion intensity shifts as emotions unfold over time with emotion explosiveness and accumulation having distinctive neural correlates. © The Author (2017). Published by Oxford University Press.

The neural basis of emotions varies over time: different regions go with onset- and offset-bound processes underlying emotion intensity

PubMed Central

Verduyn, Philippe; Delaveau, Pauline; Rotgé, Jean-Yves; Kuppens, Peter; Van Mechelen, Iven; Fossati, Philippe

2017-01-01

Abstract According to theories of emotion dynamics, emotions unfold across two phases in which different types of processes come to the fore: emotion onset and emotion offset. Differences in onset-bound processes are reflected by the degree of explosiveness or steepness of the response at onset, and differences in offset-bound processes by the degree of accumulation or intensification of the subsequent response. Whether onset- and offset-bound processes have distinctive neural correlates and, hence, whether the neural basis of emotions varies over time, still remains unknown. In the present fMRI study, we address this question using a recently developed paradigm that allows to disentangle explosiveness and accumulation. Thirty-one participants were exposed to neutral and negative social feedback, and asked to reflect on its contents. Emotional intensity while reading and thinking about the feedback was measured with an intensity profile tracking approach. Using non-negative matrix factorization, the resulting profile data were decomposed in explosiveness and accumulation components, which were subsequently entered as continuous regressors of the BOLD response. It was found that the neural basis of emotion intensity shifts as emotions unfold over time with emotion explosiveness and accumulation having distinctive neural correlates. PMID:28402478

A functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging study of neurohemodynamic abnormalities during emotion processing in subjects at high risk for schizophrenia

PubMed Central

Venkatasubramanian, Ganesan; Puthumana, Dawn Thomas K.; Jayakumar, Peruvumba N.; Gangadhar, B. N.

2010-01-01

Background: Emotion processing abnormalities are considered among the core deficits in schizophrenia. Subjects at high risk (HR) for schizophrenia also show these deficits. Structural neuroimaging studies examining unaffected relatives at high risk for schizophrenia have demonstrated neuroanatomical abnormalities involving neo-cortical and sub-cortical brain regions related to emotion processing. The brain functional correlates of emotion processing in these HR subjects in the context of ecologically valid, real-life dynamic images using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) has not been examined previously. Aim: To examine the neurohemodynamic abnormalities during emotion processing in unaffected subjects at high risk for schizophrenia in comparison with age-, sex-, handedness- and education-matched healthy controls, using fMRI. Materials and Methods: HR subjects for schizophrenia (n=17) and matched healthy controls (n=16) were examined. The emotion processing of fearful facial expression was examined using a culturally appropriate and valid tool for Indian subjects. The fMRI was performed in a 1.5-T scanner during an implicit emotion processing paradigm. The fMRI analyses were performed using the Statistical Parametric Mapping 2 (SPM2) software. Results: HR subjects had significantly reduced brain activations in left insula, left medial frontal gyrus, left inferior frontal gyrus, right cingulate gyrus, right precentral gyrus and right inferior parietal lobule. Hypothesis-driven region-of-interest analysis revealed hypoactivation of right amygdala in HR subjects. Conclusions: Study findings suggest that neurohemodynamic abnormalities involving limbic and frontal cortices could be potential indicators for increased vulnerability toward schizophrenia. The clinical utility of these novel findings in predicting the development of psychosis needs to be evaluated. PMID:21267363

Studying emotion theories through connectivity analysis: Evidence from generalized psychophysiological interactions and graph theory.

PubMed

Huang, Yun-An; Jastorff, Jan; Van den Stock, Jan; Van de Vliet, Laura; Dupont, Patrick; Vandenbulcke, Mathieu

2018-05-15

Psychological construction models of emotion state that emotions are variable concepts constructed by fundamental psychological processes, whereas according to basic emotion theory, emotions cannot be divided into more fundamental units and each basic emotion is represented by a unique and innate neural circuitry. In a previous study, we found evidence for the psychological construction account by showing that several brain regions were commonly activated when perceiving different emotions (i.e. a general emotion network). Moreover, this set of brain regions included areas associated with core affect, conceptualization and executive control, as predicted by psychological construction models. Here we investigate directed functional brain connectivity in the same dataset to address two questions: 1) is there a common pathway within the general emotion network for the perception of different emotions and 2) if so, does this common pathway contain information to distinguish between different emotions? We used generalized psychophysiological interactions and information flow indices to examine the connectivity within the general emotion network. The results revealed a general emotion pathway that connects neural nodes involved in core affect, conceptualization, language and executive control. Perception of different emotions could not be accurately classified based on the connectivity patterns from the nodes of the general emotion pathway. Successful classification was achieved when connections outside the general emotion pathway were included. We propose that the general emotion pathway functions as a common pathway within the general emotion network and is involved in shared basic psychological processes across emotions. However, additional connections within the general emotion network are required to classify different emotions, consistent with a constructionist account. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Neural Systems Underlying Emotional and Non-emotional Interference Processing: An ALE Meta-Analysis of Functional Neuroimaging Studies

PubMed Central

Xu, Min; Xu, Guiping; Yang, Yang

2016-01-01

Understanding how the nature of interference might influence the recruitments of the neural systems is considered as the key to understanding cognitive control. Although, interference processing in the emotional domain has recently attracted great interest, the question of whether there are separable neural patterns for emotional and non-emotional interference processing remains open. Here, we performed an activation likelihood estimation meta-analysis of 78 neuroimaging experiments, and examined common and distinct neural systems for emotional and non-emotional interference processing. We examined brain activation in three domains of interference processing: emotional verbal interference in the face-word conflict task, non-emotional verbal interference in the color-word Stroop task, and non-emotional spatial interference in the Simon, SRC and Flanker tasks. Our results show that the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) was recruited for both emotional and non-emotional interference. In addition, the right anterior insula, presupplementary motor area (pre-SMA), and right inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) were activated by interference processing across both emotional and non-emotional domains. In light of these results, we propose that the anterior insular cortex may serve to integrate information from different dimensions and work together with the dorsal ACC to detect and monitor conflicts, whereas pre-SMA and right IFG may be recruited to inhibit inappropriate responses. In contrast, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and posterior parietal cortex (PPC) showed different degrees of activation and distinct lateralization patterns for different processing domains, which suggests that these regions may implement cognitive control based on the specific task requirements. PMID:27895564

Neural circuitry of masked emotional face processing in youth with bipolar disorder, severe mood dysregulation, and healthy volunteers.

PubMed

Thomas, Laura A; Brotman, Melissa A; Bones, Brian L; Chen, Gang; Rosen, Brooke H; Pine, Daniel S; Leibenluft, Ellen

2014-04-01

Youth with bipolar disorder (BD) and those with severe, non-episodic irritability (severe mood dysregulation, SMD) show face-emotion labeling deficits. These groups differ from healthy volunteers (HV) in neural responses to emotional faces. It is unknown whether awareness is required to elicit these differences. We compared activation in BD (N=20), SMD (N=18), and HV (N=22) during "Aware" and "Non-aware" priming of shapes by emotional faces. Subjects rated how much they liked the shape. In aware, a face (angry, fearful, happy, neutral, blank oval) appeared (187 ms) before the shape. In non-aware, a face appeared (17 ms), followed by a mask (170 ms), and shape. A Diagnosis-by-Awareness-by-Emotion ANOVA was not significant. There were significant Diagnosis-by-Awareness interactions in occipital regions. BD and SMD showed increased activity for non-aware vs. aware; HV showed the reverse pattern. When subjects viewed angry or neutral faces, there were Emotion-by-Diagnosis interactions in face-emotion processing regions, including the L precentral gyrus, R posterior cingulate, R superior temporal gyrus, R middle occipital gyrus, and L medial frontal gyrus. Regardless of awareness, BD and SMD differ in activation patterns from HV and each other in multiple brain regions, suggesting that BD and SMD are distinct developmental mood disorders. Copyright © 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.

Neural evidence that human emotions share core affective properties.

PubMed

Wilson-Mendenhall, Christine D; Barrett, Lisa Feldman; Barsalou, Lawrence W

2013-06-01

Research on the "emotional brain" remains centered around the idea that emotions like fear, happiness, and sadness result from specialized and distinct neural circuitry. Accumulating behavioral and physiological evidence suggests, instead, that emotions are grounded in core affect--a person's fluctuating level of pleasant or unpleasant arousal. A neuroimaging study revealed that participants' subjective ratings of valence (i.e., pleasure/displeasure) and of arousal evoked by various fear, happiness, and sadness experiences correlated with neural activity in specific brain regions (orbitofrontal cortex and amygdala, respectively). We observed these correlations across diverse instances within each emotion category, as well as across instances from all three categories. Consistent with a psychological construction approach to emotion, the results suggest that neural circuitry realizes more basic processes across discrete emotions. The implicated brain regions regulate the body to deal with the world, producing the affective changes at the core of emotions and many other psychological phenomena.

Neural Evidence that Human Emotions Share Core Affective Properties

PubMed Central

Wilson-Mendenhall, Christine D.; Barrett, Lisa Feldman; Barsalou, Lawrence W.

2014-01-01

Research on the “emotional brain” remains centered around the idea that emotions like fear, happiness, and sadness result from specialized and distinct neural circuitry. Accumulating behavioral and physiological evidence suggests, instead, that emotions are grounded in core affect – a person's fluctuating level of pleasant or unpleasant arousal. A neuroimaging study revealed that participants' subjective ratings of valence (i.e., pleasure/displeasure) and of arousal evoked by various fear, happiness, and sadness experiences correlated with neural activity in specific brain regions (orbitofrontal cortex and amygdala, respectively). We observed these correlations across diverse instances within each emotion category, as well as across instances from all three categories. Consistent with a psychological construction approach to emotion, the results suggest that neural circuitry realizes more basic processes across discrete emotions. The implicated brain regions regulate the body to deal with the world, producing the affective changes at the core of emotions and many other psychological phenomena. PMID:23603916

Gender differences in the cognitive control of emotion: An fMRI study.

PubMed

Koch, Kathrin; Pauly, Katharina; Kellermann, Thilo; Seiferth, Nina Y; Reske, Martina; Backes, Volker; Stöcker, Tony; Shah, N Jon; Amunts, Katrin; Kircher, Tilo; Schneider, Frank; Habel, Ute

2007-09-20

The interaction of emotion and cognition has become a topic of major interest. However, the influence of gender on the interplay between the two processes, along with its neural correlates have not been fully analysed so far. In this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study we induced negative emotion using negative olfactory stimulation while male (n=21) and female (n=19) participants performed an n-back verbal working memory task. Based on findings indicating increased emotional reactivity in women, we expected the female participants to exhibit stronger activation in characteristically emotion-associated areas during the interaction of emotional and cognitive processing in comparison to the male participants. Both groups were found to be significantly impaired in their working memory performance by negative emotion induction. However, fMRI analysis revealed distinct differences in neuronal activation between groups. In men, cognitive performance under negative emotion induction was associated with extended activation patterns in mainly prefrontal and superior parietal regions. In women, the interaction between emotion and working memory yielded a significantly stronger response in the amygdala and the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) compared to their male counterparts. Our data suggest that in women the interaction of verbal working memory and negative emotion is associated with relative hyperactivation in more emotion-associated areas whereas in men regions commonly regarded as important for cognition and cognitive control are activated. These results provide new insights in gender-specific cerebral mechanisms.

Differential functional connectivity of rostral anterior cingulate cortex during emotional interference

PubMed Central

Szekely, Akos; Silton, Rebecca L.; Heller, Wendy; Miller, Gregory A.

2017-01-01

Abstract The rostral-ventral subdivision of the anterior cingulate cortex (rACC) plays a key role in the regulation of emotional processing. Although rACC has strong anatomical connections with anterior insular cortex (AIC), amygdala, prefrontal cortex and striatal brain regions, it is unclear whether the functional connectivity of rACC with these regions changes when regulating emotional processing. Furthermore, it is not known whether this connectivity changes with deficits in emotion regulation seen in different kinds of anxiety and depression. To address these questions regarding rACC functional connectivity, non-patients high in self-reported anxious apprehension (AP), anxious arousal (AR), anhedonic depression (AD) or none (CON) indicated the ink color of pleasant, neutral and unpleasant words during functional magnetic resonance imaging. While ignoring task-irrelevant unpleasant words, AD and CON showed an increase in the functional connectivity of rACC with AIC, putamen, caudate and ventral pallidum. There was a decrease in this connectivity in AP and AR, with AP showing greater reduction than AR. These findings provide support for the role of rACC in integrating interoceptive, emotional and cognitive functions via interactions with insula and striatal regions during effective emotion regulation in healthy individuals and a failure of this integration that may be specific to anxiety, particularly AP. PMID:27998997

Perceiving emotional expressions in others: Activation likelihood estimation meta-analyses of explicit evaluation, passive perception and incidental perception of emotions.

PubMed

Dricu, Mihai; Frühholz, Sascha

2016-12-01

We conducted a series of activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analyses to determine the commonalities and distinctions between separate levels of emotion perception, namely incidental perception, passive perception, and explicit evaluation of emotional expressions. Pooling together more than 180 neuroimaging experiments using facial, vocal or body expressions, our results are threefold. First, explicitly evaluating the emotions of others recruits brain regions associated with the sensory processing of expressions, such as the inferior occipital gyrus, middle fusiform gyrus and the superior temporal gyrus, and brain regions involved in low-level and high-level mindreading, namely the posterior superior temporal sulcus, the inferior frontal cortex and dorsomedial frontal cortex. Second, we show that only the sensory regions were also consistently active during the passive perception of emotional expressions. Third, we show that the brain regions involved in mindreading were active during the explicit evaluation of both facial and vocal expressions. We discuss these results in light of the existing literature and conclude by proposing a cognitive model for perceiving and evaluating the emotions of others. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Separating neural activity associated with emotion and implied motion: An fMRI study.

PubMed

Kolesar, Tiffany A; Kornelsen, Jennifer; Smith, Stephen D

2017-02-01

Previous research provides evidence for an emo-motoric neural network allowing emotion to modulate activity in regions of the nervous system related to movement. However, recent research suggests that these results may be due to the movement depicted in the stimuli. The purpose of the current study was to differentiate the unique neural activity of emotion and implied motion using functional MRI. Thirteen healthy participants viewed 4 sets of images: (a) negative stimuli implying movement, (b) negative stimuli not implying movement, (c) neutral stimuli implying movement, and (d) neutral stimuli not implying movement. A main effect for implied motion was found, primarily in regions associated with multimodal integration (bilateral insula and cingulate), and visual areas that process motion (bilateral middle temporal gyrus). A main effect for emotion was found primarily in occipital and parietal regions, indicating that emotion enhances visual perception. Surprisingly, emotion also activated the left precentral gyrus, a motor region. These results demonstrate that emotion elicits activity above and beyond that evoked by the perception of implied movement, but that the neural representations of these characteristics overlap. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved).

Distinct neural systems underlying reduced emotional enhancement for positive and negative stimuli in early Alzheimer's disease

PubMed Central

Mistridis, Panagiota; Taylor, Kirsten I.; Kissler, Johanna M.; Monsch, Andreas U.; Kressig, Reto W.; Kivisaari, Sasa L.

2014-01-01

Emotional information is typically better remembered than neutral content, and previous studies suggest that this effect is subserved particularly by the amygdala together with its interactions with the hippocampus. However, it is not known whether amygdala damage affects emotional memory performance at immediate and delayed recall, and whether its involvement is modulated by stimulus valence. Moreover, it is unclear to what extent more distributed neocortical regions involved in e.g., autobiographical memory, also contribute to emotional processing. We investigated these questions in a group of patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD), which affects the amygdala, hippocampus and neocortical regions. Healthy controls (n = 14), patients with AD (n = 15) and its putative prodrome amnestic mild cognitive impairment (n = 11) completed a memory task consisting of immediate and delayed free recall of a list of positive, negative and neutral words. Memory performance was related to brain integrity in region of interest and whole-brain voxel-based morphometry analyses. In the brain-behavioral analyses, the left amygdala volume predicted the immediate recall of both positive and negative material, whereas at delay, left and right amygdala volumes were associated with performance with positive and negative words, respectively. Whole-brain analyses revealed additional associations between left angular gyrus integrity and the immediate recall of positive words as well as between the orbitofrontal cortex and the delayed recall of negative words. These results indicate that emotional memory impairments in AD may be underpinned by damage to regions implicated in emotional processing as well as frontoparietal regions, which may exert their influence via autobiographical memories and organizational strategies. PMID:24478669

The role of trauma-related distractors on neural systems for working memory and emotion processing in posttraumatic stress disorder

PubMed Central

Morey, Rajendra A.; Dolcos, Florin; Petty, Christopher M.; Cooper, Debra A.; Hayes, Jasmeet Pannu; LaBar, Kevin S.; McCarthy, Gregory

2009-01-01

The relevance of emotional stimuli to threat and survival confers a privileged role in their processing. In PTSD, the ability of trauma-related information to divert attention is especially pronounced. Information unrelated to the trauma may also be highly distracting when it shares perceptual features with trauma material. Our goal was to study how trauma-related environmental cues modulate working memory networks in PTSD. We examined neural activity in participants performing a visual working memory task while distracted by task-irrelevant trauma and non-trauma material. Recent post-9/11 veterans were divided into a PTSD group (n = 22) and a trauma-exposed control group (n = 20) based on the Davidson trauma scale. Using fMRI, we measured hemodynamic change in response to emotional (trauma-related) and neutral distraction presented during the active maintenance period of a delayed-response working memory task. The goal was to examine differences in functional networks associated with working memory (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and lateral parietal cortex) and emotion processing (amygdala, ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, and fusiform gyrus). The PTSD group showed markedly different neural activity compared to the trauma-exposed control group in response to task-irrelevant visual distractors. Enhanced activity in ventral emotion processing regions was associated with trauma distractors in the PTSD group, whereas activity in brain regions associated with working memory and attention regions was disrupted by distractor stimuli independent of trauma content. Neural evidence for the impact of distraction on working memory is consistent with PTSD symptoms of hypervigilance and general distractibility during goal-directed cognitive processing. PMID:19091328

Resting-state functional connectivity of antero-medial prefrontal cortex sub-regions in major depression and relationship to emotional intelligence.

PubMed

Sawaya, Helen; Johnson, Kevin; Schmidt, Matthew; Arana, Ashley; Chahine, George; Atoui, Mia; Pincus, David; George, Mark S; Panksepp, Jaak; Nahas, Ziad

2015-03-05

Major depressive disorder has been associated with abnormal resting-state functional connectivity (FC), especially in cognitive processing and emotional regulation networks. Although studies have found abnormal FC in regions of the default mode network (DMN), no study has investigated the FC of specific regions within the anterior DMN based on cytoarchitectonic subdivisions of the antero-medial pre-frontal cortex (PFC). Studies from different areas in the field have shown regions within the anterior DMN to be involved in emotional intelligence. Although abnormalities in this region have been observed in depression, the relationship between the ventromedial PFC (vmPFC) function and emotional intelligence has yet to be investigated in depressed individuals. Twenty-one medication-free, non-treatment resistant, depressed patients and 21 healthy controls underwent a resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging session. The participants also completed an ability-based measure of emotional intelligence: the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test. FC maps of Brodmann areas (BA) 25, 10 m, 10r, and 10p were created and compared between the two groups. Mixed-effects analyses showed that the more anterior seeds encompassed larger areas of the DMN. Compared to healthy controls, depressed patients had significantly lower connectivity between BA10p and the right insula and between BA25 and the perigenual anterior cingulate cortex. Exploratory analyses showed an association between vmPFC connectivity and emotional intelligence. These results suggest that individuals with depression have reduced FC between antero-medial PFC regions and regions involved in emotional regulation compared to control subjects. Moreover, vmPFC functional connectivity appears linked to emotional intelligence. © The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of CINP.

Introspective Minds: Using ALE Meta-Analyses to Study Commonalities in the Neural Correlates of Emotional Processing, Social & Unconstrained Cognition

PubMed Central

Schilbach, Leonhard; Bzdok, Danilo; Timmermans, Bert; Fox, Peter T.; Laird, Angela R.; Vogeley, Kai; Eickhoff, Simon B.

2012-01-01

Previous research suggests overlap between brain regions that show task-induced deactivations and those activated during the performance of social-cognitive tasks. Here, we present results of quantitative meta-analyses of neuroimaging studies, which confirm a statistical convergence in the neural correlates of social and resting state cognition. Based on the idea that both social and unconstrained cognition might be characterized by introspective processes, which are also thought to be highly relevant for emotional experiences, a third meta-analysis was performed investigating studies on emotional processing. By using conjunction analyses across all three sets of studies, we can demonstrate significant overlap of task-related signal change in dorso-medial prefrontal and medial parietal cortex, brain regions that have, indeed, recently been linked to introspective abilities. Our findings, therefore, provide evidence for the existence of a core neural network, which shows task-related signal change during socio-emotional tasks and during resting states. PMID:22319593

Emotional Modulation of Learning and Memory: Pharmacological Implications.

PubMed

LaLumiere, Ryan T; McGaugh, James L; McIntyre, Christa K

2017-07-01

Memory consolidation involves the process by which newly acquired information becomes stored in a long-lasting fashion. Evidence acquired over the past several decades, especially from studies using post-training drug administration, indicates that emotional arousal during the consolidation period influences and enhances the strength of the memory and that multiple different chemical signaling systems participate in this process. The mechanisms underlying the emotional influences on memory involve the release of stress hormones and activation of the basolateral amygdala, which work together to modulate memory consolidation. Moreover, work suggests that this amygdala-based memory modulation occurs with numerous types of learning and involves interactions with many different brain regions to alter consolidation. Additionally, studies suggest that emotional arousal and amygdala activity in particular influence synaptic plasticity and associated proteins in downstream brain regions. This review considers the historical understanding for memory modulation and cellular consolidation processes and examines several research areas currently using this foundational knowledge to develop therapeutic treatments. Copyright © 2017 by The American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics.

Right-ear precedence and vocal emotion contagion: The role of the left hemisphere.

PubMed

Schepman, Astrid; Rodway, Paul; Cornmell, Louise; Smith, Bethany; de Sa, Sabrina Lauren; Borwick, Ciara; Belfon-Thompson, Elisha

2018-05-01

Much evidence suggests that the processing of emotions is lateralized to the right hemisphere of the brain. However, under some circumstances the left hemisphere might play a role, particularly for positive emotions and emotional experiences. We explored whether emotion contagion was right-lateralized, lateralized valence-specifically, or potentially left-lateralized. In two experiments, right-handed female listeners rated to what extent emotionally intoned pseudo-sentences evoked target emotions in them. These sound stimuli had a 7 ms ear lead in the left or right channel, leading to stronger stimulation of the contralateral hemisphere. In both experiments, the results revealed that right ear lead stimuli received subtly but significantly higher evocation scores, suggesting a left hemisphere dominance for emotion contagion. A control experiment using an emotion identification task showed no effect of ear lead. The findings are discussed in relation to prior findings that have linked the processing of emotional prosody to left-hemisphere brain regions that regulate emotions, control orofacial musculature, are involved in affective empathy processing areas, or have an affinity for processing emotions socially. Future work is needed to eliminate alternative interpretations and understand the mechanisms involved. Our novel binaural asynchrony method may be useful in future work in auditory laterality.

Disconnection mechanism and regional cortical atrophy contribute to impaired processing of facial expressions and theory of mind in multiple sclerosis: a structural MRI study.

PubMed

Mike, Andrea; Strammer, Erzsebet; Aradi, Mihaly; Orsi, Gergely; Perlaki, Gabor; Hajnal, Andras; Sandor, Janos; Banati, Miklos; Illes, Eniko; Zaitsev, Alexander; Herold, Robert; Guttmann, Charles R G; Illes, Zsolt

2013-01-01

Successful socialization requires the ability of understanding of others' mental states. This ability called as mentalization (Theory of Mind) may become deficient and contribute to everyday life difficulties in multiple sclerosis. We aimed to explore the impact of brain pathology on mentalization performance in multiple sclerosis. Mentalization performance of 49 patients with multiple sclerosis was compared to 24 age- and gender matched healthy controls. T1- and T2-weighted three-dimensional brain MRI images were acquired at 3Tesla from patients with multiple sclerosis and 18 gender- and age matched healthy controls. We assessed overall brain cortical thickness in patients with multiple sclerosis and the scanned healthy controls, and measured the total and regional T1 and T2 white matter lesion volumes in patients with multiple sclerosis. Performances in tests of recognition of mental states and emotions from facial expressions and eye gazes correlated with both total T1-lesion load and regional T1-lesion load of association fiber tracts interconnecting cortical regions related to visual and emotion processing (genu and splenium of corpus callosum, right inferior longitudinal fasciculus, right inferior fronto-occipital fasciculus, uncinate fasciculus). Both of these tests showed correlations with specific cortical areas involved in emotion recognition from facial expressions (right and left fusiform face area, frontal eye filed), processing of emotions (right entorhinal cortex) and socially relevant information (left temporal pole). Thus, both disconnection mechanism due to white matter lesions and cortical thinning of specific brain areas may result in cognitive deficit in multiple sclerosis affecting emotion and mental state processing from facial expressions and contributing to everyday and social life difficulties of these patients.

Structural brain differences in emotional processing and regulation areas between male batterers and other criminals: A preliminary study.

PubMed

Verdejo-Román, Juan; Bueso-Izquierdo, Natalia; Daugherty, Julia C; Pérez-García, Miguel; Hidalgo-Ruzzante, Natalia

2018-05-31

Poor emotion processing is thought to influence violent behaviors among male batterers in abusive relationships. Nevertheless, little is known about the neural mechanisms of emotion processing in this population. With the objective of better understanding brain structure and its relation to emotion processing in male batterers, the present study compares the cortical grey matter thickness of male batterers to that of other criminals in brain areas related to emotion. Differences among these brain areas were also compared to an emotional perception task. An MRI study and an emotional perception assessment was conducted with 21 male batterers and 20 men convicted of crimes other than Intimate Partner Violence (IPV). Results demonstrated that batterers' had significantly thinner cortices in prefrontal (orbitofrontal), midline (anterior and posterior cingulate) and limbic (insula, parahipocampal) brain regions. The thickness of the dorsal posterior cingulate cortex in the batterer group correlated with scores on the emotional perception task. These findings shed light on a neuroscientific approach to analyzing violent behavior perpetrated by male batterers, leading to a better understanding of the underlying mechanisms involved in IPV.

On the analysis of EEG power, frequency and asymmetry in Parkinson’s disease during emotion processing

PubMed Central

2014-01-01

Objective While Parkinson’s disease (PD) has traditionally been described as a movement disorder, there is growing evidence of disruption in emotion information processing associated with the disease. The aim of this study was to investigate whether there are specific electroencephalographic (EEG) characteristics that discriminate PD patients and normal controls during emotion information processing. Method EEG recordings from 14 scalp sites were collected from 20 PD patients and 30 age-matched normal controls. Multimodal (audio-visual) stimuli were presented to evoke specific targeted emotional states such as happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise and disgust. Absolute and relative power, frequency and asymmetry measures derived from spectrally analyzed EEGs were subjected to repeated ANOVA measures for group comparisons as well as to discriminate function analysis to examine their utility as classification indices. In addition, subjective ratings were obtained for the used emotional stimuli. Results Behaviorally, PD patients showed no impairments in emotion recognition as measured by subjective ratings. Compared with normal controls, PD patients evidenced smaller overall relative delta, theta, alpha and beta power, and at bilateral anterior regions smaller absolute theta, alpha, and beta power and higher mean total spectrum frequency across different emotional states. Inter-hemispheric theta, alpha, and beta power asymmetry index differences were noted, with controls exhibiting greater right than left hemisphere activation. Whereas intra-hemispheric alpha power asymmetry reduction was exhibited in patients bilaterally at all regions. Discriminant analysis correctly classified 95.0% of the patients and controls during emotional stimuli. Conclusion These distributed spectral powers in different frequency bands might provide meaningful information about emotional processing in PD patients. PMID:24716619

The neural correlates of cognitive reappraisal during emotional autobiographical memory recall.

PubMed

Holland, Alisha C; Kensinger, Elizabeth A

2013-01-01

We used fMRI to investigate the neural processes engaged as individuals down- and up-regulated the emotions associated with negative autobiographical memories (AMs) using cognitive reappraisal strategies. Our analyses examined neural activity during three separate phases, as participants (a) viewed a reappraisal instruction (i.e., Decrease, Increase, Maintain), (b) searched for an AM referenced by a self-generated cue, and (c) elaborated upon the details of the AM being held in mind. Decreasing emotional intensity primarily engaged activity in regions previously implicated in cognitive control (e.g., dorsal and ventral lateral pFC), emotion generation and processing (e.g., amygdala, insula), and visual imagery (e.g., precuneus) as participants searched for and retrieved events. In contrast, increasing emotional intensity engaged similar regions during the instruction phase (i.e., before a memory cue was presented) and again as individuals later elaborated upon the details of the events they had recalled. These findings confirm that reappraisal can modulate neural activity during the recall of personally relevant events, although the time course of this modulation appears to depend on whether individuals are attempting to down- or up-regulate their emotions.

Looking to the eyes influences the processing of emotion on face-sensitive event-related potentials in 7-month-old infants.

PubMed

Vanderwert, Ross E; Westerlund, Alissa; Montoya, Lina; McCormick, Sarah A; Miguel, Helga O; Nelson, Charles A

2015-10-01

Previous studies in infants have shown that face-sensitive components of the ongoing electroencephalogram (the event-related potential, or ERP) are larger in amplitude to negative emotions (e.g., fear, anger) versus positive emotions (e.g., happy). However, it is still unclear whether the negative emotions linked with the face or the negative emotions alone contribute to these amplitude differences. We simultaneously recorded infant looking behaviors (via eye-tracking) and face-sensitive ERPs while 7-month-old infants viewed human faces or animals displaying happy, fear, or angry expressions. We observed that the amplitude of the N290 was greater (i.e., more negative) to angry animals compared to happy or fearful animals; no such differences were obtained for human faces. Eye-tracking data highlighted the importance of the eye region in processing emotional human faces. Infants that spent more time looking to the eye region of human faces showing fearful or angry expressions had greater N290 or P400 amplitudes, respectively. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

FMRI Study of Neural Responses to Implicit Infant Emotion in Anorexia Nervosa

PubMed Central

Leppanen, Jenni; Cardi, Valentina; Paloyelis, Yannis; Simmons, Andy; Tchanturia, Kate; Treasure, Janet

2017-01-01

Difficulties in social–emotional processing have been proposed to play an important role in the development and maintenance of anorexia nervosa (AN). Few studies, thus far, have investigated neural processes that underlie these difficulties, including processing emotional facial expressions. However, the majority of these studies have investigated neural responses to adult emotional display, which may be confounded by elevated sensitivity to social rank and threat in AN. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate the neural processes underlying implicit processing of positively and negatively valenced infant emotional display in AN. Twenty-one adult women with AN and twenty-six healthy comparison (HC) women were presented with images of positively valenced, negatively valenced, and neutral infant faces during a fMRI scan. Significant differences between the groups in positive > neutral and negative > neutral contrasts were investigated in a priori regions of interest, including the bilateral amygdala, insula, and lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC). The findings revealed that the AN participants showed relatively increased recruitment while the HC participants showed relatively reduced recruitment of the bilateral amygdala and the right dorsolateral PFC in the positive > neutral contrast. In the negative > neutral contrast, the AN group showed relatively increased recruitment of the left posterior insula while the HC groups showed relatively reduced recruitment of this region. These findings suggest that people with AN may engage in implicit prefrontal down-regulation of elevated limbic reactivity to positively social–emotional stimuli. PMID:28567026

Brain systems underlying attentional control and emotional distraction during working memory encoding.

PubMed

Ziaei, Maryam; Peira, Nathalie; Persson, Jonas

2014-02-15

Goal-directed behavior requires that cognitive operations can be protected from emotional distraction induced by task-irrelevant emotional stimuli. The brain processes involved in attending to relevant information while filtering out irrelevant information are still largely unknown. To investigate the neural and behavioral underpinnings of attending to task-relevant emotional stimuli while ignoring irrelevant stimuli, we used fMRI to assess brain responses during attentional instructed encoding within an emotional working memory (WM) paradigm. We showed that instructed attention to emotion during WM encoding resulted in enhanced performance, by means of increased memory performance and reduced reaction time, compared to passive viewing. A similar performance benefit was also demonstrated for recognition memory performance, although for positive pictures only. Functional MRI data revealed a network of regions involved in directed attention to emotional information for both positive and negative pictures that included medial and lateral prefrontal cortices, fusiform gyrus, insula, the parahippocampal gyrus, and the amygdala. Moreover, we demonstrate that regions in the striatum, and regions associated with the default-mode network were differentially activated for emotional distraction compared to neutral distraction. Activation in a sub-set of these regions was related to individual differences in WM and recognition memory performance, thus likely contributing to performing the task at an optimal level. The present results provide initial insights into the behavioral and neural consequences of instructed attention and emotional distraction during WM encoding. © 2013.

The functional neuroanatomy of autobiographical memory: A meta-analysis

PubMed Central

Svoboda, Eva; McKinnon, Margaret C.; Levine, Brian

2007-01-01

Autobiographical memory (AM) entails a complex set of operations, including episodic memory, self-reflection, emotion, visual imagery, attention, executive functions, and semantic processes. The heterogeneous nature of AM poses significant challenges in capturing its behavioral and neuroanatomical correlates. Investigators have recently turned their attention to the functional neuroanatomy of AM. We used the effect-location method of meta-analysis to analyze data from 24 functional imaging studies of AM. The results indicated a core neural network of left-lateralized regions, including the medial and ventrolateral prefrontal, medial and lateral temporal and retrosplenial/posterior cingulate cortices, the temporoparietal junction and the cerebellum. Secondary and tertiary regions, less frequently reported in imaging studies of AM, are also identified. We examined the neural correlates of putative component processes in AM, including, executive functions, self-reflection, episodic remembering and visuospatial processing. We also separately analyzed the effect of select variables on the AM network across individual studies, including memory age, qualitative factors (personal significance, level of detail and vividness), semantic and emotional content, and the effect of reference conditions. We found that memory age effects on medial temporal lobe structures may be modulated by qualitative aspects of memory. Studies using rest as a control task masked process-specific components of the AM neural network. Our findings support a neural distinction between episodic and semantic memory in AM. Finally, emotional events produced a shift in lateralization of the AM network with activation observed in emotion-centered regions and deactivation (or lack of activation) observed in regions associated with cognitive processes. PMID:16806314

The implicit processing of categorical and dimensional strategies: an fMRI study of facial emotion perception

PubMed Central

Matsuda, Yoshi-Taka; Fujimura, Tomomi; Katahira, Kentaro; Okada, Masato; Ueno, Kenichi; Cheng, Kang; Okanoya, Kazuo

2013-01-01

Our understanding of facial emotion perception has been dominated by two seemingly opposing theories: the categorical and dimensional theories. However, we have recently demonstrated that hybrid processing involving both categorical and dimensional perception can be induced in an implicit manner (Fujimura etal., 2012). The underlying neural mechanisms of this hybrid processing remain unknown. In this study, we tested the hypothesis that separate neural loci might intrinsically encode categorical and dimensional processing functions that serve as a basis for hybrid processing. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure neural correlates while subjects passively viewed emotional faces and performed tasks that were unrelated to facial emotion processing. Activity in the right fusiform face area (FFA) increased in response to psychologically obvious emotions and decreased in response to ambiguous expressions, demonstrating the role of the FFA in categorical processing. The amygdala, insula and medial prefrontal cortex exhibited evidence of dimensional (linear) processing that correlated with physical changes in the emotional face stimuli. The occipital face area and superior temporal sulcus did not respond to these changes in the presented stimuli. Our results indicated that distinct neural loci process the physical and psychological aspects of facial emotion perception in a region-specific and implicit manner. PMID:24133426

Age differences in the neural response to emotional distraction during working memory encoding.

PubMed

Ziaei, Maryam; Samrani, George; Persson, Jonas

2018-06-11

Age-related declines in attention and working memory (WM) are well documented and may be worsened by the occurrence of distracting information. Emotionally valenced stimuli may have particularly strong distracting effects on cognition. We investigated age-related differences in emotional distraction using task-fMRI. WM performance in older adults was lower for emotional compared with neutral distractors, suggesting a disproportional impairment elicited by emotional task-irrelevant information. Critically, older adults were particularly distracted by task-irrelevant positive information, whereas the opposite pattern was found for younger adults. Age groups differed markedly in the brain response to emotional distractors; younger adults activated posterior cortical regions and the striatum, and older adults activated frontal regions. Also, an age by valence interaction was found for IFG and ACC, suggesting differential modulation of attention to task-relevant emotional information. These results provide new insights into age-related changes in emotional processing and the ability to resolve interference from emotional distraction.

Emotional Processing of Personally Familiar Faces in the Vegetative State

PubMed Central

Sharon, Haggai; Pasternak, Yotam; Ben Simon, Eti; Gruberger, Michal; Giladi, Nir; Krimchanski, Ben Zion; Hassin, David; Hendler, Talma

2013-01-01

Background The Vegetative State (VS) is a severe disorder of consciousness in which patients are awake but display no signs of awareness. Yet, recent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have demonstrated evidence for covert awareness in VS patients by recording specific brain activations during a cognitive task. However, the possible existence of incommunicable subjective emotional experiences in VS patients remains largely unexplored. This study aimed to probe the question of whether VS patients retain a brain ability to selectively process external stimuli according to their emotional value and look for evidence of covert emotional awareness in patients. Methods and Findings In order to explore these questions we employed the emotive impact of observing personally familiar faces, known to provoke specific perceptual as well as emotional brain activations. Four VS patients and thirteen healthy controls first underwent an fMRI scan while viewing pictures of non-familiar faces, personally familiar faces and pictures of themselves. In a subsequent imagery task participants were asked to actively imagine one of their parent's faces. Analyses focused on face and familiarity selective regional brain activations and inter-regional functional connectivity. Similar to controls, all patients displayed face selective brain responses with further limbic and cortical activations elicited by familiar faces. In patients as well as controls, Connectivity was observed between emotional, visual and face specific areas, suggesting aware emotional perception. This connectivity was strongest in the two patients who later recovered. Notably, these two patients also displayed selective amygdala activation during familiar face imagery, with one further exhibiting face selective activations, indistinguishable from healthy controls. Conclusions Taken together, these results show that selective emotional processing can be elicited in VS patients both by external emotionally salient stimuli and by internal cognitive processes, suggesting the ability for covert emotional awareness of self and the environment in VS patients. PMID:24086365

Functional imaging of conditioned aversive emotional responses in antisocial personality disorder.

PubMed

Schneider, F; Habel, U; Kessler, C; Posse, S; Grodd, W; Müller-Gärtner, H W

2000-01-01

Individuals with antisocial personality disorder (n = 12) and healthy controls (n = 12) were examined for cerebral regional activation involved in the processing of negative affect. A differential aversive classical conditioning paradigm was applied with odors as unconditioned stimuli and faces as conditioned stimuli. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) based on echo-planar imaging was used while cerebral activity was studied during habituation, acquisition, and extinction. Individually defined cerebral regions were analyzed. Both groups indicated behavioral conditioning following subjective ratings of emotional valence to conditioned stimuli. Differential effects were found during acquisition in the amygdala and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Controls showed signal decreases, patients signal increases. These preliminary results revealed unexpected signal increases in cortical/subcortical areas of patients. The increases may result from an additional effort put in by these individuals to form negative emotional associations, a pattern of processing that may correspond to their characteristic deviant emotional behavior. Copyright 2000 S. Karger AG, Basel.

Anatomical insights into the interaction of emotion and cognition in the prefrontal cortex

PubMed Central

Ray, Rebecca; Zald, David H.

2011-01-01

Ray, R. and D. Zald. Anatomical insights into the interaction of emotion and cognition in the prefrontal cortex. NEUROSCI BIOBEHAV REV 36(X) XXX-XXX, 2011. -Psychological research increasingly indicates that emotional processes interact with other aspects of cognition. Studies have demonstrated both the ability of emotional stimuli to influence a broad range of cognitive operations, and the ability of humans to use top-down cognitive control mechanisms to regulate emotional responses. Portions of the prefrontal cortex appear to play a significant role in these interactions. However, the manner in which these interactions are implemented remains only partially elucidated. In the present review we describe the anatomical connections between ventral and dorsal prefrontal areas as well as their connections with limbic regions. Only a subset of prefrontal areas are likely to directly influence amygdalar processing, and as such models of prefrontal control of emotions and models of emotional regulation should be constrained to plausible pathways of influence. We also focus on how the specific pattern of feedforward and feedback connections between these regions may dictate the nature of information flow between ventral and dorsal prefrontal areas and the amygdala. These patterns of connections are inconsistent with several commonly expressed assumptions about the nature of communications between emotion and cognition. PMID:21889953

The Neural Correlates of Emotional Prosody Comprehension: Disentangling Simple from Complex Emotion

PubMed Central

Alba-Ferrara, Lucy; Hausmann, Markus; Mitchell, Rachel L.; Weis, Susanne

2011-01-01

Background Emotional prosody comprehension (EPC), the ability to interpret another person's feelings by listening to their tone of voice, is crucial for effective social communication. Previous studies assessing the neural correlates of EPC have found inconsistent results, particularly regarding the involvement of the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). It remained unclear whether the involvement of the mPFC is linked to an increased demand in socio-cognitive components of EPC such as mental state attribution and if basic perceptual processing of EPC can be performed without the contribution of this region. Methods fMRI was used to delineate neural activity during the perception of prosodic stimuli conveying simple and complex emotion. Emotional trials in general, as compared to neutral ones, activated a network comprising temporal and lateral frontal brain regions, while complex emotion trials specifically showed an additional involvement of the mPFC, premotor cortex, frontal operculum and left insula. Conclusion These results indicate that the mPFC and premotor areas might be associated, but are not crucial to EPC. However, the mPFC supports socio-cognitive skills necessary to interpret complex emotion such as inferring mental states. Additionally, the premotor cortex involvement may reflect the participation of the mirror neuron system for prosody processing particularly of complex emotion. PMID:22174872

Independent component processes underlying emotions during natural music listening

PubMed Central

Zollinger, Nina; Elmer, Stefan; Jäncke, Lutz

2016-01-01

The aim of this study was to investigate the brain processes underlying emotions during natural music listening. To address this, we recorded high-density electroencephalography (EEG) from 22 subjects while presenting a set of individually matched whole musical excerpts varying in valence and arousal. Independent component analysis was applied to decompose the EEG data into functionally distinct brain processes. A k-means cluster analysis calculated on the basis of a combination of spatial (scalp topography and dipole location mapped onto the Montreal Neurological Institute brain template) and functional (spectra) characteristics revealed 10 clusters referring to brain areas typically involved in music and emotion processing, namely in the proximity of thalamic-limbic and orbitofrontal regions as well as at frontal, fronto-parietal, parietal, parieto-occipital, temporo-occipital and occipital areas. This analysis revealed that arousal was associated with a suppression of power in the alpha frequency range. On the other hand, valence was associated with an increase in theta frequency power in response to excerpts inducing happiness compared to sadness. These findings are partly compatible with the model proposed by Heller, arguing that the frontal lobe is involved in modulating valenced experiences (the left frontal hemisphere for positive emotions) whereas the right parieto-temporal region contributes to the emotional arousal. PMID:27217116

Happier People Show Greater Neural Connectivity during Negative Self-Referential Processing.

PubMed

Kim, Eun Joo; Kyeong, Sunghyon; Cho, Sang Woo; Chun, Ji-Won; Park, Hae-Jeong; Kim, Jihye; Kim, Joohan; Dolan, Raymond J; Kim, Jae-Jin

2016-01-01

Life satisfaction is an essential component of subjective well-being and provides a fundamental resource for optimal everyday functioning. The goal of the present study was to examine how life satisfaction influences self-referential processing of emotionally valenced stimuli. Nineteen individuals with high life satisfaction (HLS) and 21 individuals with low life satisfaction (LLS) were scanned using functional MRI while performing a face-word relevance rating task, which consisted of 3 types of face stimuli (self, public other, and unfamiliar other) and 3 types of word stimuli (positive, negative, and neutral). We found a significant group x word valence interaction effect, most strikingly in the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex. In the positive word condition dorsal medial prefrontal cortex activity was significantly higher in the LLS group, whereas in the negative word condition it was significantly higher in the HLS group. The two groups showed distinct functional connectivity of the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex with emotional processing-related regions. The findings suggest that, in response to emotional stimuli, individuals with HLS may successfully recruit emotion regulation-related regions in contrast to individuals with LLS. The difference in functional connectivity during self-referential processing may lead to an influence of life satisfaction on responses to emotion-eliciting stimuli.

Processing emotion from abstract art in frontotemporal lobar degeneration

PubMed Central

Cohen, Miriam H.; Carton, Amelia M.; Hardy, Christopher J.; Golden, Hannah L.; Clark, Camilla N.; Fletcher, Phillip D.; Jaisin, Kankamol; Marshall, Charles R.; Henley, Susie M.D.; Rohrer, Jonathan D.; Crutch, Sebastian J.; Warren, Jason D.

2016-01-01

Abstract art may signal emotions independently of a biological or social carrier: it might therefore constitute a test case for defining brain mechanisms of generic emotion decoding and the impact of disease states on those mechanisms. This is potentially of particular relevance to diseases in the frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) spectrum. These diseases are often led by emotional impairment despite retained or enhanced artistic interest in at least some patients. However, the processing of emotion from art has not been studied systematically in FTLD. Here we addressed this issue using a novel emotional valence matching task on abstract paintings in patients representing major syndromes of FTLD (behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia, n=11; sematic variant primary progressive aphasia (svPPA), n=7; nonfluent variant primary progressive aphasia (nfvPPA), n=6) relative to healthy older individuals (n=39). Performance on art emotion valence matching was compared between groups taking account of perceptual matching performance and assessed in relation to facial emotion matching using customised control tasks. Neuroanatomical correlates of art emotion processing were assessed using voxel-based morphometry of patients' brain MR images. All patient groups had a deficit of art emotion processing relative to healthy controls; there were no significant interactions between syndromic group and emotion modality. Poorer art emotion valence matching performance was associated with reduced grey matter volume in right lateral occopitotemporal cortex in proximity to regions previously implicated in the processing of dynamic visual signals. Our findings suggest that abstract art may be a useful model system for investigating mechanisms of generic emotion decoding and aesthetic processing in neurodegenerative diseases. PMID:26748236

Lateralization of affective processing in the insula.

PubMed

Duerden, Emma G; Arsalidou, Marie; Lee, Minha; Taylor, Margot J

2013-09-01

Evidence from electrophysiological and functional neuroimaging studies has suggested strong lateralization of affective processing within the insular cortices; however, little is known about the spatial location of these processes in these regions. Using quantitative meta-analytic methods the laterality of: (1) emotional processing; (2) stimulus valence (positive vs. negative); (3) perception vs. experience of emotion; and (4) sex-differences were assessed using the data from 143 functional magnetic resonance imaging studies. Activation in response to all emotional stimuli occurred in bilateral anterior and mid-insula, and the left posterior insula. Positive emotional stimuli were associated with activation in the left anterior and mid-insula, while negative emotional stimuli activated bilateral anterior and mid-insula. Activation in response to the perception and experience of emotions was highest in bilateral anterior insula, and within the mid and posterior insula it was left lateralized. In males, emotional stimuli predominantly activated the left anterior/mid-insula and right posterior insula, whereas females activated bilateral anterior insula and the left mid and posterior insula. Spatial distinctions observed in emotional processing and its subcategories can provide a comprehensive account of the role of the insular cortices in affect processing, which could aid in understanding deficits seen in psychiatric or developmental disorders. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Guanfacine modulates the influence of emotional cues on prefrontal cortex activation for cognitive control.

PubMed

Schulz, Kurt P; Clerkin, Suzanne M; Fan, Jin; Halperin, Jeffrey M; Newcorn, Jeffrey H

2013-03-01

Functional interactions between limbic regions that process emotions and frontal networks that guide response functions provide a substrate for emotional cues to influence behavior. Stimulation of postsynaptic α₂ adrenoceptors enhances the function of prefrontal regions in these networks. However, the impact of this stimulation on the emotional biasing of behavior has not been established. This study tested the effect of the postsynaptic α₂ adrenoceptor agonist guanfacine on the emotional biasing of response execution and inhibition in prefrontal cortex. Fifteen healthy young adults were scanned twice with functional magnetic resonance imaging while performing a face emotion go/no-go task following counterbalanced administration of single doses of oral guanfacine (1 mg) and placebo in a double-blind, cross-over design. Lower perceptual sensitivity and less response bias for sad faces resulted in fewer correct responses compared to happy and neutral faces but had no effect on correct inhibitions. Guanfacine increased the sensitivity and bias selectively for sad faces, resulting in response accuracy comparable to happy and neutral faces, and reversed the valence-dependent variation in response-related activation in left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), resulting in enhanced activation for response execution cued by sad faces relative to happy and neutral faces, in line with other frontoparietal regions. These results provide evidence that guanfacine stimulation of postsynaptic α₂ adrenoceptors moderates DLPFC activation associated with the emotional biasing of response execution processes. The findings have implications for the α₂ adrenoceptor agonist treatment of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Priming the Secure Attachment Schema Affects the Emotional Face Processing Bias in Attachment Anxiety: An fMRI Research

PubMed Central

Tang, Qingting; Chen, Xu; Hu, Jia; Liu, Ying

2017-01-01

Our study explored how priming with a secure base schema affects the processing of emotional facial stimuli in individuals with attachment anxiety. We enrolled 42 undergraduate students between 18 and 27 years of age, and divided them into two groups: attachment anxiety and attachment secure. All participants were primed under two conditions, the secure priming using references to the partner, and neutral priming using neutral references. We performed repeated attachment security priming combined with a dual-task paradigm and functional magnetic resonance imaging. Participants’ reaction times in terms of responding to the facial stimuli were also measured. Attachment security priming can facilitate an individual’s processing of positive emotional faces; for instance, the presentation of the partner’s name was associated with stronger activities in a wide range of brain regions and faster reaction times for positive facial expressions in the subjects. The current finding of higher activity in the left-hemisphere regions for secure priming rather than neutral priming is consistent with the prediction that attachment security priming triggers the spread of the activation of a positive emotional state. However, the difference in brain activity during processing of both, positive and negative emotional facial stimuli between the two priming conditions appeared in the attachment anxiety group alone. This study indicates that the effect of attachment secure priming on the processing of emotional facial stimuli could be mediated by chronic attachment anxiety. In addition, it highlights the association between higher-order processes of the attachment system (secure attachment schema priming) and early-stage information processing system (attention), given the increased attention toward the effects of secure base schema on the processing of emotion- and attachment-related information among the insecure population. Thus, the following study has applications in providing directions for clinical treatment of mood disorders in attachment anxiety. PMID:28473796

Priming the Secure Attachment Schema Affects the Emotional Face Processing Bias in Attachment Anxiety: An fMRI Research.

PubMed

Tang, Qingting; Chen, Xu; Hu, Jia; Liu, Ying

2017-01-01

Our study explored how priming with a secure base schema affects the processing of emotional facial stimuli in individuals with attachment anxiety. We enrolled 42 undergraduate students between 18 and 27 years of age, and divided them into two groups: attachment anxiety and attachment secure. All participants were primed under two conditions, the secure priming using references to the partner, and neutral priming using neutral references. We performed repeated attachment security priming combined with a dual-task paradigm and functional magnetic resonance imaging. Participants' reaction times in terms of responding to the facial stimuli were also measured. Attachment security priming can facilitate an individual's processing of positive emotional faces; for instance, the presentation of the partner's name was associated with stronger activities in a wide range of brain regions and faster reaction times for positive facial expressions in the subjects. The current finding of higher activity in the left-hemisphere regions for secure priming rather than neutral priming is consistent with the prediction that attachment security priming triggers the spread of the activation of a positive emotional state. However, the difference in brain activity during processing of both, positive and negative emotional facial stimuli between the two priming conditions appeared in the attachment anxiety group alone. This study indicates that the effect of attachment secure priming on the processing of emotional facial stimuli could be mediated by chronic attachment anxiety. In addition, it highlights the association between higher-order processes of the attachment system (secure attachment schema priming) and early-stage information processing system (attention), given the increased attention toward the effects of secure base schema on the processing of emotion- and attachment-related information among the insecure population. Thus, the following study has applications in providing directions for clinical treatment of mood disorders in attachment anxiety.

Disentangling the brain networks supporting affective speech comprehension.

PubMed

Hervé, Pierre-Yves; Razafimandimby, Annick; Vigneau, Mathieu; Mazoyer, Bernard; Tzourio-Mazoyer, Nathalie

2012-07-16

Areas involved in social cognition, such as the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and the left temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) appear to be active during the classification of sentences according to emotional criteria (happy, angry or sad, [Beaucousin et al., 2007]). These two regions are frequently co-activated in studies about theory of mind (ToM). To confirm that these regions constitute a coherent network during affective speech comprehension, new event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging data were acquired, using the emotional and grammatical-person sentence classification tasks on a larger sample of 51 participants. The comparison of the emotional and grammatical tasks confirmed the previous findings. Functional connectivity analyses established a clear demarcation between a "Medial" network, including the mPFC and TPJ regions, and a bilateral "Language" network, which gathered inferior frontal and temporal areas. These findings suggest that emotional speech comprehension results from interactions between language, ToM and emotion processing networks. The language network, active during both tasks, would be involved in the extraction of lexical and prosodic emotional cues, while the medial network, active only during the emotional task, would drive the making of inferences about the sentences' emotional content, based on their meanings. The left and right amygdalae displayed a stronger response during the emotional condition, but were seldom correlated with the other regions, and thus formed a third entity. Finally, distinct regions belonging to the Language and Medial networks were found in the left angular gyrus, where these two systems could interface. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Can modular psychological concepts like affect and emotion be assigned to a distinct subset of regional neural circuits?. Comment on "The quartet theory of human emotions: An integrative and neurofunctional model" by S. Koelsch et al.

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Fehr, Thorsten; Herrmann, Manfred

2015-06-01

The proposed Quartet Theory of Human Emotions by Koelsch and co-workers [11] adumbrates evidence from various scientific sources to integrate and assign the psychological concepts of 'affect' and 'emotion' to four brain circuits or to four neuronal core systems for affect-processing in the brain. The authors differentiate between affect and emotion and assign several facultative, or to say modular, psychological domains and principles of information processing, such as learning and memory, antecedents of affective activity, emotion satiation, cognitive complexity, subjective quality feelings, degree of conscious appraisal, to different affect systems. Furthermore, they relate orbito-frontal brain structures to moral affects as uniquely human, and the hippocampus to attachment-related affects. An additional feature of the theory describes 'emotional effector-systems' for motor-related processes (e.g., emotion-related actions), physiological arousal, attention and memory that are assumed to be cross-linked with the four proposed affect systems. Thus, higher principles of emotional information processing, but also modular affect-related issues, such as moral and attachment related affects, are thought to be handled by these four different physiological sub-systems that are on the other side assumed to be highly interwoven at both physiological and functional levels. The authors also state that the proposed sub-systems have many features in common, such as the selection and modulation of biological processes related to behaviour, perception, attention and memory. The latter aspect challenges an ongoing discussion about the mind-body problem: To which degree do the proposed sub-systems 'sufficiently' cover the processing of complex modular or facultative emotional/affective and/or cognitive phenomena? There are current models and scientific positions that almost completely reject the idea that modular psychological phenomena are handled by a distinct selection of regional brain systems or neural modules, but rather suggest highly complex and cross-linked neural networks individually shaped by livelong learning and experience [e.g., 6,7,10,13]. This holds in particular true for complex emotional phenomena such as aggression or empathy in social interaction [8,13]. It thus remains questionable, whether - beyond primary sensory and motor-processing - a small number of modular sub-systems sufficiently cover the organisation of specific phenomenological and social features of perception and behaviour [7,10].

Emotion, Cognition, and Mental State Representation in Amygdala and Prefrontal Cortex

PubMed Central

Salzman, C. Daniel; Fusi, Stefano

2011-01-01

Neuroscientists have often described cognition and emotion as separable processes implemented by different regions of the brain, such as the amygdala for emotion and the prefrontal cortex for cognition. In this framework, functional interactions between the amygdala and prefrontal cortex mediate emotional influences on cognitive processes such as decision-making, as well as the cognitive regulation of emotion. However, neurons in these structures often have entangled representations, whereby single neurons encode multiple cognitive and emotional variables. Here we review studies using anatomical, lesion, and neurophysiological approaches to investigate the representation and utilization of cognitive and emotional parameters. We propose that these mental state parameters are inextricably linked and represented in dynamic neural networks composed of interconnected prefrontal and limbic brain structures. Future theoretical and experimental work is required to understand how these mental state representations form and how shifts between mental states occur, a critical feature of adaptive cognitive and emotional behavior. PMID:20331363

Differential functional connectivity of rostral anterior cingulate cortex during emotional interference.

PubMed

Szekely, Akos; Silton, Rebecca L; Heller, Wendy; Miller, Gregory A; Mohanty, Aprajita

2017-03-01

The rostral-ventral subdivision of the anterior cingulate cortex (rACC) plays a key role in the regulation of emotional processing. Although rACC has strong anatomical connections with anterior insular cortex (AIC), amygdala, prefrontal cortex and striatal brain regions, it is unclear whether the functional connectivity of rACC with these regions changes when regulating emotional processing. Furthermore, it is not known whether this connectivity changes with deficits in emotion regulation seen in different kinds of anxiety and depression. To address these questions regarding rACC functional connectivity, non-patients high in self-reported anxious apprehension (AP), anxious arousal (AR), anhedonic depression (AD) or none (CON) indicated the ink color of pleasant, neutral and unpleasant words during functional magnetic resonance imaging. While ignoring task-irrelevant unpleasant words, AD and CON showed an increase in the functional connectivity of rACC with AIC, putamen, caudate and ventral pallidum. There was a decrease in this connectivity in AP and AR, with AP showing greater reduction than AR. These findings provide support for the role of rACC in integrating interoceptive, emotional and cognitive functions via interactions with insula and striatal regions during effective emotion regulation in healthy individuals and a failure of this integration that may be specific to anxiety, particularly AP. © The Author (2016). Published by Oxford University Press. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.

Pretreatment Differences in BOLD Response to Emotional Faces Correlate with Antidepressant Response to Scopolamine.

PubMed

Furey, Maura L; Drevets, Wayne C; Szczepanik, Joanna; Khanna, Ashish; Nugent, Allison; Zarate, Carlos A

2015-03-28

Faster acting antidepressants and biomarkers that predict treatment response are needed to facilitate the development of more effective treatments for patients with major depressive disorders. Here, we evaluate implicitly and explicitly processed emotional faces using neuroimaging to identify potential biomarkers of treatment response to the antimuscarinic, scopolamine. Healthy participants (n=15) and unmedicated-depressed major depressive disorder patients (n=16) participated in a double-blind, placebo-controlled crossover infusion study using scopolamine (4 μg/kg). Before and following scopolamine, blood oxygen-level dependent signal was measured using functional MRI during a selective attention task. Two stimuli comprised of superimposed pictures of faces and houses were presented. Participants attended to one stimulus component and performed a matching task. Face emotion was modulated (happy/sad) creating implicit (attend-houses) and explicit (attend-faces) emotion processing conditions. The pretreatment difference in blood oxygen-level dependent response to happy and sad faces under implicit and explicit conditions (emotion processing biases) within a-priori regions of interest was correlated with subsequent treatment response in major depressive disorder. Correlations were observed exclusively during implicit emotion processing in the regions of interest, which included the subgenual anterior cingulate (P<.02) and middle occipital cortices (P<.02). The magnitude and direction of differential blood oxygen-level- dependent response to implicitly processed emotional faces prior to treatment reflect the potential to respond to scopolamine. These findings replicate earlier results, highlighting the potential for pretreatment neural activity in the middle occipital cortices and subgenual anterior cingulate to inform us about the potential to respond clinically to scopolamine. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of CINP 2015. This work is written by (a) US Government employee(s) and is in the public domain in the US.

Ventromedial prefrontal cortex encodes emotional value.

PubMed

Winecoff, Amy; Clithero, John A; Carter, R McKell; Bergman, Sara R; Wang, Lihong; Huettel, Scott A

2013-07-03

The ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) plays a critical role in processing appetitive stimuli. Recent investigations have shown that reward value signals in the vmPFC can be altered by emotion regulation processes; however, to what extent the processing of positive emotion relies on neural regions implicated in reward processing is unclear. Here, we investigated the effects of emotion regulation on the valuation of emotionally evocative images. Two independent experimental samples of human participants performed a cognitive reappraisal task while undergoing fMRI. The experience of positive emotions activated the vmPFC, whereas the regulation of positive emotions led to relative decreases in vmPFC activation. During the experience of positive emotions, vmPFC activation tracked participants' own subjective ratings of the valence of stimuli. Furthermore, vmPFC activation also tracked normative valence ratings of the stimuli when participants were asked to experience their emotions, but not when asked to regulate them. A separate analysis of the predictive power of vmPFC on behavior indicated that even after accounting for normative stimulus ratings and condition, increased signal in the vmPFC was associated with more positive valence ratings. These results suggest that the vmPFC encodes a domain-general value signal that tracks the value of not only external rewards, but also emotional stimuli.

Neural network modeling of emotion

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Levine, Daniel S.

2007-03-01

This article reviews the history and development of computational neural network modeling of cognitive and behavioral processes that involve emotion. The exposition starts with models of classical conditioning dating from the early 1970s. Then it proceeds toward models of interactions between emotion and attention. Then models of emotional influences on decision making are reviewed, including some speculative (not and not yet simulated) models of the evolution of decision rules. Through the late 1980s, the neural networks developed to model emotional processes were mainly embodiments of significant functional principles motivated by psychological data. In the last two decades, network models of these processes have become much more detailed in their incorporation of known physiological properties of specific brain regions, while preserving many of the psychological principles from the earlier models. Most network models of emotional processes so far have dealt with positive and negative emotion in general, rather than specific emotions such as fear, joy, sadness, and anger. But a later section of this article reviews a few models relevant to specific emotions: one family of models of auditory fear conditioning in rats, and one model of induced pleasure enhancing creativity in humans. Then models of emotional disorders are reviewed. The article concludes with philosophical statements about the essential contributions of emotion to intelligent behavior and the importance of quantitative theories and models to the interdisciplinary enterprise of understanding the interactions of emotion, cognition, and behavior.

The neural correlates of regulating another person's emotions: an exploratory fMRI study

PubMed Central

Hallam, Glyn P.; Webb, Thomas L.; Sheeran, Paschal; Miles, Eleanor; Niven, Karen; Wilkinson, Iain D.; Hunter, Michael D.; Woodruff, Peter W. R.; Totterdell, Peter; Farrow, Tom F. D.

2014-01-01

Studies investigating the neurophysiological basis of intrapersonal emotion regulation (control of one's own emotional experience) report that the frontal cortex exerts a modulatory effect on limbic structures such as the amygdala and insula. However, no imaging study to date has examined the neurophysiological processes involved in interpersonal emotion regulation, where the goal is explicitly to regulate another person's emotion. Twenty healthy participants (10 males) underwent fMRI while regulating their own or another person's emotions. Intrapersonal and interpersonal emotion regulation tasks recruited an overlapping network of brain regions including bilateral lateral frontal cortex, pre-supplementary motor area, and left temporo-parietal junction. Activations unique to the interpersonal condition suggest that both affective (emotional simulation) and cognitive (mentalizing) aspects of empathy may be involved in the process of interpersonal emotion regulation. These findings provide an initial insight into the neural correlates of regulating another person's emotions and may be relevant to understanding mental health issues that involve problems with social interaction. PMID:24936178

Task modulated brain connectivity of the amygdala: a meta-analysis of psychophysiological interactions.

PubMed

Di, Xin; Huang, Jia; Biswal, Bharat B

2017-01-01

Understanding functional connectivity of the amygdala with other brain regions, especially task modulated connectivity, is a critical step toward understanding the role of the amygdala in emotional processes and the interactions between emotion and cognition. The present study performed coordinate-based meta-analysis on studies of task modulated connectivity of the amygdala which used psychophysiological interaction (PPI) analysis. We first analyzed 49 PPI studies on different types of tasks using activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analysis. Widespread cortical and subcortical regions showed consistent task modulated connectivity with the amygdala, including the medial frontal cortex, bilateral insula, anterior cingulate, fusiform gyrus, parahippocampal gyrus, thalamus, and basal ganglia. These regions were in general overlapped with those showed coactivations with the amygdala, suggesting that these regions and amygdala are not only activated together, but also show different levels of interactions during tasks. Further analyses with subsets of PPI studies revealed task specific functional connectivities with the amygdala that were modulated by fear processing, face processing, and emotion regulation. These results suggest a dynamic modulation of connectivity upon task demands, and provide new insights on the functions of the amygdala in different affective and cognitive processes. The meta-analytic approach on PPI studies may offer a framework toward systematical examinations of task modulated connectivity.

Gender differences in the activation of inferior frontal cortex during emotional speech perception.

PubMed

Schirmer, Annett; Zysset, Stefan; Kotz, Sonja A; Yves von Cramon, D

2004-03-01

We investigated the brain regions that mediate the processing of emotional speech in men and women by presenting positive and negative words that were spoken with happy or angry prosody. Hence, emotional prosody and word valence were either congruous or incongruous. We assumed that an fRMI contrast between congruous and incongruous presentations would reveal the structures that mediate the interaction of emotional prosody and word valence. The left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) was more strongly activated in incongruous as compared to congruous trials. This difference in IFG activity was significantly larger in women than in men. Moreover, the congruence effect was significant in women whereas it only appeared as a tendency in men. As the left IFG has been repeatedly implicated in semantic processing, these findings are taken as evidence that semantic processing in women is more susceptible to influences from emotional prosody than is semantic processing in men. Moreover, the present data suggest that the left IFG mediates increased semantic processing demands imposed by an incongruence between emotional prosody and word valence.

Emotion processing in the visual brain: a MEG analysis.

PubMed

Peyk, Peter; Schupp, Harald T; Elbert, Thomas; Junghöfer, Markus

2008-06-01

Recent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and event-related brain potential (ERP) studies provide empirical support for the notion that emotional cues guide selective attention. Extending this line of research, whole head magneto-encephalogram (MEG) was measured while participants viewed in separate experimental blocks a continuous stream of either pleasant and neutral or unpleasant and neutral pictures, presented for 330 ms each. Event-related magnetic fields (ERF) were analyzed after intersubject sensor coregistration, complemented by minimum norm estimates (MNE) to explore neural generator sources. Both streams of analysis converge by demonstrating the selective emotion processing in an early (120-170 ms) and a late time interval (220-310 ms). ERF analysis revealed that the polarity of the emotion difference fields was reversed across early and late intervals suggesting distinct patterns of activation in the visual processing stream. Source analysis revealed the amplified processing of emotional pictures in visual processing areas with more pronounced occipito-parieto-temporal activation in the early time interval, and a stronger engagement of more anterior, temporal, regions in the later interval. Confirming previous ERP studies showing facilitated emotion processing, the present data suggest that MEG provides a complementary look at the spread of activation in the visual processing stream.

Functional and dysfunctional brain circuits underlying emotional processing of music in autism spectrum disorders.

PubMed

Caria, Andrea; Venuti, Paola; de Falco, Simona

2011-12-01

Despite intersubject variability, dramatic impairments of socio-communicative skills are core features of autistic spectrum disorder (ASD). A deficit in the ability to express and understand emotions has often been hypothesized to be an important correlate of such impairments. Little is known about individuals with ASD's ability to sense emotions conveyed by nonsocial stimuli such as music. Music has been found to be capable of evoking and conveying strong and consistent positive and negative emotions in healthy subjects. The ability to process perceptual and emotional aspects of music seems to be maintained in ASD. Individuals with ASD and neurotypical (NT) controls underwent a single functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) session while processing happy and sad music excerpts. Overall, fMRI results indicated that while listening to both happy and sad music, individuals with ASD activated cortical and subcortical brain regions known to be involved in emotion processing and reward. A comparison of ASD participants with NT individuals demonstrated decreased brain activity in the premotor area and in the left anterior insula, especially in response to happy music excerpts. Our findings shed new light on the neurobiological correlates of preserved and altered emotional processing in ASD.

Machiavellian emotion regulation in a cognitive reappraisal task: An fMRI study.

PubMed

Deak, Anita; Bodrogi, Barbara; Biro, Brigitte; Perlaki, Gabor; Orsi, Gergely; Bereczkei, Tamas

2017-06-01

Affective coldness is one of the main features of Machiavellianism. Recent studies have revealed that Machiavellians are emotionally detached and that this "affective blunting" is associated with intense feelings, emotional instability, negative emotions, and difficulty in enduring distress. We used brain-imaging techniques to investigate emotion regulation in Machiavellianism at a neuropsychological level. We used situations in which participants were required to demonstrate emotional flexibility to explore the controversy surrounding the fact that Machiavellianism is associated with both cold-mindedness and emotional instability. Participants performed a reappraisal task in which emotionally evocative pictures (from the International Affective Picture System) were presented in different contexts (negative, positive, and neutral). They were asked to interpret a scenario according to its title and to reinterpret it according to another context created by a new title (e.g., negatively labeled pictures shifted to positively labeled ones). During task performance, Machiavellians showed increased activation of brain regions associated with emotion generation-for example, the amygdala and insula. This indicates that Machiavellian individuals are able to be involved emotionally in social situations. Increased activation in the temporal and parahippocampal regions during reappraisal suggests that Machiavellians use semantic-perceptual processes to construct alternative interpretations of the same situation and have enhanced memory for emotional stimuli. Furthermore, they seem to possess an intense awareness that leads them to shift attention from external to internal information to detect environmental changes. These cognitive processes may enable them to adjust their behavior quickly. This study supports the flexibility hypothesis of Machiavellianism and suggests that Machiavellians' approach to emotion regulation is linked to their rational mode of thinking.

M69. Changes in Neural Measures of Emotion Processes Following Targeted Social Cognition Training

PubMed Central

Saxena, Abhishek; Guty, Erin; Dodell-Feder, David; Yin, Hong; Haut, Kristen; Nahum, Mor; Hooker, Christine

2017-01-01

Abstract Background: Research has shown that people who develop a psychotic disorder display observable decreases in cognitive abilities even before they begin to display overt symptoms of psychosis. Thus research has shown an increased interest in targeted cognitive training (TCT) as possible technique to deter or even stop cognitive deterioration in psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia. Although TCT has shown promising improvements in certain cognitive deficits, TCT research has largely ignored social cognition training. The current study investigates whether targeted social cognition training may be a viable method of improving social cognition in patient populations. Methods: To this end, 56 healthy adults from the community completed MRI scans before and after a 2-week period, where participants were randomized to complete either up to 10 hours of SocialVille, a computerized social cognition training program from PositScience Corporation, or up to 10 hours of common computer games. SocialVille consists of a variety of social cognition exercises, such as face emotion recognition, gaze tracking, and recognizing social incongruences. During the MRI scans, participants completed an emotion identification task (EmotID), consisting of object discrimination and emotion discrimination blocks. During the object discrimination blocks, participants where shown pictures of 2 cars and were asked to indicate whether the cars were the same or different, while in the emotion discrimination blocks, participants were shown 2 faces and were asked whether the faces displayed the same emotion. Results: Behavioral data indicated that controlling for initial performance, sex, age, and estimated IQ, being in the TCT group only predicted better performance during the emotion discrimination blocks after treatment compared to those who completed placebo computer games. Additionally, fMRI analyses indicate that brain regions central to the emotion processes (ie, amygdala) and the social processes (ie, MPFC), saw significant increases in connectivity to other regions of the brain associated with emotion processes during the emotion discrimination blocks after training among the participants randomized to the TCT group compared to those assigned to complete placebo computer games, and in comparison to connectivity between these regions prior to training and during the object discrimination blocks. Conclusion: These findings indicate that social cognition can be improved in healthy adults with varying ability at baseline. Furthermore, these results indicate that it is possible to target specific neural systems associated with emotion and social cognition and show a learning-induced neuroplastic response. Thus, programs, like SocialVille, may be useful tools for targeted treatment in psychiatric populations where social cognition deficits are prominent, specifically schizophrenia.

The Social Neuroscience of Interpersonal Emotions.

PubMed

Müller-Pinzler, Laura; Krach, Sören; Krämer, Ulrike M; Paulus, Frieder M

In our daily lives, we constantly engage in reciprocal interactions with other individuals and represent ourselves in the context of our surrounding social world. Within social interactions, humans often experience interpersonal emotions such as embarrassment, shame, guilt, or pride. How interpersonal emotions are processed on the neural systems level is of major interest for social neuroscience research. While the configuration of laboratory settings in general is constraining for emotion research, recent neuroimaging investigations came up with new approaches to implement socially interactive and immersive scenarios for the real-life investigation of interpersonal emotions. These studies could show that among other brain regions the so-called mentalizing network, which is typically involved when we represent and make sense of others' states of mind, is associated with interpersonal emotions. The anterior insula/anterior cingulate cortex network at the same time processes one's own bodily arousal during such interpersonal emotional experiences. Current research aimed to explore how we make sense of others' emotional states during social interactions and investigates the modulating factors of our emotional experiences during social interactions. Understanding how interpersonal emotions are processed on the neural systems level may yield significant implications for neuropsychiatric disorders that affect social behavior such as social anxiety disorders or autism.

Processing emotion from abstract art in frontotemporal lobar degeneration.

PubMed

Cohen, Miriam H; Carton, Amelia M; Hardy, Christopher J; Golden, Hannah L; Clark, Camilla N; Fletcher, Phillip D; Jaisin, Kankamol; Marshall, Charles R; Henley, Susie M D; Rohrer, Jonathan D; Crutch, Sebastian J; Warren, Jason D

2016-01-29

art may signal emotions independently of a biological or social carrier: it might therefore constitute a test case for defining brain mechanisms of generic emotion decoding and the impact of disease states on those mechanisms. This is potentially of particular relevance to diseases in the frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) spectrum. These diseases are often led by emotional impairment despite retained or enhanced artistic interest in at least some patients. However, the processing of emotion from art has not been studied systematically in FTLD. Here we addressed this issue using a novel emotional valence matching task on abstract paintings in patients representing major syndromes of FTLD (behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia, n=11; sematic variant primary progressive aphasia (svPPA), n=7; nonfluent variant primary progressive aphasia (nfvPPA), n=6) relative to healthy older individuals (n=39). Performance on art emotion valence matching was compared between groups taking account of perceptual matching performance and assessed in relation to facial emotion matching using customised control tasks. Neuroanatomical correlates of art emotion processing were assessed using voxel-based morphometry of patients' brain MR images. All patient groups had a deficit of art emotion processing relative to healthy controls; there were no significant interactions between syndromic group and emotion modality. Poorer art emotion valence matching performance was associated with reduced grey matter volume in right lateral occopitotemporal cortex in proximity to regions previously implicated in the processing of dynamic visual signals. Our findings suggest that abstract art may be a useful model system for investigating mechanisms of generic emotion decoding and aesthetic processing in neurodegenerative diseases. Copyright © 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.

An ERP Study of Emotional Face Processing in the Adult and Infant Brain

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Leppanen, Jukka M.; Moulson, Margaret C.; Vogel-Farley, Vanessa K.; Nelson, Charles A.

2007-01-01

To examine the ontogeny of emotional face processing, event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from adults and 7-month-old infants while viewing pictures of fearful, happy, and neutral faces. Face-sensitive ERPs at occipital-temporal scalp regions differentiated between fearful and neutral/happy faces in both adults (N170 was larger for fear)…

The Neural Correlates of Cognitive Reappraisal during Emotional Autobiographical Memory Recall

PubMed Central

Holland, Alisha C.; Kensinger, Elizabeth A.

2013-01-01

We used fMRI to investigate the neural processes engaged as individuals down- and up-regulated the emotions associated with negative autobiographical memories (AMs) using cognitive reappraisal strategies. Our analyses examined neural activity during 3 separate phases, as participants: (a) viewed a reappraisal instruction (i.e., Decrease, Increase, Maintain), (b) searched for an AM referenced by a self-generated cue, and (c) elaborated upon the details of the AM being held in mind. Decreasing emotional intensity primarily engaged activity in regions previously implicated in cognitive control (e.g., dorsal and ventral lateral prefrontal cortex), emotion generation and processing (e.g., amygdala, insula), and visual imagery (e.g., precuneus) as participants searched for and retrieved events. In contrast, increasing emotional intensity engaged similar regions during the instruction phase (i.e., before a memory cue was presented) and again as individuals later elaborated upon the details of the events they had recalled. These findings confirm that reappraisal can modulate neural activity during the recall of personally-relevant events, though the time course of this modulation appears to depend on whether individuals are attempting to down- or up-regulate their emotions. PMID:22905826

Emotion introspection and regulation in depression.

PubMed

Herwig, Uwe; Opialla, Sarah; Cattapan, Katja; Wetter, Thomas C; Jäncke, Lutz; Brühl, Annette B

2018-07-30

Depressed patients suffer from an impairment to voluntarily influence and regulate their unpleasant emotional state. Strengthening the mental ability to interfere with dysfunctional emotion processing may be beneficial in treating depression. According to models of emotion processing this may be done by successful down-regulation of enhanced amygdala activity. We investigated short periods of intentional emotion-introspection compared with cognitive self-reflection as two domains of self-awareness in terms of effects on emotion regulation. Thirty depressed patients performed twelve second periods of emotion-introspection, self-reflection and a neutral condition during functional magnetic resonance imaging. We analyzed brain activation in the patients with depression by means of whole brain, region of interest and connectivity analyses. Amygdala activity decreased during emotion-introspection relative to self-reflection and to the neutral condition, whereby left amygdala was inversely activated relative to the left insula. Insula activity itself was correlated with medial and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) activation. In conclusion, depressed patients are able to down-regulate amygdala activity by emotion-introspection. This may be interpreted as well-working emotion regulation supposedly induced by PFC connections mediated via insula. The finding supports the application of emotion-introspection, a mindfulness-related process, in a clinical setting as an element of psychotherapy to train and improve emotion regulation. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Nicotine withdrawal modulates frontal brain function during an affective Stroop task

PubMed Central

Modlin, Leslie; Wang, Lihong; Kozink, Rachel V.; McClernon, F. Joseph

2013-01-01

Background Among nicotine-dependent smokers, smoking abstinence disrupts multiple cognitive and affective processes including conflict resolution and emotional information processing (EIP). However, the neurobiological basis of abstinence effects on resolving emotional interference on cognition remains largely uncharacterized. In this study, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to investigate smoking abstinence effects on emotion–cognition interactions. Methods Smokers (n=17) underwent fMRI while performing an affective Stroop task (aST) over two sessions: once following 24-h abstinence and once following smoking as usual. The aST includes trials that serially present incongruent or congruent numerical grids bracketed by neutral or negative emotional distractors and view-only emotional image trials. Statistical analyses were conducted using a statistical threshold of p<0.05 cluster corrected. Results Smoking abstinence increased Stroop blood-oxygenation-level-dependent response in the right middle frontal and rostral anterior cingulate gyri. Moreover, withdrawal-induced negative affect was associated with less activation in frontoparietal regions during negative emotional information processing; whereas, during Stroop trials, negative affect predicted greater activation in frontal regions during negative, but not neutral emotional distractor trials. Conclusion Hyperactivation in the frontal executive control network during smoking abstinence may represent a need to recruit additional executive resources to meet task demands. Moreover, abstinence-induced negative affect may disrupt cognitive control neural circuitry during EIP and place additional demands on frontal executive neural resources during cognitive demands when presented with emotionally distracting stimuli. PMID:21989805

Rapid discrimination of visual scene content in the human brain.

PubMed

Anokhin, Andrey P; Golosheykin, Simon; Sirevaag, Erik; Kristjansson, Sean; Rohrbaugh, John W; Heath, Andrew C

2006-06-06

The rapid evaluation of complex visual environments is critical for an organism's adaptation and survival. Previous studies have shown that emotionally significant visual scenes, both pleasant and unpleasant, elicit a larger late positive wave in the event-related brain potential (ERP) than emotionally neutral pictures. The purpose of the present study was to examine whether neuroelectric responses elicited by complex pictures discriminate between specific, biologically relevant contents of the visual scene and to determine how early in the picture processing this discrimination occurs. Subjects (n = 264) viewed 55 color slides differing in both scene content and emotional significance. No categorical judgments or responses were required. Consistent with previous studies, we found that emotionally arousing pictures, regardless of their content, produce a larger late positive wave than neutral pictures. However, when pictures were further categorized by content, anterior ERP components in a time window between 200 and 600 ms following stimulus onset showed a high selectivity for pictures with erotic content compared to other pictures regardless of their emotional valence (pleasant, neutral, and unpleasant) or emotional arousal. The divergence of ERPs elicited by erotic and non-erotic contents started at 185 ms post-stimulus in the fronto-central midline region, with a later onset in parietal regions. This rapid, selective, and content-specific processing of erotic materials and its dissociation from other pictures (including emotionally positive pictures) suggests the existence of a specialized neural network for prioritized processing of a distinct category of biologically relevant stimuli with high adaptive and evolutionary significance.

Rapid discrimination of visual scene content in the human brain

PubMed Central

Anokhin, Andrey P.; Golosheykin, Simon; Sirevaag, Erik; Kristjansson, Sean; Rohrbaugh, John W.; Heath, Andrew C.

2007-01-01

The rapid evaluation of complex visual environments is critical for an organism's adaptation and survival. Previous studies have shown that emotionally significant visual scenes, both pleasant and unpleasant, elicit a larger late positive wave in the event-related brain potential (ERP) than emotionally neutral pictures. The purpose of the present study was to examine whether neuroelectric responses elicited by complex pictures discriminate between specific, biologically relevant contents of the visual scene and to determine how early in the picture processing this discrimination occurs. Subjects (n=264) viewed 55 color slides differing in both scene content and emotional significance. No categorical judgments or responses were required. Consistent with previous studies, we found that emotionally arousing pictures, regardless of their content, produce a larger late positive wave than neutral pictures. However, when pictures were further categorized by content, anterior ERP components in a time window between 200−600 ms following stimulus onset showed a high selectivity for pictures with erotic content compared to other pictures regardless of their emotional valence (pleasant, neutral, and unpleasant) or emotional arousal. The divergence of ERPs elicited by erotic and non-erotic contents started at 185 ms post-stimulus in the fronto-central midline regions, with a later onset in parietal regions. This rapid, selective, and content-specific processing of erotic materials and its dissociation from other pictures (including emotionally positive pictures) suggests the existence of a specialized neural network for prioritized processing of a distinct category of biologically relevant stimuli with high adaptive and evolutionary significance. PMID:16712815

The involvement of emotion recognition in affective theory of mind.

PubMed

Mier, Daniela; Lis, Stefanie; Neuthe, Kerstin; Sauer, Carina; Esslinger, Christine; Gallhofer, Bernd; Kirsch, Peter

2010-11-01

This study was conducted to explore the relationship between emotion recognition and affective Theory of Mind (ToM). Forty subjects performed a facial emotion recognition and an emotional intention recognition task (affective ToM) in an event-related fMRI study. Conjunction analysis revealed overlapping activation during both tasks. Activation in some of these conjunctly activated regions was even stronger during affective ToM than during emotion recognition, namely in the inferior frontal gyrus, the superior temporal sulcus, the temporal pole, and the amygdala. In contrast to previous studies investigating ToM, we found no activation in the anterior cingulate, commonly assumed as the key region for ToM. The results point to a close relationship of emotion recognition and affective ToM and can be interpreted as evidence for the assumption that at least basal forms of ToM occur by an embodied, non-cognitive process. Copyright © 2010 Society for Psychophysiological Research.

Age-Related Changes in Amygdala-Frontal Connectivity during Emotional Face Processing from Childhood into Young Adulthood

PubMed Central

Wu, Minjie; Kujawa, Autumn; Lu, Lisa H.; Fitzgerald, Daniel A.; Klumpp, Heide; Fitzgerald, Kate D.; Monk, Christopher S.; Phan, K. Luan

2016-01-01

The ability to process and respond to emotional facial expressions is a critical skill for healthy social and emotional development. There has been growing interest in understanding the neural circuitry underlying development of emotional processing, with previous research implicating functional connectivity between amygdala and frontal regions. However, existing work has focused on threatening emotional faces, raising questions regarding the extent to which these developmental patterns are specific to threat or to emotional face processing more broadly. In the current study, we examined age-related changes in brain activity and amygdala functional connectivity during an fMRI emotional face matching task (including angry, fearful and happy faces) in 61 healthy subjects aged 7–25 years. We found age-related decreases in ventral medial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) activity in response to happy faces but not to angry or fearful faces, and an age-related change (shifting from positive to negative correlation) in amygdala-anterior cingulate cortex/medial prefrontal cortex (ACC/mPFC) functional connectivity to all emotional faces. Specifically, positive correlations between amygdala and ACC/mPFC in children changed to negative correlations in adults, which may suggest early emergence of bottom-up amygdala excitatory signaling to ACC/mPFC in children and later development of top-down inhibitory control of ACC/mPFC over amygdala in adults. Age-related changes in amygdala-ACC/mPFC connectivity did not vary for processing of different facial emotions, suggesting changes in amygdala-ACC/mPFC connectivity may underlie development of broad emotional processing, rather than threat-specific processing. PMID:26931629

Functional atlas of emotional faces processing: a voxel-based meta-analysis of 105 functional magnetic resonance imaging studies

PubMed Central

Fusar-Poli, Paolo; Placentino, Anna; Carletti, Francesco; Landi, Paola; Allen, Paul; Surguladze, Simon; Benedetti, Francesco; Abbamonte, Marta; Gasparotti, Roberto; Barale, Francesco; Perez, Jorge; McGuire, Philip; Politi, Pierluigi

2009-01-01

Background Most of our social interactions involve perception of emotional information from the faces of other people. Furthermore, such emotional processes are thought to be aberrant in a range of clinical disorders, including psychosis and depression. However, the exact neurofunctional maps underlying emotional facial processing are not well defined. Methods Two independent researchers conducted separate comprehensive PubMed (1990 to May 2008) searches to find all functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies using a variant of the emotional faces paradigm in healthy participants. The search terms were: “fMRI AND happy faces,” “fMRI AND sad faces,” “fMRI AND fearful faces,” “fMRI AND angry faces,” “fMRI AND disgusted faces” and “fMRI AND neutral faces.” We extracted spatial coordinates and inserted them in an electronic database. We performed activation likelihood estimation analysis for voxel-based meta-analyses. Results Of the originally identified studies, 105 met our inclusion criteria. The overall database consisted of 1785 brain coordinates that yielded an overall sample of 1600 healthy participants. Quantitative voxel-based meta-analysis of brain activation provided neurofunctional maps for 1) main effect of human faces; 2) main effect of emotional valence; and 3) modulatory effect of age, sex, explicit versus implicit processing and magnetic field strength. Processing of emotional faces was associated with increased activation in a number of visual, limbic, temporoparietal and prefrontal areas; the putamen; and the cerebellum. Happy, fearful and sad faces specifically activated the amygdala, whereas angry or disgusted faces had no effect on this brain region. Furthermore, amygdala sensitivity was greater for fearful than for happy or sad faces. Insular activation was selectively reported during processing of disgusted and angry faces. However, insular sensitivity was greater for disgusted than for angry faces. Conversely, neural response in the visual cortex and cerebellum was observable across all emotional conditions. Limitations Although the activation likelihood estimation approach is currently one of the most powerful and reliable meta-analytical methods in neuroimaging research, it is insensitive to effect sizes. Conclusion Our study has detailed neurofunctional maps to use as normative references in future fMRI studies of emotional facial processing in psychiatric populations. We found selective differences between neural networks underlying the basic emotions in limbic and insular brain regions. PMID:19949718

Asymmetric right/left encoding of emotions in the human subthalamic nucleus

PubMed Central

Eitan, Renana; Shamir, Reuben R.; Linetsky, Eduard; Rosenbluh, Ovadya; Moshel, Shay; Ben-Hur, Tamir; Bergman, Hagai; Israel, Zvi

2013-01-01

Emotional processing is lateralized to the non-dominant brain hemisphere. However, there is no clear spatial model for lateralization of emotional domains in the basal ganglia. The subthalamic nucleus (STN), an input structure in the basal ganglia network, plays a major role in the pathophysiology of Parkinson's disease (PD). This role is probably not limited only to the motor deficits of PD, but may also span the emotional and cognitive deficits commonly observed in PD patients. Beta oscillations (12–30 Hz), the electrophysiological signature of PD, are restricted to the dorsolateral part of the STN that corresponds to the anatomically defined sensorimotor STN. The more medial, more anterior and more ventral parts of the STN are thought to correspond to the anatomically defined limbic and associative territories of the STN. Surprisingly, little is known about the electrophysiological properties of the non-motor domains of the STN, nor about electrophysiological differences between right and left STNs. In this study, microelectrodes were utilized to record the STN spontaneous spiking activity and responses to vocal non-verbal emotional stimuli during deep brain stimulation (DBS) surgeries in human PD patients. The oscillation properties of the STN neurons were used to map the dorsal oscillatory and the ventral non-oscillatory regions of the STN. Emotive auditory stimulation evoked activity in the ventral non-oscillatory region of the right STN. These responses were not observed in the left ventral STN or in the dorsal regions of either the right or left STN. Therefore, our results suggest that the ventral non-oscillatory regions are asymmetrically associated with non-motor functions, with the right ventral STN associated with emotional processing. These results suggest that DBS of the right ventral STN may be associated with beneficial or adverse emotional effects observed in PD patients and may relieve mental symptoms in other neurological and psychiatric diseases. PMID:24194703

Blunted brain activation in patients with schizophrenia in response to emotional cognitive inhibition: a functional near-infrared spectroscopy study.

PubMed

Egashira, Kazuteru; Matsuo, Koji; Nakashima, Mami; Watanuki, Toshio; Harada, Kenichiro; Nakano, Masayuki; Matsubara, Toshio; Takahashi, Kanji; Watanabe, Yoshifumi

2015-03-01

Patients with schizophrenia (SZ) have deficits of facial emotion processing and cognitive inhibition, but the brain pathophysiology underlying these deficits and their interaction are not clearly understood. We tested brain activity during an emotional face go/no-go task that requires rapid executive control affected by emotional stimuli in patients with SZ using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Twenty-five patients with SZ and 28 healthy control subjects were studied. We evaluated behavioral performance and used fNIRS to measure oxygenated hemoglobin concentration changes in fronto-temporal areas during the emotional go/no-go task with emotional and non-emotional blocks. Patients with SZ made more errors and had longer reaction times in both test blocks compared with healthy subjects. Significantly greater activation in the inferior, superior, middle, and orbital frontal regions were observed in healthy subjects during the emotional go/no-go block compared to the non-emotional go/no-go block, but this difference was not observed in patients with SZ. Relative to healthy subjects, patients with SZ showed less activation in the superior and orbital frontal and middle temporal regions during the emotional go/no-go block. Our results suggest that fronto-temporal dysfunction in patients with SZ is due to an interaction between abnormal processing of emotional facial expressions with negative valence and cognitive inhibition, especially during the rapid selection of rule-based associations that override automatic emotional response tendencies. They indicate that fronto-temporal dysfunction is involved in the pathophysiology of emotional-cognitive deficits in patients with SZ. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The overlapping relationship between emotion perception and theory of mind.

PubMed

Mitchell, Rachel L C; Phillips, Louise H

2015-04-01

Socio-cognitive skills are crucial for successful interpersonal interactions. Two particularly important socio-cognitive processes are emotion perception (EP) and theory of mind (ToM), but agreement is lacking on terminology and conceptual links between these constructs. Here we seek to clarify the relationship between the two at multiple levels, from concept to neuroanatomy. EP is often regarded as a low-level perceptual process necessary to decode affective cues, while ToM is usually seen as a higher-level cognitive process involving mental state deduction. In information processing models, EP tends to precede ToM. At the neuroanatomical level, lesion study data suggest that EP and ToM are both right-hemisphere based, but there is also evidence that ToM requires temporal-cingulate networks, whereas EP requires partially separable regions linked to distinct emotions. Common regions identified in fMRI studies of EP and ToM have included medial prefrontal cortex and temporal lobe areas, but differences emerge depending on the perceptual, cognitive and emotional demands of the EP and ToM tasks. For the future, clarity of definition of EP and ToM will be paramount to produce distinct task manipulations and inform models of socio-cognitive processing. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Independent component processes underlying emotions during natural music listening.

PubMed

Rogenmoser, Lars; Zollinger, Nina; Elmer, Stefan; Jäncke, Lutz

2016-09-01

The aim of this study was to investigate the brain processes underlying emotions during natural music listening. To address this, we recorded high-density electroencephalography (EEG) from 22 subjects while presenting a set of individually matched whole musical excerpts varying in valence and arousal. Independent component analysis was applied to decompose the EEG data into functionally distinct brain processes. A k-means cluster analysis calculated on the basis of a combination of spatial (scalp topography and dipole location mapped onto the Montreal Neurological Institute brain template) and functional (spectra) characteristics revealed 10 clusters referring to brain areas typically involved in music and emotion processing, namely in the proximity of thalamic-limbic and orbitofrontal regions as well as at frontal, fronto-parietal, parietal, parieto-occipital, temporo-occipital and occipital areas. This analysis revealed that arousal was associated with a suppression of power in the alpha frequency range. On the other hand, valence was associated with an increase in theta frequency power in response to excerpts inducing happiness compared to sadness. These findings are partly compatible with the model proposed by Heller, arguing that the frontal lobe is involved in modulating valenced experiences (the left frontal hemisphere for positive emotions) whereas the right parieto-temporal region contributes to the emotional arousal. © The Author (2016). Published by Oxford University Press. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.

Amygdala and whole-brain activity to emotional faces distinguishes major depressive disorder and bipolar disorder.

PubMed

Fournier, Jay C; Keener, Matthew T; Almeida, Jorge; Kronhaus, Dina M; Phillips, Mary L

2013-11-01

It can be clinically difficult to distinguish depressed individuals with bipolar disorder (BD) and major depressive disorder (MDD). To examine potential biomarkers of difference between the two disorders, the current study examined differences in the functioning of emotion-processing neural regions during a dynamic emotional faces task. During functional magnetic resonance imaging, healthy control adults (HC) (n = 29) and depressed adults with MDD (n = 30) and BD (n = 22) performed an implicit emotional-faces task in which they identified a color label superimposed on neutral faces that dynamically morphed into one of four emotional faces (angry, fearful, sad, happy). We compared neural activation between the groups in an amygdala region-of-interest and at the whole-brain level. Adults with MDD showed significantly greater activity than adults with BD in the left amygdala to the anger condition (p = 0.01). Results of whole-brain analyses (at p < 0.005, k ≥ 20) revealed that adults with BD showed greater activity to sad faces in temporoparietal regions, primarily in the left hemisphere, whereas individuals with MDD demonstrated greater activity than those with BD to displays of anger, fear, and happiness. Many of the observed BD-MDD differences represented abnormalities in functioning compared to HC. We observed a dissociation between depressed adults with BD and MDD in the processing of emerging emotional faces. Those with BD showed greater activity during mood-congruent (i.e., sad) faces, whereas those with MDD showed greater activity for mood-incongruent (i.e., fear, anger, and happy) faces. Such findings may reflect markers of differences between BD and MDD depression in underlying pathophysiological processes. © 2013 John Wiley & Sons A/S. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

The role of spatial frequency information for ERP components sensitive to faces and emotional facial expression.

PubMed

Holmes, Amanda; Winston, Joel S; Eimer, Martin

2005-10-01

To investigate the impact of spatial frequency on emotional facial expression analysis, ERPs were recorded in response to low spatial frequency (LSF), high spatial frequency (HSF), and unfiltered broad spatial frequency (BSF) faces with fearful or neutral expressions, houses, and chairs. In line with previous findings, BSF fearful facial expressions elicited a greater frontal positivity than BSF neutral facial expressions, starting at about 150 ms after stimulus onset. In contrast, this emotional expression effect was absent for HSF and LSF faces. Given that some brain regions involved in emotion processing, such as amygdala and connected structures, are selectively tuned to LSF visual inputs, these data suggest that ERP effects of emotional facial expression do not directly reflect activity in these regions. It is argued that higher order neocortical brain systems are involved in the generation of emotion-specific waveform modulations. The face-sensitive N170 component was neither affected by emotional facial expression nor by spatial frequency information.

Mindfulness and emotion regulation—an fMRI study

PubMed Central

Lutz, Jacqueline; Herwig, Uwe; Opialla, Sarah; Hittmeyer, Anna; Jäncke, Lutz; Rufer, Michael; Grosse Holtforth, Martin

2014-01-01

Mindfulness—an attentive non-judgmental focus on present experiences—is increasingly incorporated in psychotherapeutic treatments as a skill fostering emotion regulation. Neurobiological mechanisms of actively induced emotion regulation are associated with prefrontally mediated down-regulation of, for instance, the amygdala. We were interested in neurobiological correlates of a short mindfulness instruction during emotional arousal. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we investigated effects of a short mindfulness intervention during the cued expectation and perception of negative and potentially negative pictures (50% probability) in 24 healthy individuals compared to 22 controls. The mindfulness intervention was associated with increased activations in prefrontal regions during the expectation of negative and potentially negative pictures compared to controls. During the perception of negative stimuli, reduced activation was identified in regions involved in emotion processing (amygdala, parahippocampal gyrus). Prefrontal and right insular activations when expecting negative pictures correlated negatively with trait mindfulness, suggesting that more mindful individuals required less regulatory resources to attenuate emotional arousal. Our findings suggest emotion regulatory effects of a short mindfulness intervention on a neurobiological level. PMID:23563850

Successful emotion regulation is predicted by amygdala activity and aspects of personality: A latent variable approach.

PubMed

Morawetz, Carmen; Alexandrowicz, Rainer W; Heekeren, Hauke R

2017-04-01

The experience of emotions and their cognitive control are based upon neural responses in prefrontal and subcortical regions and could be affected by personality and temperamental traits. Previous studies established an association between activity in reappraisal-related brain regions (e.g., inferior frontal gyrus and amygdala) and emotion regulation success. Given these relationships, we aimed to further elucidate how individual differences in emotion regulation skills relate to brain activity within the emotion regulation network on the one hand, and personality/temperamental traits on the other. We directly examined the relationship between personality and temperamental traits, emotion regulation success and its underlying neuronal network in a large sample (N = 82) using an explicit emotion regulation task and functional MRI (fMRI). We applied a multimethodological analysis approach, combing standard activation-based analyses with structural equation modeling. First, we found that successful downregulation is predicted by activity in key regions related to emotion processing. Second, the individual ability to successfully upregulate emotions is strongly associated with the ability to identify feelings, conscientiousness, and neuroticism. Third, the successful downregulation of emotion is modulated by openness to experience and habitual use of reappraisal. Fourth, the ability to regulate emotions is best predicted by a combination of brain activity and personality as well temperamental traits. Using a multimethodological analysis approach, we provide a first step toward a causal model of individual differences in emotion regulation ability by linking biological systems underlying emotion regulation with descriptive constructs. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved).

The impact of personal relevance on emotion processing: evidence from event-related potentials and pupillary responses

PubMed Central

Ruthmann, Katja; Schacht, Annekathrin

2017-01-01

Abstract Emotional stimuli attract attention and lead to increased activity in the visual cortex. The present study investigated the impact of personal relevance on emotion processing by presenting emotional words within sentences that referred to participants’ significant others or to unknown agents. In event-related potentials, personal relevance increased visual cortex activity within 100 ms after stimulus onset and the amplitudes of the Late Positive Complex (LPC). Moreover, personally relevant contexts gave rise to augmented pupillary responses and higher arousal ratings, suggesting a general boost of attention and arousal. Finally, personal relevance increased emotion-related ERP effects starting around 200 ms after word onset; effects for negative words compared to neutral words were prolonged in duration. Source localizations of these interactions revealed activations in prefrontal regions, in the visual cortex and in the fusiform gyrus. Taken together, these results demonstrate the high impact of personal relevance on reading in general and on emotion processing in particular. PMID:28541505

Emotional valence and arousal affect reading in an interactive way: Neuroimaging evidence for an approach-withdrawal framework

PubMed Central

Citron, Francesca M.M.; Gray, Marcus A.; Critchley, Hugo D.; Weekes, Brendan S.; Ferstl, Evelyn C.

2014-01-01

A growing body of literature shows that the emotional content of verbal material affects reading, wherein emotional words are given processing priority compared to neutral words. Human emotions can be conceptualised within a two-dimensional model comprised of emotional valence and arousal (intensity). These variables are at least in part distinct, but recent studies report interactive effects during implicit emotion processing and relate these to stimulus-evoked approach-withdrawal tendencies. The aim of the present study was to explore how valence and arousal interact at the neural level, during implicit emotion word processing. The emotional attributes of written word stimuli were orthogonally manipulated based on behavioural ratings from a corpus of emotion words. Stimuli were presented during an fMRI experiment while 16 participants performed a lexical decision task, which did not require explicit evaluation of a word′s emotional content. Results showed greater neural activation within right insular cortex in response to stimuli evoking conflicting approach-withdrawal tendencies (i.e., positive high-arousal and negative low-arousal words) compared to stimuli evoking congruent approach vs. withdrawal tendencies (i.e., positive low-arousal and negative high-arousal words). Further, a significant cluster of activation in the left extra-striate cortex was found in response to emotional than neutral words, suggesting enhanced perceptual processing of emotionally salient stimuli. These findings support an interactive two-dimensional approach to the study of emotion word recognition and suggest that the integration of valence and arousal dimensions recruits a brain region associated with interoception, emotional awareness and sympathetic functions. PMID:24440410

Regional cerebral changes and functional connectivity during the observation of negative emotional stimuli in subjects with post-traumatic stress disorder.

PubMed

Mazza, Monica; Tempesta, Daniela; Pino, Maria Chiara; Catalucci, Alessia; Gallucci, Massimo; Ferrara, Michele

2013-10-01

Patients with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) exhibit exaggerated brain responses to emotionally negative stimuli. Identifying the neural correlates of emotion regulation in these subjects is important for elucidating the neural circuitry involved in emotional dysfunction. The aim of this study was to investigate the functional connectivity between the areas activated during emotional processing of negative stimuli in a sample of individuals affected by PTSD compared to a group of healthy subjects. Ten subjects with PTSD (who survived the L'Aquila 2009 earthquake) and ten healthy controls underwent fMRI during which the participants observed 80 images: 40 pictures with negative emotional valence and 40 neutral (scrambled) stimuli. A higher activation was found in the left posterior (LP) insula for PTSD group and in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) for the healthy group. Two sets of Granger causality modeling analyses were performed to examine the directed influence from LP-insula and vmPFC to other brain regions. Activity in the vmPFC in the healthy group while observing negative stimuli predicted activity in several subcortical regions and insula, while in the PTSD group the LP-insula exerted a positive directed influence on several cortical regions. The hyperactivation in PTSD subjects of subcortical areas such as the insula would underlie the emotional, social, and relational difficulties of PTSD patients.

The effects of social anxiety on emotional face discrimination and its modulation by mouth salience.

PubMed

du Rocher, Andrew R; Pickering, Alan D

2018-05-21

People high in social anxiety experience fear of social situations due to the likelihood of social evaluation. Whereas happy faces are generally processed very quickly, this effect is impaired by high social anxiety. Mouth regions are implicated during emotional face processing, therefore differences in mouth salience might affect how social anxiety relates to emotional face discrimination. We designed an emotional facial expression recognition task to reveal how varying levels of sub-clinical social anxiety (measured by questionnaire) related to the discrimination of happy and fearful faces, and of happy and angry faces. We also categorised the facial expressions by the salience of the mouth region (i.e. high [open mouth] vs. low [closed mouth]). In a sample of 90 participants higher social anxiety (relative to lower social anxiety) was associated with a reduced happy face reaction time advantage. However, this effect was mainly driven by the faces with less salient closed mouths. Our results are consistent with theories of anxiety that incorporate an oversensitive valence evaluation system.

Film excerpts shown to specifically elicit various affects lead to overlapping activation foci in a large set of symmetrical brain regions in males.

PubMed

Karama, Sherif; Armony, Jorge; Beauregard, Mario

2011-01-01

While the limbic system theory continues to be part of common scientific parlance, its validity has been questioned on multiple grounds. Nonetheless, the issue of whether or not there exists a set of brain areas preferentially dedicated to emotional processing remains central within affective neuroscience. Recently, a widespread neural reference space for emotion which includes limbic as well as other regions was characterized in a large meta-analysis. As methodologically heterogeneous studies go into such meta-analyses, showing in an individual study in which all parameters are kept constant, the involvement of overlapping areas for various emotion conditions in keeping with the neural reference space for emotion, would serve as valuable confirmatory evidence. Here, using fMRI, 20 young adult men were scanned while viewing validated neutral and effective emotion-eliciting short film excerpts shown to quickly and specifically elicit disgust, amusement, or sexual arousal. Each emotion-specific run included, in random order, multiple neutral and emotion condition blocks. A stringent conjunction analysis revealed a large overlap across emotion conditions that fit remarkably well with the neural reference space for emotion. This overlap included symmetrical bilateral activation of the medial prefrontal cortex, the anterior cingulate, the temporo-occipital junction, the basal ganglia, the brainstem, the amygdala, the hippocampus, the thalamus, the subthalamic nucleus, the posterior hypothalamus, the cerebellum, as well as the frontal operculum extending towards the anterior insula. This study clearly confirms for the visual modality, that processing emotional stimuli leads to widespread increases in activation that cluster within relatively confined areas, regardless of valence.

How understanding the neurobiology of complex post-traumatic stress disorder can inform clinical practice: a social cognitive and affective neuroscience approach.

PubMed

Lanius, R A; Bluhm, R L; Frewen, P A

2011-11-01

In this review, we examine the relevance of the social cognitive and affective neuroscience (SCAN) paradigm for an understanding of the psychology and neurobiology of complex post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and its effective treatment. The relevant literature pertaining to SCAN and PTSD was reviewed. We suggest that SCAN offers a novel theoretical paradigm for understanding psychological trauma and its numerous clinical outcomes, most notably problems in emotional/self-awareness, emotion regulation, social emotional processing and self-referential processing. A core set of brain regions appear to mediate these collective psychological functions, most notably the cortical midline structures, the amygdala, the insula, posterior parietal cortex and temporal poles, suggesting that problems in one area (e.g. emotional awareness) may relate to difficulties in another (e.g. self-referential processing). We further propose, drawing on clinical research, that the experiences of individuals with PTSD related to chronic trauma often reflect impairments in multiple social cognitive and affective functions. It is important that the assessment and treatment of individuals with complex PTSD not only addresses traumatic memories but also takes a SCAN-informed approach that focuses on the underlying deficits in emotional/self-awareness, emotion regulation, social emotional processing and self-referential processing. © 2011 John Wiley & Sons A/S.

Neural Signaling of Food Healthiness Associated with Emotion Processing.

PubMed

Herwig, Uwe; Dhum, Matthias; Hittmeyer, Anna; Opialla, Sarah; Scherpiet, Sigrid; Keller, Carmen; Brühl, Annette B; Siegrist, Michael

2016-01-01

The ability to differentiate healthy from unhealthy foods is important in order to promote good health. Food, however, may have an emotional connotation, which could be inversely related to healthiness. The neurobiological background of differentiating healthy and unhealthy food and its relations to emotion processing are not yet well understood. We addressed the neural activations, particularly considering the single subject level, when one evaluates a food item to be of a higher, compared to a lower grade of healthiness with a particular view on emotion processing brain regions. Thirty-seven healthy subjects underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging while evaluating the healthiness of food presented as photographs with a subsequent rating on a visual analog scale. We compared individual evaluations of high and low healthiness of food items and also considered gender differences. We found increased activation when food was evaluated to be healthy in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and precuneus in whole brain analyses. In ROI analyses, perceived and rated higher healthiness was associated with lower amygdala activity and higher ventral striatal and orbitofrontal cortex activity. Females exerted a higher activation in midbrain areas when rating food items as being healthy. Our results underline the close relationship between food and emotion processing, which makes sense considering evolutionary aspects. Actively evaluating and deciding whether food is healthy is accompanied by neural signaling associated with reward and self-relevance, which could promote salutary nutrition behavior. The involved brain regions may be amenable to mechanisms of emotion regulation in the context of psychotherapeutic regulation of food intake.

Altered neural processing of emotional faces in remitted Cushing's disease.

PubMed

Bas-Hoogendam, Janna Marie; Andela, Cornelie D; van der Werff, Steven J A; Pannekoek, J Nienke; van Steenbergen, Henk; Meijer, Onno C; van Buchem, Mark A; Rombouts, Serge A R B; van der Mast, Roos C; Biermasz, Nienke R; van der Wee, Nic J A; Pereira, Alberto M

2015-09-01

Patients with long-term remission of Cushing's disease (CD) demonstrate residual psychological complaints. At present, it is not known how previous exposure to hypercortisolism affects psychological functioning in the long-term. Earlier magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies demonstrated abnormalities of brain structure and resting-state connectivity in patients with long-term remission of CD, but no data are available on functional alterations in the brain during the performance of emotional or cognitive tasks in these patients. We performed a cross-sectional functional MRI study, investigating brain activation during emotion processing in patients with long-term remission of CD. Processing of emotional faces versus a non-emotional control condition was examined in 21 patients and 21 matched healthy controls. Analyses focused on activation and connectivity of two a priori determined regions of interest: the amygdala and the medial prefrontal-orbitofrontal cortex (mPFC-OFC). We also assessed psychological functioning, cognitive failure, and clinical disease severity. Patients showed less mPFC activation during processing of emotional faces compared to controls, whereas no differences were found in amygdala activation. An exploratory psychophysiological interaction analysis demonstrated decreased functional coupling between the ventromedial PFC and posterior cingulate cortex (a region structurally connected to the PFC) in CD-patients. The present study is the first to show alterations in brain function and task-related functional coupling in patients with long-term remission of CD relative to matched healthy controls. These alterations may, together with abnormalities in brain structure, be related to the persisting psychological morbidity in patients with CD after long-term remission. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Age-related changes in amygdala-frontal connectivity during emotional face processing from childhood into young adulthood.

PubMed

Wu, Minjie; Kujawa, Autumn; Lu, Lisa H; Fitzgerald, Daniel A; Klumpp, Heide; Fitzgerald, Kate D; Monk, Christopher S; Phan, K Luan

2016-05-01

The ability to process and respond to emotional facial expressions is a critical skill for healthy social and emotional development. There has been growing interest in understanding the neural circuitry underlying development of emotional processing, with previous research implicating functional connectivity between amygdala and frontal regions. However, existing work has focused on threatening emotional faces, raising questions regarding the extent to which these developmental patterns are specific to threat or to emotional face processing more broadly. In the current study, we examined age-related changes in brain activity and amygdala functional connectivity during an fMRI emotional face matching task (including angry, fearful, and happy faces) in 61 healthy subjects aged 7-25 years. We found age-related decreases in ventral medial prefrontal cortex activity in response to happy faces but not to angry or fearful faces, and an age-related change (shifting from positive to negative correlation) in amygdala-anterior cingulate cortex/medial prefrontal cortex (ACC/mPFC) functional connectivity to all emotional faces. Specifically, positive correlations between amygdala and ACC/mPFC in children changed to negative correlations in adults, which may suggest early emergence of bottom-up amygdala excitatory signaling to ACC/mPFC in children and later development of top-down inhibitory control of ACC/mPFC over amygdala in adults. Age-related changes in amygdala-ACC/mPFC connectivity did not vary for processing of different facial emotions, suggesting changes in amygdala-ACC/mPFC connectivity may underlie development of broad emotional processing, rather than threat-specific processing. Hum Brain Mapp 37:1684-1695, 2016. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Amygdala abnormalities in first-degree relatives of individuals with schizophrenia unmasked by benzodiazepine challenge

PubMed Central

Wolf, Daniel H.; Satterthwaite, Theodore D.; Loughead, James; Pinkham, Amy; Overton, Eve; Elliott, Mark A.; Dent, Gersham W.; Smith, Mark A.; Gur, Ruben C.; Gur, Raquel E.

2014-01-01

Rationale Impaired emotion processing in schizophrenia predicts broader social dysfunction and has been related to negative symptom severity and amygdala dysfunction. Pharmacological modulation of emotion-processing deficits and related neural abnormalities may provide useful phenotypes for pathophysiological investigation. Objectives We used an acute benzodiazepine challenge to identify and modulate potential emotion-processing abnormalities in 20 unaffected first-degree relatives of individuals with schizophrenia, compared to 25 control subjects without a family history of psychosis. Methods An oral 1mg dose of the short-acting anxiolytic benzodiazepine alprazolam was administered in a balanced crossover placebo-controlled double-blind design, preceding identical 3T fMRI sessions approximately 1 week apart. Primary outcomes included fMRI activity in amygdala and related regions during two facial emotion-processing tasks: emotion identification and emotion memory. Results Family members exhibited abnormally strong alprazolam-induced reduction in amygdala and hippocampus activation during emotion identification, compared to equal reduction in both groups for the emotion memory task. Conclusions GABAergic modulation with alprazolam produced differential responses in family members vs. controls, perhaps by unmasking underlying amygdalar and/or GABAergic abnormalities. Such pharmacological fMRI paradigms could prove useful for developing drugs targeting specific neural circuits to treat or prevent schizophrenia. PMID:21603892

Influence of emotional processing on working memory in schizophrenia.

PubMed

Becerril, Karla; Barch, Deanna

2011-09-01

Research on emotional processing in schizophrenia suggests relatively intact subjective responses to affective stimuli "in the moment." However, neuroimaging evidence suggests diminished activation in brain regions associated with emotional processing in schizophrenia. We asked whether given a more vulnerable cognitive system in schizophrenia, individuals with this disorder would show increased or decreased modulation of working memory (WM) as a function of the emotional content of stimuli compared with healthy control subjects. In addition, we examined whether higher anhedonia levels were associated with a diminished impact of emotion on behavioral and brain activation responses. In the present study, 38 individuals with schizophrenia and 32 healthy individuals completed blocks of a 2-back WM task in a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanning session. Blocks contained faces displaying either only neutral stimuli or neutral and emotional stimuli (happy or fearful faces), randomly intermixed and occurring both as targets and non-targets. Both groups showed higher accuracy but slower reaction time for negative compared to neutral stimuli. Individuals with schizophrenia showed intact amygdala activity in response to emotionally evocative stimuli, but demonstrated altered dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and hippocampal activity while performing an emotionally loaded WM-task. Higher levels of social anhedonia were associated with diminished amygdala responses to emotional stimuli and increased DLPFC activity in individuals with schizophrenia. Emotional arousal may challenge dorsal-frontal control systems, which may have both beneficial and detrimental influences. Our findings suggest that disturbances in emotional processing in schizophrenia relate to alterations in emotion-cognition interactions rather than to the perception and subjective experience of emotion per se.

Changes in brain activity of somatoform disorder patients during emotional empathy after multimodal psychodynamic psychotherapy

PubMed Central

de Greck, Moritz; Bölter, Annette F.; Lehmann, Lisa; Ulrich, Cornelia; Stockum, Eva; Enzi, Björn; Hoffmann, Thilo; Tempelmann, Claus; Beutel, Manfred; Frommer, Jörg; Northoff, Georg

2013-01-01

Somatoform disorder patients show a variety of emotional disturbances including impaired emotion recognition and increased empathic distress. In a previous paper, our group showed that several brain regions involved in emotional processing, such as the parahippocampal gyrus and other regions, were less activated in pre-treatment somatoform disorder patients (compared to healthy controls) during an empathy task. Since the parahippocampal gyrus is involved in emotional memory, its decreased activation might reflect the repression of emotional memories (which—according to psychoanalytical concepts—plays an important role in somatoform disorder). Psychodynamic psychotherapy aims at increasing the understanding of emotional conflicts as well as uncovering repressed emotions. We were interested, whether brain activity in the parahippocampal gyrus normalized after (inpatient) multimodal psychodynamic psychotherapy. Using fMRI, subjects were scanned while they shared the emotional states of presented facial stimuli expressing anger, disgust, joy, and a neutral expression; distorted stimuli with unrecognizable content served as control condition. 15 somatoform disorder patients were scanned twice, pre and post multimodal psychodynamic psychotherapy; in addition, 15 age-matched healthy control subjects were investigated. Effects of psychotherapy on hemodynamic responses were analyzed implementing two approaches: (1) an a priori region of interest approach and (2) a voxelwise whole brain analysis. Both analyses revealed increased hemodynamic responses in the left and right parahippocampal gyrus (and other regions) after multimodal psychotherapy in the contrast “empathy with anger”—“control.” Our results are in line with psychoanalytical concepts about somatoform disorder. They suggest the parahippocampal gyrus is crucially involved in the neurobiological mechanisms which underly the emotional deficits of somatoform disorder patients. PMID:23966922

Increased subjective experience of non-target emotions in patients with frontotemporal dementia and Alzheimer’s disease

PubMed Central

Chen, Kuan-Hua; Lwi, Sandy J.; Hua, Alice Y.; Haase, Claudia M.; Miller, Bruce L.; Levenson, Robert W.

2017-01-01

Although laboratory procedures are designed to produce specific emotions, participants often experience mixed emotions (i.e., target and non-target emotions). We examined non-target emotions in patients with frontotemporal dementia (FTD), Alzheimer’s disease (AD), other neurodegenerative diseases, and healthy controls. Participants watched film clips designed to produce three target emotions. Subjective experience of non-target emotions was assessed and emotional facial expressions were coded. Compared to patients with other neurodegenerative diseases and healthy controls, FTD patients reported more positive and negative non-target emotions, whereas AD patients reported more positive non-target emotions. There were no group differences in facial expressions of non-target emotions. We interpret these findings as reflecting deficits in processing interoceptive and contextual information resulting from neurodegeneration in brain regions critical for creating subjective emotional experience. PMID:29457053

Neural mechanism underlying autobiographical memory modulated by remoteness and emotion

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ge, Ruiyang; Fu, Yan; Wang, DaHua; Yao, Li; Long, Zhiying

2012-03-01

Autobiographical memory is the ability to recollect past events from one's own life. Both emotional tone and memory remoteness can influence autobiographical memory retrieval along the time axis of one's life. Although numerous studies have been performed to investigate brain regions involved in retrieving processes of autobiographical memory, the effect of emotional tone and memory age on autobiographical memory retrieval remains to be clarified. Moreover, whether the involvement of hippocampus in consolidation of autobiographical events is time dependent or independent has been controversial. In this study, we investigated the effect of memory remoteness (factor1: recent and remote) and emotional valence (factor2: positive and negative) on neural correlates underlying autobiographical memory by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technique. Although all four conditions activated some common regions known as "core" regions in autobiographical memory retrieval, there are some other regions showing significantly different activation for recent versus remote and positive versus negative memories. In particular, we found that bilateral hippocampal regions were activated in the four conditions regardless of memory remoteness and emotional valence. Thus, our study confirmed some findings of previous studies and provided further evidence to support the multi-trace theory which believes that the role of hippocampus involved in autobiographical memory retrieval is time-independent and permanent in memory consolidation.

The slow forgetting of emotional episodic memories: An emotional binding account

PubMed Central

Yonelinas, Andrew P.; Ritchey, Maureen

2015-01-01

Emotional events are remembered better than neutral events, and this emotion advantage becomes particularly pronounced over time. The time dependent effects of emotion impact recollection rather than familiarity-based recognition, and they influence recollection of item-specific details rather than contextual details. Moreover, the amygdala, but not the hippocampus, is critical in producing these effects. Time-dependent effects of emotion have been attributed to an emotional consolidation process whereby the amygdala gradually facilitates the storage of emotional memories by other medial temporal lobe regions. However, here we propose that these effects can be better understood by an emotional binding account whereby the amygdala mediates the recollection of item-emotion bindings that are forgotten more slowly than item-context bindings supported by the hippocampus. PMID:25836045

Connecting multimodality in human communication

PubMed Central

Regenbogen, Christina; Habel, Ute; Kellermann, Thilo

2013-01-01

A successful reciprocal evaluation of social signals serves as a prerequisite for social coherence and empathy. In a previous fMRI study we studied naturalistic communication situations by presenting video clips to our participants and recording their behavioral responses regarding empathy and its components. In two conditions, all three channels transported congruent emotional or neutral information, respectively. Three conditions selectively presented two emotional channels and one neutral channel and were thus bimodally emotional. We reported channel-specific emotional contributions in modality-related areas, elicited by dynamic video clips with varying combinations of emotionality in facial expressions, prosody, and speech content. However, to better understand the underlying mechanisms accompanying a naturalistically displayed human social interaction in some key regions that presumably serve as specific processing hubs for facial expressions, prosody, and speech content, we pursued a reanalysis of the data. Here, we focused on two different descriptions of temporal characteristics within these three modality-related regions [right fusiform gyrus (FFG), left auditory cortex (AC), left angular gyrus (AG) and left dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC)]. By means of a finite impulse response (FIR) analysis within each of the three regions we examined the post-stimulus time-courses as a description of the temporal characteristics of the BOLD response during the video clips. Second, effective connectivity between these areas and the left dmPFC was analyzed using dynamic causal modeling (DCM) in order to describe condition-related modulatory influences on the coupling between these regions. The FIR analysis showed initially diminished activation in bimodally emotional conditions but stronger activation than that observed in neutral videos toward the end of the stimuli, possibly by bottom-up processes in order to compensate for a lack of emotional information. The DCM analysis instead showed a pronounced top-down control. Remarkably, all connections from the dmPFC to the three other regions were modulated by the experimental conditions. This observation is in line with the presumed role of the dmPFC in the allocation of attention. In contrary, all incoming connections to the AG were modulated, indicating its key role in integrating multimodal information and supporting comprehension. Notably, the input from the FFG to the AG was enhanced when facial expressions conveyed emotional information. These findings serve as preliminary results in understanding network dynamics in human emotional communication and empathy. PMID:24265613

Connecting multimodality in human communication.

PubMed

Regenbogen, Christina; Habel, Ute; Kellermann, Thilo

2013-01-01

A successful reciprocal evaluation of social signals serves as a prerequisite for social coherence and empathy. In a previous fMRI study we studied naturalistic communication situations by presenting video clips to our participants and recording their behavioral responses regarding empathy and its components. In two conditions, all three channels transported congruent emotional or neutral information, respectively. Three conditions selectively presented two emotional channels and one neutral channel and were thus bimodally emotional. We reported channel-specific emotional contributions in modality-related areas, elicited by dynamic video clips with varying combinations of emotionality in facial expressions, prosody, and speech content. However, to better understand the underlying mechanisms accompanying a naturalistically displayed human social interaction in some key regions that presumably serve as specific processing hubs for facial expressions, prosody, and speech content, we pursued a reanalysis of the data. Here, we focused on two different descriptions of temporal characteristics within these three modality-related regions [right fusiform gyrus (FFG), left auditory cortex (AC), left angular gyrus (AG) and left dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC)]. By means of a finite impulse response (FIR) analysis within each of the three regions we examined the post-stimulus time-courses as a description of the temporal characteristics of the BOLD response during the video clips. Second, effective connectivity between these areas and the left dmPFC was analyzed using dynamic causal modeling (DCM) in order to describe condition-related modulatory influences on the coupling between these regions. The FIR analysis showed initially diminished activation in bimodally emotional conditions but stronger activation than that observed in neutral videos toward the end of the stimuli, possibly by bottom-up processes in order to compensate for a lack of emotional information. The DCM analysis instead showed a pronounced top-down control. Remarkably, all connections from the dmPFC to the three other regions were modulated by the experimental conditions. This observation is in line with the presumed role of the dmPFC in the allocation of attention. In contrary, all incoming connections to the AG were modulated, indicating its key role in integrating multimodal information and supporting comprehension. Notably, the input from the FFG to the AG was enhanced when facial expressions conveyed emotional information. These findings serve as preliminary results in understanding network dynamics in human emotional communication and empathy.

Emotional context enhances auditory novelty processing in superior temporal gyrus.

PubMed

Domínguez-Borràs, Judith; Trautmann, Sina-Alexa; Erhard, Peter; Fehr, Thorsten; Herrmann, Manfred; Escera, Carles

2009-07-01

Visualizing emotionally loaded pictures intensifies peripheral reflexes toward sudden auditory stimuli, suggesting that the emotional context may potentiate responses elicited by novel events in the acoustic environment. However, psychophysiological results have reported that attentional resources available to sounds become depleted, as attention allocation to emotional pictures increases. These findings have raised the challenging question of whether an emotional context actually enhances or attenuates auditory novelty processing at a central level in the brain. To solve this issue, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to first identify brain activations induced by novel sounds (NOV) when participants made a color decision on visual stimuli containing both negative (NEG) and neutral (NEU) facial expressions. We then measured modulation of these auditory responses by the emotional load of the task. Contrary to what was assumed, activation induced by NOV in superior temporal gyrus (STG) was enhanced when subjects responded to faces with a NEG emotional expression compared with NEU ones. Accordingly, NOV yielded stronger behavioral disruption on subjects' performance in the NEG context. These results demonstrate that the emotional context modulates the excitability of auditory and possibly multimodal novelty cerebral regions, enhancing acoustic novelty processing in a potentially harming environment.

Mesial temporal lobe epilepsy diminishes functional connectivity during emotion perception.

PubMed

Steiger, Bettina K; Muller, Angela M; Spirig, Esther; Toller, Gianina; Jokeit, Hennric

2017-08-01

Unilateral mesial temporal lobe epilepsy (MTLE) has been associated with impaired recognition of emotional facial expressions. Correspondingly, imaging studies showed decreased activity of the amygdala and cortical face processing regions in response to emotional faces. However, functional connectivity among regions involved in emotion perception has not been studied so far. To address this, we examined intrinsic functional connectivity (FC) modulated by the perception of dynamic fearful faces among the amygdala and limbic, frontal, temporal and brainstem regions. Regions of interest were identified in an activation analysis by presenting a block-design with dynamic fearful faces and dynamic landscapes to 15 healthy individuals. This led to 10 predominately right-hemispheric regions. Functional connectivity between these regions during the perception of fearful faces was examined in drug-refractory patients with left- (n=16) or right-sided (n=17) MTLE, epilepsy patients with extratemporal seizure onset (n=15) and a second group of 15 healthy controls. Healthy controls showed a widespread functional network modulated by the perception of fearful faces that encompassed bilateral amygdalae, limbic, cortical, subcortical and brainstem regions. In patients with left MTLE, a downsized network of frontal and temporal regions centered on the right amygdala was present. Patients with right MTLE showed almost no significant functional connectivity. A maintained network in the epilepsy control group indicates that findings in mesial temporal lobe epilepsy could not be explained by clinical factors such as seizures and antiepileptic medication. Functional networks underlying facial emotion perception are considerably changed in left and right MTLE. Alterations are present for both hemispheres in either MTLE group, but are more pronounced in right MTLE. Disruption of the functional network architecture possibly contributes to deficits in facial emotion recognition frequently reported in MTLE. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Sleep and dreaming are for important matters

PubMed Central

Perogamvros, L.; Dang-Vu, T. T.; Desseilles, M.; Schwartz, S.

2013-01-01

Recent studies in sleep and dreaming have described an activation of emotional and reward systems, as well as the processing of internal information during these states. Specifically, increased activity in the amygdala and across mesolimbic dopaminergic regions during REM sleep is likely to promote the consolidation of memory traces with high emotional/motivational value. Moreover, coordinated hippocampal-striatal replay during NREM sleep may contribute to the selective strengthening of memories for important events. In this review, we suggest that, via the activation of emotional/motivational circuits, sleep and dreaming may offer a neurobehavioral substrate for the offline reprocessing of emotions, associative learning, and exploratory behaviors, resulting in improved memory organization, waking emotion regulation, social skills, and creativity. Dysregulation of such motivational/emotional processes due to sleep disturbances (e.g., insomnia, sleep deprivation) would predispose to reward-related disorders, such as mood disorders, increased risk-taking and compulsive behaviors, and may have major health implications, especially in vulnerable populations. PMID:23898315

Multimodal emotion perception after anterior temporal lobectomy (ATL)

PubMed Central

Milesi, Valérie; Cekic, Sezen; Péron, Julie; Frühholz, Sascha; Cristinzio, Chiara; Seeck, Margitta; Grandjean, Didier

2014-01-01

In the context of emotion information processing, several studies have demonstrated the involvement of the amygdala in emotion perception, for unimodal and multimodal stimuli. However, it seems that not only the amygdala, but several regions around it, may also play a major role in multimodal emotional integration. In order to investigate the contribution of these regions to multimodal emotion perception, five patients who had undergone unilateral anterior temporal lobe resection were exposed to both unimodal (vocal or visual) and audiovisual emotional and neutral stimuli. In a classic paradigm, participants were asked to rate the emotional intensity of angry, fearful, joyful, and neutral stimuli on visual analog scales. Compared with matched controls, patients exhibited impaired categorization of joyful expressions, whether the stimuli were auditory, visual, or audiovisual. Patients confused joyful faces with neutral faces, and joyful prosody with surprise. In the case of fear, unlike matched controls, patients provided lower intensity ratings for visual stimuli than for vocal and audiovisual ones. Fearful faces were frequently confused with surprised ones. When we controlled for lesion size, we no longer observed any overall difference between patients and controls in their ratings of emotional intensity on the target scales. Lesion size had the greatest effect on intensity perceptions and accuracy in the visual modality, irrespective of the type of emotion. These new findings suggest that a damaged amygdala, or a disrupted bundle between the amygdala and the ventral part of the occipital lobe, has a greater impact on emotion perception in the visual modality than it does in either the vocal or audiovisual one. We can surmise that patients are able to use the auditory information contained in multimodal stimuli to compensate for difficulty processing visually conveyed emotion. PMID:24839437

Emotion disrupts neural activity during selective attention in psychopathy

PubMed Central

Spielberg, Jeffrey M.; Heller, Wendy; Herrington, John D.; Engels, Anna S.; Warren, Stacie L.; Crocker, Laura D.; Sutton, Bradley P.; Miller, Gregory A.

2013-01-01

Dimensions of psychopathy are theorized to be associated with distinct cognitive and emotional abnormalities that may represent unique neurobiological risk factors for the disorder. This hypothesis was investigated by examining whether the psychopathic personality dimensions of fearless-dominance and impulsive-antisociality moderated neural activity and behavioral responses associated with selective attention and emotional processing during an emotion-word Stroop task in 49 adults. As predicted, the dimensions evidenced divergent selective-attention deficits and sensitivity to emotional distraction. Fearless-dominance was associated with disrupted attentional control to positive words, and activation in right superior frontal gyrus mediated the relationship between fearless-dominance and errors to positive words. In contrast, impulsive-antisociality evidenced increased behavioral interference to both positive and negative words and correlated positively with recruitment of regions associated with motivational salience (amygdala, orbitofrontal cortex, insula), emotion regulation (temporal cortex, superior frontal gyrus) and attentional control (dorsal anterior cingulate cortex). Individuals high on both dimensions had increased recruitment of regions related to attentional control (temporal cortex, rostral anterior cingulate cortex), response preparation (pre-/post-central gyri) and motivational value (orbitofrontal cortex) in response to negative words. These findings provide evidence that the psychopathy dimensions represent dual sets of risk factors characterized by divergent dysfunction in cognitive and affective processes. PMID:22210673

Emotion disrupts neural activity during selective attention in psychopathy.

PubMed

Sadeh, Naomi; Spielberg, Jeffrey M; Heller, Wendy; Herrington, John D; Engels, Anna S; Warren, Stacie L; Crocker, Laura D; Sutton, Bradley P; Miller, Gregory A

2013-03-01

Dimensions of psychopathy are theorized to be associated with distinct cognitive and emotional abnormalities that may represent unique neurobiological risk factors for the disorder. This hypothesis was investigated by examining whether the psychopathic personality dimensions of fearless-dominance and impulsive-antisociality moderated neural activity and behavioral responses associated with selective attention and emotional processing during an emotion-word Stroop task in 49 adults. As predicted, the dimensions evidenced divergent selective-attention deficits and sensitivity to emotional distraction. Fearless-dominance was associated with disrupted attentional control to positive words, and activation in right superior frontal gyrus mediated the relationship between fearless-dominance and errors to positive words. In contrast, impulsive-antisociality evidenced increased behavioral interference to both positive and negative words and correlated positively with recruitment of regions associated with motivational salience (amygdala, orbitofrontal cortex, insula), emotion regulation (temporal cortex, superior frontal gyrus) and attentional control (dorsal anterior cingulate cortex). Individuals high on both dimensions had increased recruitment of regions related to attentional control (temporal cortex, rostral anterior cingulate cortex), response preparation (pre-/post-central gyri) and motivational value (orbitofrontal cortex) in response to negative words. These findings provide evidence that the psychopathy dimensions represent dual sets of risk factors characterized by divergent dysfunction in cognitive and affective processes.

Direction of Amygdala-Neocortex Interaction During Dynamic Facial Expression Processing.

PubMed

Sato, Wataru; Kochiyama, Takanori; Uono, Shota; Yoshikawa, Sakiko; Toichi, Motomi

2017-03-01

Dynamic facial expressions of emotion strongly elicit multifaceted emotional, perceptual, cognitive, and motor responses. Neuroimaging studies revealed that some subcortical (e.g., amygdala) and neocortical (e.g., superior temporal sulcus and inferior frontal gyrus) brain regions and their functional interaction were involved in processing dynamic facial expressions. However, the direction of the functional interaction between the amygdala and the neocortex remains unknown. To investigate this issue, we re-analyzed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data from 2 studies and magnetoencephalography (MEG) data from 1 study. First, a psychophysiological interaction analysis of the fMRI data confirmed the functional interaction between the amygdala and neocortical regions. Then, dynamic causal modeling analysis was used to compare models with forward, backward, or bidirectional effective connectivity between the amygdala and neocortical networks in the fMRI and MEG data. The results consistently supported the model of effective connectivity from the amygdala to the neocortex. Further increasing time-window analysis of the MEG demonstrated that this model was valid after 200 ms from the stimulus onset. These data suggest that emotional processing in the amygdala rapidly modulates some neocortical processing, such as perception, recognition, and motor mimicry, when observing dynamic facial expressions of emotion. © The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.

The Route to an Integrative Associative Memory Is Influenced by Emotion

PubMed Central

Murray, Brendan D.; Kensinger, Elizabeth A.

2014-01-01

Though the hippocampus typically has been implicated in processes related to associative binding, special types of associations – such as those created by integrative mental imagery – may be supported by processes implemented in other medial temporal-lobe or sensory processing regions. Here, we investigated what neural mechanisms underlie the formation and subsequent retrieval of integrated mental images, and whether those mechanisms differ based on the emotionality of the integration (i.e., whether it contains an emotional item or not). Participants viewed pairs of words while undergoing a functional MRI scan. They were instructed to imagine the two items separately from one another (“non-integrative” study) or as a single, integrated mental image (“integrative” study). They provided ratings of how successful they were at generating vivid images that fit the instructions. They were then given a surprise associative recognition test, also while undergoing an fMRI scan. The cuneus showed parametric correspondence to increasing imagery success selectively during encoding and retrieval of emotional integrations, while the parahippocampal gyri and prefrontal cortices showed parametric correspondence during the encoding and retrieval of non-emotional integrations. Connectivity analysis revealed that selectively during negative integration, left amygdala activity was negatively correlated with frontal and hippocampal activity. These data indicate that individuals utilize two different neural routes for forming and retrieving integrations depending on their emotional content, and they suggest a potentially disruptive role for the amygdala on frontal and medial-temporal regions during negative integration. PMID:24427267

Effects of aging on functional connectivity of the amygdala for subsequent memory of negative pictures: a network analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging data.

PubMed

St Jacques, Peggy L; Dolcos, Florin; Cabeza, Roberto

2009-01-01

Aging is associated with preserved enhancement of emotional memory, as well as with age-related reductions in memory for negative stimuli, but the neural networks underlying such alterations are not clear. We used a subsequent-memory paradigm to identify brain activity predicting enhanced emotional memory in young and older adults. Activity in the amygdala predicted enhanced emotional memory, with subsequent-memory activity greater for negative stimuli than for neutral stimuli, across age groups, a finding consistent with an overall enhancement of emotional memory. However, older adults recruited greater activity in anterior regions and less activity in posterior regions in general for negative stimuli that were subsequently remembered. Functional connectivity of the amygdala with the rest of the brain was consistent with age-related reductions in memory for negative stimuli: Older adults showed decreased functional connectivity between the amygdala and the hippocampus, but increased functional connectivity between the amygdala and dorsolateral prefrontal cortices. These findings suggest that age-related differences in the enhancement of emotional memory might reflect decreased connectivity between the amygdala and typical subsequent-memory regions, as well as the engagement of regulatory processes that inhibit emotional responses.

Effect of emotional arousal on inter-temporal decision-making: an fMRI study.

PubMed

Sohn, Jin-Hun; Kim, Hyo-Eun; Sohn, Sunju; Seok, Ji-Woo; Choi, Damee; Watanuki, Shigeki

2015-03-07

Previous research has shown that emotion can significantly impact decision-making in humans. The current study examined whether or not and how situationally induced emotion influences people to make inter-temporal choices. Affective pictures were used as experiment stimuli to provoke emotion, immediately followed by subjects' performance of a delay-discounting task to measure impulsivity during functional magnetic resonance imaging. Results demonstrate a subsequent process of increased impulsive decision-making following a prior exposure to both high positive and negative arousal stimuli, compared to the experiment subjects' experiences with neutral stimuli. Findings indicate that increased impulsive decision-making behaviors can occur with high arousal and can be characterized by decreased activities in the cognitive control regions such as prefronto-parietal regions. These results suggest that 'stabilization of high emotional arousal' may facilitate a reduction of impulsive decision-making and implementation of longer term goals.

Altered resting-state amygdala functional connectivity in men with posttraumatic stress disorder

PubMed Central

Sripada, Rebecca K.; King, Anthony P.; Garfinkel, Sarah N.; Wang, Xin; Sripada, Chandra S.; Welsh, Robert C.; Liberzon, Israel

2012-01-01

Background Converging neuroimaging research suggests altered emotion neurocircuitry in individuals with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Emotion activation studies in these individuals have shown hyperactivation in emotion-related regions, including the amygdala and insula, and hypoactivation in emotion-regulation regions, including the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). However, few studies have examined patterns of connectivity at rest in individuals with PTSD, a potentially powerful method for illuminating brain network structure. Methods Using the amygdala as a seed region, we measured resting-state brain connectivity using 3 T functional magnetic resonance imaging in returning male veterans with PTSD and combat controls without PTSD. Results Fifteen veterans with PTSD and 14 combat controls enrolled in our study. Compared with controls, veterans with PTSD showed greater positive connectivity between the amygdala and insula, reduced positive connectivity between the amygdala and hippocampus, and reduced anticorrelation between the amygdala and dorsal ACC and rostral ACC. Limitations Only male veterans with combat exposure were tested, thus our findings cannot be generalized to women or to individuals with non–combat related PTSD. Conclusion These results demonstrate that studies of functional connectivity during resting state can discern aberrant patterns of coupling within emotion circuits and suggest a possible brain basis for emotion-processing and emotion-regulation deficits in individuals with PTSD. PMID:22313617

Auditory conflict and congruence in frontotemporal dementia.

PubMed

Clark, Camilla N; Nicholas, Jennifer M; Agustus, Jennifer L; Hardy, Christopher J D; Russell, Lucy L; Brotherhood, Emilie V; Dick, Katrina M; Marshall, Charles R; Mummery, Catherine J; Rohrer, Jonathan D; Warren, Jason D

2017-09-01

Impaired analysis of signal conflict and congruence may contribute to diverse socio-emotional symptoms in frontotemporal dementias, however the underlying mechanisms have not been defined. Here we addressed this issue in patients with behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD; n = 19) and semantic dementia (SD; n = 10) relative to healthy older individuals (n = 20). We created auditory scenes in which semantic and emotional congruity of constituent sounds were independently probed; associated tasks controlled for auditory perceptual similarity, scene parsing and semantic competence. Neuroanatomical correlates of auditory congruity processing were assessed using voxel-based morphometry. Relative to healthy controls, both the bvFTD and SD groups had impaired semantic and emotional congruity processing (after taking auditory control task performance into account) and reduced affective integration of sounds into scenes. Grey matter correlates of auditory semantic congruity processing were identified in distributed regions encompassing prefrontal, parieto-temporal and insular areas and correlates of auditory emotional congruity in partly overlapping temporal, insular and striatal regions. Our findings suggest that decoding of auditory signal relatedness may probe a generic cognitive mechanism and neural architecture underpinning frontotemporal dementia syndromes. Copyright © 2017 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.

Aberrant Neural Connectivity during Emotional Processing Associated with Posttraumatic Stress

PubMed Central

Sadeh, Naomi; Spielberg, Jeffrey M.; Warren, Stacie L.; Miller, Gregory A.; Heller, Wendy

2014-01-01

Given the complexity of the brain, characterizing relations among distributed brain regions is likely essential to describing the neural instantiation of posttraumatic stress symptoms. This study examined patterns of functional connectivity among key brain regions implicated in the pathophysiology of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in 35 trauma-exposed adults using an emotion-word Stroop task. PTSD symptom severity (particularly hyperarousal symptoms) moderated amygdala-mPFC coupling during the processing of unpleasant words, and this moderation correlated positively with reported real-world impairment and amygdala reactivity. Reexperiencing severity moderated hippocampus-insula coupling during pleasant and unpleasant words. Results provide evidence that PTSD symptoms differentially moderate functional coupling during emotional interference and underscore the importance of examining network connectivity in research on PTSD. They suggest that hyperarousal is associated with negative mPFC-amygdala coupling and that reexperiencing is associated with altered insula-hippocampus function, patterns of connectivity that may represent separable indicators of dysfunctional inhibitory control during affective processing. PMID:25419500

Aberrant Neural Connectivity during Emotional Processing Associated with Posttraumatic Stress.

PubMed

Sadeh, Naomi; Spielberg, Jeffrey M; Warren, Stacie L; Miller, Gregory A; Heller, Wendy

2014-11-01

Given the complexity of the brain, characterizing relations among distributed brain regions is likely essential to describing the neural instantiation of posttraumatic stress symptoms. This study examined patterns of functional connectivity among key brain regions implicated in the pathophysiology of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in 35 trauma-exposed adults using an emotion-word Stroop task. PTSD symptom severity (particularly hyperarousal symptoms) moderated amygdala-mPFC coupling during the processing of unpleasant words, and this moderation correlated positively with reported real-world impairment and amygdala reactivity. Reexperiencing severity moderated hippocampus-insula coupling during pleasant and unpleasant words. Results provide evidence that PTSD symptoms differentially moderate functional coupling during emotional interference and underscore the importance of examining network connectivity in research on PTSD. They suggest that hyperarousal is associated with negative mPFC-amygdala coupling and that reexperiencing is associated with altered insula-hippocampus function, patterns of connectivity that may represent separable indicators of dysfunctional inhibitory control during affective processing.

The Functional Role of Neural Oscillations in Non-Verbal Emotional Communication

PubMed Central

Symons, Ashley E.; El-Deredy, Wael; Schwartze, Michael; Kotz, Sonja A.

2016-01-01

Effective interpersonal communication depends on the ability to perceive and interpret nonverbal emotional expressions from multiple sensory modalities. Current theoretical models propose that visual and auditory emotion perception involves a network of brain regions including the primary sensory cortices, the superior temporal sulcus (STS), and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). However, relatively little is known about how the dynamic interplay between these regions gives rise to the perception of emotions. In recent years, there has been increasing recognition of the importance of neural oscillations in mediating neural communication within and between functional neural networks. Here we review studies investigating changes in oscillatory activity during the perception of visual, auditory, and audiovisual emotional expressions, and aim to characterize the functional role of neural oscillations in nonverbal emotion perception. Findings from the reviewed literature suggest that theta band oscillations most consistently differentiate between emotional and neutral expressions. While early theta synchronization appears to reflect the initial encoding of emotionally salient sensory information, later fronto-central theta synchronization may reflect the further integration of sensory information with internal representations. Additionally, gamma synchronization reflects facilitated sensory binding of emotional expressions within regions such as the OFC, STS, and, potentially, the amygdala. However, the evidence is more ambiguous when it comes to the role of oscillations within the alpha and beta frequencies, which vary as a function of modality (or modalities), presence or absence of predictive information, and attentional or task demands. Thus, the synchronization of neural oscillations within specific frequency bands mediates the rapid detection, integration, and evaluation of emotional expressions. Moreover, the functional coupling of oscillatory activity across multiples frequency bands supports a predictive coding model of multisensory emotion perception in which emotional facial and body expressions facilitate the processing of emotional vocalizations. PMID:27252638

The Functional Role of Neural Oscillations in Non-Verbal Emotional Communication.

PubMed

Symons, Ashley E; El-Deredy, Wael; Schwartze, Michael; Kotz, Sonja A

2016-01-01

Effective interpersonal communication depends on the ability to perceive and interpret nonverbal emotional expressions from multiple sensory modalities. Current theoretical models propose that visual and auditory emotion perception involves a network of brain regions including the primary sensory cortices, the superior temporal sulcus (STS), and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). However, relatively little is known about how the dynamic interplay between these regions gives rise to the perception of emotions. In recent years, there has been increasing recognition of the importance of neural oscillations in mediating neural communication within and between functional neural networks. Here we review studies investigating changes in oscillatory activity during the perception of visual, auditory, and audiovisual emotional expressions, and aim to characterize the functional role of neural oscillations in nonverbal emotion perception. Findings from the reviewed literature suggest that theta band oscillations most consistently differentiate between emotional and neutral expressions. While early theta synchronization appears to reflect the initial encoding of emotionally salient sensory information, later fronto-central theta synchronization may reflect the further integration of sensory information with internal representations. Additionally, gamma synchronization reflects facilitated sensory binding of emotional expressions within regions such as the OFC, STS, and, potentially, the amygdala. However, the evidence is more ambiguous when it comes to the role of oscillations within the alpha and beta frequencies, which vary as a function of modality (or modalities), presence or absence of predictive information, and attentional or task demands. Thus, the synchronization of neural oscillations within specific frequency bands mediates the rapid detection, integration, and evaluation of emotional expressions. Moreover, the functional coupling of oscillatory activity across multiples frequency bands supports a predictive coding model of multisensory emotion perception in which emotional facial and body expressions facilitate the processing of emotional vocalizations.

A Role for the Motor System in Binding Abstract Emotional Meaning

PubMed Central

Carota, Francesca; Hauk, Olaf; Mohr, Bettina; Pulvermüller, Friedemann

2012-01-01

Sensorimotor areas activate to action- and object-related words, but their role in abstract meaning processing is still debated. Abstract emotion words denoting body internal states are a critical test case because they lack referential links to objects. If actions expressing emotion are crucial for learning correspondences between word forms and emotions, emotion word–evoked activity should emerge in motor brain systems controlling the face and arms, which typically express emotions. To test this hypothesis, we recruited 18 native speakers and used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging to compare brain activation evoked by abstract emotion words to that by face- and arm-related action words. In addition to limbic regions, emotion words indeed sparked precentral cortex, including body-part–specific areas activated somatotopically by face words or arm words. Control items, including hash mark strings and animal words, failed to activate precentral areas. We conclude that, similar to their role in action word processing, activation of frontocentral motor systems in the dorsal stream reflects the semantic binding of sign and meaning of abstract words denoting emotions and possibly other body internal states. PMID:21914634

Annotation: Development of facial expression recognition from childhood to adolescence: behavioural and neurological perspectives.

PubMed

Herba, Catherine; Phillips, Mary

2004-10-01

Intact emotion processing is critical for normal emotional development. Recent advances in neuroimaging have facilitated the examination of brain development, and have allowed for the exploration of the relationships between the development of emotion processing abilities, and that of associated neural systems. A literature review was performed of published studies examining the development of emotion expression recognition in normal children and psychiatric populations, and of the development of neural systems important for emotion processing. Few studies have explored the development of emotion expression recognition throughout childhood and adolescence. Behavioural studies suggest continued development throughout childhood and adolescence (reflected by accuracy scores and speed of processing), which varies according to the category of emotion displayed. Factors such as sex, socio-economic status, and verbal ability may also affect this development. Functional neuroimaging studies in adults highlight the role of the amygdala in emotion processing. Results of the few neuroimaging studies in children have focused on the role of the amygdala in the recognition of fearful expressions. Although results are inconsistent, they provide evidence throughout childhood and adolescence for the continued development of and sex differences in amygdalar function in response to fearful expressions. Studies exploring emotion expression recognition in psychiatric populations of children and adolescents suggest deficits that are specific to the type of disorder and to the emotion displayed. Results from behavioural and neuroimaging studies indicate continued development of emotion expression recognition and neural regions important for this process throughout childhood and adolescence. Methodological inconsistencies and disparate findings make any conclusion difficult, however. Further studies are required examining the relationship between the development of emotion expression recognition and that of underlying neural systems, in particular subcortical and prefrontal cortical structures. These will inform understanding of the neural bases of normal and abnormal emotional development, and aid the development of earlier interventions for children and adolescents with psychiatric disorders.

Epigenetic modification of the oxytocin receptor gene influences the perception of anger and fear in the human brain

PubMed Central

Puglia, Meghan H.; Lillard, Travis S.; Morris, James P.; Connelly, Jessica J.

2015-01-01

In humans, the neuropeptide oxytocin plays a critical role in social and emotional behavior. The actions of this molecule are dependent on a protein that acts as its receptor, which is encoded by the oxytocin receptor gene (OXTR). DNA methylation of OXTR, an epigenetic modification, directly influences gene transcription and is variable in humans. However, the impact of this variability on specific social behaviors is unknown. We hypothesized that variability in OXTR methylation impacts social perceptual processes often linked with oxytocin, such as perception of facial emotions. Using an imaging epigenetic approach, we established a relationship between OXTR methylation and neural activity in response to emotional face processing. Specifically, high levels of OXTR methylation were associated with greater amounts of activity in regions associated with face and emotion processing including amygdala, fusiform, and insula. Importantly, we found that these higher levels of OXTR methylation were also associated with decreased functional coupling of amygdala with regions involved in affect appraisal and emotion regulation. These data indicate that the human endogenous oxytocin system is involved in attenuation of the fear response, corroborating research implicating intranasal oxytocin in the same processes. Our findings highlight the importance of including epigenetic mechanisms in the description of the endogenous oxytocin system and further support a central role for oxytocin in social cognition. This approach linking epigenetic variability with neural endophenotypes may broadly explain individual differences in phenotype including susceptibility or resilience to disease. PMID:25675509

Automatic Processing of Changes in Facial Emotions in Dysphoria: A Magnetoencephalography Study.

PubMed

Xu, Qianru; Ruohonen, Elisa M; Ye, Chaoxiong; Li, Xueqiao; Kreegipuu, Kairi; Stefanics, Gabor; Luo, Wenbo; Astikainen, Piia

2018-01-01

It is not known to what extent the automatic encoding and change detection of peripherally presented facial emotion is altered in dysphoria. The negative bias in automatic face processing in particular has rarely been studied. We used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to record automatic brain responses to happy and sad faces in dysphoric (Beck's Depression Inventory ≥ 13) and control participants. Stimuli were presented in a passive oddball condition, which allowed potential negative bias in dysphoria at different stages of face processing (M100, M170, and M300) and alterations of change detection (visual mismatch negativity, vMMN) to be investigated. The magnetic counterpart of the vMMN was elicited at all stages of face processing, indexing automatic deviance detection in facial emotions. The M170 amplitude was modulated by emotion, response amplitudes being larger for sad faces than happy faces. Group differences were found for the M300, and they were indexed by two different interaction effects. At the left occipital region of interest, the dysphoric group had larger amplitudes for sad than happy deviant faces, reflecting negative bias in deviance detection, which was not found in the control group. On the other hand, the dysphoric group showed no vMMN to changes in facial emotions, while the vMMN was observed in the control group at the right occipital region of interest. Our results indicate that there is a negative bias in automatic visual deviance detection, but also a general change detection deficit in dysphoria.

Neural Mechanisms of Cognitive Reappraisal of Negative Self-Beliefs in Social Anxiety Disorder

PubMed Central

Goldin, Philippe R.; Ball, Tali M.; Werner, Kelly; Heimberg, Richard; Gross, James J.

2009-01-01

Background Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is characterized by distorted negative self-beliefs (NSBs) which are thought to enhance emotional reactivity, interfere with emotion regulation, and undermine social functioning. Cognitive reappraisal is a type of emotion regulation used to alter NSBs, with the goal of modulating emotional reactivity. Despite its relevance, little is known about the neural bases and temporal features of cognitive reappraisal in patients with SAD. Methods Twenty-seven patients with SAD and 27 healthy controls (HC) were trained to react and to implement cognitive reappraisal in order to down-regulate negative emotional reactivity to NSBs while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging and providing ratings of negative emotion experience. Results Behaviorally, compared with HC, patients with SAD reported greater negative emotion both while reacting to and reappraising NSBs. However, when cued, participants in both groups were able to use cognitive reappraisal to decrease emotion. Neurally, reacting to NSBs resulted in early amygdala response in both groups. Reappraising NSBs resulted in greater early cognitive control, language, and visual processing in HC, but greater late cognitive control, visceral, and visual processing in patients with SAD. Functional connectivity analysis during reappraisal identified more regulatory regions inversely related to left amygdala in HCs than in patients with SAD. Reappraisal-related brain regions that differentiated patients and controls were associated with negative emotion ratings and cognitive reappraisal self-efficacy. Conclusions Findings regarding cognitive reappraisal suggest neural timing, connectivity, and brain-behavioral associations specific to patients with SAD, and elucidate neural mechanisms that might serve as biomarkers of interventions for SAD. PMID:19717138

Emotional face processing and flat affect in schizophrenia: functional and structural neural correlates.

PubMed

Lepage, M; Sergerie, K; Benoit, A; Czechowska, Y; Dickie, E; Armony, J L

2011-09-01

There is a general consensus in the literature that schizophrenia causes difficulties with facial emotion perception and discrimination. Functional brain imaging studies have observed reduced limbic activity during facial emotion perception but few studies have examined the relation to flat affect severity. A total of 26 people with schizophrenia and 26 healthy controls took part in this event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging study. Sad, happy and neutral faces were presented in a pseudo-random order and participants indicated the gender of the face presented. Manual segmentation of the amygdala was performed on a structural T1 image. Both the schizophrenia group and the healthy control group rated the emotional valence of facial expressions similarly. Both groups exhibited increased brain activity during the perception of emotional faces relative to neutral ones in multiple brain regions, including multiple prefrontal regions bilaterally, the right amygdala, right cingulate cortex and cuneus. Group comparisons, however, revealed increased activity in the healthy group in the anterior cingulate, right parahippocampal gyrus and multiple visual areas. In schizophrenia, the severity of flat affect correlated significantly with neural activity in several brain areas including the amygdala and parahippocampal region bilaterally. These results suggest that many of the brain regions involved in emotional face perception, including the amygdala, are equally recruited in both schizophrenia and controls, but flat affect can also moderate activity in some other brain regions, notably in the left amygdala and parahippocampal gyrus bilaterally. There were no significant group differences in the volume of the amygdala.

Musical Creativity “Revealed” in Brain Structure: Interplay between Motor, Default Mode, and Limbic Networks

PubMed Central

Bashwiner, David M.; Wertz, Christopher J.; Flores, Ranee A.; Jung, Rex E.

2016-01-01

Creative behaviors are among the most complex that humans engage in, involving not only highly intricate, domain-specific knowledge and skill, but also domain-general processing styles and the affective drive to create. This study presents structural imaging data indicating that musically creative people (as indicated by self-report) have greater cortical surface area or volume in a) regions associated with domain-specific higher-cognitive motor activity and sound processing (dorsal premotor cortex, supplementary and pre-supplementary motor areas, and planum temporale), b) domain-general creative-ideation regions associated with the default mode network (dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, middle temporal gyrus, and temporal pole), and c) emotion-related regions (orbitofrontal cortex, temporal pole, and amygdala). These findings suggest that domain-specific musical expertise, default-mode cognitive processing style, and intensity of emotional experience might all coordinate to motivate and facilitate the drive to create music. PMID:26888383

Automatic Processing of Emotional Words in the Absence of Awareness: The Critical Role of P2

PubMed Central

Lei, Yi; Dou, Haoran; Liu, Qingming; Zhang, Wenhai; Zhang, Zhonglu; Li, Hong

2017-01-01

It has been long debated to what extent emotional words can be processed in the absence of awareness. Behavioral studies have shown that the meaning of emotional words can be accessed even without any awareness. However, functional magnetic resonance imaging studies have revealed that emotional words that are unconsciously presented do not activate the brain regions involved in semantic or emotional processing. To clarify this point, we used continuous flash suppression (CFS) and event-related potential (ERP) techniques to distinguish between semantic and emotional processing. In CFS, we successively flashed some Mondrian-style images into one participant's eye steadily, which suppressed the images projected to the other eye. Negative, neutral, and scrambled words were presented to 16 healthy participants for 500 ms. Whenever the participants saw the stimuli—in both visible and invisible conditions—they pressed specific keyboard buttons. Behavioral data revealed that there was no difference in reaction time to negative words and to neutral words in the invisible condition, although negative words were processed faster than neutral words in the visible condition. The ERP results showed that negative words elicited a larger P2 amplitude in the invisible condition than in the visible condition. The P2 component was enhanced for the neutral words compared with the scrambled words in the visible condition; however, the scrambled words elicited larger P2 amplitudes than the neutral words in the invisible condition. These results suggest that the emotional processing of words is more sensitive than semantic processing in the conscious condition. Semantic processing was found to be attenuated in the absence of awareness. Our findings indicate that P2 plays an important role in the unconscious processing of emotional words, which highlights the fact that emotional processing may be automatic and prioritized compared with semantic processing in the absence of awareness. PMID:28473785

Automatic Processing of Emotional Words in the Absence of Awareness: The Critical Role of P2.

PubMed

Lei, Yi; Dou, Haoran; Liu, Qingming; Zhang, Wenhai; Zhang, Zhonglu; Li, Hong

2017-01-01

It has been long debated to what extent emotional words can be processed in the absence of awareness. Behavioral studies have shown that the meaning of emotional words can be accessed even without any awareness. However, functional magnetic resonance imaging studies have revealed that emotional words that are unconsciously presented do not activate the brain regions involved in semantic or emotional processing. To clarify this point, we used continuous flash suppression (CFS) and event-related potential (ERP) techniques to distinguish between semantic and emotional processing. In CFS, we successively flashed some Mondrian-style images into one participant's eye steadily, which suppressed the images projected to the other eye. Negative, neutral, and scrambled words were presented to 16 healthy participants for 500 ms. Whenever the participants saw the stimuli-in both visible and invisible conditions-they pressed specific keyboard buttons. Behavioral data revealed that there was no difference in reaction time to negative words and to neutral words in the invisible condition, although negative words were processed faster than neutral words in the visible condition. The ERP results showed that negative words elicited a larger P2 amplitude in the invisible condition than in the visible condition. The P2 component was enhanced for the neutral words compared with the scrambled words in the visible condition; however, the scrambled words elicited larger P2 amplitudes than the neutral words in the invisible condition. These results suggest that the emotional processing of words is more sensitive than semantic processing in the conscious condition. Semantic processing was found to be attenuated in the absence of awareness. Our findings indicate that P2 plays an important role in the unconscious processing of emotional words, which highlights the fact that emotional processing may be automatic and prioritized compared with semantic processing in the absence of awareness.

Brain Metabolism during Hallucination-Like Auditory Stimulation in Schizophrenia

PubMed Central

Horga, Guillermo; Fernández-Egea, Emilio; Mané, Anna; Font, Mireia; Schatz, Kelly C.; Falcon, Carles; Lomeña, Francisco; Bernardo, Miguel; Parellada, Eduard

2014-01-01

Auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH) in schizophrenia are typically characterized by rich emotional content. Despite the prominent role of emotion in regulating normal perception, the neural interface between emotion-processing regions such as the amygdala and auditory regions involved in perception remains relatively unexplored in AVH. Here, we studied brain metabolism using FDG-PET in 9 remitted patients with schizophrenia that previously reported severe AVH during an acute psychotic episode and 8 matched healthy controls. Participants were scanned twice: (1) at rest and (2) during the perception of aversive auditory stimuli mimicking the content of AVH. Compared to controls, remitted patients showed an exaggerated response to the AVH-like stimuli in limbic and paralimbic regions, including the left amygdala. Furthermore, patients displayed abnormally strong connections between the amygdala and auditory regions of the cortex and thalamus, along with abnormally weak connections between the amygdala and medial prefrontal cortex. These results suggest that abnormal modulation of the auditory cortex by limbic-thalamic structures might be involved in the pathophysiology of AVH and may potentially account for the emotional features that characterize hallucinatory percepts in schizophrenia. PMID:24416328

Psychosocial Stress and Brain Function in Adolescent Psychopathology.

PubMed

Quinlan, Erin Burke; Cattrell, Anna; Jia, Tianye; Artiges, Eric; Banaschewski, Tobias; Barker, Gareth; Bokde, Arun L W; Bromberg, Uli; Büchel, Christian; Brühl, Rüdiger; Conrod, Patricia J; Desrivieres, Sylvane; Flor, Herta; Frouin, Vincent; Gallinat, Jürgen; Garavan, Hugh; Gowland, Penny; Heinz, Andreas; Martinot, Jean-Luc; Paillère Martinot, Marie-Laure; Nees, Frauke; Papadopoulos-Orfanos, Dimitri; Paus, Tomáš; Poustka, Luise; Smolka, Michael N; Vetter, Nora C; Walter, Henrik; Whelan, Robert; Glennon, Jeffrey C; Buitelaar, Jan K; Happé, Francesca; Loth, Eva; Barker, Edward D; Schumann, Gunter

2017-08-01

The authors sought to explore how conduct, hyperactivity/inattention, and emotional symptoms are associated with neural reactivity to social-emotional stimuli, and the extent to which psychosocial stress modulates these relationships. Participants were community adolescents recruited as part of the European IMAGEN study. Bilateral amygdala regions of interest were used to assess the relationship between the three symptom domains and functional MRI neural reactivity during passive viewing of dynamic angry and neutral facial expressions. Exploratory functional connectivity and whole brain multiple regression approaches were used to analyze how the symptoms and psychosocial stress relate to other brain regions. In response to the social-emotional stimuli, adolescents with high levels of conduct or hyperactivity/inattention symptoms who had also experienced a greater number of stressful life events showed hyperactivity of the amygdala and several regions across the brain. This effect was not observed with emotional symptoms. A cluster in the midcingulate was found to be common to both conduct problems and hyperactivity symptoms. Exploratory functional connectivity analyses suggested that amygdala-precuneus connectivity is associated with hyperactivity/inattention symptoms. The results link hyperactive amygdala responses and regions critical for top-down emotional processing with high levels of psychosocial stress in individuals with greater conduct and hyperactivity/inattention symptoms. This work highlights the importance of studying how psychosocial stress affects functional brain responses to social-emotional stimuli, particularly in adolescents with externalizing symptoms.

Film Excerpts Shown to Specifically Elicit Various Affects Lead to Overlapping Activation Foci in a Large Set of Symmetrical Brain Regions in Males

PubMed Central

Karama, Sherif; Armony, Jorge; Beauregard, Mario

2011-01-01

While the limbic system theory continues to be part of common scientific parlance, its validity has been questioned on multiple grounds. Nonetheless, the issue of whether or not there exists a set of brain areas preferentially dedicated to emotional processing remains central within affective neuroscience. Recently, a widespread neural reference space for emotion which includes limbic as well as other regions was characterized in a large meta-analysis. As methodologically heterogeneous studies go into such meta-analyses, showing in an individual study in which all parameters are kept constant, the involvement of overlapping areas for various emotion conditions in keeping with the neural reference space for emotion, would serve as valuable confirmatory evidence. Here, using fMRI, 20 young adult men were scanned while viewing validated neutral and effective emotion-eliciting short film excerpts shown to quickly and specifically elicit disgust, amusement, or sexual arousal. Each emotion-specific run included, in random order, multiple neutral and emotion condition blocks. A stringent conjunction analysis revealed a large overlap across emotion conditions that fit remarkably well with the neural reference space for emotion. This overlap included symmetrical bilateral activation of the medial prefrontal cortex, the anterior cingulate, the temporo-occipital junction, the basal ganglia, the brainstem, the amygdala, the hippocampus, the thalamus, the subthalamic nucleus, the posterior hypothalamus, the cerebellum, as well as the frontal operculum extending towards the anterior insula. This study clearly confirms for the visual modality, that processing emotional stimuli leads to widespread increases in activation that cluster within relatively confined areas, regardless of valence. PMID:21818311

The Influences of Emotion on Learning and Memory

PubMed Central

Tyng, Chai M.; Amin, Hafeez U.; Saad, Mohamad N. M.; Malik, Aamir S.

2017-01-01

Emotion has a substantial influence on the cognitive processes in humans, including perception, attention, learning, memory, reasoning, and problem solving. Emotion has a particularly strong influence on attention, especially modulating the selectivity of attention as well as motivating action and behavior. This attentional and executive control is intimately linked to learning processes, as intrinsically limited attentional capacities are better focused on relevant information. Emotion also facilitates encoding and helps retrieval of information efficiently. However, the effects of emotion on learning and memory are not always univalent, as studies have reported that emotion either enhances or impairs learning and long-term memory (LTM) retention, depending on a range of factors. Recent neuroimaging findings have indicated that the amygdala and prefrontal cortex cooperate with the medial temporal lobe in an integrated manner that affords (i) the amygdala modulating memory consolidation; (ii) the prefrontal cortex mediating memory encoding and formation; and (iii) the hippocampus for successful learning and LTM retention. We also review the nested hierarchies of circular emotional control and cognitive regulation (bottom-up and top-down influences) within the brain to achieve optimal integration of emotional and cognitive processing. This review highlights a basic evolutionary approach to emotion to understand the effects of emotion on learning and memory and the functional roles played by various brain regions and their mutual interactions in relation to emotional processing. We also summarize the current state of knowledge on the impact of emotion on memory and map implications for educational settings. In addition to elucidating the memory-enhancing effects of emotion, neuroimaging findings extend our understanding of emotional influences on learning and memory processes; this knowledge may be useful for the design of effective educational curricula to provide a conducive learning environment for both traditional “live” learning in classrooms and “virtual” learning through online-based educational technologies. PMID:28883804

Prefrontal inhibition of threat processing reduces working memory interference

PubMed Central

Clarke, Robert; Johnstone, Tom

2013-01-01

Bottom-up processes can interrupt ongoing cognitive processing in order to adaptively respond to emotional stimuli of high potential significance, such as those that threaten wellbeing. However it is vital that this interference can be modulated in certain contexts to focus on current tasks. Deficits in the ability to maintain the appropriate balance between cognitive and emotional demands can severely impact on day-to-day activities. This fMRI study examined this interaction between threat processing and cognition; 18 adult participants performed a visuospatial working memory (WM) task with two load conditions, in the presence and absence of anxiety induction by threat of electric shock. Threat of shock interfered with performance in the low cognitive load condition; however interference was eradicated under high load, consistent with engagement of emotion regulation mechanisms. Under low load the amygdala showed significant activation to threat of shock that was modulated by high cognitive load. A directed top-down control contrast identified two regions associated with top-down control; ventrolateral PFC and dorsal ACC. Dynamic causal modeling provided further evidence that under high cognitive load, top-down inhibition is exerted on the amygdala and its outputs to prefrontal regions. Additionally, we hypothesized that individual differences in a separate, non-emotional top-down control task would predict the recruitment of dorsal ACC and ventrolateral PFC during top-down control of threat. Consistent with this, performance on a separate dichotic listening task predicted dorsal ACC and ventrolateral PFC activation during high WM load under threat of shock, though activation in these regions did not directly correlate with WM performance. Together, the findings suggest that under high cognitive load and threat, top-down control is exerted by dACC and vlPFC to inhibit threat processing, thus enabling WM performance without threat-related interference. PMID:23750133

Passive and Motivated Perception of Emotional Faces: Qualitative and Quantitative Changes in the Face Processing Network

PubMed Central

Skelly, Laurie R.; Decety, Jean

2012-01-01

Emotionally expressive faces are processed by a distributed network of interacting sub-cortical and cortical brain regions. The components of this network have been identified and described in large part by the stimulus properties to which they are sensitive, but as face processing research matures interest has broadened to also probe dynamic interactions between these regions and top-down influences such as task demand and context. While some research has tested the robustness of affective face processing by restricting available attentional resources, it is not known whether face network processing can be augmented by increased motivation to attend to affective face stimuli. Short videos of people expressing emotions were presented to healthy participants during functional magnetic resonance imaging. Motivation to attend to the videos was manipulated by providing an incentive for improved recall performance. During the motivated condition, there was greater coherence among nodes of the face processing network, more widespread correlation between signal intensity and performance, and selective signal increases in a task-relevant subset of face processing regions, including the posterior superior temporal sulcus and right amygdala. In addition, an unexpected task-related laterality effect was seen in the amygdala. These findings provide strong evidence that motivation augmentsco-activity among nodes of the face processing network and the impact of neural activity on performance. These within-subject effects highlight the necessity to consider motivation when interpreting neural function in special populations, and to further explore the effect of task demands on face processing in healthy brains. PMID:22768287

Emotion and Theory of Mind in Schizophrenia-Investigating the Role of the Cerebellum.

PubMed

Mothersill, Omar; Knee-Zaska, Charlotte; Donohoe, Gary

2016-06-01

Social cognitive dysfunction, including deficits in facial emotion recognition and theory of mind, is a core feature of schizophrenia and more strongly predicts functional outcome than neurocognition alone. Although traditionally considered to play an important role in motor coordination, the cerebellum has been suggested to play a role in emotion processing and theory of mind, and also shows structural and functional abnormalities in schizophrenia. The aim of this systematic review was to investigate the specific role of the cerebellum in emotion and theory of mind deficits in schizophrenia using previously published functional neuroimaging studies. PubMed and PsycINFO were used to search for all functional neuroimaging studies reporting altered cerebellum activity in schizophrenia patients during emotion processing or theory of mind tasks, published until December 2014. Overall, 14 functional neuroimaging studies were retrieved. Most emotion studies reported lower cerebellum activity in schizophrenia patients relative to healthy controls. In contrast, the theory of mind studies reported mixed findings. Altered activity was observed across several posterior cerebellar regions involved in emotion and cognition. Weaker cerebellum activity in schizophrenia patients relative to healthy controls during emotion processing may contribute to blunted affect and reduced ability to recognise emotion in others. This research could be expanded by examining the relationship between cerebellum function, symptomatology and behaviour, and examining cerebellum functional connectivity in patients during emotion and theory of mind tasks.

Concepts in context: Processing mental state concepts with internal or external focus involves different neural systems

PubMed Central

Oosterwijk, Suzanne; Mackey, Scott; Wilson-Mendenhall, Christine; Winkielman, Piotr; Paulus, Martin P.

2015-01-01

According to embodied cognition theories concepts are contextually-situated and grounded in neural systems that produce experiential states. This view predicts that processing mental state concepts recruits neural regions associated with different aspects of experience depending on the context in which people understand a concept. This neuroimaging study tested this prediction using a set of sentences that described emotional (e.g., fear, joy) and non-emotional (e.g., thinking, hunger) mental states with internal focus (i.e. focusing on bodily sensations and introspection) or external focus (i.e. focusing on expression and action). Consistent with our predictions, data suggested that the inferior frontal gyrus, a region associated with action representation, was engaged more by external than internal sentences. By contrast, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, a region associated with the generation of internal states, was engaged more by internal emotion sentences than external sentence categories. Similar patterns emerged when we examined the relationship between neural activity and independent ratings of sentence focus. Furthermore, ratings of emotion were associated with activation in the medial prefrontal cortex, whereas ratings of activity were associated with activation in the inferior frontal gyrus. These results suggest that mental state concepts are represented in a dynamic way, using context-relevant interoceptive and sensorimotor resources. PMID:25748274

Sex differences in brain activation patterns during processing of positively and negatively valenced emotional words.

PubMed

Hofer, Alex; Siedentopf, Christian M; Ischebeck, Anja; Rettenbacher, Maria A; Verius, Michael; Felber, Stephan; Wolfgang Fleischhacker, W

2007-01-01

Previous studies have suggested that men and women process emotional stimuli differently. In this study, we used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate gender differences in regional cerebral activity during the perception of positive or negative emotions. The experiment comprised two emotional conditions (positively/negatively valenced words) during which fMRI data were acquired. Thirty-eight healthy volunteers (19 males, 19 females) were investigated. A direct comparison of brain activation between men and women revealed differential activation in the right putamen, the right superior temporal gyrus, and the left supramarginal gyrus during processing of positively valenced words versus non-words for women versus men. By contrast, during processing of negatively valenced words versus non-words, relatively greater activation was seen in the left perirhinal cortex and hippocampus for women versus men, and in the right supramarginal gyrus for men versus women. Our findings suggest gender-related neural responses to emotional stimuli and could contribute to the understanding of mechanisms underlying the gender disparity of neuropsychiatric diseases such as mood disorders.

Metabolic and hormone influences on emotion processing during menopause.

PubMed

Berent-Spillson, Alison; Marsh, Courtney; Persad, Carol; Randolph, John; Zubieta, Jon-Kar; Smith, Yolanda

2017-02-01

Disturbances of emotion regulation and depressive symptoms are common during the menopause transition. Reproductive hormone levels are not directly correlated with depressive symptoms, and other factors may influence mood symptoms during menopause. In this study, we sought to determine the role of metabolic function in mood symptoms during menopause, hypothesizing an association with menopause status and long-term glucose load. We studied 54 women across three menopause transition stages (15 premenopause, 11 perimenopause, and 28 postmenopause), examining effects of age, hormones, and metabolism on mood and neural activation during emotional discrimination. We assessed participants using behavioral and functional MRI measures of negative emotion and emotion discrimination, and glycated hemoglobin A1c, to assess long-term glucose load. We found that emotionally unpleasant images activated emotion regulation (amygdala) and cognitive association brain regions (prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate, temporal-parietal-occipital (TPO) junction, hippocampus). Cognitive association region activity increased with menopause stage. Perimenopausal women had left TPO junction activation, and postmenopausal women had prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate, and TPO junction activation. Negative affect was associated with decreased amygdala activation, while depression symptoms and negative mood were associated with increased TPO junction activation. Hemoglobin A1c was associated with negative interpretation bias of neutral images and cognitive region recruitment during emotion discrimination. FSH levels, indicating menopause stage, were associated with negative mood. Age was not associated with any behavioral measures or activation patterns during the emotion task. Our results suggest that an interaction between metabolic and hormonal factors may influence emotion regulation, leading to increased risk for depression during menopause. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Altered neural activity and emotions following right middle cerebral artery stroke.

PubMed

Paradiso, Sergio; Anderson, Beth M; Boles Ponto, Laura L; Tranel, Daniel; Robinson, Robert G

2011-01-01

Stroke of the right MCA is common. Such strokes often have consequences for emotional experience, but these can be subtle. In such cases diagnosis is difficult because emotional awareness (limiting reporting of emotional changes) may be affected. The present study sought to clarify the mechanisms of altered emotion experience after right MCA stroke. It was predicted that after right MCA stroke the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a brain region concerned with emotional awareness, would show reduced neural activity. Brain activity during presentation of emotional stimuli was measured in 6 patients with stable stroke, and in 12 age- and sex-matched nonlesion comparisons using positron emission tomography and the [(15)O]H(2)O autoradiographic method. MCA stroke was associated with weaker pleasant experience and decreased activity ipsilaterally in the ACC. Other regions involved in emotional processing including thalamus, dorsal and medial prefrontal cortex showed reduced activity ipsilaterally. Dorsal and medial prefrontal cortex, association visual cortex and cerebellum showed reduced activity contralaterally. Experience from unpleasant stimuli was unaltered and was associated with decreased activity only in the left midbrain. Right MCA stroke may reduce experience of pleasant emotions by altering brain activity in limbic and paralimbic regions distant from the area of direct damage, in addition to changes due to direct tissue damage to insula and basal ganglia. The knowledge acquired in this study begins to explain the mechanisms underlying emotional changes following right MCA stroke. Recognizing these changes may improve diagnoses, management and rehabilitation of right MCA stroke victims. Copyright © 2011 National Stroke Association. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Disrupted neural processing of emotional faces in psychopathy.

PubMed

Contreras-Rodríguez, Oren; Pujol, Jesus; Batalla, Iolanda; Harrison, Ben J; Bosque, Javier; Ibern-Regàs, Immaculada; Hernández-Ribas, Rosa; Soriano-Mas, Carles; Deus, Joan; López-Solà, Marina; Pifarré, Josep; Menchón, José M; Cardoner, Narcís

2014-04-01

Psychopaths show a reduced ability to recognize emotion facial expressions, which may disturb the interpersonal relationship development and successful social adaptation. Behavioral hypotheses point toward an association between emotion recognition deficits in psychopathy and amygdala dysfunction. Our prediction was that amygdala dysfunction would combine deficient activation with disturbances in functional connectivity with cortical regions of the face-processing network. Twenty-two psychopaths and 22 control subjects were assessed and functional magnetic resonance maps were generated to identify both brain activation and task-induced functional connectivity using psychophysiological interaction analysis during an emotional face-matching task. Results showed significant amygdala activation in control subjects only, but differences between study groups did not reach statistical significance. In contrast, psychopaths showed significantly increased activation in visual and prefrontal areas, with this latest activation being associated with psychopaths' affective-interpersonal disturbances. Psychophysiological interaction analyses revealed a reciprocal reduction in functional connectivity between the left amygdala and visual and prefrontal cortices. Our results suggest that emotional stimulation may evoke a relevant cortical response in psychopaths, but a disruption in the processing of emotional faces exists involving the reciprocal functional interaction between the amygdala and neocortex, consistent with the notion of a failure to integrate emotion into cognition in psychopathic individuals.

Culture, gaze and the neural processing of fear expressions

PubMed Central

Franklin, Robert G.; Rule, Nicholas O.; Freeman, Jonathan B.; Kveraga, Kestutis; Hadjikhani, Nouchine; Yoshikawa, Sakiko; Ambady, Nalini

2010-01-01

The direction of others’ eye gaze has important influences on how we perceive their emotional expressions. Here, we examined differences in neural activation to direct- versus averted-gaze fear faces as a function of culture of the participant (Japanese versus US Caucasian), culture of the stimulus face (Japanese versus US Caucasian), and the relation between the two. We employed a previously validated paradigm to examine differences in neural activation in response to rapidly presented direct- versus averted-fear expressions, finding clear evidence for a culturally determined role of gaze in the processing of fear. Greater neural responsivity was apparent to averted- versus direct-gaze fear in several regions related to face and emotion processing, including bilateral amygdalae, when posed on same-culture faces, whereas greater response to direct- versus averted-gaze fear was apparent in these same regions when posed on other-culture faces. We also found preliminary evidence for intercultural variation including differential responses across participants to Japanese versus US Caucasian stimuli, and to a lesser degree differences in how Japanese and US Caucasian participants responded to these stimuli. These findings reveal a meaningful role of culture in the processing of eye gaze and emotion, and highlight their interactive influences in neural processing. PMID:20019073

Emotional processing and brain activity in youth at high risk for alcoholism.

PubMed

Cservenka, Anita; Fair, Damien A; Nagel, Bonnie J

2014-07-01

Even in the absence of heavy alcohol use, youth with familial alcoholism (family history positive [FHP]) exhibit atypical brain functioning and behavior. Although emotional and cognitive systems are affected in alcohol use disorders (AUDs), little attention has focused on whether brain and behavior phenotypes related to the interplay between affective and executive functioning may be a premorbid risk factor for the development of AUDs in FHP youth. Twenty-four FHP and 22 family history negative (FHN) 12- to 16-year-old adolescents completed study procedures. After exclusion of participants with clinically significant depressive symptoms and those who did not meet performance criteria during an Emotional Go-NoGo task, 19 FHP and 17 FHN youth were included in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) analyses. Resting state functional connectivity MRI, using amygdalar seed regions, was analyzed in 16 FHP and 18 FHN youth, after exclusion of participants with excessive head movement. fMRI showed that brain activity in FHP youth, compared with FHN peers, was reduced during emotional processing in the superior temporal cortex, as well as during cognitive control within emotional contexts in frontal and striatal regions. Group differences in resting state amygdalar connectivity were seen bilaterally between FHP and FHN youth. In FHP youth, reduced resting state synchrony between the left amygdala and left superior frontal gyrus was related to poorer response inhibition, as measured during the fMRI task. To our knowledge, this is the first study to examine emotion-cognition interactions and resting state functional connectivity in FHP youth. Findings from this research provide insight into neural and behavioral phenotypes associated with emotional processing in familial alcoholism, which may relate to increased risk of developing AUDs. Copyright © 2014 by the Research Society on Alcoholism.

Neural Dynamics of Autistic Behaviors: Cognitive, Emotional, and Timing Substrates

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Grossberg, Stephen; Seidman, Don

2006-01-01

What brain mechanisms underlie autism, and how do they give rise to autistic behavioral symptoms? This article describes a neural model, called the Imbalanced Spectrally Timed Adaptive Resonance Theory (iSTART) model, that proposes how cognitive, emotional, timing, and motor processes that involve brain regions such as the prefrontal and temporal…

Psychological constructionism and cultural neuroscience.

PubMed

Hechtman, Lisa A; Pornpattananangkul, Narun; Chiao, Joan Y

2012-06-01

Lindquist et al. argue that emotional categories do not map onto distinct regions within the brain, but rather, arise from basic psychological processes, including conceptualization, executive attention, and core affect. Here, we use examples from cultural neuroscience to argue that psychological constructionism, not locationism, captures the essential role of emotion in the social and cultural brain.

An fMRI study of facial emotion processing in patients with schizophrenia.

PubMed

Gur, Raquel E; McGrath, Claire; Chan, Robin M; Schroeder, Lee; Turner, Travis; Turetsky, Bruce I; Kohler, Christian; Alsop, David; Maldjian, Joseph; Ragland, J Daniel; Gur, Ruben C

2002-12-01

Emotion processing deficits are notable in schizophrenia. The authors evaluated cerebral blood flow response in schizophrenia patients during facial emotion processing to test the hypothesis of diminished limbic activation related to emotional relevance of facial stimuli. Fourteen patients with schizophrenia and 14 matched comparison subjects viewed facial displays of happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and disgust as well as neutral faces. Functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to measure blood-oxygen-level-dependent signal changes as the subjects alternated between tasks of discriminating emotional valence (positive versus negative) and age (over 30 versus under 30) of the faces with an interleaved crosshair reference condition. The groups did not differ in performance on either task. For both tasks, healthy participants showed activation in the fusiform gyrus, occipital lobe, and inferior frontal cortex relative to the resting baseline condition. The increase was greater in the amygdala and hippocampus during the emotional valence discrimination task than during the age discrimination task. In the patients with schizophrenia, minimal focal response was observed for all tasks relative to the resting baseline condition. Contrasting patients and comparison subjects on the emotional valence discrimination task revealed voxels in the left amygdala and bilateral hippocampus in which the comparison subjects had significantly greater activation. Failure to activate limbic regions during emotional valence discrimination may explain emotion processing deficits in patients with schizophrenia. While the lack of limbic recruitment did not significantly impair simple valence discrimination performance in this clinically stable group, it may impact performance of more demanding tasks.

[What is an emotion? An introduction to the study of emotions].

PubMed

Derouesné, Christian

2011-03-01

Human emotions are hypothetic constructs based on psychological and physiological data. According to the psychoevolutionnist theories, all emotions derive from a set of discrete basic emotions, common to human and animals, genetically determined. Basic emotions are thus considered as physiological processes based on specific neuronal circuits. On the contrary, for appraisal and social theories, emotions are psychological processes resulting from the cognitive appraisal of the stimulus-event for the well-being and objectives of the subject, and are of social origin. They develop during life, especially in childhood, from interactions between the individual and his environement. According to the appraisal or constructivist theories, no sharp distinction is to be made between emotions and other manifestations of the affective life. Emotions require the global functioning of the brain, even if more specialized regions are involved. They play a fundamental role in the development of the child's psychological and social life. They mediate the subject's response to the stimulus-event, allowing more appropriate reactions than fixed instinctive ones. Nevertheless, the adaptative function of every emotion or their every component can be questioned. Emotional disturbances are major consequences of psychiatric or neurological disorders. The link between the results of neuropsychological studies of emotions based on the recognition of emotional facal expression according to the basic emotion theory, and the emotional disturbances experienced in daily life is highly questionable on account of the high complexity of human affective life.

Childhood trauma and emotional processing circuits in schizophrenia: A functional connectivity study.

PubMed

Cancel, Aïda; Comte, Magali; Boutet, Claire; Schneider, Fabien C; Rousseau, Pierre-François; Boukezzi, Sarah; Gay, Aurélia; Sigaud, Torrance; Massoubre, Catherine; Berna, Fabrice; Zendjidjian, Xavier Y; Azorin, Jean-Michel; Blin, Olivier; Fakra, Eric

2017-06-01

Childhood trauma strongly impacts emotional responses in schizophrenia. We have explored an association between early trauma and the amygdala functional connectivity using generalized psychophysiological interaction during an emotional task. Twenty-one schizophrenia patients and twenty-five controls were included. In schizophrenia patients, higher levels of sexual abuse and physical neglect during childhood were associated with decreased connectivity between the amygdala and the posterior cingulate/precuneus region. Additionally, patients showed decreased coupling between the amygdala and the posterior cingulate/precuneus region compared to controls. These findings suggest that early trauma could impact later connectivity in specific stress-related circuits affecting self-consciousness and social cognition in schizophrenia. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Human emotions detection based on a smart-thermal system of thermographic images

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Cruz-Albarran, Irving A.; Benitez-Rangel, Juan P.; Osornio-Rios, Roque A.; Morales-Hernandez, Luis A.

2017-03-01

This work presents a noninvasive methodology to obtain biomedical thermal imaging which provide relevant information that may assist in the diagnosis of emotions. Biomedical thermal images of the facial expressions of 44 subjects were captured experiencing joy, disgust, anger, fear and sadness. The analysis of these thermograms was carried out through its thermal value not with its intensity value. Regions of interest were obtained through image processing techniques that allow to differentiate between the subject and the background, having only the subject, the centers of each region of interest were obtained in order to get the same region of the face for each subject. Through the thermal analysis a biomarker for each region of interest was obtained, these biomarkers can diagnose when an emotion takes place. Because each subject tends to react differently to the same stimuli, a self-calibration phase is proposed, its function is to have the same thermal trend for each subject in order to make a decision so that the five emotions can be correctly diagnosed through a top-down hierarchical classifier. As a final result, a smart-thermal system that diagnose emotions was obtained and it was tested on twenty-five subjects (625 thermograms). The results of this test were 89.9% successful.

Social anhedonia is associated with neural abnormalities during face emotion processing.

PubMed

Germine, Laura T; Garrido, Lucia; Bruce, Lori; Hooker, Christine

2011-10-01

Human beings are social organisms with an intrinsic desire to seek and participate in social interactions. Social anhedonia is a personality trait characterized by a reduced desire for social affiliation and reduced pleasure derived from interpersonal interactions. Abnormally high levels of social anhedonia prospectively predict the development of schizophrenia and contribute to poorer outcomes for schizophrenia patients. Despite the strong association between social anhedonia and schizophrenia, the neural mechanisms that underlie individual differences in social anhedonia have not been studied and are thus poorly understood. Deficits in face emotion recognition are related to poorer social outcomes in schizophrenia, and it has been suggested that face emotion recognition deficits may be a behavioral marker for schizophrenia liability. In the current study, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to see whether there are differences in the brain networks underlying basic face emotion processing in a community sample of individuals low vs. high in social anhedonia. We isolated the neural mechanisms related to face emotion processing by comparing face emotion discrimination with four other baseline conditions (identity discrimination of emotional faces, identity discrimination of neutral faces, object discrimination, and pattern discrimination). Results showed a group (high/low social anhedonia) × condition (emotion discrimination/control condition) interaction in the anterior portion of the rostral medial prefrontal cortex, right superior temporal gyrus, and left somatosensory cortex. As predicted, high (relative to low) social anhedonia participants showed less neural activity in face emotion processing regions during emotion discrimination as compared to each control condition. The findings suggest that social anhedonia is associated with abnormalities in networks responsible for basic processes associated with social cognition, and provide a starting point for understanding the neural basis of social motivation and our drive to seek social affiliation. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Neural Correlates of Opposing Effects of Emotional Distraction on Perception and Episodic Memory: An Event-Related fMRI Investigation

PubMed Central

Shafer, Andrea T.; Dolcos, Florin

2012-01-01

A main question in emotion and memory literature concerns the relationship between the immediate impact of emotional distraction on perception and the long-term impact of emotion on memory. While previous research shows both automatic and resource-mediated mechanisms to be involved in initial emotion processing and memory, it remains unclear what the exact relationship between the immediate and long-term effects is, and how this relationship may change as a function of manipulations at perception favoring the engagement of either more automatic or mediated mechanisms. Using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging, we varied the degree of resource availability for processing task-irrelevant emotional information, to determine how the initial (impairing) impact of emotional distraction related to the long-term (enhancing) impact of emotion on memory. Results showed that a direct relationship between emotional distraction and memory was dependent on automatic mechanisms, as this was found only under conditions of limited resource availability and engagement of amygdala (AMY)-hippocampal (HC) mechanisms to both impairing and enhancing effects. A hemispheric disassociation was also identified in AMY-HC, where while both sides were associated with emotional distraction and left AMY and anterior HC were linked to emotional memory, functional asymmetry was only identified in the posterior HC, with only the left side contributing to emotional memory. Finally, areas dissociating between the two opposing effects included the medial frontal, precentral, superior temporal, and middle occipital gyri (linked to emotional distraction), and the superior parietal cortex (linked to emotional memory). These findings demonstrate the relationship between emotional distraction and memory is context dependent and that specific brain regions may be more or less susceptible to the direction of emotional modulation (increased or decreased), depending on the task manipulation, and processes investigated. PMID:23049502

Level of processing modulates the neural correlates of emotional memory formation

PubMed Central

Ritchey, Maureen; LaBar, Kevin S.; Cabeza, Roberto

2010-01-01

Emotion is known to influence multiple aspects of memory formation, including the initial encoding of the memory trace and its consolidation over time. However, the neural mechanisms whereby emotion impacts memory encoding remain largely unexplored. The present study employed a levels-of-processing manipulation to characterize the impact of emotion on encoding with and without the influence of elaborative processes. Participants viewed emotionally negative, neutral, and positive scenes under two conditions: a shallow condition focused on the perceptual features of the scenes and a deep condition that queried their semantic meaning. Recognition memory was tested 2 days later. Results showed that emotional memory enhancements were greatest in the shallow condition. FMRI analyses revealed that the right amygdala predicted subsequent emotional memory in the shallow more than deep condition, whereas the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex demonstrated the reverse pattern. Furthermore, the association of these regions with the hippocampus was modulated by valence: the amygdala-hippocampal link was strongest for negative stimuli, whereas the prefrontal-hippocampal link was strongest for positive stimuli. Taken together, these results suggest two distinct activation patterns underlying emotional memory formation: an amygdala component that promotes memory during shallow encoding, especially for negative information, and a prefrontal component that provides extra benefits during deep encoding, especially for positive information. PMID:20350176

Level of processing modulates the neural correlates of emotional memory formation.

PubMed

Ritchey, Maureen; LaBar, Kevin S; Cabeza, Roberto

2011-04-01

Emotion is known to influence multiple aspects of memory formation, including the initial encoding of the memory trace and its consolidation over time. However, the neural mechanisms whereby emotion impacts memory encoding remain largely unexplored. The present study used a levels-of-processing manipulation to characterize the impact of emotion on encoding with and without the influence of elaborative processes. Participants viewed emotionally negative, neutral, and positive scenes under two conditions: a shallow condition focused on the perceptual features of the scenes and a deep condition that queried their semantic meaning. Recognition memory was tested 2 days later. Results showed that emotional memory enhancements were greatest in the shallow condition. fMRI analyses revealed that the right amygdala predicted subsequent emotional memory in the shallow more than deep condition, whereas the right ventrolateral PFC demonstrated the reverse pattern. Furthermore, the association of these regions with the hippocampus was modulated by valence: the amygdala-hippocampal link was strongest for negative stimuli, whereas the prefrontal-hippocampal link was strongest for positive stimuli. Taken together, these results suggest two distinct activation patterns underlying emotional memory formation: an amygdala component that promotes memory during shallow encoding, especially for negative information, and a prefrontal component that provides extra benefits during deep encoding, especially for positive information.

Perception of emotion-related conflict in human communications: what are the effects of schizophrenia?

PubMed

Mitchell, Rachel L C; Rossell, Susan L

2014-12-15

Our ability to make sense of emotional cues is of paramount importance for understanding state of mind and communicative intent. However, emotional cues often conflict with each other; this presents a significant challenge for people with schizophrenia. We conducted a theoretical review to determine the extent and types of impaired processing of emotion-related conflict in schizophrenia; we evaluated the relationship with medication and symptoms, and considered possible mediatory mechanisms. The literature established that people with schizophrenia demonstrated impaired function: (i) when passively exposed to emotion cues whilst performing an unrelated task, (ii) when selectively attending to one source of emotion cues whilst trying to ignore interference from another source, and (iii) when trying to resolve conflicting emotion cues and judge meta-communicative intent. These deficits showed associations with both negative and positive symptoms. There was limited evidence for antipsychotic medications attenuating impaired emotion perception when there are conflicting cues, with further direct research needed. Impaired attentional control and context processing may underlie some of the observed impairments. Neuroanatomical correlates are likely to involve interhemispheric transfer via the corpus callosum, limbic regions such as the amygdala, and possibly dorsolateral prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortex through their role in conflict processing. Crown Copyright © 2014. Published by Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

Affect and neural activity in women with PTSD during a task of emotional interference.

PubMed

Brown, Wilson J; Wojtalik, Jessica A; Dewey, Daniel; Bruce, Steven E; Yang, Zhen; Sheline, Yvette I

2016-11-01

The current study sought to determine the relationship between self-reported dimensions of affect and activation in brain regions associated with emotion regulation in PTSD during a task of non-conscious emotional processing in interpersonal trauma survivors with PTSD and healthy controls. Participants included 52 women diagnosed with PTSD and 18 female healthy controls. All participants completed a clinical assessment including the SCID, CAPS, and PANAS followed by a functional MRI assessment including a task of implicit emotional conflict. When PTSD participants were oriented to fearful faces, negative affect (NA) was inversely related to activation in the left amygdala and positive affect (PA) was inversely related to activation in the right amygdala. When ignoring fearful faces, NA was positively associated with activation in the right parahippocampal gyrus and PA was inversely related to activation in the left hippocampus. Similar results were observed in healthy controls regarding PA. However, NA was not significantly related to any region of interest in healthy controls. Limitations include the homogeneity of the healthy controls with regard to racial diversity, results may only be specific to female interpersonal trauma survivors with PTSD, and neutral faces within the conflict task may be perceived as negative by clinical samples. Persistent, increased NA may represent a proxy for disruptions in emotional processing in interpersonal trauma survivors with PTSD. As such, clinicians may prioritize increasing emotional awareness through emotion regulation and/or distress tolerance strategies in this population. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The interaction of working memory and emotion in persons clinically at risk for psychosis: an fMRI pilot study.

PubMed

Pauly, Katharina; Seiferth, Nina Y; Kellermann, Thilo; Ruhrmann, Stephan; Daumann, Bianca; Backes, Volker; Klosterkötter, Joachim; Shah, N Jon; Schneider, Frank; Kircher, Tilo T; Habel, Ute

2010-07-01

Subtle emotional and cognitive dysfunctions may already be apparent in individuals at risk for psychosis. However, there is a paucity of research on the neural correlates of the interaction of both domains. It remains unclear whether those correlates are already dysfunctional before a transition to psychosis. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine the interaction of working memory and emotion in 12 persons clinically at high risk for psychosis (CHR) and 12 healthy subjects individually matched for age, gender and parental education. Participants performed an n-back task while negative or neutral emotion was induced by olfactory stimulation. Although healthy and psychosis-prone subjects did not differ in their working memory performance or the evaluation of the induced emotion, decreased activations were found in CHR subjects in the superior parietal lobe and the precuneus during working memory and in the insula during emotion induction. Looking at the interaction, CHR subjects, showed decreased activation in the right superior temporal gyrus, which correlated negatively with psychopathological scores. Decreased activation was also found in the thalamus. However, an increase of activation emerged in several cerebellar regions. Dysfunctions in areas associated with controlling whether incoming information is linked to emotional content and in the integration of multimodal information might lead to compensatory activations of cerebellar regions known to be involved in olfactory and working memory processes. Our study underlines that cerebral dysfunctions related to cognitive and emotional processes, as well as their interaction, can emerge in persons with CHR, even in absence of behavioral differences. (c) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The neural bases of cognitive conflict and control in moral judgment.

PubMed

Greene, Joshua D; Nystrom, Leigh E; Engell, Andrew D; Darley, John M; Cohen, Jonathan D

2004-10-14

Traditional theories of moral psychology emphasize reasoning and "higher cognition," while more recent work emphasizes the role of emotion. The present fMRI data support a theory of moral judgment according to which both "cognitive" and emotional processes play crucial and sometimes mutually competitive roles. The present results indicate that brain regions associated with abstract reasoning and cognitive control (including dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex) are recruited to resolve difficult personal moral dilemmas in which utilitarian values require "personal" moral violations, violations that have previously been associated with increased activity in emotion-related brain regions. Several regions of frontal and parietal cortex predict intertrial differences in moral judgment behavior, exhibiting greater activity for utilitarian judgments. We speculate that the controversy surrounding utilitarian moral philosophy reflects an underlying tension between competing subsystems in the brain.

Neural correlates of admiration and compassion

PubMed Central

Immordino-Yang, Mary Helen; McColl, Andrea; Damasio, Hanna; Damasio, Antonio

2009-01-01

In an fMRI experiment, participants were exposed to narratives based on true stories designed to evoke admiration and compassion in 4 distinct categories: admiration for virtue (AV), admiration for skill (AS), compassion for social/psychological pain (CSP), and compassion for physical pain (CPP). The goal was to test hypotheses about recruitment of homeostatic, somatosensory, and consciousness-related neural systems during the processing of pain-related (compassion) and non-pain-related (admiration) social emotions along 2 dimensions: emotions about other peoples' social/psychological conditions (AV, CSP) and emotions about others' physical conditions (AS, CPP). Consistent with theoretical accounts, the experience of all 4 emotions engaged brain regions involved in interoceptive representation and homeostatic regulation, including anterior insula, anterior cingulate, hypothalamus, and mesencephalon. However, the study also revealed a previously undescribed pattern within the posteromedial cortices (the ensemble of precuneus, posterior cingulate cortex, and retrosplenial region), an intriguing territory currently known for its involvement in the default mode of brain operation and in self-related/consciousness processes: emotions pertaining to social/psychological and physical situations engaged different networks aligned, respectively, with interoceptive and exteroceptive neural systems. Finally, within the anterior insula, activity correlated with AV and CSP peaked later and was more sustained than that associated with CPP. Our findings contribute insights on the functions of the posteromedial cortices and on the recruitment of the anterior insula in social emotions concerned with physical versus psychological pain. PMID:19414310

Mental state attribution and the temporoparietal junction: an fMRI study comparing belief, emotion, and perception.

PubMed

Zaitchik, Deborah; Walker, Caren; Miller, Saul; LaViolette, Pete; Feczko, Eric; Dickerson, Bradford C

2010-07-01

By age 2, children attribute referential mental states such as perceptions and emotions to themselves and others, yet it is not until age 4 that they attribute representational mental states such as beliefs. This raises an interesting question: is attribution of beliefs different from attribution of perceptions and emotions in terms of its neural substrate? To address this question with a high degree of anatomic specificity, we partitioned the TPJ, a broad area often found to be recruited in theory of mind tasks, into 2 neuroanatomically specific regions of interest: Superior Temporal Sulcus (STS) and Inferior Parietal Lobule (IPL). To maximize behavioral specificity, we designed a tightly controlled verbal task comprised of sets of single sentences--sentences identical except for the type of mental state specified in the verb (belief, emotion, perception, syntax control). Results indicated that attribution of beliefs more strongly recruited both regions of interest than did emotions or perceptions. This is especially surprising with respect to STS, since it is widely reported in the literature to mediate the detection of referential states--among them emotions and perceptions--rather than the inference of beliefs. An explanation is offered that focuses on the differences between verbal stimuli and visual stimuli, and between a process of sentence comprehension and a process of visual detection. Copyright (c) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Neural correlates of admiration and compassion.

PubMed

Immordino-Yang, Mary Helen; McColl, Andrea; Damasio, Hanna; Damasio, Antonio

2009-05-12

In an fMRI experiment, participants were exposed to narratives based on true stories designed to evoke admiration and compassion in 4 distinct categories: admiration for virtue (AV), admiration for skill (AS), compassion for social/psychological pain (CSP), and compassion for physical pain (CPP). The goal was to test hypotheses about recruitment of homeostatic, somatosensory, and consciousness-related neural systems during the processing of pain-related (compassion) and non-pain-related (admiration) social emotions along 2 dimensions: emotions about other peoples' social/psychological conditions (AV, CSP) and emotions about others' physical conditions (AS, CPP). Consistent with theoretical accounts, the experience of all 4 emotions engaged brain regions involved in interoceptive representation and homeostatic regulation, including anterior insula, anterior cingulate, hypothalamus, and mesencephalon. However, the study also revealed a previously undescribed pattern within the posteromedial cortices (the ensemble of precuneus, posterior cingulate cortex, and retrosplenial region), an intriguing territory currently known for its involvement in the default mode of brain operation and in self-related/consciousness processes: emotions pertaining to social/psychological and physical situations engaged different networks aligned, respectively, with interoceptive and exteroceptive neural systems. Finally, within the anterior insula, activity correlated with AV and CSP peaked later and was more sustained than that associated with CPP. Our findings contribute insights on the functions of the posteromedial cortices and on the recruitment of the anterior insula in social emotions concerned with physical versus psychological pain.

Neuronal coding of implicit emotion categories in the subcallosal cortex in patients with depression.

PubMed

Laxton, Adrian W; Neimat, Joseph S; Davis, Karen D; Womelsdorf, Thilo; Hutchison, William D; Dostrovsky, Jonathan O; Hamani, Clement; Mayberg, Helen S; Lozano, Andres M

2013-11-15

The subcallosal cingulate and adjacent ventromedial prefrontal cortex (collectively referred to here as the subcallosal cortex or SCC) have been identified as key brain areas in emotional processing. The SCC's role in affective valuation as well as severe mood and motivational disturbances, such as major depression, has been largely inferred from measures of neuronal population activity using functional neuroimaging. On the basis of imaging studies, it is unclear whether the SCC predominantly processes 1) negatively valenced affective content, 2) affective arousal, or 3) category-specific affective information. To clarify these putative functional roles of the SCC, we measured single neuron activity in the SCC of 15 human subjects undergoing deep brain stimulation for depression while they viewed emotionally evocative images grouped into categories that varied in emotional valence (pleasantness) and arousal. We found that the majority of responsive neurons were modulated by specific emotion categories, rather than by valence or arousal alone. Moreover, although these emotion-category-specific neurons responded to both positive and negative emotion categories, a significant majority were selective for negatively valenced emotional content. These findings reveal that single SCC neuron activity reflects the automatic valuational processing and implicit emotion categorization of visual stimuli. Furthermore, because of the predominance of neuronal signals in SCC conveying negative affective valuations and the increased activity in this region among depressed people, the effectiveness of depression therapies that alter SCC neuronal activity may relate to the down-regulation of a previously negative emotional processing bias. © 2013 Society of Biological Psychiatry.

Cerebral Correlates of Abnormal Emotion Conflict Processing in Euthymic Bipolar Patients: A Functional MRI Study.

PubMed

Favre, Pauline; Polosan, Mircea; Pichat, Cédric; Bougerol, Thierry; Baciu, Monica

2015-01-01

Patients with bipolar disorder experience cognitive and emotional impairment that may persist even during the euthymic state of the disease. These persistent symptoms in bipolar patients (BP) may be characterized by disturbances of emotion regulation and related fronto-limbic brain circuitry. The present study aims to investigate the modulation of fronto-limbic activity and connectivity in BP by the processing of emotional conflict. Fourteen euthymic BP and 13 matched healthy subjects (HS) underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while performing a word-face emotional Stroop task designed to dissociate the monitoring/generation of emotional conflict from its resolution. Functional connectivity was determined by means of psychophysiological interaction (PPI) approach. Relative to HS, BP were slower to process incongruent stimuli, reflecting higher amount of behavioral interference during emotional Stroop. Furthermore, BP showed decreased activation of the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) during the monitoring and a lack of bilateral amygdala deactivation during the resolution of the emotional conflict. In addition, during conflict monitoring, BP showed abnormal positive connectivity between the right DLPFC and several regions of the default mode network. Overall, our results highlighted dysfunctional processing of the emotion conflict in euthymic BP that may be subtended by abnormal activity and connectivity of the DLPFC during the conflict monitoring, which, in turn, leads to failure of amygdala deactivation during the resolution of the conflict. Emotional dysregulation in BP may be underpinned by a lack of top-down cognitive control and a difficulty to focus on the task due to persistent self-oriented attention.

Parametric modulation of neural activity by emotion in youth with bipolar disorder, severe mood dysregulation, and healthy subjects

PubMed Central

Thomas, Laura A.; Brotman, Melissa A.; Muhrer, Eli M.; Rosen, Brooke H.; Bones, Brian L.; Reynolds, Richard C.; Deveney, Christen; Pine, Daniel S.; Leibenluft, Ellen

2012-01-01

Context Youth with bipolar disorder (BD) and those with severe, non-episodic irritability (severe mood dysregulation, SMD) show amygdala dysfunction during face emotion processing. However, studies have not compared such patients to each other and to comparison subjects in neural responsiveness to subtle changes in face emotion; the ability to process such changes is important for social cognition. We employed a novel parametrically designed faces paradigm. Objective Using a parametrically morphed emotional faces task, we compared activation in the amygdala and across the brain in BD, SMD, and healthy volunteers (HV). Design Case-control study. Setting Government research institute. Participants 57 youths (19 BD, 15 SMD, 23 HV). Main Outcome Measure Blood oxygenated level dependent (BOLD) data. Neutral faces were morphed with angry and happy faces in 25% intervals; static face stimuli appeared for 3000ms. Subjects performed hostility or non-emotional facial feature (i.e., nose width) ratings. Slope of BOLD activity was calculated across neutral-to-angry (N→A) and neutral-to-happy (N→H) face stimuli. Results In HV, but not BD or SMD, there was a positive association between left amygdala activity and anger on the face. In the N→H whole brain analysis, BD and SMD modulated parietal, temporal, and medial-frontal areas differently from each other and from HV; with increasing facial-happiness, SMD increased, while BD decreased, activity in parietal, temporal, and frontal regions. Conclusions Youth with BD or SMD differ from HV in modulation of amygdala activity in response to small changes in facial anger displays. In contrast, BD and SMD show distinct perturbations in regions mediating attention and face processing in association with changes in the emotional intensity of facial happiness displays. These findings demonstrate similarities and differences in the neural correlates of face emotion processing in BD and SMD, suggesting these distinct clinical presentations may reflect differing pathologies along a mood disorders spectrum. PMID:23026912

Regional gray matter correlates of memory for emotion-laden words in middle-aged and older adults: A voxel-based morphometry study.

PubMed

Saarela, Carina; Joutsa, Juho; Laine, Matti; Parkkola, Riitta; Rinne, Juha O; Karrasch, Mira

2017-01-01

Emotional content is known to enhance memory in a content-dependent manner in healthy populations. In middle-aged and older adults, a reduced preference for negative material, or even an enhanced preference for positive material has been observed. This preference seems to be modulated by the emotional arousal that the material evokes. The neuroanatomical basis for emotional memory processes is, however, not well understood in middle-aged and older healthy people. Previous research on local gray matter correlates of emotional memory in older populations has mainly been conducted with patients suffering from various neurodegenerative diseases. To our knowledge, this is the first study to examine regional gray matter correlates of immediate free recall and recognition memory of intentionally encoded positive, negative, and emotionally neutral words using voxel-based morphometry (VBM) in a sample of 50-to-79-year-old cognitively intact normal adults. The behavioral analyses yielded a positivity bias in recognition memory, but not in immediate free recall. No associations with memory performance emerged from the region-of-interest (ROI) analyses using amygdalar and hippocampal volumes. Controlling for total intracranial volume, age, and gender, the whole-brain VBM analyses showed statistically significant associations between immediate free recall of negative words and volumes in various frontal regions, between immediate free recall of positive words and cerebellar volume, and between recognition memory of positive words and primary visual cortex volume. The findings indicate that the neural areas subserving memory for emotion-laden information encompass posterior brain areas, including the cerebellum, and that memory for emotion-laden information may be driven by cognitive control functions.

Regional gray matter correlates of memory for emotion-laden words in middle-aged and older adults: A voxel-based morphometry study

PubMed Central

Joutsa, Juho; Laine, Matti; Parkkola, Riitta; Rinne, Juha O.; Karrasch, Mira

2017-01-01

Emotional content is known to enhance memory in a content-dependent manner in healthy populations. In middle-aged and older adults, a reduced preference for negative material, or even an enhanced preference for positive material has been observed. This preference seems to be modulated by the emotional arousal that the material evokes. The neuroanatomical basis for emotional memory processes is, however, not well understood in middle-aged and older healthy people. Previous research on local gray matter correlates of emotional memory in older populations has mainly been conducted with patients suffering from various neurodegenerative diseases. To our knowledge, this is the first study to examine regional gray matter correlates of immediate free recall and recognition memory of intentionally encoded positive, negative, and emotionally neutral words using voxel-based morphometry (VBM) in a sample of 50-to-79-year-old cognitively intact normal adults. The behavioral analyses yielded a positivity bias in recognition memory, but not in immediate free recall. No associations with memory performance emerged from the region-of-interest (ROI) analyses using amygdalar and hippocampal volumes. Controlling for total intracranial volume, age, and gender, the whole-brain VBM analyses showed statistically significant associations between immediate free recall of negative words and volumes in various frontal regions, between immediate free recall of positive words and cerebellar volume, and between recognition memory of positive words and primary visual cortex volume. The findings indicate that the neural areas subserving memory for emotion-laden information encompass posterior brain areas, including the cerebellum, and that memory for emotion-laden information may be driven by cognitive control functions. PMID:28771634

Task-specific activity and connectivity within the mentalizing network during emotion and intention mentalizing.

PubMed

Atique, Bijoy; Erb, Michael; Gharabaghi, Alireza; Grodd, Wolfgang; Anders, Silke

2011-04-15

Mentalizing, i.e. the process of inferring another person's mental state, is thought to be primarily subserved by three brain regions, the VMPFC (ventromedial prefrontal cortex), precuneus and TPJ (temporo-parietal junction). However, it is still unclear what the exact roles of these regions in mentalizing are. Here, we compare activity within, and functional connectivity between, the VMPFC, precuneus and TPJ during two different mentalizing tasks. Specifically, we examine whether inferring another person's emotion ("emotion mentalizing") and inferring another person's intention ("intention mentalizing") activate similar or distinct subregions within the VMPFC, precuneus and TPJ, and whether these different kinds of mentalizing are associated with different patterns of functional connectivity between these regions. Our results indicate that emotion mentalizing and intention mentalizing activate partly distinct subregions of the right and left TPJ that can be spatially separated across participants. These subregions also showed different patterns of functional connectivity with the VMPFC: a more anterior region of the right and left TPJ, which was more strongly activated during emotion mentalizing, showed stronger functional connectivity with the VMPFC, particularly during emotion mentalizing, than a more posterior region that was more strongly activated during intention mentalizing. Critically, this double dissociation became evident only when the fine-scale distribution of activity within activated regions was analysed, and despite the fact that there was also a significant overlap of activity during the two tasks. Our findings provide first evidence that different neural modules might have evolved within the TPJ that show distinct patterns of functional connectivity and might subserve slightly different subfunctions of mentalizing. Copyright © 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Emotion recognition deficits associated with ventromedial prefrontal cortex lesions are improved by gaze manipulation.

PubMed

Wolf, Richard C; Pujara, Maia; Baskaya, Mustafa K; Koenigs, Michael

2016-09-01

Facial emotion recognition is a critical aspect of human communication. Since abnormalities in facial emotion recognition are associated with social and affective impairment in a variety of psychiatric and neurological conditions, identifying the neural substrates and psychological processes underlying facial emotion recognition will help advance basic and translational research on social-affective function. Ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) has recently been implicated in deploying visual attention to the eyes of emotional faces, although there is mixed evidence regarding the importance of this brain region for recognition accuracy. In the present study of neurological patients with vmPFC damage, we used an emotion recognition task with morphed facial expressions of varying intensities to determine (1) whether vmPFC is essential for emotion recognition accuracy, and (2) whether instructed attention to the eyes of faces would be sufficient to improve any accuracy deficits. We found that vmPFC lesion patients are impaired, relative to neurologically healthy adults, at recognizing moderate intensity expressions of anger and that recognition accuracy can be improved by providing instructions of where to fixate. These results suggest that vmPFC may be important for the recognition of facial emotion through a role in guiding visual attention to emotionally salient regions of faces. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Music and emotions: from enchantment to entrainment.

PubMed

Vuilleumier, Patrik; Trost, Wiebke

2015-03-01

Producing and perceiving music engage a wide range of sensorimotor, cognitive, and emotional processes. Emotions are a central feature of the enjoyment of music, with a large variety of affective states consistently reported by people while listening to music. However, besides joy or sadness, music often elicits feelings of wonder, nostalgia, or tenderness, which do not correspond to emotion categories typically studied in neuroscience and whose neural substrates remain largely unknown. Here we review the similarities and differences in the neural substrates underlying these "complex" music-evoked emotions relative to other more "basic" emotional experiences. We suggest that these emotions emerge through a combination of activation in emotional and motivational brain systems (e.g., including reward pathways) that confer its valence to music, with activation in several other areas outside emotional systems, including motor, attention, or memory-related regions. We then discuss the neural substrates underlying the entrainment of cognitive and motor processes by music and their relation to affective experience. These effects have important implications for the potential therapeutic use of music in neurological or psychiatric diseases, particularly those associated with motor, attention, or affective disturbances. © 2015 New York Academy of Sciences.

[Emotional processing in patients with a dissocial personality disorder subtype "psychopathy" according to PCL-R].

PubMed

Weber, Tatjana; Sommer, Monika; Hajak, Göran; Müller, Jürgen

2004-11-01

Functional MRI was used to test the effects of the deficient emotional responsiveness of psychopathic patients on cognitive processes. We used a Simon-paradigm, in which ten healthy volunteers and ten patients with a diagnosis of "psychopathy" (defined by Hare Psychopathy Checklist Revised) have to select their spatially defined responses on the basis of a nonspatial stimuli feature. For the emotion induction pictures from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) were selected. At the beginning and intermediated by the Simon-paradigm blocks of positive, negative or neutral pictures were presented. Patients with "psychopathy" exhibited untypical activation patterns in amygdala and prefrontal regions during interferences between negative or positive stimulations and cognitive tasks. These results demonstrated disturbed regulation of emotion-cognition-interaction in "psychopathy" according to PCL-R.

A Shared Neural Substrate for Mentalizing and the Affective Component of Sentence Comprehension

PubMed Central

Hervé, Pierre-Yves; Razafimandimby, Annick; Jobard, Gaël; Tzourio-Mazoyer, Nathalie

2013-01-01

Using event-related fMRI in a sample of 42 healthy participants, we compared the cerebral activity maps obtained when classifying spoken sentences based on the mental content of the main character (belief, deception or empathy) or on the emotional tonality of the sentence (happiness, anger or sadness). To control for the effects of different syntactic constructions (such as embedded clauses in belief sentences), we subtracted from each map the BOLD activations obtained during plausibility judgments on structurally matching sentences, devoid of emotions or ToM. The obtained theory of mind (ToM) and emotional speech comprehension networks overlapped in the bilateral temporo-parietal junction, posterior cingulate cortex, right anterior temporal lobe, dorsomedial prefrontal cortex and in the left inferior frontal sulcus. These regions form a ToM network, which contributes to the emotional component of spoken sentence comprehension. Compared with the ToM task, in which the sentences were enounced on a neutral tone, the emotional sentence classification task, in which the sentences were play-acted, was associated with a greater activity in the bilateral superior temporal sulcus, in line with the presence of emotional prosody. Besides, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex was more active during emotional than ToM sentence processing. This region may link mental state representations with verbal and prosodic emotional cues. Compared with emotional sentence classification, ToM was associated with greater activity in the caudate nucleus, paracingulate cortex, and superior frontal and parietal regions, in line with behavioral data showing that ToM sentence comprehension was a more demanding task. PMID:23342148

Eyes wide shut: amygdala mediates eyes-closed effect on emotional experience with music.

PubMed

Lerner, Yulia; Papo, David; Zhdanov, Andrey; Belozersky, Libi; Hendler, Talma

2009-07-15

The perceived emotional value of stimuli and, as a consequence the subjective emotional experience with them, can be affected by context-dependent styles of processing. Therefore, the investigation of the neural correlates of emotional experience requires accounting for such a variable, a matter of an experimental challenge. Closing the eyes affects the style of attending to auditory stimuli by modifying the perceptual relationship with the environment without changing the stimulus itself. In the current study, we used fMRI to characterize the neural mediators of such modification on the experience of emotionality in music. We assumed that closed eyes position will reveal interplay between different levels of neural processing of emotions. More specifically, we focused on the amygdala as a central node of the limbic system and on its co-activation with the Locus Ceruleus (LC) and Ventral Prefrontal Cortex (VPFC); regions involved in processing of, respectively, 'low', visceral-, and 'high', cognitive-related, values of emotional stimuli. Fifteen healthy subjects listened to negative and neutral music excerpts with eyes closed or open. As expected, behavioral results showed that closing the eyes while listening to emotional music resulted in enhanced rating of emotionality, specifically of negative music. In correspondence, fMRI results showed greater activation in the amygdala when subjects listened to the emotional music with eyes closed relative to eyes open. More so, by using voxel-based correlation and a dynamic causal model analyses we demonstrated that increased amygdala activation to negative music with eyes closed led to increased activations in the LC and VPFC. This finding supports a system-based model of perceived emotionality in which the amygdala has a central role in mediating the effect of context-based processing style by recruiting neural operations involved in both visceral (i.e. 'low') and cognitive (i.e. 'high') related processes of emotions.

Recognition of Scared Faces and the Serotonin Transporter Gene in Young Children: The Generation R Study

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Szekely, Eszter; Herba, Catherine M.; Arp, Pascal P.; Uitterlinden, Andre G.; Jaddoe, Vincent W. V.; Hofman, Albert; Verhulst, Frank C.; Hudziak, James J.; Tiemeier, Henning

2011-01-01

Background: Previous research highlights the significance of a functional polymorphism located in the promoter region (5-HTTLPR) of the serotonin transporter gene in emotional behaviour. This study examined the effect of the 5-HTTLPR polymorphism on emotion processing in a large number of healthy preschoolers. Methods: The 5-HTTLPR genotype was…

How emotion leads to selective memory: neuroimaging evidence.

PubMed

Waring, Jill D; Kensinger, Elizabeth A

2011-06-01

Often memory for emotionally arousing items is enhanced relative to neutral items within complex visual scenes, but this enhancement can come at the expense of memory for peripheral background information. This 'trade-off' effect has been elicited by a range of stimulus valence and arousal levels, yet the magnitude of the effect has been shown to vary with these factors. Using fMRI, this study investigated the neural mechanisms underlying this selective memory for emotional scenes. Further, we examined how these processes are affected by stimulus dimensions of arousal and valence. The trade-off effect in memory occurred for low to high arousal positive and negative scenes. There was a core emotional memory network associated with the trade-off among all the emotional scene types, however, there were additional regions that were uniquely associated with the trade-off for each individual scene type. These results suggest that there is a common network of regions associated with the emotional memory trade-off effect, but that valence and arousal also independently affect the neural activity underlying the effect. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

How emotion leads to selective memory: Neuroimaging evidence

PubMed Central

Waring, Jill D.; Kensinger, Elizabeth A.

2011-01-01

Often memory for emotionally arousing items is enhanced relative to neutral items within complex visual scenes, but this enhancement can come at the expense of memory for peripheral background information. This ‘trade-off’ effect has been elicited by a range of stimulus valence and arousal levels, yet the magnitude of the effect has been shown to vary with these factors. Using fMRI, this study investigated the neural mechanisms underlying this selective memory for emotional scenes. Further, we examined how these processes are affected by stimulus dimensions of arousal and valence. The trade-off effect in memory occurred for low to high arousal positive and negative scenes. There was a core emotional memory network associated with the trade-off among all the emotional scene types, however there were additional regions that were uniquely associated with the trade-off for each individual scene type. These results suggest that there is a common network of regions associated with the emotional memory tradeoff effect, but that valence and arousal also independently affect the neural activity underlying the effect. PMID:21414333

Discrete Neural Correlates for the Recognition of Negative Emotions: Insights from Frontotemporal Dementia

PubMed Central

Kumfor, Fiona; Irish, Muireann; Hodges, John R.; Piguet, Olivier

2013-01-01

Patients with frontotemporal dementia have pervasive changes in emotion recognition and social cognition, yet the neural changes underlying these emotion processing deficits remain unclear. The multimodal system model of emotion proposes that basic emotions are dependent on distinct brain regions, which undergo significant pathological changes in frontotemporal dementia. As such, this syndrome may provide important insight into the impact of neural network degeneration upon the innate ability to recognise emotions. This study used voxel-based morphometry to identify discrete neural correlates involved in the recognition of basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, sadness, surprise and happiness) in frontotemporal dementia. Forty frontotemporal dementia patients (18 behavioural-variant, 11 semantic dementia, 11 progressive nonfluent aphasia) and 27 healthy controls were tested on two facial emotion recognition tasks: The Ekman 60 and Ekman Caricatures. Although each frontotemporal dementia group showed impaired recognition of negative emotions, distinct associations between emotion-specific task performance and changes in grey matter intensity emerged. Fear recognition was associated with the right amygdala; disgust recognition with the left insula; anger recognition with the left middle and superior temporal gyrus; and sadness recognition with the left subcallosal cingulate, indicating that discrete neural substrates are necessary for emotion recognition in frontotemporal dementia. The erosion of emotion-specific neural networks in neurodegenerative disorders may produce distinct profiles of performance that are relevant to understanding the neurobiological basis of emotion processing. PMID:23805313

Neural control of vascular reactions: impact of emotion and attention.

PubMed

Okon-Singer, Hadas; Mehnert, Jan; Hoyer, Jana; Hellrung, Lydia; Schaare, Herma Lina; Dukart, Juergen; Villringer, Arno

2014-03-19

This study investigated the neural regions involved in blood pressure reactions to negative stimuli and their possible modulation by attention. Twenty-four healthy human subjects (11 females; age = 24.75 ± 2.49 years) participated in an affective perceptual load task that manipulated attention to negative/neutral distractor pictures. fMRI data were collected simultaneously with continuous recording of peripheral arterial blood pressure. A parametric modulation analysis examined the impact of attention and emotion on the relation between neural activation and blood pressure reactivity during the task. When attention was available for processing the distractor pictures, negative pictures resulted in behavioral interference, neural activation in brain regions previously related to emotion, a transient decrease of blood pressure, and a positive correlation between blood pressure response and activation in a network including prefrontal and parietal regions, the amygdala, caudate, and mid-brain. These effects were modulated by attention; behavioral and neural responses to highly negative distractor pictures (compared with neutral pictures) were smaller or diminished, as was the negative blood pressure response when the central task involved high perceptual load. Furthermore, comparing high and low load revealed enhanced activation in frontoparietal regions implicated in attention control. Our results fit theories emphasizing the role of attention in the control of behavioral and neural reactions to irrelevant emotional distracting information. Our findings furthermore extend the function of attention to the control of autonomous reactions associated with negative emotions by showing altered blood pressure reactions to emotional stimuli, the latter being of potential clinical relevance.

Isolating N400 as neural marker of vocal anger processing in 6-11-year old children.

PubMed

Chronaki, Georgia; Broyd, Samantha; Garner, Matthew; Hadwin, Julie A; Thompson, Margaret J J; Sonuga-Barke, Edmund J S

2012-04-01

Vocal anger is a salient social signal serving adaptive functions in typical child development. Despite recent advances in the developmental neuroscience of emotion processing with regard to visual stimuli, little remains known about the neural correlates of vocal anger processing in childhood. This study represents the first attempt to isolate a neural marker of vocal anger processing in children using electrophysiological methods. We compared ERP wave forms during the processing of non-word emotional vocal stimuli in a population sample of 55 6-11-year-old typically developing children. Children listened to three types of stimuli expressing angry, happy, and neutral prosody and completed an emotion identification task with three response options (angry, happy and neutral/'ok'). A distinctive N400 component which was modulated by emotional content of vocal stimulus was observed in children over parietal and occipital scalp regions-amplitudes were significantly attenuated to angry compared to happy and neutral voices. Findings of the present study regarding the N400 are compatible with adult studies showing reduced N400 amplitudes to negative compared to neutral emotional stimuli. Implications for studies of the neural basis of vocal anger processing in children are discussed. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Behavioral neuroscience of emotion in aging.

PubMed

Kaszniak, Alfred W; Menchola, Marisa

2012-01-01

Recent research on emotion and aging has revealed a stability of emotional experience from adulthood to older age, despite aging-related decrements in the perception and categorization of emotionally relevant stimuli. Research also shows that emotional expression remains intact with aging. In contrast, other studies provide evidence for an age-related decrease in autonomic nervous system physiological arousal, particularly in response to emotionally negative stimuli, and for shifts in central nervous system physiologic response to emotional stimuli, with increased prefrontal cortex activation and decreased amygdala activation in aging. Research on attention and memory for emotional information supports a decreased processing of negative emotional stimuli (i.e., a decrease in the negativity effect seen in younger adults), and a relative increase in the processing of emotionally positive stimuli (positivity effect). These physiological response and attentional/memory preference differences across increasingly older groups have been interpreted, within socioemotional selectivity theory, as reflecting greater motivation for emotion regulation with aging. According to this theory, as persons age, their perceived future time horizon shrinks, and a greater value is placed upon cultivating close, familiar, and meaningful relationships and other situations that give rise to positive emotional experience, and avoiding, or shifting attention from, those people and situations that are likely to elicit negative emotion. Even though there are central nervous system structural changes in emotion-relevant brain regions with aging, this shift in socioemotional selectivity, and perhaps the decreased autonomic nervous system physiological arousal of emotion with aging, facilitate enhanced emotion regulation with aging.

Neural Systems for Cognitive and Emotional Processing in Posttraumatic Stress Disorder

PubMed Central

Brown, Vanessa M.; Morey, Rajendra A.

2012-01-01

Individuals with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) show altered cognition when trauma-related material is present. PTSD may lead to enhanced processing of trauma-related material, or it may cause impaired processing of trauma-unrelated information. However, other forms of emotional information may also alter cognition in PTSD. In this review, we discuss the behavioral and neural effects of emotion processing on cognition in PTSD, with a focus on neuroimaging results. We propose a model of emotion-cognition interaction based on evidence of two network models of altered brain activation in PTSD. The first is a trauma-disrupted network made up of ventrolateral PFC, dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), hippocampus, insula, and dorsomedial PFC that are differentially modulated by trauma content relative to emotional trauma-unrelated information. The trauma-disrupted network forms a subnetwork of regions within a larger, widely recognized network organized into ventral and dorsal streams for processing emotional and cognitive information that converge in the medial PFC and cingulate cortex. Models of fear learning, while not a cognitive process in the conventional sense, provide important insights into the maintenance of the core symptom clusters of PTSD such as re-experiencing and hypervigilance. Fear processing takes place within the limbic corticostriatal loop composed of threat-alerting and threat-assessing components. Understanding the disruptions in these two networks, and their effect on individuals with PTSD, will lead to an improved knowledge of the etiopathogenesis of PTSD and potential targets for both psychotherapeutic and pharmacotherapeutic interventions. PMID:23162499

Ability to Maintain Internal Arousal and Motivation Modulates Brain Responses to Emotions

PubMed Central

Sterpenich, Virginie; Schwartz, Sophie; Maquet, Pierre; Desseilles, Martin

2014-01-01

Persistence (PS) is defined as the ability to generate and maintain arousal and motivation internally in the absence of immediate external reward. Low PS individuals tend to become discouraged when expectations are not rapidly fulfilled. The goal of this study was to investigate whether individual differences in PS influence the recruitment of brain regions involved in emotional processing and regulation. In a functional MRI study, 35 subjects judged the emotional intensity of displayed pictures. When processing negative pictures, low PS (vs. high PS) subjects showed higher amygdala and right orbito-frontal cortex (OFC) activity but lower left OFC activity. This dissociation in OFC activity suggests greater prefrontal cortical asymmetry for approach/avoidance motivation, suggesting an avoidance response to aversive stimuli in low PS. For positive or neutral stimuli, low PS subjects showed lower activity in the amygdala, striatum, and hippocampus. These results suggest that low PS may involve an imbalance in processing distinct emotional inputs, with greater reactivity to aversive information in regions involved in avoidance behaviour (amygdala, OFC) and dampened response to positive and neutral stimuli across circuits subserving motivated behaviour (striatum, hippocampus, amygdala). Low PS affective style was associated with depression vulnerability. These findings in non-depressed subjects point to a neural mechanism whereby some individuals are more likely to show systematic negative emotional biases, as frequently observed in depression. The assessment of these individual differences, including those that may cause vulnerability to depressive disorders, would therefore constitute a promising approach to risk assessment for depression. PMID:25438046

Ability to maintain internal arousal and motivation modulates brain responses to emotions.

PubMed

Sterpenich, Virginie; Schwartz, Sophie; Maquet, Pierre; Desseilles, Martin

2014-01-01

Persistence (PS) is defined as the ability to generate and maintain arousal and motivation internally in the absence of immediate external reward. Low PS individuals tend to become discouraged when expectations are not rapidly fulfilled. The goal of this study was to investigate whether individual differences in PS influence the recruitment of brain regions involved in emotional processing and regulation. In a functional MRI study, 35 subjects judged the emotional intensity of displayed pictures. When processing negative pictures, low PS (vs. high PS) subjects showed higher amygdala and right orbito-frontal cortex (OFC) activity but lower left OFC activity. This dissociation in OFC activity suggests greater prefrontal cortical asymmetry for approach/avoidance motivation, suggesting an avoidance response to aversive stimuli in low PS. For positive or neutral stimuli, low PS subjects showed lower activity in the amygdala, striatum, and hippocampus. These results suggest that low PS may involve an imbalance in processing distinct emotional inputs, with greater reactivity to aversive information in regions involved in avoidance behaviour (amygdala, OFC) and dampened response to positive and neutral stimuli across circuits subserving motivated behaviour (striatum, hippocampus, amygdala). Low PS affective style was associated with depression vulnerability. These findings in non-depressed subjects point to a neural mechanism whereby some individuals are more likely to show systematic negative emotional biases, as frequently observed in depression. The assessment of these individual differences, including those that may cause vulnerability to depressive disorders, would therefore constitute a promising approach to risk assessment for depression.

Gender differences in brain networks supporting empathy.

PubMed

Schulte-Rüther, Martin; Markowitsch, Hans J; Shah, N Jon; Fink, Gereon R; Piefke, Martina

2008-08-01

Females frequently score higher on standard tests of empathy, social sensitivity, and emotion recognition than do males. It remains to be clarified, however, whether these gender differences are associated with gender specific neural mechanisms of emotional social cognition. We investigated gender differences in an emotion attribution task using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Subjects either focused on their own emotional response to emotion expressing faces (SELF-task) or evaluated the emotional state expressed by the faces (OTHER-task). Behaviorally, females rated SELF-related emotions significantly stronger than males. Across the sexes, SELF- and OTHER-related processing of facial expressions activated a network of medial and lateral prefrontal, temporal, and parietal brain regions involved in emotional perspective taking. During SELF-related processing, females recruited the right inferior frontal cortex and superior temporal sulcus stronger than males. In contrast, there was increased neural activity in the left temporoparietal junction in males (relative to females). When performing the OTHER-task, females showed increased activation of the right inferior frontal cortex while there were no differential activations in males. The data suggest that females recruit areas containing mirror neurons to a higher degree than males during both SELF- and OTHER-related processing in empathic face-to-face interactions. This may underlie facilitated emotional "contagion" in females. Together with the observation that males differentially rely on the left temporoparietal junction (an area mediating the distinction between the SELF and OTHERS) the data suggest that females and males rely on different strategies when assessing their own emotions in response to other people.

Veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder exhibit altered emotional processing and attentional control during an emotional Stroop task.

PubMed

Khanna, M M; Badura-Brack, A S; McDermott, T J; Embury, C M; Wiesman, A I; Shepherd, A; Ryan, T J; Heinrichs-Graham, E; Wilson, T W

2017-08-01

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is often associated with attention allocation and emotional regulation difficulties, but the brain dynamics underlying these deficits are unknown. The emotional Stroop task (EST) is an ideal means to monitor these difficulties, because participants are asked to attend to non-emotional aspects of the stimuli. In this study, we used magnetoencephalography (MEG) and the EST to monitor attention allocation and emotional regulation during the processing of emotionally charged stimuli in combat veterans with and without PTSD. A total of 31 veterans with PTSD and 20 without PTSD performed the EST during MEG. Three categories of stimuli were used, including combat-related, generally threatening and neutral words. MEG data were imaged in the time-frequency domain and the network dynamics were probed for differences in processing threatening and non-threatening words. Behaviorally, veterans with PTSD were significantly slower in responding to combat-related relative to neutral and generally threatening words. Veterans without PTSD exhibited no significant differences in responding to the three different word types. Neurophysiologically, we found a significant three-way interaction between group, word type and time period across multiple brain regions. Follow-up testing indicated stronger theta-frequency (4-8 Hz) responses in the right ventral prefrontal (0.4-0.8 s) and superior temporal cortices (0.6-0.8 s) of veterans without PTSD compared with those with PTSD during the processing of combat-related words. Our data indicated that veterans with PTSD exhibited deficits in attention allocation and emotional regulation when processing trauma cues, while those without PTSD were able to regulate emotion by directing attention away from threat.

Alterations in the neural circuitry for emotion and attention associated with posttraumatic stress symptomatology

PubMed Central

Hayes, Jasmeet Pannu; LaBar, Kevin S.; Petty, Christopher M.; McCarthy, Gregory; Morey, Rajendra A.

2009-01-01

Information processing models of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) suggest that PTSD is characterized by preferential allocation of attentional resources to potentially threatening stimuli. However, few studies have examined the neural pattern underlying attention and emotion in association with PTSD symptomatology. In the present study, combat veterans with PTSD symptomatology engaged in an emotional oddball task while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Veterans were classified into a high or low symptomatology group based on their scores on the Davidson Trauma Scale (DTS). Participants discriminated infrequent target stimuli (circles) from frequent standards (squares) while emotional and neutral distractors were presented infrequently and irregularly. Results revealed that participants with greater PTSD symptomatology showed enhanced neural activity in ventral-limbic and dorsal regions for emotional stimuli and attenuated activity in dorsolateral prefrontal and parietal regions for attention targets. In the anterior cingulate gyrus, participants with fewer PTSD symptoms showed equivalent responses to attentional and emotional stimuli while the high symptom group showed greater activation for negative emotional stimuli. Taken together, the results suggest that hyperresponsive ventral-limbic activity coupled with altered dorsal-attention and anterior cingulate function may be a neural marker of attention bias in PTSD. PMID:19237269

A critical appraisal of neuroimaging studies of bipolar disorder: toward a new conceptualization of underlying neural circuitry and roadmap for future research

PubMed Central

Phillips, Mary L; Swartz, Holly A.

2014-01-01

Objective This critical review appraises neuroimaging findings in bipolar disorder in emotion processing, emotion regulation, and reward processing neural circuitry, to synthesize current knowledge of the neural underpinnings of bipolar disorder, and provide a neuroimaging research “roadmap” for future studies. Method We examined findings from all major studies in bipolar disorder that used fMRI, volumetric analyses, diffusion imaging, and resting state techniques, to inform current conceptual models of larger-scale neural circuitry abnormalities in bipolar disorder Results Bipolar disorder can be conceptualized in neural circuitry terms as parallel dysfunction in bilateral prefrontal cortical (especially ventrolateral prefrontal cortical)-hippocampal-amygdala emotion processing and emotion regulation neural circuitries, together with an “overactive” left-sided ventral striatal-ventrolateral and orbitofrontal cortical reward processing circuitry, that result in characteristic behavioral abnormalities associated with bipolar disorder: emotional lability, emotional dysregulation and heightened reward sensitivity. A potential structural basis for these functional abnormalities are gray matter decreases in prefrontal and temporal cortices, amygdala and hippocampus, and fractional anisotropy decreases in white matter tracts connecting prefrontal and subcortical regions. Conclusion Neuroimaging studies of bipolar disorder clearly demonstrate abnormalities in neural circuitries supporting emotion processing, emotion regulation and reward processing, although there are several limitations to these studies. Future neuroimaging research in bipolar disorder should include studies adopting dimensional approaches; larger studies examining neurodevelopmental trajectories in bipolar disorder and at-risk youth; multimodal neuroimaging studies using integrated systems approaches; and studies using pattern recognition approaches to provide clinically useful, individual-level data. Such studies will help identify clinically-relevant biomarkers to guide diagnosis and treatment decision-making for individuals with bipolar disorder. PMID:24626773

Frontal electroencephalographic correlates of individual differences in emotion expression in infants: a brain systems perspective on emotion.

PubMed

Dawson, G

1994-01-01

Emotion expressions can be characterized by both the type of emotion displayed and the intensity with which the emotion is expressed. Individual differences in these two aspects of emotion appear to vary independently and may perhaps account for distinct dimensions of temperament, personality, and vulnerability to psychopathology. We reviewed several sets of data gathered in our laboratory that indicate that these two dimensions of emotion expression are associated with distinct and independent patterns of frontal EEG activity in infants. Specifically, whereas the type of emotion expression was found to be associated with asymmetries in frontal EEG activity, the intensity of emotion expression was found to be associated with generalized activation of both the right and the left frontal regions. Moreover, we reviewed and provided evidence that measures of asymmetrical frontal activity are better predictors of individual differences in the tendency to express certain emotions, such as distress and sadness, whereas measures of generalized frontal activity are better predictors of individual differences in emotional reactivity and emotion intensity. The neuroanatomical bases of emotion were discussed with special reference to the role of the frontal lobe in emotion regulation. It was hypothesized that the frontal activation asymmetries that have been found to accompany emotion expressions reflect specific regulation strategies. The left frontal region is specialized for regulation strategies involving action schemes that serve to maintain continuity and stability of the organism-environment relation and of ongoing motor schemes, such as those involved in language and the expression of happiness and interest. In contrast, the right frontal region appears to be specialized for regulation strategies that involve processing novel stimuli that disrupt ongoing activity, such as might occur during the expression of fear, disgust, and distress. Furthermore, it was proposed that individual differences in patterns of frontal EEG asymmetries during emotion may be related to socialization influences rather than solely innate factors. It was speculated that the pattern of generalized frontal lobe activation that accompanies the experience of intense emotions may reflect, in part, the relatively diffuse influence of subcortical structures on the cortex and may serve to increase the infant's general readiness to receive and respond to significant external stimuli.

Reduced beta connectivity during emotional face processing in adolescents with autism.

PubMed

Leung, Rachel C; Ye, Annette X; Wong, Simeon M; Taylor, Margot J; Doesburg, Sam M

2014-01-01

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by impairments in social cognition. The biological basis of deficits in social cognition in ASD, and their difficulty in processing emotional face information in particular, remains unclear. Atypical communication within and between brain regions has been reported in ASD. Interregional phase-locking is a neurophysiological mechanism mediating communication among brain areas and is understood to support cognitive functions. In the present study we investigated interregional magnetoencephalographic phase synchronization during the perception of emotional faces in adolescents with ASD. A total of 22 adolescents with ASD (18 males, mean age =14.2 ± 1.15 years, 22 right-handed) with mild to no cognitive delay and 17 healthy controls (14 males, mean age =14.4 ± 0.33 years, 16 right-handed) performed an implicit emotional processing task requiring perception of happy, angry and neutral faces while we recorded neuromagnetic signals. The faces were presented rapidly (80 ms duration) to the left or right of a central fixation cross and participants responded to a scrambled pattern that was presented concurrently on the opposite side of the fixation point. Task-dependent interregional phase-locking was calculated among source-resolved brain regions. Task-dependent increases in interregional beta synchronization were observed. Beta-band interregional phase-locking in adolescents with ASD was reduced, relative to controls, during the perception of angry faces in a distributed network involving the right fusiform gyrus and insula. No significant group differences were found for happy or neutral faces, or other analyzed frequency ranges. Significant reductions in task-dependent beta connectivity strength, clustering and eigenvector centrality (all P <0.001) in the right insula were found in adolescents with ASD, relative to controls. Reduced beta synchronization may reflect inadequate recruitment of task-relevant networks during emotional face processing in ASD. The right insula, specifically, was a hub of reduced functional connectivity and may play a prominent role in the inability to effectively extract emotional information from faces. These findings suggest that functional disconnection in brain networks mediating emotional processes may contribute to deficits in social cognition in this population.

Cognitive and emotional processes during dreaming: a neuroimaging view.

PubMed

Desseilles, Martin; Dang-Vu, Thien Thanh; Sterpenich, Virginie; Schwartz, Sophie

2011-12-01

Dream is a state of consciousness characterized by internally-generated sensory, cognitive and emotional experiences occurring during sleep. Dream reports tend to be particularly abundant, with complex, emotional, and perceptually vivid experiences after awakenings from rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. This is why our current knowledge of the cerebral correlates of dreaming, mainly derives from studies of REM sleep. Neuroimaging results show that REM sleep is characterized by a specific pattern of regional brain activity. We demonstrate that this heterogeneous distribution of brain activity during sleep explains many typical features in dreams. Reciprocally, specific dream characteristics suggest the activation of selective brain regions during sleep. Such an integration of neuroimaging data of human sleep, mental imagery, and the content of dreams is critical for current models of dreaming; it also provides neurobiological support for an implication of sleep and dreaming in some important functions such as emotional regulation. Copyright © 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The structural neuroanatomy of music emotion recognition: Evidence from frontotemporal lobar degeneration

PubMed Central

Omar, Rohani; Henley, Susie M.D.; Bartlett, Jonathan W.; Hailstone, Julia C.; Gordon, Elizabeth; Sauter, Disa A.; Frost, Chris; Scott, Sophie K.; Warren, Jason D.

2011-01-01

Despite growing clinical and neurobiological interest in the brain mechanisms that process emotion in music, these mechanisms remain incompletely understood. Patients with frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) frequently exhibit clinical syndromes that illustrate the effects of breakdown in emotional and social functioning. Here we investigated the neuroanatomical substrate for recognition of musical emotion in a cohort of 26 patients with FTLD (16 with behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia, bvFTD, 10 with semantic dementia, SemD) using voxel-based morphometry. On neuropsychological evaluation, patients with FTLD showed deficient recognition of canonical emotions (happiness, sadness, anger and fear) from music as well as faces and voices compared with healthy control subjects. Impaired recognition of emotions from music was specifically associated with grey matter loss in a distributed cerebral network including insula, orbitofrontal cortex, anterior cingulate and medial prefrontal cortex, anterior temporal and more posterior temporal and parietal cortices, amygdala and the subcortical mesolimbic system. This network constitutes an essential brain substrate for recognition of musical emotion that overlaps with brain regions previously implicated in coding emotional value, behavioural context, conceptual knowledge and theory of mind. Musical emotion recognition may probe the interface of these processes, delineating a profile of brain damage that is essential for the abstraction of complex social emotions. PMID:21385617

The structural neuroanatomy of music emotion recognition: evidence from frontotemporal lobar degeneration.

PubMed

Omar, Rohani; Henley, Susie M D; Bartlett, Jonathan W; Hailstone, Julia C; Gordon, Elizabeth; Sauter, Disa A; Frost, Chris; Scott, Sophie K; Warren, Jason D

2011-06-01

Despite growing clinical and neurobiological interest in the brain mechanisms that process emotion in music, these mechanisms remain incompletely understood. Patients with frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) frequently exhibit clinical syndromes that illustrate the effects of breakdown in emotional and social functioning. Here we investigated the neuroanatomical substrate for recognition of musical emotion in a cohort of 26 patients with FTLD (16 with behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia, bvFTD, 10 with semantic dementia, SemD) using voxel-based morphometry. On neuropsychological evaluation, patients with FTLD showed deficient recognition of canonical emotions (happiness, sadness, anger and fear) from music as well as faces and voices compared with healthy control subjects. Impaired recognition of emotions from music was specifically associated with grey matter loss in a distributed cerebral network including insula, orbitofrontal cortex, anterior cingulate and medial prefrontal cortex, anterior temporal and more posterior temporal and parietal cortices, amygdala and the subcortical mesolimbic system. This network constitutes an essential brain substrate for recognition of musical emotion that overlaps with brain regions previously implicated in coding emotional value, behavioural context, conceptual knowledge and theory of mind. Musical emotion recognition may probe the interface of these processes, delineating a profile of brain damage that is essential for the abstraction of complex social emotions. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Emotion processing biases and resting EEG activity in depressed adolescents

PubMed Central

Auerbach, Randy P.; Stewart, Jeremy G.; Stanton, Colin H.; Mueller, Erik M.; Pizzagalli, Diego A.

2015-01-01

Background While theorists have posited that adolescent depression is characterized by emotion processing biases (greater propensity to identify sad than happy facial expressions), findings have been mixed. Additionally, the neural correlates associated with putative emotion processing biases remain largely unknown. Our aim was to identify emotion processing biases in depressed adolescents and examine neural abnormalities related to these biases using high-density resting EEG and source localization. Methods Healthy (n = 36) and depressed (n = 23) female adolescents, aged 13–18 years, completed a facial recognition task in which they identified happy, sad, fear, and angry expressions across intensities from 10% (low) to 100% (high). Additionally, 128-channel resting (i.e., task-free) EEG was recorded and analyzed using a distributed source localization technique (LORETA). Given research implicating the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) in depression and emotion processing, analyses focused on this region. Results Relative to healthy youth, depressed adolescents were more accurate for sad and less accurate for happy, particularly low-intensity happy faces. No differences emerged for fearful or angry facial expressions. Further, LORETA analyses revealed greater theta and alpha current density (i.e., reduced brain activity) in depressed versus healthy adolescents, particularly in the left DLPFC (BA9/BA46). Theta and alpha current density were positively correlated, and greater current density predicted reduced accuracy for happy faces. Conclusion Depressed female adolescents were characterized by emotion processing biases in favor of sad emotions and reduced recognition of happiness, especially when cues of happiness were subtle. Blunted recognition of happy was associated with left DLPFC resting hypoactivity. PMID:26032684

Sex differences in effective fronto-limbic connectivity during negative emotion processing.

PubMed

Lungu, Ovidiu; Potvin, Stéphane; Tikàsz, Andràs; Mendrek, Adrianna

2015-12-01

In view of the greater prevalence of depression and anxiety disorders in women than in men, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have examined sex-differences in brain activations during emotion processing. Comparatively, sex-differences in brain connectivity received little attention, despite evidence for important fronto-limbic connections during emotion processing across sexes. Here, we investigated sex-differences in fronto-limbic connectivity during negative emotion processing. Forty-six healthy individuals (25 women, 21 men) viewed negative, positive and neutral images during an fMRI session. Effective connectivity between significantly activated regions was examined using Granger causality and psychophysical interaction analyses. Sex steroid hormones and feminine-masculine traits were also measured. Subjective ratings of negative emotional images were higher in women than in men. Across sexes, significant activations were observed in the dorso-medial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) and the right amygdala. Granger connectivity from right amygdala was significantly greater than that from dmPFC during the 'high negative' condition, an effect driven by men. Magnitude of this effect correlated negatively with highly negative image ratings and feminine traits and positively with testosterone levels. These results highlight critical sex differences in brain connectivity during negative emotion processing and point to the fact that both biological (sex steroid hormones) and psychosocial (gender role and identity) variables contribute to them. As the dmPFC is involved in social cognition and action planning, and the amygdala-in threat detection, the connectivity results suggest that compared to women, men have a more evaluative, rather than purely affective, brain response during negative emotion processing. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

How emotion context modulates unconscious goal activation during motor force exertion.

PubMed

Blakemore, Rebekah L; Neveu, Rémi; Vuilleumier, Patrik

2017-02-01

Priming participants with emotional or action-related concepts influences goal formation and motor force output during effort exertion tasks, even without awareness of priming information. However, little is known about neural processes underpinning how emotional cues interact with action (or inaction) goals to motivate (or demotivate) motor behaviour. In a novel functional neuroimaging paradigm, visible emotional images followed by subliminal action or inaction word primes were presented before participants performed a maximal force exertion. In neutral emotional contexts, maximum force was lower following inaction than action primes. However, arousing emotional images had interactive motivational effects on the motor system: Unpleasant images prior to inaction primes increased force output (enhanced effort exertion) relative to control primes, and engaged a motivation-related network involving ventral striatum, extended amygdala, as well as right inferior frontal cortex. Conversely, pleasant images presented before action (versus control) primes decreased force and activated regions of the default-mode network, including inferior parietal lobule and medial prefrontal cortex. These findings show that emotional context can determine how unconscious goal representations influence motivational processes and are transformed into actual motor output, without direct rewarding contingencies. Furthermore, they provide insight into altered motor behaviour in psychopathological disorders with dysfunctional motivational processes. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Cross-classification of musical and vocal emotions in the auditory cortex.

PubMed

Paquette, Sébastien; Takerkart, Sylvain; Saget, Shinji; Peretz, Isabelle; Belin, Pascal

2018-05-09

Whether emotions carried by voice and music are processed by the brain using similar mechanisms has long been investigated. Yet neuroimaging studies do not provide a clear picture, mainly due to lack of control over stimuli. Here, we report a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study using comparable stimulus material in the voice and music domains-the Montreal Affective Voices and the Musical Emotional Bursts-which include nonverbal short bursts of happiness, fear, sadness, and neutral expressions. We use a multivariate emotion-classification fMRI analysis involving cross-timbre classification as a means of comparing the neural mechanisms involved in processing emotional information in the two domains. We find, for affective stimuli in the violin, clarinet, or voice timbres, that local fMRI patterns in the bilateral auditory cortex and upper premotor regions support above-chance emotion classification when training and testing sets are performed within the same timbre category. More importantly, classifier performance generalized well across timbre in cross-classifying schemes, albeit with a slight accuracy drop when crossing the voice-music boundary, providing evidence for a shared neural code for processing musical and vocal emotions, with possibly a cost for the voice due to its evolutionary significance. © 2018 New York Academy of Sciences.

Altered brain mechanisms of emotion processing in pre-manifest Huntington's disease.

PubMed

Novak, Marianne J U; Warren, Jason D; Henley, Susie M D; Draganski, Bogdan; Frackowiak, Richard S; Tabrizi, Sarah J

2012-04-01

Huntington's disease is an inherited neurodegenerative disease that causes motor, cognitive and psychiatric impairment, including an early decline in ability to recognize emotional states in others. The pathophysiology underlying the earliest manifestations of the disease is not fully understood; the objective of our study was to clarify this. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate changes in brain mechanisms of emotion recognition in pre-manifest carriers of the abnormal Huntington's disease gene (subjects with pre-manifest Huntington's disease): 16 subjects with pre-manifest Huntington's disease and 14 control subjects underwent 1.5 tesla magnetic resonance scanning while viewing pictures of facial expressions from the Ekman and Friesen series. Disgust, anger and happiness were chosen as emotions of interest. Disgust is the emotion in which recognition deficits have most commonly been detected in Huntington's disease; anger is the emotion in which impaired recognition was detected in the largest behavioural study of emotion recognition in pre-manifest Huntington's disease to date; and happiness is a positive emotion to contrast with disgust and anger. Ekman facial expressions were also used to quantify emotion recognition accuracy outside the scanner and structural magnetic resonance imaging with voxel-based morphometry was used to assess the relationship between emotion recognition accuracy and regional grey matter volume. Emotion processing in pre-manifest Huntington's disease was associated with reduced neural activity for all three emotions in partially separable functional networks. Furthermore, the Huntington's disease-associated modulation of disgust and happiness processing was negatively correlated with genetic markers of pre-manifest disease progression in distributed, largely extrastriatal networks. The modulated disgust network included insulae, cingulate cortices, pre- and postcentral gyri, precunei, cunei, bilateral putamena, right pallidum, right thalamus, cerebellum, middle frontal, middle occipital, right superior and left inferior temporal gyri, and left superior parietal lobule. The modulated happiness network included postcentral gyri, left caudate, right cingulate cortex, right superior and inferior parietal lobules, and right superior frontal, middle temporal, middle occipital and precentral gyri. These effects were not driven merely by striatal dysfunction. We did not find equivalent associations between brain structure and emotion recognition, and the pre-manifest Huntington's disease cohort did not have a behavioural deficit in out-of-scanner emotion recognition relative to controls. In addition, we found increased neural activity in the pre-manifest subjects in response to all three emotions in frontal regions, predominantly in the middle frontal gyri. Overall, these findings suggest that pathophysiological effects of Huntington's disease may precede the development of overt clinical symptoms and detectable cerebral atrophy.

Cortical network dysfunction in musicogenic epilepsy reflecting the role of snowballing emotional processes in seizure generation: an fMRI-EEG study.

PubMed

Diekmann, Volker; Hoppner, Anselm Cornelius

2014-03-01

Patients suffering from musicogenic epilepsy have focal seizures triggered by auditory stimuli. In some of these patients, the emotions associated with the music appear to play a role in the process triggering the seizure, however, the significance of these emotions and the brain regions involved are unclear. In order to shed some light on this, we conducted fMRI and EEG in a case of musicogenic epilepsy. In a 32-year-old male patient with seizures induced by a specific piece of Russian music, we performed video-EEG monitoring as well as simultaneous fMRI and EEG registration. Video-EEG monitoring revealed a left temporo-frontal epileptogenic focus. During fMRI-EEG co-registration, BOLD signal alterations were not only found in the epileptogenic focus but also in areas known for their role in the processing of emotions. Prior to a seizure in some of these areas, BOLD contrasts exponentially increased or decreased. These results suggest that in our case, dysfunction of the regulation processes of the musically-induced emotions, and not the musical stimulus itself, led to the seizures.

Newly-formed emotional memories guide selective attention processes: Evidence from event-related potentials.

PubMed

Schupp, Harald T; Kirmse, Ursula; Schmälzle, Ralf; Flaisch, Tobias; Renner, Britta

2016-06-20

Emotional cues can guide selective attention processes. However, emotional stimuli can both activate long-term memory representations reflecting general world knowledge and engage newly formed memory representations representing specific knowledge from the immediate past. Here, the self-completion feature of associative memory was utilized to assess the regulation of attention processes by newly-formed emotional memory. First, new memory representations were formed by presenting pictures depicting a person either in an erotic pose or as a portrait. Afterwards, to activate newly-built memory traces, edited pictures were presented showing only the head region of the person. ERP recordings revealed the emotional regulation of attention by newly-formed memories. Specifically, edited pictures from the erotic compared to the portrait category elicited an early posterior negativity and late positive potential, similar to the findings observed for the original pictures. A control condition showed that the effect was dependent on newly-formed memory traces. Given the large number of new memories formed each day, they presumably make an important contribution to the regulation of attention in everyday life.

Newly-formed emotional memories guide selective attention processes: Evidence from event-related potentials

PubMed Central

Schupp, Harald T.; Kirmse, Ursula; Schmälzle, Ralf; Flaisch, Tobias; Renner, Britta

2016-01-01

Emotional cues can guide selective attention processes. However, emotional stimuli can both activate long-term memory representations reflecting general world knowledge and engage newly formed memory representations representing specific knowledge from the immediate past. Here, the self-completion feature of associative memory was utilized to assess the regulation of attention processes by newly-formed emotional memory. First, new memory representations were formed by presenting pictures depicting a person either in an erotic pose or as a portrait. Afterwards, to activate newly-built memory traces, edited pictures were presented showing only the head region of the person. ERP recordings revealed the emotional regulation of attention by newly-formed memories. Specifically, edited pictures from the erotic compared to the portrait category elicited an early posterior negativity and late positive potential, similar to the findings observed for the original pictures. A control condition showed that the effect was dependent on newly-formed memory traces. Given the large number of new memories formed each day, they presumably make an important contribution to the regulation of attention in everyday life. PMID:27321471

Neural Basis of the Emotional Conflict Processing in Major Depression: ERPs and Source Localization Analysis on the N450 and P300 Components

PubMed Central

Zhu, Jing; Li, Jianxiu; Li, Xiaowei; Rao, Juan; Hao, Yanrong; Ding, Zhijie; Wang, Gangping

2018-01-01

Objects: Effective psychological function requires that cognition is not affected by task-irrelevant emotional stimuli in emotional conflict. Depression is mainly characterized as an emotional disorder. The object of this study is to reveal the behavioral and electrophysiological signature of emotional conflict processing in major depressive disorder (MDD) using event-related potentials (ERPs) and standardized low-resolution brain electromagnetic tomography (sLORETA) analysis. Method: We used a face–word Stroop task involving emotional faces while recording EEG (electroencephalography) in 20 patients with MDD and 20 healthy controls (HCs). And then ERPs were extracted and the corresponding brain sources were reconstructed using sLORETA. Results: Behaviorally, subjects with MDDs manifested significantly increased Stroop effect when examining the RT difference between happy incongruent trials and happy congruent trials, compared with HC subjects. ERP results exhibited that MDDs were characterized by the attenuated difference between P300 amplitude to sad congruent stimuli and sad incongruent stimuli, as electrophysiological evidence of impaired conflict processing in subjects with MDD. The sLORETA results showed that MDD patients had a higher current density in rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rostral ACC) within N450 time window in response to happy incongruent trials than happy congruent stimuli. Moreover, HC subjects had stronger activity in right inferior frontal gyrus (rIFG) region in response to incongruent stimuli than congruent stimuli, revealing successful inhibition of emotional distraction in HCs, which was absent in MDDs. Conclusion: Our results indicated that rostral ACC was implicated in the processing of negative emotional distraction in MDDs, as well as impaired inhibition of task-irrelevant emotional stimuli, relative to HCs. This work furnishes novel behavioral and neurophysiological evidence that are closely related to emotional conflict among MDD patients. PMID:29896094

Differences in neural activity when processing emotional arousal and valence in autism spectrum disorders.

PubMed

Tseng, Angela; Wang, Zhishun; Huo, Yuankai; Goh, Suzanne; Russell, James A; Peterson, Bradley S

2016-02-01

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) often have difficulty recognizing and interpreting facial expressions of emotion, which may impair their ability to navigate and communicate successfully in their social, interpersonal environments. Characterizing specific differences between individuals with ASD and their typically developing (TD) counterparts in the neural activity subserving their experience of emotional faces may provide distinct targets for ASD interventions. Thus we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and a parametric experimental design to identify brain regions in which neural activity correlated with ratings of arousal and valence for a broad range of emotional faces. Participants (51 ASD, 84 TD) were group-matched by age, sex, IQ, race, and socioeconomic status. Using task-related change in blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) fMRI signal as a measure, and covarying for age, sex, FSIQ, and ADOS scores, we detected significant differences across diagnostic groups in the neural activity subserving the dimension of arousal but not valence. BOLD-signal in TD participants correlated inversely with ratings of arousal in regions associated primarily with attentional functions, whereas BOLD-signal in ASD participants correlated positively with arousal ratings in regions commonly associated with impulse control and default-mode activity. Only minor differences were detected between groups in the BOLD signal correlates of valence ratings. Our findings provide unique insight into the emotional experiences of individuals with ASD. Although behavioral responses to face-stimuli were comparable across diagnostic groups, the corresponding neural activity for our ASD and TD groups differed dramatically. The near absence of group differences for valence correlates and the presence of strong group differences for arousal correlates suggest that individuals with ASD are not atypical in all aspects of emotion-processing. Studying these similarities and differences may help us to understand the origins of divergent interpersonal emotional experience in persons with ASD. Hum Brain Mapp 37:443-461, 2016. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Differences in Neural Activity when Processing Emotional Arousal and Valence in Autism Spectrum Disorders

PubMed Central

Tseng, Angela; Wang, Zhishun; Huo, Yuankai; Goh, Suzanne; Russell, James A.; Peterson, Bradley S.

2016-01-01

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) often have difficulty recognizing and interpreting facial expressions of emotion, which may impair their ability to navigate and communicate successfully in their social, interpersonal environments. Characterizing specific differences between individuals with ASD and their typically-developing (TD) counterparts in the neural activity subserving their experience of emotional faces may provide distinct targets for ASD interventions. Thus we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and a parametric experimental design to identify brain regions in which neural activity correlated with ratings of arousal and valence for a broad range of emotional faces. Participants (51 ASD, 84 TD) were group-matched by age, sex, IQ, race, and socioeconomic status. Using task-related change in blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) fMRI signal as a measure, and covarying for age, sex, FSIQ, and ADOS scores, we detected significant differences across diagnostic groups in the neural activity subserving the dimension of arousal but not valence. BOLD-signal in TD participants correlated inversely with ratings of arousal in regions associated primarily with attentional functions, whereas BOLD-signal in ASD participants correlated positively with arousal ratings in regions commonly associated with impulse control and default-mode activity. Only minor differences were detected between groups in the BOLD signal correlates of valence ratings. Our findings provide unique insight into the emotional experiences of individuals with ASD. Although behavioral responses to face-stimuli were comparable across diagnostic groups, the corresponding neural activity for our ASD and TD groups differed dramatically. The near absence of group differences for valence correlates and the presence of strong group differences for arousal correlates suggest that individuals with ASD are not atypical in all aspects of emotion-processing. Studying these similarities and differences may help us to understand the origins of divergent interpersonal emotional experience in persons with ASD. PMID:26526072

Emotion brain alterations in anorexia nervosa: a candidate biological marker and implications for treatment

PubMed Central

Hatch, Ainslie; Madden, Sloane; Kohn, Michael R.; Clarke, Simon; Touyz, Stephen; Gordon, Evian; Williams, Leanne M.

2010-01-01

Background Identification of the biological markers of anorexia nervosa (AN) is crucial for the development of new treatments. We aimed to determine whether AN is associated with disturbances in the nonconscious neural processing of innate signals of emotion and whether these disturbances persist after weight gain. Methods In a retest design, 28 adolescent females with AN were tested at first admission to hospital and again after they had gained weight. Matched healthy control participants were tested at the same times. We assessed emotion-elicited event-related potentials (ERPs) during overt and covert presentation of emotion expressions, scores on an emotion-identification behavioural task, and symptom measures. We performed between and within group analyses. Results Individuals with AN had a marked alteration in ERPs relative to healthy controls. Irrespective of the form of stimulus, early and late ERP components were significantly reduced in AN patients at baseline (when underweight) and on retest (after weight gain), especially in the temporo-occipital regions, suggesting a persistent disruption of the early automatic appraisal of salient emotional signals. Limitations This study could have been improved with a longer standardized retest interval. Conclusion There is likely a core, generic disturbance in AN in the early “automatic” neural processing of emotion irrespective of weight or nutritional status. New innovative emotion-based psychologic or pharmacologic treatments targeting these nonconscious processes may prove beneficial. PMID:20598239

Emotion brain alterations in anorexia nervosa: a candidate biological marker and implications for treatment.

PubMed

Hatch, Ainslie; Madden, Sloane; Kohn, Michael R; Clarke, Simon; Touyz, Stephen; Gordon, Evian; Williams, Leanne M

2010-07-01

Identification of the biological markers of anorexia nervosa (AN) is crucial for the development of new treatments. We aimed to determine whether AN is associated with disturbances in the nonconscious neural processing of innate signals of emotion and whether these disturbances persist after weight gain. In a retest design, 28 adolescent females with AN were tested at first ad not mission to hospital and again after they had gained weight. Matched healthy control participants were tested at the same times. We assessed emotion-elicited event-related potentials (ERPs) during overt and covert presentation of emotion expressions, scores on an emotion-identification behavioural task, and symptom measures. We performed between and within group analyses. Individuals with AN had a marked alteration in ERPs relative to healthy controls. Irrespective of the form of stimulus, early and late ERP componotnents were significantly reduced in AN patients at baseline (when underweight) and on retest (after weight gain), especially in the temporo-occipital regions, suggesting a persistent disruption of the early automatic appraisal of salient emotional signals. This study could have been improved with a longer standardized retest interval. There is likely a core, generic disturbance in AN in the early "automatic" neural processing of emotion irrespective of weight or nutritional status. New innovative emotion-based psychologic or pharmacologic treatments targeting these nonconscious processes may prove beneficial.

Audiovisual integration of emotional signals in voice and face: an event-related fMRI study.

PubMed

Kreifelts, Benjamin; Ethofer, Thomas; Grodd, Wolfgang; Erb, Michael; Wildgruber, Dirk

2007-10-01

In a natural environment, non-verbal emotional communication is multimodal (i.e. speech melody, facial expression) and multifaceted concerning the variety of expressed emotions. Understanding these communicative signals and integrating them into a common percept is paramount to successful social behaviour. While many previous studies have focused on the neurobiology of emotional communication in the auditory or visual modality alone, far less is known about multimodal integration of auditory and visual non-verbal emotional information. The present study investigated this process using event-related fMRI. Behavioural data revealed that audiovisual presentation of non-verbal emotional information resulted in a significant increase in correctly classified stimuli when compared with visual and auditory stimulation. This behavioural gain was paralleled by enhanced activation in bilateral posterior superior temporal gyrus (pSTG) and right thalamus, when contrasting audiovisual to auditory and visual conditions. Further, a characteristic of these brain regions, substantiating their role in the emotional integration process, is a linear relationship between the gain in classification accuracy and the strength of the BOLD response during the bimodal condition. Additionally, enhanced effective connectivity between audiovisual integration areas and associative auditory and visual cortices was observed during audiovisual stimulation, offering further insight into the neural process accomplishing multimodal integration. Finally, we were able to document an enhanced sensitivity of the putative integration sites to stimuli with emotional non-verbal content as compared to neutral stimuli.

Network dysfunction of emotional and cognitive processes in those at genetic risk of bipolar disorder.

PubMed

Breakspear, Michael; Roberts, Gloria; Green, Melissa J; Nguyen, Vinh T; Frankland, Andrew; Levy, Florence; Lenroot, Rhoshel; Mitchell, Philip B

2015-11-01

The emotional and cognitive vulnerabilities that precede the development of bipolar disorder are poorly understood. The inferior frontal gyrus-a key cortical hub for the integration of cognitive and emotional processes-exhibits both structural and functional changes in bipolar disorder, and is also functionally impaired in unaffected first-degree relatives, showing diminished engagement during inhibition of threat-related emotional stimuli. We hypothesized that this functional impairment of the inferior frontal gyrus in those at genetic risk of bipolar disorder reflects the dysfunction of broader network dynamics underlying the coordination of emotion perception and cognitive control. To test this, we studied effective connectivity in functional magnetic resonance imaging data acquired from 41 first-degree relatives of patients with bipolar disorder, 45 matched healthy controls and 55 participants with established bipolar disorder. Dynamic causal modelling was used to model the neuronal interaction between key regions associated with fear perception (the anterior cingulate), inhibition (the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) and the region upon which these influences converge, namely the inferior frontal gyrus. Network models that embodied non-linear, hierarchical relationships were the most strongly supported by data from our healthy control and bipolar participants. We observed a marked difference in the hierarchical influence of the anterior cingulate on the effective connectivity from the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex to the inferior frontal gyrus that is unique to the at-risk cohort. Non-specific, non-hierarchical mechanisms appear to compensate for this network disturbance. We thus establish a specific network disturbance suggesting dysfunction in the processes that support hierarchical relationships between emotion and cognitive control in those at high genetic risk for bipolar disorder. © The Author (2015). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Guarantors of Brain. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.

Pedophilia is linked to reduced activation in hypothalamus and lateral prefrontal cortex during visual erotic stimulation.

PubMed

Walter, Martin; Witzel, Joachim; Wiebking, Christine; Gubka, Udo; Rotte, Michael; Schiltz, Kolja; Bermpohl, Felix; Tempelmann, Claus; Bogerts, Bernhard; Heinze, Hans Jochen; Northoff, Georg

2007-09-15

Although pedophilia is of high public concern, little is known about underlying neural mechanisms. Although pedophilic patients are sexually attracted to prepubescent children, they show no sexual interest toward adults. This study aimed to investigate the neural correlates of deficits of sexual and emotional arousal in pedophiles. Thirteen pedophilic patients and 14 healthy control subjects were tested for differential neural activity during visual stimulation with emotional and erotic pictures with functional magnetic resonance imaging. Regions showing differential activations during the erotic condition comprised the hypothalamus, the periaqueductal gray, and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the latter correlating with a clinical measure. Alterations of emotional processing concerned the amygdala-hippocampus and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex. Hypothesized regions relevant for processing of erotic stimuli in healthy individuals showed reduced activations during visual erotic stimulation in pedophilic patients. This suggests an impaired recruitment of key structures that might contribute to an altered sexual interest of these patients toward adults.

Serotonergic neurotransmission in emotional processing: New evidence from long-term recreational poly-drug ecstasy use.

PubMed

Laursen, Helle Ruff; Henningsson, Susanne; Macoveanu, Julian; Jernigan, Terry L; Siebner, Hartwig R; Holst, Klaus K; Skimminge, Arnold; Knudsen, Gitte M; Ramsoy, Thomas Z; Erritzoe, David

2016-12-01

The brain's serotonergic system plays a crucial role in the processing of emotional stimuli, and several studies have shown that a reduced serotonergic neurotransmission is associated with an increase in amygdala activity during emotional face processing. Prolonged recreational use of ecstasy (3,4-methylene-dioxymethamphetamine [MDMA]) induces alterations in serotonergic neurotransmission that are comparable to those observed in a depleted state. In this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, we investigated the responsiveness of the amygdala to emotional face stimuli in recreational ecstasy users as a model of long-term serotonin depletion. Fourteen ecstasy users and 12 non-using controls underwent fMRI to measure the regional neural activity elicited in the amygdala by male or female faces expressing anger, disgust, fear, sadness, or no emotion. During fMRI, participants made a sex judgement on each face stimulus. Positron emission tomography with 11 C-DASB was additionally performed to assess serotonin transporter (SERT) binding in the brain. In the ecstasy users, SERT binding correlated negatively with amygdala activity, and accumulated lifetime intake of ecstasy tablets was associated with an increase in amygdala activity during angry face processing. Conversely, time since the last ecstasy intake was associated with a trend toward a decrease in amygdala activity during angry and sad face processing. These results indicate that the effects of long-term serotonin depletion resulting from ecstasy use are dose-dependent, affecting the functional neural basis of emotional face processing. © The Author(s) 2016.

The effect of constraining eye-contact during dynamic emotional face perception—an fMRI study

PubMed Central

Zurcher, Nicole R.; Lassalle, Amandine; Hippolyte, Loyse; Ward, Noreen; Johnels, Jakob Åsberg

2017-01-01

Abstract Eye-contact modifies how we perceive emotions and modulates activity in the social brain network. Here, using fMRI, we demonstrate that adding a fixation cross in the eye region of dynamic facial emotional stimuli significantly increases activation in the social brain of healthy, neurotypical participants when compared with activation for the exact same stimuli observed in a free-viewing mode. In addition, using PPI analysis, we show that the degree of amygdala connectivity with the rest of the brain is enhanced for the constrained view for all emotions tested except for fear, and that anxiety and alexithymia modulate the strength of amygdala connectivity for each emotion differently. Finally, we show that autistic traits have opposite effects on amygdala connectivity for fearful and angry emotional expressions, suggesting that these emotions should be treated separately in studies investigating facial emotion processing. PMID:28402536

Differential brain responses to cries of infants with autistic disorder and typical development: an fMRI study.

PubMed

Venuti, Paola; Caria, Andrea; Esposito, Gianluca; De Pisapia, Nicola; Bornstein, Marc H; de Falco, Simona

2012-01-01

This study used fMRI to measure brain activity during adult processing of cries of infants with autistic disorder (AD) compared to cries of typically developing (TD) infants. Using whole brain analysis, we found that cries of infants with AD compared to those of TD infants elicited enhanced activity in brain regions associated with verbal and prosodic processing, perhaps because altered acoustic patterns of AD cries render them especially difficult to interpret, and increased activity in brain regions associated with emotional processing, indicating that AD cries also elicit more negative feelings and may be perceived as more aversive and/or arousing. Perceived distress engendered by AD cries related to increased activation in brain regions associated with emotional processing. This study supports the hypothesis that cry is an early and meaningful anomaly displayed by children with AD. It could be that cries associated with AD alter parent-child interactions much earlier than the time that reliable AD diagnosis normally occurs. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Neuronal generator patterns at scalp elicited by lateralized aversive pictures reveal consecutive stages of motivated attention

PubMed Central

Kayser, Jürgen; Tenke, Craig E.; Abraham, Karen S.; Alschuler, Daniel M.; Alvarenga, Jorge E.; Skipper, Jamie; Warner, Virginia; Bruder, Gerard E.; Weissman, Myrna M.

2016-01-01

Event-related potential (ERP) studies have provided evidence for an allocation of attentional resources to enhance perceptual processing of motivationally salient stimuli. Emotional modulation affects several consecutive components associated with stages of affective-cognitive processing, beginning as early as 100-200 ms after stimulus onset. In agreement with the notion that the right parietotemporal region is critically involved during the perception of arousing affective stimuli, some ERP studies have reported asymmetric emotional ERP effects. However, it is difficult to separate emotional from non-emotional effects because differences in stimulus content unrelated to affective salience or task demands may also be associated with lateralized function or promote cognitive processing. Other concerns pertain to the operational definition and statistical independence of ERP component measures, their dependence on an EEG reference, and spatial smearing due to volume conduction, all of which impede the identification of distinct scalp activation patterns associated with affective processing. Building on prior research using a visual half-field paradigm with highly-controlled emotional stimuli (pictures of cosmetic surgery patients showing disordered [negative] or healed [neutral] facial areas before or after treatment), 72-channel ERPs recorded from 152 individuals (age 13-68 years; 81 female) were transformed into reference-free current source density (CSD) waveforms and submitted to temporal principal components analysis (PCA) to identify their underlying neuronal generator patterns. Using both nonparametric randomization tests and repeated measures ANOVA, robust effects of emotional content were found over parietooccipital regions for CSD factors corresponding to N2 sink (212 ms peak latency), P3 source (385 ms) and a late centroparietal source (630 ms), all indicative of greater positivity for negative than neutral stimuli. For the N2 sink, emotional effects were right-lateralized and modulated by hemifield, with larger amplitude and asymmetry for left hemifield (right hemisphere) presentations. For all three factors, more positive amplitudes at parietooccipital sites were associated with increased ratings of negative valence and greater arousal. Distributed inverse solutions of the CSD-PCA-based emotional effects implicated a sequence of maximal activations in right occipitotemporal cortex, bilateral posterior cingulate cortex, and bilateral inferior temporal cortex. These findings are consistent with hierarchical activations of the ventral visual pathway reflecting subsequent processing stages in response to motivationally salient stimuli. PMID:27263509

Neuronal generator patterns at scalp elicited by lateralized aversive pictures reveal consecutive stages of motivated attention.

PubMed

Kayser, Jürgen; Tenke, Craig E; Abraham, Karen S; Alschuler, Daniel M; Alvarenga, Jorge E; Skipper, Jamie; Warner, Virginia; Bruder, Gerard E; Weissman, Myrna M

2016-11-15

Event-related potential (ERP) studies have provided evidence for an allocation of attentional resources to enhance perceptual processing of motivationally salient stimuli. Emotional modulation affects several consecutive components associated with stages of affective-cognitive processing, beginning as early as 100-200ms after stimulus onset. In agreement with the notion that the right parietotemporal region is critically involved during the perception of arousing affective stimuli, some ERP studies have reported asymmetric emotional ERP effects. However, it is difficult to separate emotional from non-emotional effects because differences in stimulus content unrelated to affective salience or task demands may also be associated with lateralized function or promote cognitive processing. Other concerns pertain to the operational definition and statistical independence of ERP component measures, their dependence on an EEG reference, and spatial smearing due to volume conduction, all of which impede the identification of distinct scalp activation patterns associated with affective processing. Building on prior research using a visual half-field paradigm with highly controlled emotional stimuli (pictures of cosmetic surgery patients showing disordered [negative] or healed [neutral] facial areas before or after treatment), 72-channel ERPs recorded from 152 individuals (ages 13-68years; 81 female) were transformed into reference-free current source density (CSD) waveforms and submitted to temporal principal components analysis (PCA) to identify their underlying neuronal generator patterns. Using both nonparametric randomization tests and repeated measures ANOVA, robust effects of emotional content were found over parietooccipital regions for CSD factors corresponding to N2 sink (212ms peak latency), P3 source (385ms) and a late centroparietal source (630ms), all indicative of greater positivity for negative than neutral stimuli. For the N2 sink, emotional effects were right-lateralized and modulated by hemifield, with larger amplitude and asymmetry for left hemifield (right hemisphere) presentations. For all three factors, more positive amplitudes at parietooccipital sites were associated with increased ratings of negative valence and greater arousal. Distributed inverse solutions of the CSD-PCA-based emotional effects implicated a sequence of maximal activations in right occipitotemporal cortex, bilateral posterior cingulate cortex, and bilateral inferior temporal cortex. These findings are consistent with hierarchical activations of the ventral visual pathway reflecting subsequent processing stages in response to motivationally salient stimuli. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Neural Basis of Moral Elevation Demonstrated through Inter-Subject Synchronization of Cortical Activity during Free-Viewing

PubMed Central

Englander, Zoë A.; Haidt, Jonathan; Morris, James P.

2012-01-01

Background Most research investigating the neural basis of social emotions has examined emotions that give rise to negative evaluations of others (e.g. anger, disgust). Emotions triggered by the virtues and excellences of others have been largely ignored. Using fMRI, we investigated the neural basis of two “other-praising" emotions – Moral Elevation (a response to witnessing acts of moral beauty), and Admiration (which we restricted to admiration for physical skill). Methodology/Principal Findings Ten participants viewed the same nine video clips. Three clips elicited moral elevation, three elicited admiration, and three were emotionally neutral. We then performed pair-wise voxel-by-voxel correlations of the BOLD signal between individuals for each video clip and a separate resting-state run. We observed a high degree of inter-subject synchronization, regardless of stimulus type, across several brain regions during free-viewing of videos. Videos in the elevation condition evoked significant inter-subject synchronization in brain regions previously implicated in self-referential and interoceptive processes, including the medial prefrontal cortex, precuneus, and insula. The degree of synchronization was highly variable over the course of the videos, with the strongest synchrony occurring during portions of the videos that were independently rated as most emotionally arousing. Synchrony in these same brain regions was not consistently observed during the admiration videos, and was absent for the neutral videos. Conclusions/Significance Results suggest that the neural systems supporting moral elevation are remarkably consistent across subjects viewing the same emotional content. We demonstrate that model-free techniques such as inter-subject synchronization may be a useful tool for studying complex, context dependent emotions such as self-transcendent emotion. PMID:22745745

Spatiotemporal analysis of single-trial EEG of emotional pictures based on independent component analysis and source location

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Liu, Jiangang; Tian, Jie

2007-03-01

The present study combined the Independent Component Analysis (ICA) and low-resolution brain electromagnetic tomography (LORETA) algorithms to identify the spatial distribution and time course of single-trial EEG record differences between neural responses to emotional stimuli vs. the neutral. Single-trial multichannel (129-sensor) EEG records were collected from 21 healthy, right-handed subjects viewing the emotion emotional (pleasant/unpleasant) and neutral pictures selected from International Affective Picture System (IAPS). For each subject, the single-trial EEG records of each emotional pictures were concatenated with the neutral, and a three-step analysis was applied to each of them in the same way. First, the ICA was performed to decompose each concatenated single-trial EEG records into temporally independent and spatially fixed components, namely independent components (ICs). The IC associated with artifacts were isolated. Second, the clustering analysis classified, across subjects, the temporally and spatially similar ICs into the same clusters, in which nonparametric permutation test for Global Field Power (GFP) of IC projection scalp maps identified significantly different temporal segments of each emotional condition vs. neutral. Third, the brain regions accounted for those significant segments were localized spatially with LORETA analysis. In each cluster, a voxel-by-voxel randomization test identified significantly different brain regions between each emotional condition vs. the neutral. Compared to the neutral, both emotional pictures elicited activation in the visual, temporal, ventromedial and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulated gyrus. In addition, the pleasant pictures activated the left middle prefrontal cortex and the posterior precuneus, while the unpleasant pictures activated the right orbitofrontal cortex, posterior cingulated gyrus and somatosensory region. Our results were well consistent with other functional imaging studies, while revealed temporal dynamics of emotional processing of specific brain structure with high temporal resolution.

Neural substrates of cognitive switching and inhibition in a face processing task.

PubMed

Piguet, Camille; Sterpenich, Virginie; Desseilles, Martin; Cojan, Yann; Bertschy, Gilles; Vuilleumier, Patrik

2013-11-15

We frequently need to change our current occupation, an operation requiring additional effortful cognitive demands. Switching from one task to another may involve two distinct processes: inhibition of the previously relevant task-set, and initiation of a new one. Here we tested whether these two processes are underpinned by separate neural substrates, and whether they differ depending on the nature of the task and the emotional content of stimuli. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging in healthy human volunteers who categorize emotional faces according to three different judgment rules (color, gender, or emotional expression). Our paradigm allowed us to separate neural activity associated with inhibition and switching based on the sequence of the tasks required on successive trials. We found that the bilateral medial superior parietal lobule and left intraparietal sulcus showed consistent activation during switching regardless of the task. On the other hand, no common region was activated (or suppressed) as a consequence of inhibition across all tasks. Rather, task-specific effects were observed in brain regions that were more activated when switching to a particular task but less activated after inhibition of the same task. In addition, compared to other conditions, the emotional task elicited a similar switching cost but lower inhibition cost, accompanied by selective decrease in the anterior cingulate cortex when returning to this task shortly after inhibiting it. These results demonstrate that switching relies on domain-general processes mediated by postero-medial parietal areas, engaged across all tasks, but also provide novel evidence that task inhibition produces domain-specific decreases as a function of particular task demands, with only the latter inhibition component being modulated by emotional information. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The nexus between decision making and emotion regulation: a review of convergent neurocognitive substrates.

PubMed

Mitchell, Derek G V

2011-02-02

Emotional information, such as reward or punishment, gains rapid and often preferential access to neurocognitive resources. This ability to quickly evaluate and integrate emotion-related information is thought to benefit a range of behaviours critical for survival. Conversely, the improper use of, or preoccupation with, emotional information is associated with disruptions in functioning and psychiatric disorders. Optimally, an organism utilizes emotional information when it is significant, and minimizes its influence when it is not. Recently, similar regions of prefrontal cortex have been identified that are associated with regulating both behavioural conflict (motor response selection or inhibition) and affective conflict (emotional representation and awareness). In this review, data will be examined that concerns this convergence between decision making (modulating what we do) and emotion regulation (modulating how we feel) and an informal model will be proposed linking these processes at a neurocognitive level. The studies reviewed collectively support the conclusion that overlapping areas of prefrontal cortex perform similar computations whether the functional objective is to modulate an operant response, or an emotional one. Specifically, the idea is raised that key aspects of decision making and emotion regulation are bound by a common functional objective in which internal representations of conditioned stimuli and reinforcers are modulated to facilitate optimal behaviour or states. Emphasis is placed on dorsomedial, dorsolateral, ventrolateral, and ventromedial regions of prefrontal cortex. Copyright © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Image-based Analysis of Emotional Facial Expressions in Full Face Transplants.

PubMed

Bedeloglu, Merve; Topcu, Çagdas; Akgul, Arzu; Döger, Ela Naz; Sever, Refik; Ozkan, Ozlenen; Ozkan, Omer; Uysal, Hilmi; Polat, Ovunc; Çolak, Omer Halil

2018-01-20

In this study, it is aimed to determine the degree of the development in emotional expression of full face transplant patients from photographs. Hence, a rehabilitation process can be planned according to the determination of degrees as a later work. As envisaged, in full face transplant cases, the determination of expressions can be confused or cannot be achieved as the healthy control group. In order to perform image-based analysis, a control group consist of 9 healthy males and 2 full-face transplant patients participated in the study. Appearance-based Gabor Wavelet Transform (GWT) and Local Binary Pattern (LBP) methods are adopted for recognizing neutral and 6 emotional expressions which consist of angry, scared, happy, hate, confused and sad. Feature extraction was carried out by using both methods and combination of these methods serially. In the performed expressions, the extracted features of the most distinct zones in the facial area where the eye and mouth region, have been used to classify the emotions. Also, the combination of these region features has been used to improve classifier performance. Control subjects and transplant patients' ability to perform emotional expressions have been determined with K-nearest neighbor (KNN) classifier with region-specific and method-specific decision stages. The results have been compared with healthy group. It has been observed that transplant patients don't reflect some emotional expressions. Also, there were confusions among expressions.

Amygdala-prefrontal cortical functional connectivity during implicit emotion processing differentiates youth with bipolar spectrum from youth with externalizing disorders.

PubMed

Hafeman, Danella; Bebko, Genna; Bertocci, Michele A; Fournier, Jay C; Chase, Henry W; Bonar, Lisa; Perlman, Susan B; Travis, Michael; Gill, Mary Kay; Diwadkar, Vaibhav A; Sunshine, Jeffrey L; Holland, Scott K; Kowatch, Robert A; Birmaher, Boris; Axelson, David; Horwitz, Sarah M; Arnold, L Eugene; Fristad, Mary A; Frazier, Thomas W; Youngstrom, Eric A; Findling, Robert L; Phillips, Mary L

2017-01-15

Both bipolar spectrum disorders (BPSD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) present with emotion-regulation deficits, but require different clinical management. We examined how the neurobiological underpinnings of emotion regulation might differentiate youth with BPSD versus ADHD (and healthy controls, HCs), specifically assessing functional connectivity (FxC) of amygdala-prefrontal circuitry during an implicit emotion processing task. We scanned a subset of the Longitudinal Assessment of Manic Symptoms (LAMS) sample, a clinically recruited cohort with elevated behavioral and emotional dysregulation, and age/sex-ratio matched HCs. Our sample consisted of 22 youth with BPSD, 30 youth with ADHD/no BPSD, and 26 HCs. We used generalized psychophysiological interaction (gPPI) to calculate group differences to emerging emotional faces vs. morphing shapes in FxC between bilateral amygdala and ventral prefrontal cortex/anterior cingulate cortex. FxC between amygdala and left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC) in response to emotions vs. shapes differed by group (p=.05): while BPSD showed positive FxC (emotions>shapes), HC and ADHD showed inverse FxC (emotions

Impact of childhood emotional abuse on neocortical neurometabolites and complex emotional processing in patients with generalized anxiety disorder.

PubMed

Raparia, Eva; Coplan, Jeremy D; Abdallah, Chadi G; Hof, Patrick R; Mao, Xiangling; Mathew, Sanjay J; Shungu, Dikoma C

2016-01-15

The rostral prefrontal cortex (RPFC) is involved in reflective thought processes such as self-knowledge and person perception. We hypothesized that childhood emotional abuse, which is disruptive of emotional regulation, would differentially impact neurometabolite concentrations of the RPFC, and related neocortical areas, in adults with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) versus healthy controls. GAD patients (n=16; females=11) and medically healthy volunteers (n=16; F=10) were assessed using the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ), specifically the emotional abuse category. Proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy imaging examined 3 regions of interest (ROI) from the most rostral slice from the Duyn et al. (1993) multivoxel imaging modality: rostral prefrontal cortex (BA 10,9), premotor cortex (BA 6,8) and secondary somatosensory and associated parietal cortex (BA 5,7). Metabolites included N-acetyl-aspartate, creatine, and choline. GAD patients reported higher emotional abuse scores versus controls. An omnibus general linear model including 3 ROI, 3 metabolites, and laterality as dependent variables revealed a significant diagnosis by CTQ emotional abuse score interactive effect. In controls, all 3 ROI for all 3 metabolites on both sides demonstrated a significant inverse relationship with emotional abuse scores; none were significant in GAD patients. A major limitation is the uneven distribution of emotional abuse scores between the controls and GAD patients, with GAD patients reporting higher scores. Unlike controls, GAD patients appear compromised in forming a molecular representation reflective of magnitude of childhood emotional abuse. The neurometabolites in GAD patients appear non-aligned to childhood emotional abuse, suggesting potential consequences for normative "theory of mind" processes and emotional function in certain anxiety disorders. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Prolonged hemodynamic response during incidental facial emotion processing in inter-episode bipolar I disorder.

PubMed

Rosenfeld, Ethan S; Pearlson, Godfrey D; Sweeney, John A; Tamminga, Carol A; Keshavan, Matcheri S; Nonterah, Camilla; Stevens, Michael C

2014-03-01

This fMRI study examined whether hemodynamic responses to affectively-salient stimuli were abnormally prolonged in remitted bipolar disorder, possibly representing a novel illness biomarker. A group of 18 DSM-IV bipolar I-diagnosed adults in remission and a demographically-matched control group performed an event-related fMRI gender-discrimination task in which face stimuli had task-irrelevant neutral, happy or angry expressions designed to elicit incidental emotional processing. Participants' brain activation was modeled using a "fully informed" SPM5 basis set. Mixed-model ANOVA tested for diagnostic group differences in BOLD response amplitude and shape within brain regions-of-interest selected from ALE meta-analysis of previous comparable fMRI studies. Bipolar-diagnosed patients had a generally longer duration and/or later-peaking hemodynamic response in amygdala and numerous prefrontal cortex brain regions. Data are consistent with existing models of bipolar limbic hyperactivity, but the prolonged frontolimbic response more precisely details abnormalities recognized in previous studies. Prolonged hemodynamic responses were unrelated to stimulus type, task performance, or degree of residual mood symptoms, suggesting an important novel trait vulnerability brain dysfunction in bipolar disorder. Bipolar patients also failed to engage pregenual cingulate and left orbitofrontal cortex-regions important to models of automatic emotion regulation-while engaging a delayed dorsolateral prefrontal cortex response not seen in controls. These results raise questions about whether there are meaningful relationships between bipolar dysfunction of specific ventromedial prefrontal cortex regions believed to automatically regulate emotional reactions and the prolonged responses in more lateral aspects of prefrontal cortex.

Brain activity correlates with emotional perception induced by dynamic avatars.

PubMed

Goldberg, Hagar; Christensen, Andrea; Flash, Tamar; Giese, Martin A; Malach, Rafael

2015-11-15

An accurate judgment of the emotional state of others is a prerequisite for successful social interaction and hence survival. Thus, it is not surprising that we are highly skilled at recognizing the emotions of others. Here we aimed to examine the neuronal correlates of emotion recognition from gait. To this end we created highly controlled dynamic body-movement stimuli based on real human motion-capture data (Roether et al., 2009). These animated avatars displayed gait in four emotional (happy, angry, fearful, and sad) and speed-matched neutral styles. For each emotional gait and its equivalent neutral gait, avatars were displayed at five morphing levels between the two. Subjects underwent fMRI scanning while classifying the emotions and the emotional intensity levels expressed by the avatars. Our results revealed robust brain selectivity to emotional compared to neutral gait stimuli in brain regions which are involved in emotion and biological motion processing, such as the extrastriate body area (EBA), fusiform body area (FBA), superior temporal sulcus (STS), and the amygdala (AMG). Brain activity in the amygdala reflected emotional awareness: for visually identical stimuli it showed amplified stronger response when the stimulus was perceived as emotional. Notably, in avatars gradually morphed along an emotional expression axis there was a parametric correlation between amygdala activity and emotional intensity. This study extends the mapping of emotional decoding in the human brain to the domain of highly controlled dynamic biological motion. Our results highlight an extensive level of brain processing of emotional information related to body language, which relies mostly on body kinematics. Copyright © 2015. Published by Elsevier Inc.

The embodiment of emotion: language use during the feeling of social emotions predicts cortical somatosensory activity.

PubMed

Saxbe, Darby E; Yang, Xiao-Fei; Borofsky, Larissa A; Immordino-Yang, Mary Helen

2013-10-01

Complex social emotions involve both abstract cognitions and bodily sensations, and individuals may differ on their relative reliance on these. We hypothesized that individuals' descriptions of their feelings during a semi-structured emotion induction interview would reveal two distinct psychological styles-a more abstract, cognitive style and a more body-based, affective style-and that these would be associated with somatosensory neural activity. We examined 28 participants' open-ended verbal responses to admiration- and compassion-provoking narratives in an interview and BOLD activity to the same narratives during subsequent functional magnetic resonance imaging scanning. Consistent with hypotheses, individuals' affective and cognitive word use were stable across emotion conditions, negatively correlated and unrelated to reported emotion strength in the scanner. Greater use of affective relative to cognitive words predicted more activation in SI, SII, middle anterior cingulate cortex and insula during emotion trials. The results suggest that individuals' verbal descriptions of their feelings reflect differential recruitment of neural regions supporting physical body awareness. Although somatosensation has long been recognized as an important component of emotion processing, these results offer 'proof of concept' that individual differences in open-ended speech reflect different processing styles at the neurobiological level. This study also demonstrates SI involvement during social emotional experience.

The embodiment of emotion: language use during the feeling of social emotions predicts cortical somatosensory activity

PubMed Central

Saxbe, Darby E.; Yang, Xiao-Fei; Borofsky, Larissa A.

2013-01-01

Complex social emotions involve both abstract cognitions and bodily sensations, and individuals may differ on their relative reliance on these. We hypothesized that individuals’ descriptions of their feelings during a semi-structured emotion induction interview would reveal two distinct psychological styles—a more abstract, cognitive style and a more body-based, affective style—and that these would be associated with somatosensory neural activity. We examined 28 participants’ open-ended verbal responses to admiration- and compassion-provoking narratives in an interview and BOLD activity to the same narratives during subsequent functional magnetic resonance imaging scanning. Consistent with hypotheses, individuals’ affective and cognitive word use were stable across emotion conditions, negatively correlated and unrelated to reported emotion strength in the scanner. Greater use of affective relative to cognitive words predicted more activation in SI, SII, middle anterior cingulate cortex and insula during emotion trials. The results suggest that individuals’ verbal descriptions of their feelings reflect differential recruitment of neural regions supporting physical body awareness. Although somatosensation has long been recognized as an important component of emotion processing, these results offer ‘proof of concept’ that individual differences in open-ended speech reflect different processing styles at the neurobiological level. This study also demonstrates SI involvement during social emotional experience. PMID:22798396

Contextual and perceptual brain processes underlying moral cognition: a quantitative meta-analysis of moral reasoning and moral emotions.

PubMed

Sevinc, Gunes; Spreng, R Nathan

2014-01-01

Human morality has been investigated using a variety of tasks ranging from judgments of hypothetical dilemmas to viewing morally salient stimuli. These experiments have provided insight into neural correlates of moral judgments and emotions, yet these approaches reveal important differences in moral cognition. Moral reasoning tasks require active deliberation while moral emotion tasks involve the perception of stimuli with moral implications. We examined convergent and divergent brain activity associated with these experimental paradigms taking a quantitative meta-analytic approach. A systematic search of the literature yielded 40 studies. Studies involving explicit decisions in a moral situation were categorized as active (n = 22); studies evoking moral emotions were categorized as passive (n = 18). We conducted a coordinate-based meta-analysis using the Activation Likelihood Estimation to determine reliable patterns of brain activity. Results revealed a convergent pattern of reliable brain activity for both task categories in regions of the default network, consistent with the social and contextual information processes supported by this brain network. Active tasks revealed more reliable activity in the temporoparietal junction, angular gyrus and temporal pole. Active tasks demand deliberative reasoning and may disproportionately involve the retrieval of social knowledge from memory, mental state attribution, and construction of the context through associative processes. In contrast, passive tasks reliably engaged regions associated with visual and emotional information processing, including lingual gyrus and the amygdala. A laterality effect was observed in dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, with active tasks engaging the left, and passive tasks engaging the right. While overlapping activity patterns suggest a shared neural network for both tasks, differential activity suggests that processing of moral input is affected by task demands. The results provide novel insight into distinct features of moral cognition, including the generation of moral context through associative processes and the perceptual detection of moral salience.

Contextual and Perceptual Brain Processes Underlying Moral Cognition: A Quantitative Meta-Analysis of Moral Reasoning and Moral Emotions

PubMed Central

Sevinc, Gunes; Spreng, R. Nathan

2014-01-01

Background and Objectives Human morality has been investigated using a variety of tasks ranging from judgments of hypothetical dilemmas to viewing morally salient stimuli. These experiments have provided insight into neural correlates of moral judgments and emotions, yet these approaches reveal important differences in moral cognition. Moral reasoning tasks require active deliberation while moral emotion tasks involve the perception of stimuli with moral implications. We examined convergent and divergent brain activity associated with these experimental paradigms taking a quantitative meta-analytic approach. Data Source A systematic search of the literature yielded 40 studies. Studies involving explicit decisions in a moral situation were categorized as active (n = 22); studies evoking moral emotions were categorized as passive (n = 18). We conducted a coordinate-based meta-analysis using the Activation Likelihood Estimation to determine reliable patterns of brain activity. Results & Conclusions Results revealed a convergent pattern of reliable brain activity for both task categories in regions of the default network, consistent with the social and contextual information processes supported by this brain network. Active tasks revealed more reliable activity in the temporoparietal junction, angular gyrus and temporal pole. Active tasks demand deliberative reasoning and may disproportionately involve the retrieval of social knowledge from memory, mental state attribution, and construction of the context through associative processes. In contrast, passive tasks reliably engaged regions associated with visual and emotional information processing, including lingual gyrus and the amygdala. A laterality effect was observed in dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, with active tasks engaging the left, and passive tasks engaging the right. While overlapping activity patterns suggest a shared neural network for both tasks, differential activity suggests that processing of moral input is affected by task demands. The results provide novel insight into distinct features of moral cognition, including the generation of moral context through associative processes and the perceptual detection of moral salience. PMID:24503959

Regional gray matter density associated with emotional conflict resolution: evidence from voxel-based morphometry.

PubMed

Deng, Z; Wei, D; Xue, S; Du, X; Hitchman, G; Qiu, J

2014-09-05

Successful emotion regulation is a fundamental prerequisite for well-being and dysregulation may lead to psychopathology. The ability to inhibit spontaneous emotions while behaving in accordance with desired goals is an important dimension of emotion regulation and can be measured using emotional conflict resolution tasks. Few studies have investigated the gray matter correlates underlying successful emotional conflict resolution at the whole-brain level. We had 190 adults complete an emotional conflict resolution task (face-word task) and examined the brain regions significantly correlated with successful emotional conflict resolution using voxel-based morphometry. We found successful emotional conflict resolution was associated with increased regional gray matter density in widely distributed brain regions. These regions included the dorsal anterior cingulate/dorsal medial prefrontal cortex, ventral medial prefrontal cortex, supplementary motor area, amygdala, ventral striatum, precuneus, posterior cingulate cortex, inferior parietal lobule, superior temporal gyrus and fusiform face area. Together, our results indicate that individual differences in emotional conflict resolution ability may be attributed to regional structural differences across widely distributed brain regions. Copyright © 2014 IBRO. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Distinct Neural Activity Associated with Focused-Attention Meditation and Loving-Kindness Meditation

PubMed Central

Lee, Tatia M. C.; Leung, Mei-Kei; Hou, Wai-Kai; Tang, Joey C. Y.; Yin, Jing; So, Kwok-Fai; Lee, Chack-Fan; Chan, Chetwyn C. H.

2012-01-01

This study examined the dissociable neural effects of ānāpānasati (focused-attention meditation, FAM) and mettā (loving-kindness meditation, LKM) on BOLD signals during cognitive (continuous performance test, CPT) and affective (emotion-processing task, EPT, in which participants viewed affective pictures) processing. Twenty-two male Chinese expert meditators (11 FAM experts, 11 LKM experts) and 22 male Chinese novice meditators (11 FAM novices, 11 LKM novices) had their brain activity monitored by a 3T MRI scanner while performing the cognitive and affective tasks in both meditation and baseline states. We examined the interaction between state (meditation vs. baseline) and expertise (expert vs. novice) separately during LKM and FAM, using a conjunction approach to reveal common regions sensitive to the expert meditative state. Additionally, exclusive masking techniques revealed distinct interactions between state and group during LKM and FAM. Specifically, we demonstrated that the practice of FAM was associated with expertise-related behavioral improvements and neural activation differences in attention task performance. However, the effect of state LKM meditation did not carry over to attention task performance. On the other hand, both FAM and LKM practice appeared to affect the neural responses to affective pictures. For viewing sad faces, the regions activated for FAM practitioners were consistent with attention-related processing; whereas responses of LKM experts to sad pictures were more in line with differentiating emotional contagion from compassion/emotional regulation processes. Our findings provide the first report of distinct neural activity associated with forms of meditation during sustained attention and emotion processing. PMID:22905090

Can Harry Potter still put a spell on us in a second language? An fMRI study on reading emotion-laden literature in late bilinguals.

PubMed

Hsu, Chun-Ting; Jacobs, Arthur M; Conrad, Markus

2015-02-01

In this fMRI study we contrasted emotional responses to literary reading in late bilinguals' first or second language. German participants with adequate English proficiency in their second language (L2) English read short text passages from Harry Potter books characterized by a "negative" or "positive" versus "neutral" emotional valence manipulation. Previous studies have suggested that given sufficient L2 proficiency, neural substrates involved in L1 versus L2 do not differ (Fabbro, 2001). On the other hand, the question of attenuated emotionality of L2 language processing is still an open debate (see Conrad, Recio, & Jacobs, 2011). Our results revealed a set of neural structures involved in the processing of emotion-laden literature, including emotion-related amygdala and a set of lateral prefrontal, anterior temporal, and temporo-parietal regions associated with discourse comprehension, high-level semantic integration, and Theory-of-Mind processing. Yet, consistent with post-scan emotion ratings of text passages, factorial fMRI analyses revealed stronger hemodynamic responses to "happy" than to "neutral" in bilateral amygdala and the left precentral cortex that were restricted to L1 reading. Furthermore, multivariate pattern analyses (MVPA) demonstrated better classifiability of differential patterns of brain activity elicited by passages of different emotional content in L1 than in L2 for the whole brain level. Overall, our results suggest that reading emotion-laden texts in our native language provides a stronger and more differentiated emotional experience than reading in a second language. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The influence of positive and negative emotional associations on semantic processing in depression: an fMRI study.

PubMed

Sass, Katharina; Habel, Ute; Kellermann, Thilo; Mathiak, Klaus; Gauggel, Siegfried; Kircher, Tilo

2014-02-01

In depression, patients suffer from emotional and cognitive deficits, among others in semantic processing. If these semantic deficits are cognitive or interact with emotional dysfunctions, is still an open question. The aim of the current study was to investigate the influence of emotional valence on the neural correlates of semantic priming in major depression. In a lexical decision task, positive, negative, and neutral word pairs were presented during fMRI measurement. Nineteen inpatients and 19 demographically matched controls were recruited. Behaviorally, positive and neutral valence induced a priming effect whereas negative valence induced no effect (controls) or even inhibition (slower RT for related stimuli) in patients. At the neural level, the semantic relation effect revealed similar neural activation in right middle frontal regions for patients and controls. Group differences emerged in the right fusiform gyrus and the ACC. Activity associated with positive valence differed at the DLPFC and amygdala and for negative valence at putamen and cerebellum. The activation of amygdala and DLPFC correlated negatively with the severity of depression. To conclude, semantic processing deficits in depression are modulated by emotional valence of the stimulus on the behavioral as well as on neural level in right-lateralized prefrontal areas and the amygdala. The results highlighted an influence of depression severity on emotion information processing as the severity of symptoms correlated negatively with neural responses to positively and negatively valenced information. Hence, the dysfunctional emotion processing may further enhance the cognitive deficits in depression. Copyright © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

[Neural activity related to emotional and empathic deficits in subjects with post-traumatic stress disorder who survived the L'Aquila (Central Italy) 2009 earthquake].

PubMed

Mazza, Monica; Pino, Maria Chiara; Tempesta, Daniela; Catalucci, Alessia; Masciocchi, Carlo; Ferrara, Michele

2016-01-01

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a chronic anxiety disorder. The continued efforts to control the distressing memories by traumatized individuals, together with the reduction of responsiveness to the outside world, are called Emotional Numbing (EN). The EN is one of the central symptoms in PTSD and it plays an integral role not only in the development and maintenance of post-traumatic symptomatology, but also in the disability of emotional regulation. This disorder shows an abnormal response of cortical and limbic regions which are normally involved in understanding emotions since the very earliest stages of the development of processing ability. Patients with PTSD exhibit exaggerated brain responses to emotionally negative stimuli. Identifying the neural correlates of emotion regulation in these subjects is important for elucidating the neural circuitry involved in emotional and empathic dysfunction. We showed that PTSD patients, all survivors of the L'Aquila 2009 earthquake, have a higher sensitivity to negative emotion and lower empathy levels. These emotional and empathic deficits are accompanied by neural brain functional correlates. Indeed PTSD subjects exhibit functional abnormalities in brain regions that are involved in stress regulation and emotional responses. The reduced activation of the frontal areas and a stronger activation of the limbic areas when responding to emotional stimuli could lead the subjects to enact coping strategies aimed at protecting themselves from the re-experience of pain related to traumatic events. This would result in a dysfunctional hyperactivation of subcortical areas, which may cause emotional distress and, consequently, impaired social relationships often reported by PTSD patients.

Ventromedial prefrontal cortex mediates visual attention during facial emotion recognition.

PubMed

Wolf, Richard C; Philippi, Carissa L; Motzkin, Julian C; Baskaya, Mustafa K; Koenigs, Michael

2014-06-01

The ventromedial prefrontal cortex is known to play a crucial role in regulating human social and emotional behaviour, yet the precise mechanisms by which it subserves this broad function remain unclear. Whereas previous neuropsychological studies have largely focused on the role of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex in higher-order deliberative processes related to valuation and decision-making, here we test whether ventromedial prefrontal cortex may also be critical for more basic aspects of orienting attention to socially and emotionally meaningful stimuli. Using eye tracking during a test of facial emotion recognition in a sample of lesion patients, we show that bilateral ventromedial prefrontal cortex damage impairs visual attention to the eye regions of faces, particularly for fearful faces. This finding demonstrates a heretofore unrecognized function of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex-the basic attentional process of controlling eye movements to faces expressing emotion. © The Author (2014). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Guarantors of Brain. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.

Emotional learning, stress, and development: An ever-changing landscape shaped by early-life experience.

PubMed

Pattwell, Siobhan S; Bath, Kevin G

2017-09-01

The capacity to learn to associate cues with negative outcomes is a highly adaptive process that appears to be conserved across species. However, when the cue is no longer a valid predictor of danger, but the emotional response persists, this can result in maladaptive behaviors, and in humans contribute to debilitating emotional disorders. Over the past several decades, work in neuroscience, psychiatry, psychology, and biology have uncovered key processes underlying, and structures governing, emotional responding and learning, as well as identified disruptions in the structural and functional integrity of these brain regions in models of pathology. In this review, we highlight some of this elegant body of work as well as incorporate emerging findings from the field of developmental neurobiology to emphasize how development contributes to changes in the ability to learn and express emotional responses, and how early experiences, such as stress, shape the development and functioning of these circuits. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Neural circuitry of emotional face processing in autism spectrum disorders.

PubMed

Monk, Christopher S; Weng, Shih-Jen; Wiggins, Jillian Lee; Kurapati, Nikhil; Louro, Hugo M C; Carrasco, Melisa; Maslowsky, Julie; Risi, Susan; Lord, Catherine

2010-03-01

Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are associated with severe impairments in social functioning. Because faces provide nonverbal cues that support social interactions, many studies of ASD have examined neural structures that process faces, including the amygdala, ventromedial prefrontal cortex and superior and middle temporal gyri. However, increases or decreases in activation are often contingent on the cognitive task. Specifically, the cognitive domain of attention influences group differences in brain activation. We investigated brain function abnormalities in participants with ASD using a task that monitored attention bias to emotional faces. Twenty-four participants (12 with ASD, 12 controls) completed a functional magnetic resonance imaging study while performing an attention cuing task with emotional (happy, sad, angry) and neutral faces. In response to emotional faces, those in the ASD group showed greater right amygdala activation than those in the control group. A preliminary psychophysiological connectivity analysis showed that ASD participants had stronger positive right amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex coupling and weaker positive right amygdala and temporal lobe coupling than controls. There were no group differences in the behavioural measure of attention bias to the emotional faces. The small sample size may have affected our ability to detect additional group differences. When attention bias to emotional faces was equivalent between ASD and control groups, ASD was associated with greater amygdala activation. Preliminary analyses showed that ASD participants had stronger connectivity between the amygdala ventromedial prefrontal cortex (a network implicated in emotional modulation) and weaker connectivity between the amygdala and temporal lobe (a pathway involved in the identification of facial expressions, although areas of group differences were generally in a more anterior region of the temporal lobe than what is typically reported for emotional face processing). These alterations in connectivity are consistent with emotion and face processing disturbances in ASD.

Appraisals Generate Specific Configurations of Facial Muscle Movements in a Gambling Task: Evidence for the Component Process Model of Emotion.

PubMed

Gentsch, Kornelia; Grandjean, Didier; Scherer, Klaus R

2015-01-01

Scherer's Component Process Model provides a theoretical framework for research on the production mechanism of emotion and facial emotional expression. The model predicts that appraisal results drive facial expressions, which unfold sequentially and cumulatively over time. In two experiments, we examined facial muscle activity changes (via facial electromyography recordings over the corrugator, cheek, and frontalis regions) in response to events in a gambling task. These events were experimentally manipulated feedback stimuli which presented simultaneous information directly affecting goal conduciveness (gambling outcome: win, loss, or break-even) and power appraisals (Experiment 1 and 2), as well as control appraisal (Experiment 2). We repeatedly found main effects of goal conduciveness (starting ~600 ms), and power appraisals (starting ~800 ms after feedback onset). Control appraisal main effects were inconclusive. Interaction effects of goal conduciveness and power appraisals were obtained in both experiments (Experiment 1: over the corrugator and cheek regions; Experiment 2: over the frontalis region) suggesting amplified goal conduciveness effects when power was high in contrast to invariant goal conduciveness effects when power was low. Also an interaction of goal conduciveness and control appraisals was found over the cheek region, showing differential goal conduciveness effects when control was high and invariant effects when control was low. These interaction effects suggest that the appraisal of having sufficient control or power affects facial responses towards gambling outcomes. The result pattern suggests that corrugator and frontalis regions are primarily related to cognitive operations that process motivational pertinence, whereas the cheek region would be more influenced by coping implications. Our results provide first evidence demonstrating that cognitive-evaluative mechanisms related to goal conduciveness, control, and power appraisals affect facial expressions dynamically over time, immediately after an event is perceived. In addition, our results provide further indications for the chronography of appraisal-driven facial movements and the underlying cognitive processes.

Appraisals Generate Specific Configurations of Facial Muscle Movements in a Gambling Task: Evidence for the Component Process Model of Emotion

PubMed Central

Gentsch, Kornelia; Grandjean, Didier; Scherer, Klaus R.

2015-01-01

Scherer’s Component Process Model provides a theoretical framework for research on the production mechanism of emotion and facial emotional expression. The model predicts that appraisal results drive facial expressions, which unfold sequentially and cumulatively over time. In two experiments, we examined facial muscle activity changes (via facial electromyography recordings over the corrugator, cheek, and frontalis regions) in response to events in a gambling task. These events were experimentally manipulated feedback stimuli which presented simultaneous information directly affecting goal conduciveness (gambling outcome: win, loss, or break-even) and power appraisals (Experiment 1 and 2), as well as control appraisal (Experiment 2). We repeatedly found main effects of goal conduciveness (starting ~600 ms), and power appraisals (starting ~800 ms after feedback onset). Control appraisal main effects were inconclusive. Interaction effects of goal conduciveness and power appraisals were obtained in both experiments (Experiment 1: over the corrugator and cheek regions; Experiment 2: over the frontalis region) suggesting amplified goal conduciveness effects when power was high in contrast to invariant goal conduciveness effects when power was low. Also an interaction of goal conduciveness and control appraisals was found over the cheek region, showing differential goal conduciveness effects when control was high and invariant effects when control was low. These interaction effects suggest that the appraisal of having sufficient control or power affects facial responses towards gambling outcomes. The result pattern suggests that corrugator and frontalis regions are primarily related to cognitive operations that process motivational pertinence, whereas the cheek region would be more influenced by coping implications. Our results provide first evidence demonstrating that cognitive-evaluative mechanisms related to goal conduciveness, control, and power appraisals affect facial expressions dynamically over time, immediately after an event is perceived. In addition, our results provide further indications for the chronography of appraisal-driven facial movements and the underlying cognitive processes. PMID:26295338

Neurobiological Phenotypes of Familial Chronic Pain in Adolescence: A Pilot fMRI Study.

PubMed

Cservenka, Anita; Stein, Hannah; Wilson, Anna C; Nagel, Bonnie J

2015-09-01

Parental history of chronic pain has been associated with self-reported pain in adolescent offspring. This suggests that there may be neurobiological mechanisms associated with pain heritability. Because emotional circuitry is an important component of pain processing and may also influence cognition, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine affective processing and cognitive control using an Emotional Go/NoGo task in youth with (FH + Pain, n = 8) and without (FH - Pain, n = 8) a parental history of chronic pain (mean age = 14.17 ± .34 years). FH + Pain youth had widespread reductions in brain activity within limbic and visual processing regions during processing of positively valenced emotional stimuli, as well as reduced frontoparietal response while processing negatively valenced emotional stimuli compared with their peers. In addition, during inhibition within a positive emotional context, FH + Pain youth had reduced cognitive control and salience-related brain activity. On the other hand, default mode-related brain response was increased during inhibitory control within a negative emotional context in these adolescents compared with their peers (P/α < .05). The current findings indicate differences in both emotional processing and cognitive control brain response in FH + Pain compared with FH - Pain youth, suggesting that both affective and executive functioning pathways may be important markers related to the intergenerational transmission of pain. Perspective: This is the first study to examine neurobiological markers of pain risk in adolescents with a family history of chronic pain. These findings may aid in the identification of neural phenotypes related to vulnerability for the onset of pain in at-risk youth. Copyright © 2015 American Pain Society. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Image and emotion: from outcomes to brain behavior.

PubMed

Nanda, Upali; Zhu, Xi; Jansen, Ben H

2012-01-01

A systematic review of neuroscience articles on the emotional states of fear, anxiety, and pain to understand how emotional response is linked to the visual characteristics of an image at the level of brain behavior. A number of outcome studies link exposure to visual images (with nature content) to improvements in stress, anxiety, and pain perception. However, an understanding of the underlying perceptual mechanisms has been lacking. In this article, neuroscience studies that use visual images to induce fear, anxiety, or pain are reviewed to gain an understanding of how the brain processes visual images in this context and to explore whether this processing can be linked to specific visual characteristics. The amygdala was identified as one of the key regions of the brain involved in the processing of fear, anxiety, and pain (induced by visual images). Other key areas included the thalamus, insula, and hippocampus. Characteristics of visual images such as the emotional dimension (valence/arousal), subject matter (familiarity, ambiguity, novelty, realism, and facial expressions), and form (sharp and curved contours) were identified as key factors influencing emotional processing. The broad structural properties of an image and overall content were found to have a more pivotal role in the emotional response than the specific details of an image. Insights on specific visual properties were translated to recommendations for what should be incorporated-and avoided-in healthcare environments.

Oxytocin attenuates neural reactivity to masked threat cues from the eyes.

PubMed

Kanat, Manuela; Heinrichs, Markus; Schwarzwald, Ralf; Domes, Gregor

2015-01-01

The neuropeptide oxytocin has recently been shown to modulate covert attention shifts to emotional face cues and to improve discrimination of masked facial emotions. These results suggest that oxytocin modulates facial emotion processing at early perceptual stages prior to full evaluation of the emotional expression. Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine whether oxytocin alters neural responses to backwardly masked angry and happy faces while controlling for attention to the eye vs the mouth region. Intranasal oxytocin administration reduced amygdala reactivity to masked emotions when attending to salient facial features, ie, the eyes of angry faces and the mouth of happy faces. In addition, oxytocin decreased neural responses within the fusiform gyrus and brain stem areas, as well as functional coupling between the amygdala and the fusiform gyrus specifically for threat cues from the eyes. Effects of oxytocin on brain activity were not attributable to differences in behavioral performance, as oxytocin had no impact on mere emotion detection. Our results suggest that oxytocin attenuates neural correlates of early arousal by threat signals from the eye region. As reduced threat sensitivity may increase the likelihood of engaging in social interactions, our findings may have important implications for clinical states of social anxiety.

Brain activations during judgments of positive self-conscious emotion and positive basic emotion: pride and joy.

PubMed

Takahashi, Hidehiko; Matsuura, Masato; Koeda, Michihiko; Yahata, Noriaki; Suhara, Tetsuya; Kato, Motoichiro; Okubo, Yoshiro

2008-04-01

We aimed to investigate the neural correlates associated with judgments of a positive self-conscious emotion, pride, and elucidate the difference between pride and a basic positive emotion, joy, at the neural basis level using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Study of the neural basis associated with pride might contribute to a better understanding of the pride-related behaviors observed in neuropsychiatric disorders. Sixteen healthy volunteers were studied. The participants read sentences expressing joy or pride contents during the scans. Pride conditions activated the right posterior superior temporal sulcus and left temporal pole, the regions implicated in the neural substrate of social cognition or theory of mind. However, against our prediction, we did not find brain activation in the medial prefrontal cortex, a region responsible for inferring others' intention or self-reflection. Joy condition produced activations in the ventral striatum and insula/operculum, the key nodes of processing of hedonic or appetitive stimuli. Our results support the idea that pride is a self-conscious emotion, requiring the ability to detect the intention of others. At the same time, judgment of pride might require less self-reflection compared with those of negative self-conscious emotions such as guilt or embarrassment.

Emotion processing in joint hypermobility: A potential link to the neural bases of anxiety and related somatic symptoms in collagen anomalies.

PubMed

Mallorquí-Bagué, N; Bulbena, A; Roé-Vellvé, N; Hoekzema, E; Carmona, S; Barba-Müller, E; Fauquet, J; Pailhez, G; Vilarroya, O

2015-06-01

Joint hypermobility syndrome (JHS) has repeatedly been associated with anxiety and anxiety disorders, fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome and temporomandibular joint disorder. However, the neural underpinnings of these associations still remain unclear. This study explored brain responses to facial visual stimuli with emotional cues using fMRI techniques in general population with different ranges of hypermobility. Fifty-one non-clinical volunteers (33 women) completed state and trait anxiety questionnaire measures, were assessed with a clinical examination for hypermobility (Beighton system) and performed an emotional face processing paradigm during functional neuroimaging. Trait anxiety scores did significantly correlate with both state anxiety and hypermobility scores. BOLD signals of the hippocampus did positively correlate with hypermobility scores for the crying faces versus neutral faces contrast in ROI analyses. No results were found for any of the other studied ROIs. Additionally, hypermobility scores were also associated with other key affective processing areas (i.e. the middle and anterior cingulate gyrus, fusiform gyrus, parahippocampal region, orbitofrontal cortex and cerebellum) in the whole brain analysis. Hypermobility scores are associated with trait anxiety and higher brain responses to emotional faces in emotion processing brain areas (including hippocampus) described to be linked to anxiety and somatic symptoms. These findings increase our understanding of emotion processing in people bearing this heritable variant of collagen and the mechanisms through which vulnerability to anxiety and somatic symptoms arises in this population. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.

Influence of emotional states on inhibitory gating: Animals models to clinical neurophysiology

PubMed Central

Cromwell, Howard C.; Atchley, Rachel M.

2014-01-01

Integrating research efforts using a cross-domain approach could redefine traditional constructs used in behavioral and clinical neuroscience by demonstrating that behavior and mental processes arise not from functional isolation but from integration. Our research group has been examining the interface between cognitive and emotional processes by studying inhibitory gating. Inhibitory gating can be measured via changes in behavior or neural signal processing. Sensorimotor gating of the startle response is a well-used measure. To study how emotion and cognition interact during startle modulation in the animal model, we examined ultrasonic vocalization (USV) emissions during acoustic startle and prepulse inhibition. We found high rates of USV emission during the sensorimotor gating paradigm and revealed links between prepulse inhibition (PPI) and USV emission that could reflect emotional and cognitive influences. Measuring inhibitory gating as P50 event-related potential suppression has also revealed possible connections between emotional states and cognitive processes. We have examined the single unit responses during the traditional gating paradigm and found that acute and chronic stress can alter gating of neural signals in regions such as amygdala, striatum and medial prefrontal cortex. Our findings point to the need for more cross-domain research on how shifting states of emotion can impact basic mechanisms of information processing. Results could inform clinical work with the development of tools that depend upon cross-domain communication, and enable a better understanding and evaluation of psychological impairment. PMID:24861710

Impact of transient emotions on functional connectivity during subsequent resting state: a wavelet correlation approach.

PubMed

Eryilmaz, Hamdi; Van De Ville, Dimitri; Schwartz, Sophie; Vuilleumier, Patrik

2011-02-01

The functional properties of resting brain activity are poorly understood, but have generally been related to self-monitoring and introspective processes. Here we investigated how emotionally positive and negative information differentially influenced subsequent brain activity at rest. We acquired fMRI data in 15 participants during rest periods following fearful, joyful, and neutral movies. Several brain regions were more active during resting than during movie-watching, including posterior/anterior cingulate cortices (PCC, ACC), bilateral insula and inferior parietal lobules (IPL). Functional connectivity at different frequency bands was also assessed using a wavelet correlation approach and small-world network analysis. Resting activity in ACC and insula as well as their coupling were strongly enhanced by preceding emotions, while coupling between ventral-medial prefrontal cortex and amygdala was selectively reduced. These effects were more pronounced after fearful than joyful movies for higher frequency bands. Moreover, the initial suppression of resting activity in ACC and insula after emotional stimuli was followed by a gradual restoration over time. Emotions did not affect IPL average activity but increased its connectivity with other regions. These findings reveal specific neural circuits recruited during the recovery from emotional arousal and highlight the complex functional dynamics of default mode networks in emotionally salient contexts. Copyright © 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Unconscious presentation of fearful face modulates electrophysiological responses to emotional prosody.

PubMed

Doi, Hirokazu; Shinohara, Kazuyuki

2015-03-01

Cross-modal integration of visual and auditory emotional cues is supposed to be advantageous in the accurate recognition of emotional signals. However, the neural locus of cross-modal integration between affective prosody and unconsciously presented facial expression in the neurologically intact population is still elusive at this point. The present study examined the influences of unconsciously presented facial expressions on the event-related potentials (ERPs) in emotional prosody recognition. In the experiment, fearful, happy, and neutral faces were presented without awareness by continuous flash suppression simultaneously with voices containing laughter and a fearful shout. The conventional peak analysis revealed that the ERPs were modulated interactively by emotional prosody and facial expression at multiple latency ranges, indicating that audio-visual integration of emotional signals takes place automatically without conscious awareness. In addition, the global field power during the late-latency range was larger for shout than for laughter only when a fearful face was presented unconsciously. The neural locus of this effect was localized to the left posterior fusiform gyrus, giving support to the view that the cortical region, traditionally considered to be unisensory region for visual processing, functions as the locus of audiovisual integration of emotional signals. © The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.

Role of the lateral habenula in memory through online processing of information.

PubMed

Mathis, Victor; Lecourtier, Lucas

2017-11-01

Our memory abilities, whether they involve short-term working memory or long-term episodic or procedural memories, are essential for our well-being, our capacity to adapt to constraints of our environment and survival. Therefore, several key brain regions and neurotransmitter systems are engaged in the processing of sensory information to either maintain such information in working memory so that it will quickly be used, and/or participate in the elaboration and storage of enduring traces useful for longer periods of time. Animal research has recently attracted attention on the lateral habenula which, as shown in rodents and non-human primates, seems to process information stemming in the main regions involved in memory processing, e.g., the medial prefrontal cortex, the hippocampus, the amygdala, the septal region, the basal ganglia, and participates in the control of key memory-related neurotransmitters systems, i.e., dopamine, serotonin, acetylcholine. Recently, the lateral habenula has been involved in working and spatial reference memories, in rodents, likely by participating in online processing of contextual information. In addition, several behavioral studies strongly suggest that it is also involved in the processing of the emotional valance of incoming information in order to adapt to particularly stressful situations. Therefore, the lateral habenula appears like a key region at the interface between cognition and emotion to participate in the selection of appropriate behaviors. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Evidence for an anterior-posterior differentiation in the human hippocampal formation revealed by meta-analytic parcellation of fMRI coordinate maps: focus on the subiculum.

PubMed

Chase, Henry W; Clos, Mareike; Dibble, Sofia; Fox, Peter; Grace, Anthony A; Phillips, Mary L; Eickhoff, Simon B

2015-06-01

Previous studies, predominantly in experimental animals, have suggested the presence of a differentiation of function across the hippocampal formation. In rodents, ventral regions are thought to be involved in emotional behavior while dorsal regions mediate cognitive or spatial processes. Using a combination of modeling the co-occurrence of significant activations across thousands of neuroimaging experiments and subsequent data-driven clustering of these data we were able to provide evidence of distinct subregions within a region corresponding to the human subiculum, a critical hub within the hippocampal formation. This connectivity-based model consists of a bilateral anterior region, as well as separate posterior and intermediate regions on each hemisphere. Functional connectivity assessed both by meta-analytic and resting fMRI approaches revealed that more anterior regions were more strongly connected to the default mode network, and more posterior regions were more strongly connected to 'task positive' regions. In addition, our analysis revealed that the anterior subregion was functionally connected to the ventral striatum, midbrain and amygdala, a circuit that is central to models of stress and motivated behavior. Analysis of a behavioral taxonomy provided evidence for a role for each subregion in mnemonic processing, as well as implication of the anterior subregion in emotional and visual processing and the right posterior subregion in reward processing. These findings lend support to models which posit anterior-posterior differentiation of function within the human hippocampal formation and complement other early steps toward a comparative (cross-species) model of the region. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Dysregulated left inferior parietal activity in schizophrenia and depression: functional connectivity and characterization

PubMed Central

Müller, Veronika I.; Cieslik, Edna C.; Laird, Angela R.; Fox, Peter T.; Eickhoff, Simon B.

2013-01-01

The inferior parietal cortex (IPC) is a heterogeneous region that is known to be involved in a multitude of diverse different tasks and processes, though its contribution to these often-complex functions is yet poorly understood. In a previous study we demonstrated that patients with depression failed to deactivate the left IPC during processing of congruent audiovisual information. We now found the same dysregulation (same region and condition) in schizophrenia. By using task-independent (resting state) and task-dependent meta-analytic connectivity modeling (MACM) analyses we aimed at characterizing this particular region with regard to its connectivity and function. Across both approaches, results revealed functional connectivity of the left inferior parietal seed region with bilateral IPC, precuneus and posterior cingulate cortex (PrC/PCC), medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC), left middle frontal (MFG) as well as inferior frontal (IFG) gyrus. Network-level functional characterization further revealed that on the one hand, all interconnected regions are part of a network involved in memory processes. On the other hand, sub-networks are formed when emotion, language, social cognition and reasoning processes are required. Thus, the IPC-region that is dysregulated in both depression and schizophrenia is functionally connected to a network of regions which, depending on task demands may form sub-networks. These results therefore indicate that dysregulation of left IPC in depression and schizophrenia might not only be connected to deficits in audiovisual integration, but is possibly also associated to impaired memory and deficits in emotion processing in these patient groups. PMID:23781190

Changes in brain activation during working memory and facial recognition tasks in patients with bipolar disorder with Lamotrigine monotherapy.

PubMed

Haldane, Morgan; Jogia, Jigar; Cobb, Annabel; Kozuch, Eliza; Kumari, Veena; Frangou, Sophia

2008-01-01

Verbal working memory and emotional self-regulation are impaired in Bipolar Disorder (BD). Our aim was to investigate the effect of Lamotrigine (LTG), which is effective in the clinical management of BD, on the neural circuits subserving working memory and emotional processing. Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging data from 12 stable BD patients was used to detect LTG-induced changes as the differences in brain activity between drug-free and post-LTG monotherapy conditions during a verbal working memory (N-back sequential letter task) and an angry facial affect recognition task. For both tasks, LGT monotherapy compared to baseline was associated with increased activation mostly within the prefrontal cortex and cingulate gyrus, in regions normally engaged in verbal working memory and emotional processing. Therefore, LTG monotherapy in BD patients may enhance cortical function within neural circuits involved in memory and emotional self-regulation.

Are corporations people too? The neural correlates of moral judgments about companies and individuals.

PubMed

Plitt, Mark; Savjani, Ricky R; Eagleman, David M

2015-04-01

To investigate whether the legal concept of "corporate personhood" mirrors an inherent similarity in the neural processing of the actions of corporations and people, we measured brain responses to vignettes about corporations and people while participants underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging. We found that anti-social actions of corporations elicited more intense negative emotions and that pro-social actions of people elicited more intense positive emotions. However, the networks underlying the moral decisions about corporations and people are strikingly similar, including regions of the canonical theory of mind network. In analyzing the activity in these networks, we found differences in the emotional processing of these two types of vignettes: neutral actions of corporations showed neural correlates that more closely resembled negative actions than positive actions. Collectively, these findings indicate that our brains understand and analyze the actions of corporations and people very similarly, with a small emotional bias against corporations.

Reading a Suspenseful Literary Text Activates Brain Areas Related to Social Cognition and Predictive Inference

PubMed Central

Lehne, Moritz; Engel, Philipp; Rohrmeier, Martin; Menninghaus, Winfried; Jacobs, Arthur M.; Koelsch, Stefan

2015-01-01

Stories can elicit powerful emotions. A key emotional response to narrative plots (e.g., novels, movies, etc.) is suspense. Suspense appears to build on basic aspects of human cognition such as processes of expectation, anticipation, and prediction. However, the neural processes underlying emotional experiences of suspense have not been previously investigated. We acquired functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data while participants read a suspenseful literary text (E.T.A. Hoffmann's “The Sandman”) subdivided into short text passages. Individual ratings of experienced suspense obtained after each text passage were found to be related to activation in the medial frontal cortex, bilateral frontal regions (along the inferior frontal sulcus), lateral premotor cortex, as well as posterior temporal and temporo-parietal areas. The results indicate that the emotional experience of suspense depends on brain areas associated with social cognition and predictive inference. PMID:25946306

The Functional Neuroanatomy of Male Psychosexual and Physiosexual Arousal: A Quantitative Meta-Analysis

PubMed Central

Poeppl, Timm B.; Langguth, Berthold; Laird, Angela R.; Eickhoff, Simon B.

2016-01-01

Reproductive behavior is mandatory for conservation of species and mediated by a state of sexual arousal (SA), involving both complex mental processes and bodily reactions. An early neurobehavioral model of SA proposes cognitive, emotional, motivational, and autonomic components. In a comprehensive quantitative meta-analysis on previous neuroimaging findings, we provide here evidence for distinct brain networks underlying psychosexual and physiosexual arousal. Psychosexual (i.e., mental sexual) arousal recruits brain areas crucial for cognitive evaluation, top-down modulation of attention and exteroceptive sensory processing, relevance detection and affective evaluation, as well as regions implicated in the representation of urges and in triggering autonomic processes. In contrast, physiosexual (i.e., physiological sexual) arousal is mediated by regions responsible for regulation and monitoring of initiated autonomic processes and emotions and for somatosensory processing. These circuits are interconnected by subcortical structures (putamen and claustrum) that provide exchange of sensorimotor information and crossmodal processing between and within the networks. Brain deactivations may imply attenuation of introspective processes and social cognition, but be necessary to release intrinsic inhibition of SA. PMID:23674246

Impact of self-esteem and sex on stress reactions.

PubMed

Kogler, Lydia; Seidel, Eva-Maria; Metzler, Hannah; Thaler, Hanna; Boubela, Roland N; Pruessner, Jens C; Kryspin-Exner, Ilse; Gur, Ruben C; Windischberger, Christian; Moser, Ewald; Habel, Ute; Derntl, Birgit

2017-12-08

Positive self-evaluation is a major psychological resource modulating stress coping behavior. Sex differences have been reported in self-esteem as well as stress reactions, but so far their interactions have not been investigated. Therefore, we investigated sex-specific associations of self-esteem and stress reaction on behavioral, hormonal and neural levels. We applied a commonly used fMRI-stress task in 80 healthy participants. Men compared to women showed higher activation during stress in hippocampus, precuneus, superior temporal gyrus (STG) and insula. Furthermore, men outperformed women in the stress task and had higher cortisol and testosterone levels than women after stress. Self-esteem had an impact on precuneus, insula and STG activation during stress across the whole group. During stress, men recruit regions associated with emotion and stress regulation, self-referential processing and cognitive control more strongly than women. Self-esteem affects stress processing, however in a sex-independent fashion: participants with lower self-esteem show higher activation of regions involved in emotion and stress regulation, self-referential processing and cognitive control. Taken together, our data suggest that men are more engaged during the applied stress task. Across women and men, lower self-esteem increases the effort in emotion and stress processing and cognitive control, possibly leading to self-related thoughts in stressful situations.

Effects of Valence and Origin of Emotions in Word Processing Evidenced by Event Related Potential Correlates in a Lexical Decision Task

PubMed Central

Imbir, Kamil K.; Spustek, Tomasz; Żygierewicz, Jarosław

2016-01-01

This paper presents behavioral and event-related potential (ERP) correlates of emotional word processing during a lexical decision task (LDT). We showed that valence and origin (two distinct affective properties of stimuli) help to account for the ERP correlates of LDT. The origin of emotion is a factor derived from the emotion duality model. This model distinguishes between the automatic and controlled elicitation of emotional states. The subjects’ task was to discriminate words from pseudo-words. The stimulus words were carefully selected to differ with respect to valence and origin whilst being matched with respect to arousal, concreteness, length and frequency in natural language. Pseudo-words were matched to words with respect to length. The subjects were 32 individuals aged from 19 to 26 years who were invited to participate in an EEG study of lexical decision making. They evaluated a list of words and pseudo-words. We found that valence modulated the amplitude of the FN400 component (290–375 ms) at centro-frontal (Fz, Cz) region, whereas origin modulated the amplitude of the component in the LPC latency range (375–670 ms). The results indicate that the origin of stimuli should be taken into consideration while deliberating on the processing of emotional words. PMID:26973569

Neural correlates of impaired emotion processing in manifest Huntington's disease.

PubMed

Dogan, Imis; Saß, Christian; Mirzazade, Shahram; Kleiman, Alexandra; Werner, Cornelius J; Pohl, Anna; Schiefer, Johannes; Binkofski, Ferdinand; Schulz, Jörg B; Shah, N Jon; Reetz, Kathrin

2014-05-01

The complex phenotype of Huntington's disease (HD) encompasses motor, psychiatric and cognitive dysfunctions, including early impairments in emotion recognition. In this first functional magnetic resonance imaging study, we investigated emotion-processing deficits in 14 manifest HD patients and matched controls. An emotion recognition task comprised short video clips displaying one of six basic facial expressions (sadness, happiness, disgust, fear, anger and neutral). Structural changes between patients and controls were assessed by means of voxel-based morphometry. Along with deficient recognition of negative emotions, patients exhibited predominantly lower neural response to stimuli of negative valences in the amygdala, hippocampus, striatum, insula, cingulate and prefrontal cortices, as well as in sensorimotor, temporal and visual areas. Most of the observed reduced activity patterns could not be explained merely by regional volume loss. Reduced activity in the thalamus during fear correlated with lower thalamic volumes. During the processing of sadness, patients exhibited enhanced amygdala and hippocampal activity along with reduced recruitment of the medial prefrontal cortex. Higher amygdala activity was related to more pronounced amygdala atrophy and disease burden. Overall, the observed emotion-related dysfunctions in the context of structural neurodegeneration suggest both disruptions of striatal-thalamo-cortical loops and potential compensation mechanism with greater disease severity in manifest HD.

Altered Brain Activity in Unipolar Depression Revisited: Meta-analyses of Neuroimaging Studies.

PubMed

Müller, Veronika I; Cieslik, Edna C; Serbanescu, Ilinca; Laird, Angela R; Fox, Peter T; Eickhoff, Simon B

2017-01-01

During the past 20 years, numerous neuroimaging experiments have investigated aberrant brain activation during cognitive and emotional processing in patients with unipolar depression (UD). The results of those investigations, however, vary considerably; moreover, previous meta-analyses also yielded inconsistent findings. To readdress aberrant brain activation in UD as evidenced by neuroimaging experiments on cognitive and/or emotional processing. Neuroimaging experiments published from January 1, 1997, to October 1, 2015, were identified by a literature search of PubMed, Web of Science, and Google Scholar using different combinations of the terms fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), PET (positron emission tomography), neural, major depression, depression, major depressive disorder, unipolar depression, dysthymia, emotion, emotional, affective, cognitive, task, memory, working memory, inhibition, control, n-back, and Stroop. Neuroimaging experiments (using fMRI or PET) reporting whole-brain results of group comparisons between adults with UD and healthy control individuals as coordinates in a standard anatomic reference space and using an emotional or/and cognitive challenging task were selected. Coordinates reported to show significant activation differences between UD and healthy controls during emotional or cognitive processing were extracted. By using the revised activation likelihood estimation algorithm, different meta-analyses were calculated. Meta-analyses tested for brain regions consistently found to show aberrant brain activation in UD compared with controls. Analyses were calculated across all emotional processing experiments, all cognitive processing experiments, positive emotion processing, negative emotion processing, experiments using emotional face stimuli, experiments with a sex discrimination task, and memory processing. All meta-analyses were calculated across experiments independent of reporting an increase or decrease of activity in major depressive disorder. For meta-analyses with a minimum of 17 experiments available, separate analyses were performed for increases and decreases. In total, 57 studies with 99 individual neuroimaging experiments comprising in total 1058 patients were included; 34 of them tested cognitive and 65 emotional processing. Overall analyses across cognitive processing experiments (P > .29) and across emotional processing experiments (P > .47) revealed no significant results. Similarly, no convergence was found in analyses investigating positive (all P > .15), negative (all P > .76), or memory (all P > .48) processes. Analyses that restricted inclusion of confounds (eg, medication, comorbidity, age) did not change the results. Inconsistencies exist across individual experiments investigating aberrant brain activity in UD and replication problems across previous neuroimaging meta-analyses. For individual experiments, these inconsistencies may relate to use of uncorrected inference procedures, differences in experimental design and contrasts, or heterogeneous clinical populations; meta-analytically, differences may be attributable to varying inclusion and exclusion criteria or rather liberal statistical inference approaches.

Altered Brain Activity in Unipolar Depression Revisited Meta-analyses of Neuroimaging Studies

PubMed Central

Müller, Veronika I.; Cieslik, Edna C.; Serbanescu, Ilinca; Laird, Angela R.; Fox, Peter T.; Eickhoff, Simon B.

2017-01-01

IMPORTANCE During the past 20 years, numerous neuroimaging experiments have investigated aberrant brain activation during cognitive and emotional processing in patients with unipolar depression (UD). The results of those investigations, however, vary considerably; moreover, previous meta-analyses also yielded inconsistent findings. OBJECTIVE To readdress aberrant brain activation in UD as evidenced by neuroimaging experiments on cognitive and/or emotional processing. DATA SOURCES Neuroimaging experiments published from January 1, 1997, to October 1, 2015, were identified by a literature search of PubMed, Web of Science, and Google Scholar using different combinations of the terms fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), PET (positron emission tomography), neural, major depression, depression, major depressive disorder, unipolar depression, dysthymia, emotion, emotional, affective, cognitive, task, memory, working memory, inhibition, control, n-back, and Stroop. STUDY SELECTION Neuroimaging experiments (using fMRI or PET) reporting whole-brain results of group comparisons between adults with UD and healthy control individuals as coordinates in a standard anatomic reference space and using an emotional or/and cognitive challenging task were selected. DATA EXTRACTION AND SYNTHESIS Coordinates reported to show significant activation differences between UD and healthy controls during emotional or cognitive processing were extracted. By using the revised activation likelihood estimation algorithm, different meta-analyses were calculated. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES Meta-analyses tested for brain regions consistently found to show aberrant brain activation in UD compared with controls. Analyses were calculated across all emotional processing experiments, all cognitive processing experiments, positive emotion processing, negative emotion processing, experiments using emotional face stimuli, experiments with a sex discrimination task, and memory processing. All meta-analyses were calculated across experiments independent of reporting an increase or decrease of activity in major depressive disorder. For meta-analyses with a minimum of 17 experiments available, separate analyses were performed for increases and decreases. RESULTS In total, 57 studies with 99 individual neuroimaging experiments comprising in total 1058 patients were included; 34 of them tested cognitive and 65 emotional processing. Overall analyses across cognitive processing experiments (P > .29) and across emotional processing experiments (P > .47) revealed no significant results. Similarly, no convergence was found in analyses investigating positive (all P > .15), negative (all P > .76), or memory (all P > .48) processes. Analyses that restricted inclusion of confounds (eg, medication, comorbidity, age) did not change the results. CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE Inconsistencies exist across individual experiments investigating aberrant brain activity in UD and replication problems across previous neuroimaging meta-analyses. For individual experiments, these inconsistencies may relate to use of uncorrected inference procedures, differences in experimental design and contrasts, or heterogeneous clinical populations; meta-analytically, differences may be attributable to varying inclusion and exclusion criteria or rather liberal statistical inference approaches. PMID:27829086

Effect of Explicit Evaluation on Neural Connectivity Related to Listening to Unfamiliar Music

PubMed Central

Liu, Chao; Brattico, Elvira; Abu-jamous, Basel; Pereira, Carlos S.; Jacobsen, Thomas; Nandi, Asoke K.

2017-01-01

People can experience different emotions when listening to music. A growing number of studies have investigated the brain structures and neural connectivities associated with perceived emotions. However, very little is known about the effect of an explicit act of judgment on the neural processing of emotionally-valenced music. In this study, we adopted the novel consensus clustering paradigm, called binarisation of consensus partition matrices (Bi-CoPaM), to study whether and how the conscious aesthetic evaluation of the music would modulate brain connectivity networks related to emotion and reward processing. Participants listened to music under three conditions – one involving a non-evaluative judgment, one involving an explicit evaluative aesthetic judgment, and one involving no judgment at all (passive listening only). During non-evaluative attentive listening we obtained auditory-limbic connectivity whereas when participants were asked to decide explicitly whether they liked or disliked the music excerpt, only two clusters of intercommunicating brain regions were found: one including areas related to auditory processing and action observation, and the other comprising higher-order structures involved with visual processing. Results indicate that explicit evaluative judgment has an impact on the neural auditory-limbic connectivity during affective processing of music. PMID:29311874

A cross-linguistic fMRI study of perception of intonation and emotion in Chinese.

PubMed

Gandour, Jack; Wong, Donald; Dzemidzic, Mario; Lowe, Mark; Tong, Yunxia; Li, Xiaojian

2003-03-01

Conflicting data from neurobehavioral studies of the perception of intonation (linguistic) and emotion (affective) in spoken language highlight the need to further examine how functional attributes of prosodic stimuli are related to hemispheric differences in processing capacity. Because of similarities in their acoustic profiles, intonation and emotion permit us to assess to what extent hemispheric lateralization of speech prosody depends on functional instead of acoustical properties. To examine how the brain processes linguistic and affective prosody, an fMRI study was conducted using Chinese, a tone language in which both intonation and emotion may be signaled prosodically, in addition to lexical tones. Ten Chinese and 10 English subjects were asked to perform discrimination judgments of intonation (I: statement, question) and emotion (E: happy, angry, sad) presented in semantically neutral Chinese sentences. A baseline task required passive listening to the same speech stimuli (S). In direct between-group comparisons, the Chinese group showed left-sided frontoparietal activation for both intonation (I vs. S) and emotion (E vs. S) relative to baseline. When comparing intonation relative to emotion (I vs. E), the Chinese group demonstrated prefrontal activation bilaterally; parietal activation in the left hemisphere only. The reverse comparison (E vs. I), on the other hand, revealed that activation occurred in anterior and posterior prefrontal regions of the right hemisphere only. These findings show that some aspects of perceptual processing of emotion are dissociable from intonation, and, moreover, that they are mediated by the right hemisphere. Copyright 2003 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

The Right Place at the Right Time: Priming Facial Expressions with Emotional Face Components in Developmental Visual Agnosia

PubMed Central

Aviezer, Hillel; Hassin, Ran. R.; Perry, Anat; Dudarev, Veronica; Bentin, Shlomo

2012-01-01

The current study examined the nature of deficits in emotion recognition from facial expressions in case LG, an individual with a rare form of developmental visual agnosia (DVA). LG presents with profoundly impaired recognition of facial expressions, yet the underlying nature of his deficit remains unknown. During typical face processing, normal sighted individuals extract information about expressed emotions from face regions with activity diagnostic for specific emotion categories. Given LG’s impairment, we sought to shed light on his emotion perception by examining if priming facial expressions with diagnostic emotional face components would facilitate his recognition of the emotion expressed by the face. LG and control participants matched isolated face components with components appearing in a subsequently presented full-face and then categorized the face’s emotion. Critically, the matched components were from regions which were diagnostic or non-diagnostic of the emotion portrayed by the full face. In experiment 1, when the full faces were briefly presented (150 ms), LG’s performance was strongly influenced by the diagnosticity of the components: His emotion recognition was boosted within normal limits when diagnostic components were used and was obliterated when non-diagnostic components were used. By contrast, in experiment 2, when the face-exposure duration was extended (2000 ms), the beneficial effect of the diagnostic matching was diminished as was the detrimental effect of the non-diagnostic matching. These data highlight the impact of diagnostic facial features in normal expression recognition and suggest that impaired emotion recognition in DVA results from deficient visual integration across diagnostic face components. PMID:22349446

Single-trial EEG-informed fMRI analysis of emotional decision problems in hot executive function.

PubMed

Guo, Qian; Zhou, Tiantong; Li, Wenjie; Dong, Li; Wang, Suhong; Zou, Ling

2017-07-01

Executive function refers to conscious control in psychological process which relates to thinking and action. Emotional decision is a part of hot executive function and contains emotion and logic elements. As a kind of important social adaptation ability, more and more attention has been paid in recent years. Gambling task can be well performed in the study of emotional decision. As fMRI researches focused on gambling task show not completely consistent brain activation regions, this study adopted EEG-fMRI fusion technology to reveal brain neural activity related with feedback stimuli. In this study, an EEG-informed fMRI analysis was applied to process simultaneous EEG-fMRI data. First, relative power-spectrum analysis and K-means clustering method were performed separately to extract EEG-fMRI features. Then, Generalized linear models were structured using fMRI data and using different EEG features as regressors. The results showed that in the win versus loss stimuli, the activated regions almost covered the caudate, the ventral striatum (VS), the orbital frontal cortex (OFC), and the cingulate. Wide activation areas associated with reward and punishment were revealed by the EEG-fMRI integration analysis than the conventional fMRI results, such as the posterior cingulate and the OFC. The VS and the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) were found when EEG power features were performed as regressors of GLM compared with results entering the amplitudes of feedback-related negativity (FRN) as regressors. Furthermore, the brain region activation intensity was the strongest when theta-band power was used as a regressor compared with the other two fusion results. The EEG-based fMRI analysis can more accurately depict the whole-brain activation map and analyze emotional decision problems.

DNA methylation of the serotonin transporter gene (SLC6A4) is associated with brain function involved in processing emotional stimuli.

PubMed

Frodl, Thomas; Szyf, Moshe; Carballedo, Angela; Ly, Victoria; Dymov, Sergiy; Vaisheva, Farida; Morris, Derek; Fahey, Ciara; Meaney, James; Gill, Michael; Booij, Linda

2015-09-01

The aim of the present study was to investigate the association of fMRI blood oxygen-level dependent (BOLD) reactivity with the level of epigenetic methylation of SLC6A4 in blood DNA from a sample of healthy participants and patients with major depressive disorder (MDD). We investigated patients with MDD and healthy controls using fMRI and an emotional attention-shifting task. We assessed site-specific DNA methylation of a previously characterized SLC6A4 region in peripheral blood DNA using pyrosequencing. Our study involved 25 patients with MDD and 35 healthy controls. Activation in the anterior insula elicited by negative emotional content was significantly positively associated with the degree of SLC6A4 methylation. Significantly negative associations were observed between activation in the posterior insula and the degree of SLC6A4 methylation when judging the geometry of pictures after seeing negative in contrast to positive emotional stimuli. Healthy controls with a high degree of SLC6A4 methylation depicted significantly more activity elicited by positive stimuli in limbic regions and more activity elicited by negative stimuli in limbic as well as cognitive control regions than those with a low degree of SLC6A4 methylation. It is impossible to measure methylation directly in the brain and thus we assessed peripheral methylation of SLC6A4. Since the association was cross-sectional, no conclusion about cause and effect can be drawn. Our study provides further support to the hypothesis that particular DNA methylation states that are associated with brain function during emotion processing are detectable in the periphery.

Anterior cingulate hyperactivations during negative emotion processing among men with schizophrenia and a history of violent behavior.

PubMed

Tikàsz, Andràs; Potvin, Stéphane; Lungu, Ovidiu; Joyal, Christian C; Hodgins, Sheilagh; Mendrek, Adrianna; Dumais, Alexandre

2016-01-01

Evidence suggests a 2.1-4.6 times increase in the risk of violent behavior in schizophrenia compared to the general population. Current theories propose that the processing of negative emotions is defective in violent individuals and that dysfunctions within the neural circuits involved in emotion processing are implicated in violence. Although schizophrenia patients show enhanced sensitivity to negative stimuli, there are only few functional neuroimaging studies that have examined emotion processing among men with schizophrenia and a history of violence. The present study aimed to identify the brain regions with greater neurofunctional alterations, as detected by functional magnetic resonance imaging during an emotion processing task, of men with schizophrenia who had engaged in violent behavior compared with those who had not. Sixty men were studied; 20 with schizophrenia and a history of violence, 19 with schizophrenia and no violence, and 21 healthy men were scanned while viewing positive, negative, and neutral images. Negative images elicited hyperactivations in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), left and right lingual gyrus, and the left precentral gyrus in violent men with schizophrenia, compared to nonviolent men with schizophrenia and healthy men. Neutral images elicited hyperactivations in the right and left middle occipital gyrus, left lingual gyrus, and the left fusiform gyrus in violent men with schizophrenia, compared to the other two groups. Violent men with schizophrenia displayed specific increases in ACC in response to negative images. Given the role of the ACC in information integration, these results indicate a specific dysfunction in the processing of negative emotions that may trigger violent behavior in men with schizophrenia.

Increased frontal and paralimbic activation following ayahuasca, the pan-Amazonian inebriant.

PubMed

Riba, Jordi; Romero, Sergio; Grasa, Eva; Mena, Esther; Carrió, Ignasi; Barbanoj, Manel J

2006-05-01

Ayahuasca is a South American psychoactive plant tea which contains the serotonergic psychedelic N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) and monoamine-oxidase inhibitors that render DMT orally active. Previous investigations with ayahuasca have highlighted a psychotropic effect profile characterized by enhanced introspective attention, with individuals reporting altered somatic perceptions and intense emotional modifications, frequently accompanied by visual imagery. Despite recent advances in the study of ayahuasca pharmacology, the neural correlates of acute ayahuasca intoxication remain largely unknown. To investigate the effects of ayahuasca administration on regional cerebral blood flow. Fifteen male volunteers with prior experience in the use of psychedelics received a single oral dose of encapsulated freeze-dried ayahuasca equivalent to 1.0 mg DMT/kg body weight and a placebo in a randomized double-blind clinical trial. Regional cerebral blood flow was measured 100-110 min after drug administration by means of single photon emission tomography (SPECT). Ayahuasca administration led to significant activation of frontal and paralimbic brain regions. Increased blood perfusion was observed bilaterally in the anterior insula, with greater intensity in the right hemisphere, and in the anterior cingulate/frontomedial cortex of the right hemisphere, areas previously implicated in somatic awareness, subjective feeling states, and emotional arousal. Additional increases were observed in the left amygdala/parahippocampal gyrus, a structure also involved in emotional arousal. The present results suggest that ayahuasca interacts with neural systems that are central to interoception and emotional processing and point to a modulatory role of serotonergic neurotransmission in these processes.

Psychophysiology of neural, cognitive and affective integration: fMRI and autonomic indicants

PubMed Central

Critchley, Hugo D.

2009-01-01

Behaviour is shaped by environmental challenge in the context of homoeostatic need. Emotional and cognitive processes evoke patterned changes in bodily state that may signal emotional state to others. This dynamic modulation of visceral state is neurally mediated by sympathetic and parasympathetic divisions of the autonomic nervous system. Moreover neural afferents convey representations of the internal state of the body back to the brain to further influence emotion and cognition. Neuroimaging and lesion studies implicate specific regions of limbic forebrain in the behavioural generation of autonomic arousal states. Activity within these regions may predict emotion-specific autonomic response patterns within and between bodily organs, with implications for psychosomatic medicine. Feedback from the viscera is mapped hierarchically in the brain to influence efferent signals, and ultimately at the cortical level to engender and reinforce affective responses and subjective feeling states. Again neuroimaging and patient studies suggest discrete neural substrates for these representations, notably regions of insula and orbitofrontal cortex. Individual differences in conscious access to these interoceptive representations predict differences in emotional experience, but equally the misperception of heightened arousal level may evoke changes in emotional behaviour through engagement of the same neural centres. Perturbation of feedback may impair emotional reactivity and, in the context of inflammatory states give rise to cognitive, affective and psychomotor expressions of illness. Changes in visceral state during emotion may be mirrored in the responses of others, permitting a corresponding representation in the observer. The degree to which individuals are susceptible to this ‘contagion’ predicts individual differences in questionnaire ratings of empathy. Together these neuroimaging and clinical studies highlight the dynamic relationship between mind and body and help identify neural substrates that may translate thoughts into autonomic arousal and bodily states into feelings that can be shared. PMID:19414044

Dissociable neural systems resolve conflict from emotional versus nonemotional distracters.

PubMed

Egner, Tobias; Etkin, Amit; Gale, Seth; Hirsch, Joy

2008-06-01

The human brain protects the processing of task-relevant stimuli from interference ("conflict") by task-irrelevant stimuli via attentional biasing mechanisms. The lateral prefrontal cortex has been implicated in resolving conflict between competing stimuli by selectively enhancing task-relevant stimulus representations in sensory cortices. Conversely, recent data suggest that conflict from emotional distracters may be resolved by an alternative route, wherein the rostral anterior cingulate cortex inhibits amygdalar responsiveness to task-irrelevant emotional stimuli. Here we tested the proposal of 2 dissociable, distracter-specific conflict resolution mechanisms, by acquiring functional magnetic resonance imaging data during resolution of conflict from either nonemotional or emotional distracters. The results revealed 2 distinct circuits: a lateral prefrontal "cognitive control" system that resolved nonemotional conflict and was associated with enhanced processing of task-relevant stimuli in sensory cortices, and a rostral anterior cingulate "emotional control" system that resolved emotional conflict and was associated with decreased amygdalar responses to emotional distracters. By contrast, activations related to both emotional and nonemotional conflict monitoring were observed in a common region of the dorsal anterior cingulate. These data suggest that the neuroanatomical networks recruited to overcome conflict vary systematically with the nature of the conflict, but that they may share a common conflict-detection mechanism.

The neural correlates of priming emotion and reward systems for conflict processing in alcoholics.

PubMed

Schulte, T; Jung, Y-C; Sullivan, E V; Pfefferbaum, A; Serventi, M; Müller-Oehring, E M

2017-12-01

Emotional dysregulation in alcoholism (ALC) may result from disturbed inhibitory mechanisms. We therefore tested emotion and alcohol cue reactivity and inhibitory processes using negative priming. To test the neural correlates of cue reactivity and negative priming, 26 ALC and 26 age-matched controls underwent functional MRI performing a Stroop color match-to-sample task. In cue reactivity trials, task-irrelevant emotion and alcohol-related pictures were interspersed between color samples and color words. In negative priming trials, pictures primed the semantic content of an alcohol or emotion Stroop word. Behaviorally, both groups showed response facilitation to picture cue trials and response inhibition to primed trials. For cue reactivity to emotion and alcohol pictures, ALC showed midbrain-limbic activation. By contrast, controls activated frontoparietal executive control regions. Greater midbrain-hippocampal activation in ALC correlated with higher amounts of lifetime alcohol consumption and higher anxiety. With negative priming, ALC exhibited frontal cortical but not midbrain-hippocampal activation, similar to the pattern observed in controls. Higher frontal activation to alcohol-priming correlated with less craving and to emotion-priming with fewer depressive symptoms. The findings suggest that neurofunctional systems in ALC can be primed to deal with upcoming emotion- and alcohol-related conflict and can overcome the prepotent midbrain-limbic cue reactivity response.

Further characterisation of the functional neuroanatomy associated with prosodic emotion decoding.

PubMed

Mitchell, Rachel L C

2013-06-01

Current models of prosodic emotion comprehension propose a three stage cognition mediated by temporal lobe auditory regions through to inferior and orbitofrontal regions. Cumulative evidence suggests that its mediation may be more flexible though, with a facility to respond in a graded manner based on the need for executive control. The location of this fine-tuning system is unclear, as is its similarity to the cognitive control system. In the current study, need for executive control was manipulated in a block-design functional MRI study by systematically altering the proportion of incongruent trials across time, i.e., trials for which participants identified prosodic emotions in the face of conflicting lexico-semantic emotion cues. Resultant Blood Oxygenation Level Dependent contrast data were analysed according to standard procedures using Statistical Parametric Mapping v8 (Ashburner et al., 2009). In the parametric analyses, superior (medial) frontal gyrus activity increased linearly with increased need for executive control. In the separate analyses of each level of incongruity, results suggested that the baseline prosodic emotion comprehension system was sufficient to deal with low proportions of incongruent trials, whereas a more widespread frontal lobe network was required for higher proportions. These results suggest an executive control system for prosodic emotion comprehension exists which has the capability to recruit superior (medial) frontal gyrus in a graded manner and other frontal regions once demand exceeds a certain threshold. The need to revise current models of prosodic emotion comprehension and add a fourth processing stage are discussed. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Emotional modulation of experimental pain: a source imaging study of laser evoked potentials

PubMed Central

Stancak, Andrej; Fallon, Nicholas

2013-01-01

Negative emotions have been shown to augment experimental pain. As induced emotions alter brain activity, it is not clear whether pain augmentation during noxious stimulation would be related to neural activation existing prior to onset of a noxious stimulus or alternatively, whether emotional stimuli would only alter neural activity during the period of nociceptive processing. We analyzed the spatio-temporal patterns of laser evoked potentials (LEPs) occurring prior to and during the period of cortical processing of noxious laser stimuli during passive viewing of negative, positive, or neutral emotional pictures. Independent component analysis (ICA) was applied to series of source activation volumes, reconstructed using local autoregressive average model (LAURA). Pain was the strongest when laser stimuli were associated with negative emotional pictures. Prior to laser stimulus and during the first 100 ms after onset of laser stimulus, activations were seen in the left and right medial temporal cortex, cerebellum, posterior cingulate, and rostral cingulate/prefrontal cortex. In all these regions, positive or neutral pictures showed stronger activations than negative pictures. During laser stimulation, activations in the right and left anterior insula, temporal cortex and right anterior and posterior parietal cortex were stronger during negative than neutral or positive emotional pictures. Results suggest that negative emotional stimuli increase activation in the left and right anterior insula and temporal cortex, and right posterior and anterior parietal cortex only during the period of nociceptive processing. The role of background brain activation in emotional modulation of pain appears to be only permissive, and consisting in attenuation of activation in structures maintaining the resting state of the brain. PMID:24062659

Alexithymia is associated with attenuated automatic brain response to facial emotion in clinical depression.

PubMed

Suslow, Thomas; Kugel, Harald; Rufer, Michael; Redlich, Ronny; Dohm, Katharina; Grotegerd, Dominik; Zaremba, Dario; Dannlowski, Udo

2016-02-04

Alexithymia is a clinically relevant personality trait related to difficulties in recognizing and describing emotions. Previous studies examining the neural correlates of alexithymia have shown mainly decreased response of several brain areas during emotion processing in healthy samples and patients suffering from autism or post-traumatic stress disorder. In the present study, we examined the effect of alexithymia on automatic brain reactivity to negative and positive facial expressions in clinical depression. Brain activation in response to sad, happy, neutral, and no facial expression (presented for 33 ms and masked by neutral faces) was measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging at 3 T in 26 alexithymic and 26 non-alexithymic patients with major depression. Alexithymic patients manifested less activation in response to masked sad and happy (compared to neutral) faces in right frontal regions and right caudate nuclei than non-alexithymic patients. Our neuroimaging study provides evidence that the personality trait alexithymia has a modulating effect on automatic emotion processing in clinical depression. Our findings support the idea that alexithymia could be associated with functional deficits of the right hemisphere. Future research on the neural substrates of emotion processing in depression should assess and control alexithymia in their analyses.

A lesion model of envy and Schadenfreude: legal, deservingness and moral dimensions as revealed by neurodegeneration.

PubMed

Santamaría-García, Hernando; Baez, Sandra; Reyes, Pablo; Santamaría-García, José A; Santacruz-Escudero, José M; Matallana, Diana; Arévalo, Analía; Sigman, Mariano; García, Adolfo M; Ibáñez, Agustín

2017-12-01

The study of moral emotions (i.e. Schadenfreude and envy) is critical to understand the ecological complexity of everyday interactions between cognitive, affective, and social cognition processes. Most previous studies in this area have used correlational imaging techniques and framed Schadenfreude and envy as unified and monolithic emotional domains. Here, we profit from a relevant neurodegeneration model to disentangle the brain regions engaged in three dimensions of Schadenfreude and envy: deservingness, morality, and legality. We tested a group of patients with behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD), patients with Alzheimer's disease, as a contrastive neurodegeneration model, and healthy controls on a novel task highlighting each of these dimensions in scenarios eliciting Schadenfreude and envy. Compared with the Alzheimer's disease and control groups, patients with bvFTD obtained significantly higher scores on all dimensions for both emotions. Correlational analyses revealed an association between envy and Schadenfreude scores and greater deficits in social cognition, inhibitory control, and behaviour disturbances in bvFTD patients. Brain anatomy findings (restricted to bvFTD and controls) confirmed the partially dissociable nature of the moral emotions' experiences and highlighted the importance of socio-moral brain areas in processing those emotions. In all subjects, an association emerged between Schadenfreude and the ventral striatum, and between envy and the anterior cingulate cortex. In addition, the results supported an association between scores for moral and legal transgression and the morphology of areas implicated in emotional appraisal, including the amygdala and the parahippocampus. By contrast, bvFTD patients exhibited a negative association between increased Schadenfreude and envy across dimensions and critical regions supporting social-value rewards and social-moral processes (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, angular gyrus and precuneus). Together, this study provides lesion-based evidence for the multidimensional nature of the emotional experiences of envy and Schadenfreude. Our results offer new insights into the mechanisms subsuming complex emotions and moral cognition in neurodegeneration. Moreover, this study presents the exacerbation of envy and Schadenfreude as a new potential hallmark of bvFTD that could impact in diagnosis and progression. © The Authors 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Entomological Society of America.

Functional connectivity analysis of the neural bases of emotion regulation: A comparison of independent component method with density-based k-means clustering method.

PubMed

Zou, Ling; Guo, Qian; Xu, Yi; Yang, Biao; Jiao, Zhuqing; Xiang, Jianbo

2016-04-29

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is an important tool in neuroscience for assessing connectivity and interactions between distant areas of the brain. To find and characterize the coherent patterns of brain activity as a means of identifying brain systems for the cognitive reappraisal of the emotion task, both density-based k-means clustering and independent component analysis (ICA) methods can be applied to characterize the interactions between brain regions involved in cognitive reappraisal of emotion. Our results reveal that compared with the ICA method, the density-based k-means clustering method provides a higher sensitivity of polymerization. In addition, it is more sensitive to those relatively weak functional connection regions. Thus, the study concludes that in the process of receiving emotional stimuli, the relatively obvious activation areas are mainly distributed in the frontal lobe, cingulum and near the hypothalamus. Furthermore, density-based k-means clustering method creates a more reliable method for follow-up studies of brain functional connectivity.

The theta burst transcranial magnetic stimulation over the right PFC affects electroencephalogram oscillation during emotional processing.

PubMed

Cao, Dan; Li, Yingjie; Niznikiewicz, Margaret A; Tang, Yingying; Wang, Jijun

2018-03-02

Prefrontal cortex (PFC) plays an important role in emotional processing and therefore is one of the most frequently targeted regions for non-invasive brain stimulation such as repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) in clinical trials, especially in the treatment of emotional disorders. As an approach to enhance the effectiveness of rTMS, continuous theta burst stimulation (cTBS) has been demonstrated to be efficient and safe. However, it is unclear how cTBS affects brain processes related to emotion. In particular, psychophysiological studies on the underlying neural mechanisms are sparse. In the current study, we investigated how the cTBS influences emotional processing when applied over the right PFC. Participants performed an emotion recognition Go/NoGo task, which asked them to select a GO response to either happy or fearful faces after the cTBS or after sham stimulation, while 64-channel electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded. EEG oscillation was examined using event-related spectral perturbation (ERSP) in a time-interval between 170 and 310ms after face stimuli onset. In the sham group, we found a significant difference in the alpha band between response to happy and fearful stimuli but that effect did not exist in the cTBS group. The alpha band activity at the scalp was reduced suggesting the excitatory effect at the brain level. The beta and gamma band activity was not sensitive to cTBS intervention. The results of the current study demonstrate that cTBS does affect emotion processing and the effect is reflected in changes in EEG oscillations in the alpha band specifically. The results confirm the role of prefrontal cortex in emotion processing. We also suggest that this pattern of cTBS results elucidates mechanisms by which mood improvement in depressive disorders is achieved using cTBS intervention. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Hippocampal Damage Increases Deontological Responses during Moral Decision Making.

PubMed

McCormick, Cornelia; Rosenthal, Clive R; Miller, Thomas D; Maguire, Eleanor A

2016-11-30

Complex moral decision making is associated with the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) in humans, and damage to this region significantly increases the frequency of utilitarian judgments. Since the vmPFC has strong anatomical and functional links with the hippocampus, here we asked how patients with selective bilateral hippocampal damage would derive moral decisions on a classic moral dilemmas paradigm. We found that the patients approved of the utilitarian options significantly less often than control participants, favoring instead deontological responses-rejecting actions that harm even one person. Thus, patients with hippocampal damage have a strikingly opposite approach to moral decision making than vmPFC-lesioned patients. Skin-conductance data collected during the task showed increased emotional arousal in the hippocampal-damaged patients and they stated that their moral decisions were based on emotional instinct. By contrast, control participants made moral decisions based on the integration of an adverse emotional response to harming others, visualization of the consequences of one's action, and the rational re-evaluation of future benefits. This integration may be disturbed in patients with either hippocampal or vmPFC damage. Hippocampal lesions decreased the ability to visualize a scenario and its future consequences, which seemed to render the adverse emotional response overwhelmingly dominant. In patients with vmPFC damage, visualization might also be reduced alongside an inability to detect the adverse emotional response, leaving only the utilitarian option open. Overall, these results provide insights into the processes involved in moral decision making and highlight the complementary roles played by two closely connected brain regions. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) is closely associated with the ability to make complex moral judgements. When this area is damaged, patients become more utilitarian (the ends justify the means) and have decreased emotional arousal during moral decision making. The vmPFC is closely connected with another brain region-the hippocampus. In this study we found that patients with selective bilateral hippocampal damage show a strikingly opposite response pattern to those with vmPFC damage when making moral judgements. They rejected harmful actions of any kind (thus their responses were deontological) and showed increased emotional arousal. These results provide new insights into the processes involved in moral decision making and highlight the complementary roles played by two closely connected brain regions. Copyright © 2015 McCormick et al.

Amygdala reactivity in healthy adults is correlated with prefrontal cortical thickness.

PubMed

Foland-Ross, Lara C; Altshuler, Lori L; Bookheimer, Susan Y; Lieberman, Matthew D; Townsend, Jennifer; Penfold, Conor; Moody, Teena; Ahlf, Kyle; Shen, Jim K; Madsen, Sarah K; Rasser, Paul E; Toga, Arthur W; Thompson, Paul M

2010-12-08

Recent evidence suggests that putting feelings into words activates the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and suppresses the response of the amygdala, potentially helping to alleviate emotional distress. To further elucidate the relationship between brain structure and function in these regions, structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data were collected from a sample of 20 healthy human subjects. Structural MRI data were processed using cortical pattern-matching algorithms to produce spatially normalized maps of cortical thickness. During functional scanning, subjects cognitively assessed an emotional target face by choosing one of two linguistic labels (label emotion condition) or matched geometric forms (control condition). Manually prescribed regions of interest for the left amygdala were used to extract percentage signal change in this region occurring during the contrast of label emotion versus match forms. A correlation analysis between left amygdala activation and cortical thickness was then performed along each point of the cortical surface, resulting in a color-coded r value at each cortical point. Correlation analyses revealed that gray matter thickness in left ventromedial PFC was inversely correlated with task-related activation in the amygdala. These data add support to a general role of the ventromedial PFC in regulating activity of the amygdala.

Change in emotional self-concept following socio-cognitive training relates to structural plasticity of the prefrontal cortex.

PubMed

Lumma, Anna-Lena; Valk, Sofie L; Böckler, Anne; Vrtička, Pascal; Singer, Tania

2018-04-01

Self-referential processing is a key component of the emotional self-concept. Previous studies have shown that emotional self-referential processing is related to structure and function of cortical midline areas such as medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), and that it can be altered on a behavioral level by specific mental training practices. However, it remains unknown how behavioral training-related change in emotional self-concept content relates to structural plasticity. To address this issue, we examined the relationship between training-induced change in participant's emotional self-concept measured through emotional word use in the Twenty Statement Test and change in cortical thickness in the context of a large-scale longitudinal mental training study called the ReSource Project . Based on prior behavioral findings showing increased emotional word use particularly after socio-cognitive training targeting perspective-taking capacities, this study extended these results by revealing that individual differences in the degree to which participants changed their emotional self-concept after training was positively related to cortical thickness change in right mPFC extending to dorsolateral PFC (dlPFC). Furthermore, increased self-related negative emotional word use after training was positively associated with cortical thickness change in left pars orbitalis and bilateral dlPFC. Our findings reveal training-related structural brain change in regions known to be involved in self-referential processing and cognitive control, and could indicate a relationship between restructuring of the emotional self-concept content as well as reappraisal of negative aspects and cortical thickness change. As such, our findings can guide the development of psychological interventions targeted to alter specific facets of the self-concept.

The Neurodevelopmental Basis of Math Anxiety

PubMed Central

Young, Christina B.; Wu, Sarah S.; Menon, Vinod

2012-01-01

Math anxiety is a negative emotional reaction to situations involving mathematical problem solving. Math anxiety has a detrimental impact on an individual’s long-term professional success, but its neurodevelopmental origins are unknown. In a functional MRI study on 7- to 9-year-old children, we showed that math anxiety was associated with hyperactivity in right amygdala regions that are important for processing negative emotions. In addition, we found that math anxiety was associated with reduced activity in posterior parietal and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex regions involved in mathematical reasoning. Multivariate classification analysis revealed distinct multivoxel activity patterns, which were independent of overall activation levels in the right amygdala. Furthermore, effective connectivity between the amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex regions that regulate negative emotions was elevated in children with math anxiety. These effects were specific to math anxiety and unrelated to general anxiety, intelligence, working memory, or reading ability. Our study identified the neural correlates of math anxiety for the first time, and our findings have significant implications for its early identification and treatment. PMID:22434239

The neurodevelopmental basis of math anxiety.

PubMed

Young, Christina B; Wu, Sarah S; Menon, Vinod

2012-05-01

Math anxiety is a negative emotional reaction to situations involving mathematical problem solving. Math anxiety has a detrimental impact on an individual's long-term professional success, but its neurodevelopmental origins are unknown. In a functional MRI study on 7- to 9-year-old children, we showed that math anxiety was associated with hyperactivity in right amygdala regions that are important for processing negative emotions. In addition, we found that math anxiety was associated with reduced activity in posterior parietal and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex regions involved in mathematical reasoning. Multivariate classification analysis revealed distinct multivoxel activity patterns, which were independent of overall activation levels in the right amygdala. Furthermore, effective connectivity between the amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex regions that regulate negative emotions was elevated in children with math anxiety. These effects were specific to math anxiety and unrelated to general anxiety, intelligence, working memory, or reading ability. Our study identified the neural correlates of math anxiety for the first time, and our findings have significant implications for its early identification and treatment.

Neural Reactivity to Emotional Faces Mediates the Relationship Between Childhood Empathy and Adolescent Prosocial Behavior

PubMed Central

Flournoy, John C.; Pfeifer, Jennifer H.; Moore, William E.; Tackman, Allison; Masten, Carrie L.; Mazziotta, John C.; Iacoboni, Marco; Dapretto, Mirella

2017-01-01

Reactivity to others' emotions can result in empathic concern (EC), an important motivator of prosocial behavior, but can also result in personal distress (PD), which may hinder prosocial behavior. Examining neural substrates of emotional reactivity may elucidate how EC and PD differentially influence prosocial behavior. Participants (N=57) provided measures of EC, PD, prosocial behavior, and neural responses to emotional expressions at age 10 and 13. Initial EC predicted subsequent prosocial behavior. Initial EC and PD predicted subsequent reactivity to emotions in the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and inferior parietal lobule, respectively. Activity in the IFG, a region linked to mirror neuron processes, as well as cognitive control and language, mediated the relation between initial EC and subsequent prosocial behavior. PMID:28262939

Effects of Gene × Attachment Interaction on Adolescents’ Emotion Regulation and Aggressive Hostile Behavior Towards their Mothers during a Computer Game

PubMed Central

Zimmermann, Peter; Spangler, Gottfried

2016-01-01

Adolescence is a time of increased emotionality and major changes in emotion regulation often elicited in autonomy-relevant situations. Both genetic as well as social factors may lead to inter-individual differences in emotional processes in adolescence. We investigated whether both 5-HTTLPR and attachment security influence adolescents’ observed emotionality, emotional dysregulation, and their aggressive hostile autonomy while interacting with their mothers. Eighty-eight adolescents at age 12 were observed in interaction with their mothers during a standardized, emotion eliciting computer game task. They were genotyped for the 5-HTTLPR, a repeat polymorphism in the promoter region of the serotonin transporter gene. Concurrent attachment quality was assessed by the Late Childhood Attachment Interview (LCAI). Results revealed a significant gene × attachment effect showing that ss/sl carriers of 5-HTTLPR show increased emotional dysregulation and aggressive hostile autonomy towards their mothers. The results of the study suggest that secure attachment in adolescence moderates the genetically based higher tendency for emotional dysregulation and aggressive reactions to restrictions of autonomy during emotional social interactions with their mothers. PMID:27378877

Effects of Gene × Attachment Interaction on Adolescents' Emotion Regulation and Aggressive Hostile Behavior Towards their Mothers during a Computer Game.

PubMed

Zimmermann, Peter; Spangler, Gottfried

2016-01-01

Adolescence is a time of increased emotionality and major changes in emotion regulation often elicited in autonomy-relevant situations. Both genetic as well as social factors may lead to inter-individual differences in emotional processes in adolescence. We investigated whether both 5-HTTLPR and attachment security influence adolescents' observed emotionality, emotional dysregulation, and their aggressive hostile autonomy while interacting with their mothers. Eighty-eight adolescents at age 12 were observed in interaction with their mothers during a standardized, emotion eliciting computer game task. They were genotyped for the 5-HTTLPR, a repeat polymorphism in the promoter region of the serotonin transporter gene. Concurrent attachment quality was assessed by the Late Childhood Attachment Interview (LCAI). Results revealed a significant gene × attachment effect showing that ss/sl carriers of 5-HTTLPR show increased emotional dysregulation and aggressive hostile autonomy towards their mothers. The results of the study suggest that secure attachment in adolescence moderates the genetically based higher tendency for emotional dysregulation and aggressive reactions to restrictions of autonomy during emotional social interactions with their mothers.

Neural Processing of Facial Identity and Emotion in Infants at High-Risk for Autism Spectrum Disorders

PubMed Central

Fox, Sharon E.; Wagner, Jennifer B.; Shrock, Christine L.; Tager-Flusberg, Helen; Nelson, Charles A.

2013-01-01

Deficits in face processing and social impairment are core characteristics of autism spectrum disorder. The present work examined 7-month-old infants at high-risk for developing autism and typically developing controls at low-risk, using a face perception task designed to differentiate between the effects of face identity and facial emotions on neural response using functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy. In addition, we employed independent component analysis, as well as a novel method of condition-related component selection and classification to identify group differences in hemodynamic waveforms and response distributions associated with face and emotion processing. The results indicate similarities of waveforms, but differences in the magnitude, spatial distribution, and timing of responses between groups. These early differences in local cortical regions and the hemodynamic response may, in turn, contribute to differences in patterns of functional connectivity. PMID:23576966

Effects of the BDNF Val66Met polymorphism on neural responses to facial emotion.

PubMed

Mukherjee, Prerona; Whalley, Heather C; McKirdy, James W; McIntosh, Andrew M; Johnstone, Eve C; Lawrie, Stephen M; Hall, Jeremy

2011-03-31

The brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) Val66Met polymorphism has been associated with affective disorders, but its role in emotion processing has not been fully established. Due to the clinically heterogeneous nature of these disorders, studying the effect of genetic variation in the BDNF gene on a common attribute such as fear processing may elucidate how the BDNF Val66Met polymorphism impacts brain function. Here we use functional magnetic resonance imaging examine the effect of the BDNF Val66Met genotype on neural activity for fear processing. Forty healthy participants performed an implicit fear task during scanning, where subjects made gender judgments from facial images with neutral or fearful emotion. Subjects were tested for facial emotion recognition post-scan. Functional connectivity was investigated using psycho-physiological interactions. Subjects were genotyped for the BDNF Val66Met polymorphism and the measures compared between genotype groups. Met carriers showed overactivation in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), brainstem and insula bilaterally for fear processing, along with reduced functional connectivity from the ACC to the left hippocampus, and impaired fear recognition ability. The results show that during fear processing, Met allele carriers show an increased neural response in regions previously implicated in mediating autonomic arousal. Further, the Met carriers show decreased functional connectivity with the hippocampus, which may reflect differential retrieval of emotional associations. Together, these effects show significant differences in the neural substrate for fear processing with genetic variation in BDNF. Copyright © 2010 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

Frontolimbic dysfunction in response to facial emotion in borderline personality disorder: an event-related fMRI study

PubMed Central

Minzenberg, Michael J.; Fan, Jin; New, Antonia S.; Tang, Cheuk Y.; Siever, Larry J.

2007-01-01

Clinical hallmarks of borderline personality disorder (BPD) include social and emotional dysregulation. We tested a model of frontolimbic dysfunction in facial emotion processing in BPD. Groups of 12 unmedicated adults with BPD by DSM-IV and 12 demographically-matched healthy controls (HC) viewed facial expressions (Conditions) of neutral emotion, fear and anger, and made gender discriminations during rapid event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Analysis of variance of Region of Interest signal change revealed a statistically significant effect of the Group-by-Region-by-Condition interaction. This was due to the BPD group exhibiting a significantly larger magnitude of deactivation (relative to HC) in the bilateral rostral/subgenual anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) to fear and in the left ACC to fear minus neutral; and significantly greater activation in the right amygdala to fear minus neutral. There were no significant between-group differences in ROI signal change in response to anger. In voxel-wise analyses constrained within these ROIs, the BPD group exhibited significant changes in the fear minus neutral contrast, with relatively less activation in the bilateral rostral/subgenual ACC, and greater activation in the right amygdala. In the anger minus neutral contrast this pattern was reversed, with the BPD group showing greater activation in the bilateral rostral/subgenual ACC and less activation in the bilateral amygdala. We conclude that adults with BPD exhibit changes in fronto-limbic activity in the processing of fear stimuli, with exaggerated amygdala response and impaired emotion-modulation of ACC activity. The neural substrates underlying processing of anger may also be altered. These changes may represent an expression of the volumetric and serotonergic deficits observed in these brain areas in BPD. PMID:17601709

Fronto-limbic dysfunction in response to facial emotion in borderline personality disorder: an event-related fMRI study.

PubMed

Minzenberg, Michael J; Fan, Jin; New, Antonia S; Tang, Cheuk Y; Siever, Larry J

2007-08-15

Clinical hallmarks of borderline personality disorder (BPD) include social and emotional dysregulation. We tested a model of fronto-limbic dysfunction in facial emotion processing in BPD. Groups of 12 unmedicated adults with BPD by DSM-IV and 12 demographically-matched healthy controls (HC) viewed facial expressions (Conditions) of neutral emotion, fear and anger, and made gender discriminations during rapid event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Analysis of variance of Region of Interest signal change revealed a statistically significant effect of the Group-by-Region-by-Condition interaction. This was due to the BPD group exhibiting a significantly larger magnitude of deactivation (relative to HC) in the bilateral rostral/subgenual anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) to fear and in the left ACC to fear minus neutral; and significantly greater activation in the right amygdala to fear minus neutral. There were no significant between-group differences in ROI signal change in response to anger. In voxel-wise analyses constrained within these ROIs, the BPD group exhibited significant changes in the fear minus neutral contrast, with relatively less activation in the bilateral rostral/subgenual ACC, and greater activation in the right amygdala. In the anger minus neutral contrast this pattern was reversed, with the BPD group showing greater activation in the bilateral rostral/subgenual ACC and less activation in the bilateral amygdala. We conclude that adults with BPD exhibit changes in fronto-limbic activity in the processing of fear stimuli, with exaggerated amygdala response and impaired emotion-modulation of ACC activity. The neural substrates underlying processing of anger may also be altered. These changes may represent an expression of the volumetric and serotonergic deficits observed in these brain areas in BPD.

The emotional power of music: how music enhances the feeling of affective pictures.

PubMed

Baumgartner, Thomas; Lutz, Kai; Schmidt, Conny F; Jäncke, Lutz

2006-02-23

Music is an intriguing stimulus widely used in movies to increase the emotional experience. However, no brain imaging study has to date examined this enhancement effect using emotional pictures (the modality mostly used in emotion research) and musical excerpts. Therefore, we designed this functional magnetic resonance imaging study to explore how musical stimuli enhance the feeling of affective pictures. In a classical block design carefully controlling for habituation and order effects, we presented fearful and sad pictures (mostly taken from the IAPS) either alone or combined with congruent emotional musical excerpts (classical pieces). Subjective ratings clearly indicated that the emotional experience was markedly increased in the combined relative to the picture condition. Furthermore, using a second-level analysis and regions of interest approach, we observed a clear functional and structural dissociation between the combined and the picture condition. Besides increased activation in brain areas known to be involved in auditory as well as in neutral and emotional visual-auditory integration processes, the combined condition showed increased activation in many structures known to be involved in emotion processing (including for example amygdala, hippocampus, parahippocampus, insula, striatum, medial ventral frontal cortex, cerebellum, fusiform gyrus). In contrast, the picture condition only showed an activation increase in the cognitive part of the prefrontal cortex, mainly in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Based on these findings, we suggest that emotional pictures evoke a more cognitive mode of emotion perception, whereas congruent presentations of emotional visual and musical stimuli rather automatically evoke strong emotional feelings and experiences.

Processing of Facial Emotion in Bipolar Depression and Euthymia.

PubMed

Robinson, Lucy J; Gray, John M; Burt, Mike; Ferrier, I Nicol; Gallagher, Peter

2015-10-01

Previous studies of facial emotion processing in bipolar disorder (BD) have reported conflicting findings. In independently conducted studies, we investigate facial emotion labeling in euthymic and depressed BD patients using tasks with static and dynamically morphed images of different emotions displayed at different intensities. Study 1 included 38 euthymic BD patients and 28 controls. Participants completed two tasks: labeling of static images of basic facial emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happy, sad) shown at different expression intensities; the Eyes Test (Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Hill, Raste, & Plumb, 2001), which involves recognition of complex emotions using only the eye region of the face. Study 2 included 53 depressed BD patients and 47 controls. Participants completed two tasks: labeling of "dynamic" facial expressions of the same five basic emotions; the Emotional Hexagon test (Young, Perret, Calder, Sprengelmeyer, & Ekman, 2002). There were no significant group differences on any measures of emotion perception/labeling, compared to controls. A significant group by intensity interaction was observed in both emotion labeling tasks (euthymia and depression), although this effect did not survive the addition of measures of executive function/psychomotor speed as covariates. Only 2.6-15.8% of euthymic patients and 7.8-13.7% of depressed patients scored below the 10th percentile of the controls for total emotion recognition accuracy. There was no evidence of specific deficits in facial emotion labeling in euthymic or depressed BD patients. Methodological variations-including mood state, sample size, and the cognitive demands of the tasks-may contribute significantly to the variability in findings between studies.

The effects of an action video game on visual and affective information processing.

PubMed

Bailey, Kira; West, Robert

2013-04-04

Playing action video games can have beneficial effects on visuospatial cognition and negative effects on social information processing. However, these two effects have not been demonstrated in the same individuals in a single study. The current study used event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to examine the effects of playing an action or non-action video game on the processing of emotion in facial expression. The data revealed that 10h of playing an action or non-action video game had differential effects on the ERPs relative to a no-contact control group. Playing an action game resulted in two effects: one that reflected an increase in the amplitude of the ERPs following training over the right frontal and posterior regions that was similar for angry, happy, and neutral faces; and one that reflected a reduction in the allocation of attention to happy faces. In contrast, playing a non-action game resulted in changes in slow wave activity over the central-parietal and frontal regions that were greater for targets (i.e., angry and happy faces) than for non-targets (i.e., neutral faces). These data demonstrate that the contrasting effects of action video games on visuospatial and emotion processing occur in the same individuals following the same level of gaming experience. This observation leads to the suggestion that caution should be exercised when using action video games to modify visual processing, as this experience could also have unintended effects on emotion processing. Published by Elsevier B.V.

Color Based Bags-of-Emotions

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Solli, Martin; Lenz, Reiner

In this paper we describe how to include high level semantic information, such as aesthetics and emotions, into Content Based Image Retrieval. We present a color-based emotion-related image descriptor that can be used for describing the emotional content of images. The color emotion metric used is derived from psychophysical experiments and based on three variables: activity, weight and heat. It was originally designed for single-colors, but recent research has shown that the same emotion estimates can be applied in the retrieval of multi-colored images. Here we describe a new approach, based on the assumption that perceived color emotions in images are mainly affected by homogenous regions, defined by the emotion metric, and transitions between regions. RGB coordinates are converted to emotion coordinates, and for each emotion channel, statistical measurements of gradient magnitudes within a stack of low-pass filtered images are used for finding interest points corresponding to homogeneous regions and transitions between regions. Emotion characteristics are derived for patches surrounding each interest point, and saved in a bag-of-emotions, that, for instance, can be used for retrieving images based on emotional content.

The paradox of fiction: Emotional response toward fiction and the modulatory role of self-relevance.

PubMed

Sperduti, Marco; Arcangeli, Margherita; Makowski, Dominique; Wantzen, Prany; Zalla, Tiziana; Lemaire, Stéphane; Dokic, Jérôme; Pelletier, Jérôme; Piolino, Pascale

2016-03-01

For over forty years, philosophers have struggled with the "paradox of fiction", which is the issue of how we can get emotionally involved with fictional characters and events. The few neuroscientific studies investigating the distinction between the processing of real and fictional entities have evidenced that midline cortical structures and lateral fronto-parietal regions are more engaged for real and fictional entities, respectively. Interestingly, the former network is engaged in autobiographical memory retrieval and self-reference, processes that are known to boost emotional reactivity, while the latter underpins emotion regulation. Thus, a possible modulation of the emotional response according to the nature (real or fictional) of the stimulus is conceivable. To test this hypothesis, we presented short emotional (negative and positive) and neutral video as fictional or real. For negative material, we found that subjective emotional experience, but not physiological arousal measured by electrodermal activity, was reduced in the fictional condition. Moreover, the amount of personal memories linked to the scenes counteracted this effect boosting the subjective emotional response. On the contrary, personal memories elicited by the scenes, but not fiction, modulate the emotional response for positive material. These results suggest that when a stimulus triggers a personal memory, the emotional response is less prone to be modulated by contextual factors, and suggest that personal engagement could be responsible for emotional reaction toward fiction. We discuss these results in the emotion regulation framework and underline their implications in informing theoretical accounts of emotion in the neuroscientific domain and the philosophical debate on the paradox of emotional response to fiction. Copyright © 2016. Published by Elsevier B.V.

Abnormal autonomic and associated brain activities during rest in autism spectrum disorder

PubMed Central

Eilam-Stock, Tehila; Xu, Pengfei; Cao, Miao; Gu, Xiaosi; Van Dam, Nicholas T.; Anagnostou, Evdokia; Kolevzon, Alexander; Soorya, Latha; Park, Yunsoo; Siller, Michael; He, Yong; Hof, Patrick R.

2014-01-01

Autism spectrum disorders are associated with social and emotional deficits, the aetiology of which are not well understood. A growing consensus is that the autonomic nervous system serves a key role in emotional processes, by providing physiological signals essential to subjective states. We hypothesized that altered autonomic processing is related to the socio-emotional deficits in autism spectrum disorders. Here, we investigated the relationship between non-specific skin conductance response, an objective index of sympathetic neural activity, and brain fluctuations during rest in high-functioning adults with autism spectrum disorder relative to neurotypical controls. Compared with control participants, individuals with autism spectrum disorder showed less skin conductance responses overall. They also showed weaker correlations between skin conductance responses and frontal brain regions, including the anterior cingulate and anterior insular cortices. Additionally, skin conductance responses were found to have less contribution to default mode network connectivity in individuals with autism spectrum disorders relative to controls. These results suggest that autonomic processing is altered in autism spectrum disorders, which may be related to the abnormal socio-emotional behaviours that characterize this condition. PMID:24424916

Looking on the bright side: biased attention and the human serotonin transporter gene.

PubMed

Fox, Elaine; Ridgewell, Anna; Ashwin, Chris

2009-05-22

Humans differ in terms of biased attention for emotional stimuli and these biases can confer differential resilience and vulnerability to emotional disorders. Selective processing of positive emotional information, for example, is associated with enhanced sociability and well-being while a bias for negative material is associated with neuroticism and anxiety. A tendency to selectively avoid negative material might also be associated with mental health and well-being. The neurobiological mechanisms underlying these cognitive phenotypes are currently unknown. Here we show for the first time that allelic variation in the promotor region of the serotonin transporter gene (5-HTTLPR) is associated with differential biases for positive and negative affective pictures. Individuals homozygous for the long allele (LL) showed a marked bias to selectively process positive affective material alongside selective avoidance of negative affective material. This potentially protective pattern was absent among individuals carrying the short allele (S or SL). Thus, allelic variation on a common genetic polymorphism was associated with the tendency to selectively process positive or negative information. The current study is important in demonstrating a genotype-related alteration in a well-established processing bias, which is a known risk factor in determining both resilience and vulnerability to emotional disorders.

Social Cognition as Reinforcement Learning: Feedback Modulates Emotion Inference.

PubMed

Zaki, Jamil; Kallman, Seth; Wimmer, G Elliott; Ochsner, Kevin; Shohamy, Daphna

2016-09-01

Neuroscientific studies of social cognition typically employ paradigms in which perceivers draw single-shot inferences about the internal states of strangers. Real-world social inference features much different parameters: People often encounter and learn about particular social targets (e.g., friends) over time and receive feedback about whether their inferences are correct or incorrect. Here, we examined this process and, more broadly, the intersection between social cognition and reinforcement learning. Perceivers were scanned using fMRI while repeatedly encountering three social targets who produced conflicting visual and verbal emotional cues. Perceivers guessed how targets felt and received feedback about whether they had guessed correctly. Visual cues reliably predicted one target's emotion, verbal cues predicted a second target's emotion, and neither reliably predicted the third target's emotion. Perceivers successfully used this information to update their judgments over time. Furthermore, trial-by-trial learning signals-estimated using two reinforcement learning models-tracked activity in ventral striatum and ventromedial pFC, structures associated with reinforcement learning, and regions associated with updating social impressions, including TPJ. These data suggest that learning about others' emotions, like other forms of feedback learning, relies on domain-general reinforcement mechanisms as well as domain-specific social information processing.

The right place at the right time: priming facial expressions with emotional face components in developmental visual agnosia.

PubMed

Aviezer, Hillel; Hassin, Ran R; Perry, Anat; Dudarev, Veronica; Bentin, Shlomo

2012-04-01

The current study examined the nature of deficits in emotion recognition from facial expressions in case LG, an individual with a rare form of developmental visual agnosia (DVA). LG presents with profoundly impaired recognition of facial expressions, yet the underlying nature of his deficit remains unknown. During typical face processing, normal sighted individuals extract information about expressed emotions from face regions with activity diagnostic for specific emotion categories. Given LG's impairment, we sought to shed light on his emotion perception by examining if priming facial expressions with diagnostic emotional face components would facilitate his recognition of the emotion expressed by the face. LG and control participants matched isolated face components with components appearing in a subsequently presented full-face and then categorized the face's emotion. Critically, the matched components were from regions which were diagnostic or non-diagnostic of the emotion portrayed by the full face. In experiment 1, when the full faces were briefly presented (150 ms), LG's performance was strongly influenced by the diagnosticity of the components: his emotion recognition was boosted within normal limits when diagnostic components were used and was obliterated when non-diagnostic components were used. By contrast, in experiment 2, when the face-exposure duration was extended (2000 ms), the beneficial effect of the diagnostic matching was diminished as was the detrimental effect of the non-diagnostic matching. These data highlight the impact of diagnostic facial features in normal expression recognition and suggest that impaired emotion recognition in DVA results from deficient visual integration across diagnostic face components. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Cognitive and neural contributors to emotion regulation in aging

PubMed Central

Winecoff, Amy; LaBar, Kevin S.; Madden, David J.; Cabeza, Roberto

2011-01-01

Older adults, compared to younger adults, focus on emotional well-being. While the lifespan trajectory of emotional processing and its regulation has been characterized behaviorally, few studies have investigated the underlying neural mechanisms. Here, older adults (range: 59–73 years) and younger adults (range: 19–33 years) participated in a cognitive reappraisal task during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanning. On each trial, participants viewed positive, negative or neutral pictures and either naturally experienced the image (‘Experience’ condition) or attempted to detach themselves from the image (‘Reappraise’ condition). Across both age groups, cognitive reappraisal activated prefrontal regions similar to those reported in prior studies of emotion regulation, while emotional experience activated the bilateral amygdala. Psychophysiological interaction analyses revealed that the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and amygdala demonstrated greater inverse connectivity during the ‘Reappraise’ condition relative to the ‘Experience’ condition. The only regions exhibiting significant age differences were the left IFG and the left superior temporal gyrus, for which greater regulation-related activation was observed in younger adults. Controlling for age, increased performance on measures of cognition predicted greater regulation-related decreases in amygdala activation. Thus, while older and younger adults use similar brain structures for emotion regulation and experience, the functional efficacy of those structures depends on underlying cognitive ability. PMID:20385663

Emotional and cognitive stimuli differentially engage the default network during inductive reasoning

PubMed Central

Deckersbach, Thilo; Carlson, Lindsay E.; Beucke, Jan C.; Dougherty, Darin D.

2012-01-01

The brain’s default network (DN) is comprised of several cortical regions demonstrating robust intrinsic connectivity at rest. The authors sought to examine the differential effects of emotional reasoning and reasoning under certainty upon the DN through the employment of an event-related fMRI design in healthy participants. Participants were presented with syllogistic arguments which were organized into a 2 × 2 factorial design in which the first factor was emotional salience and the second factor was certainty/uncertainty. We demonstrate that regions of the DN were activated both during reasoning that is emotionally salient and during reasoning which is more certain, suggesting that these processes are neurally instantiated on a network level. In addition, we present evidence that emotional reasoning preferentially activates the dorsomedial (dMPFC) subsystem of the DN, whereas reasoning in the context of certainty activates areas specific to the DN’s medial temporal (MTL) subsystem. We postulate that emotional reasoning mobilizes the dMPFC subsystem of the DN because this type of reasoning relies upon the recruitment of introspective and self-relevant data such as personal bias and temperament. In contrast, activation of the MTL subsystem during certainty argues that this form of reasoning involves the recruitment of mnemonic and semantic associations to derive conclusions. PMID:21296864

Amygdala atrophy affects emotion-related activity in face-responsive regions in frontotemporal degeneration.

PubMed

De Winter, François-Laurent; Van den Stock, Jan; de Gelder, Beatrice; Peeters, Ronald; Jastorff, Jan; Sunaert, Stefan; Vanduffel, Wim; Vandenberghe, Rik; Vandenbulcke, Mathieu

2016-09-01

In the healthy brain, modulatory influences from the amygdala commonly explain enhanced activation in face-responsive areas by emotional facial expressions relative to neutral expressions. In the behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) facial emotion recognition is impaired and has been associated with atrophy of the amygdala. By combining structural and functional MRI in 19 patients with bvFTD and 20 controls we investigated the neural effects of emotion in face-responsive cortex and its relationship with amygdalar gray matter (GM) volume in neurodegeneration. Voxel-based morphometry revealed decreased GM volume in anterior medio-temporal regions including amygdala in patients compared to controls. During fMRI, we presented dynamic facial expressions (fear and chewing) and their spatiotemporally scrambled versions. We found enhanced activation for fearful compared to neutral faces in ventral temporal cortex and superior temporal sulcus in controls, but not in patients. In the bvFTD group left amygdalar GM volume correlated positively with emotion-related activity in left fusiform face area (FFA). This correlation was amygdala-specific and driven by GM in superficial and basolateral (BLA) subnuclei, consistent with reported amygdalar-cortical networks. The data suggests that anterior medio-temporal atrophy in bvFTD affects emotion processing in distant posterior areas. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Emotional and cognitive stimuli differentially engage the default network during inductive reasoning.

PubMed

Eldaief, Mark C; Deckersbach, Thilo; Carlson, Lindsay E; Beucke, Jan C; Dougherty, Darin D

2012-04-01

The brain's default network (DN) is comprised of several cortical regions demonstrating robust intrinsic connectivity at rest. The authors sought to examine the differential effects of emotional reasoning and reasoning under certainty upon the DN through the employment of an event-related fMRI design in healthy participants. Participants were presented with syllogistic arguments which were organized into a 2 × 2 factorial design in which the first factor was emotional salience and the second factor was certainty/uncertainty. We demonstrate that regions of the DN were activated both during reasoning that is emotionally salient and during reasoning which is more certain, suggesting that these processes are neurally instantiated on a network level. In addition, we present evidence that emotional reasoning preferentially activates the dorsomedial (dMPFC) subsystem of the DN, whereas reasoning in the context of certainty activates areas specific to the DN's medial temporal (MTL) subsystem. We postulate that emotional reasoning mobilizes the dMPFC subsystem of the DN because this type of reasoning relies upon the recruitment of introspective and self-relevant data such as personal bias and temperament. In contrast, activation of the MTL subsystem during certainty argues that this form of reasoning involves the recruitment of mnemonic and semantic associations to derive conclusions.

Coherence explored between emotion components: evidence from event-related potentials and facial electromyography.

PubMed

Gentsch, Kornelia; Grandjean, Didier; Scherer, Klaus R

2014-04-01

Componential theories assume that emotion episodes consist of emergent and dynamic response changes to relevant events in different components, such as appraisal, physiology, motivation, expression, and subjective feeling. In particular, Scherer's Component Process Model hypothesizes that subjective feeling emerges when the synchronization (or coherence) of appraisal-driven changes between emotion components has reached a critical threshold. We examined the prerequisite of this synchronization hypothesis for appraisal-driven response changes in facial expression. The appraisal process was manipulated by using feedback stimuli, presented in a gambling task. Participants' responses to the feedback were investigated in concurrently recorded brain activity related to appraisal (event-related potentials, ERP) and facial muscle activity (electromyography, EMG). Using principal component analysis, the prediction of appraisal-driven response changes in facial EMG was examined. Results support this prediction: early cognitive processes (related to the feedback-related negativity) seem to primarily affect the upper face, whereas processes that modulate P300 amplitudes tend to predominantly drive cheek region responses. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The NMDA antagonist ketamine and the 5-HT agonist psilocybin produce dissociable effects on structural encoding of emotional face expressions.

PubMed

Schmidt, André; Kometer, Michael; Bachmann, Rosilla; Seifritz, Erich; Vollenweider, Franz

2013-01-01

Both glutamate and serotonin (5-HT) play a key role in the pathophysiology of emotional biases. Recent studies indicate that the glutamate N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptor antagonist ketamine and the 5-HT receptor agonist psilocybin are implicated in emotion processing. However, as yet, no study has systematically compared their contribution to emotional biases. This study used event-related potentials (ERPs) and signal detection theory to compare the effects of the NMDA (via S-ketamine) and 5-HT (via psilocybin) receptor system on non-conscious or conscious emotional face processing biases. S-ketamine or psilocybin was administrated to two groups of healthy subjects in a double-blind within-subject placebo-controlled design. We behaviorally assessed objective thresholds for non-conscious discrimination in all drug conditions. Electrophysiological responses to fearful, happy, and neutral faces were subsequently recorded with the face-specific P100 and N170 ERP. Both S-ketamine and psilocybin impaired the encoding of fearful faces as expressed by a reduced N170 over parieto-occipital brain regions. In contrast, while S-ketamine also impaired the encoding of happy facial expressions, psilocybin had no effect on the N170 in response to happy faces. This study demonstrates that the NMDA and 5-HT receptor systems differentially contribute to the structural encoding of emotional face expressions as expressed by the N170. These findings suggest that the assessment of early visual evoked responses might allow detecting pharmacologically induced changes in emotional processing biases and thus provides a framework to study the pathophysiology of dysfunctional emotional biases.

In psychopathic patients emotion attribution modulates activity in outcome-related brain areas.

PubMed

Sommer, Monika; Sodian, Beate; Döhnel, Katrin; Schwerdtner, Johannes; Meinhardt, Jörg; Hajak, Göran

2010-05-30

The understanding that other people's emotional states depend on the fulfilment of their intention is fundamentally important for responding adequately to others. Psychopathic patients show severe deficits in responding adequately to other people's emotion. The present study explored whether these impairments are associated with deficits in the ability to infer others' emotional states. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), identical cartoon stories, depicting a subject whose intention was fulfilled or not fulfilled, were presented to 14 psychopathic patients and 14 non-psychopathic patients. The participants should indicate the protagonist's emotional state. Additionally, a non-mentalizing control condition was presented. The two groups showed no behavioural differences. But in non-psychopathic patients emotion attribution was associated with increased activity of the mirror neuron system, the bilateral supramarginal gyrus and the superior frontal gyrus. In contrast psychopathic patients showed increased activation of regions associated with outcome monitoring and attention, such as the orbitofrontal cortex, the medial frontal cortex and temporo-parietal areas. The results emphasize that although psychopathic patients show no deficits in reasoning about other people's emotion if an explicit evaluation is demanded, they use divergent neural processing strategies that are related to more rational, outcome-oriented processes. Copyright (c) 2010 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

Anterior cingulate hyperactivations during negative emotion processing among men with schizophrenia and a history of violent behavior

PubMed Central

Tikàsz, Andràs; Potvin, Stéphane; Lungu, Ovidiu; Joyal, Christian C; Hodgins, Sheilagh; Mendrek, Adrianna; Dumais, Alexandre

2016-01-01

Background Evidence suggests a 2.1–4.6 times increase in the risk of violent behavior in schizophrenia compared to the general population. Current theories propose that the processing of negative emotions is defective in violent individuals and that dysfunctions within the neural circuits involved in emotion processing are implicated in violence. Although schizophrenia patients show enhanced sensitivity to negative stimuli, there are only few functional neuroimaging studies that have examined emotion processing among men with schizophrenia and a history of violence. Objective The present study aimed to identify the brain regions with greater neurofunctional alterations, as detected by functional magnetic resonance imaging during an emotion processing task, of men with schizophrenia who had engaged in violent behavior compared with those who had not. Methods Sixty men were studied; 20 with schizophrenia and a history of violence, 19 with schizophrenia and no violence, and 21 healthy men were scanned while viewing positive, negative, and neutral images. Results Negative images elicited hyperactivations in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), left and right lingual gyrus, and the left precentral gyrus in violent men with schizophrenia, compared to nonviolent men with schizophrenia and healthy men. Neutral images elicited hyperactivations in the right and left middle occipital gyrus, left lingual gyrus, and the left fusiform gyrus in violent men with schizophrenia, compared to the other two groups. Discussion Violent men with schizophrenia displayed specific increases in ACC in response to negative images. Given the role of the ACC in information integration, these results indicate a specific dysfunction in the processing of negative emotions that may trigger violent behavior in men with schizophrenia. PMID:27366072

The role of the amygdala during emotional processing in Huntington's disease: from pre-manifest to late stage disease.

PubMed

Mason, Sarah L; Zhang, Jiaxiang; Begeti, Faye; Guzman, Natalie Valle; Lazar, Alpar S; Rowe, James B; Barker, Roger A; Hampshire, Adam

2015-04-01

Deficits in emotional processing can be detected in the pre-manifest stage of Huntington's disease and negative emotion recognition has been identified as a predictor of clinical diagnosis. The underlying neuropathological correlates of such deficits are typically established using correlative structural MRI studies. This approach does not take into consideration the impact of disruption to the complex interactions between multiple brain circuits on emotional processing. Therefore, exploration of the neural substrates of emotional processing in pre-manifest HD using fMRI connectivity analysis may be a useful way of evaluating the way brain regions interrelate in the period prior to diagnosis. We investigated the impact of predicted time to disease onset on brain activation when participants were exposed to pictures of faces with angry and neutral expressions, in 20 pre-manifest HD gene carriers and 23 healthy controls. On the basis of the results of this initial study went on to look at amygdala dependent cognitive performance in 79 Huntington's disease patients from a cross-section of disease stages (pre-manifest to late disease) and 26 healthy controls, using a validated theory of mind task: "the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test" which has been previously been shown to be amygdala dependent. Psychophysiological interaction analysis identified reduced connectivity between the left amygdala and right fusiform facial area in pre-manifest HD gene carriers compared to controls when viewing angry compared to neutral faces. Change in PPI connectivity scores correlated with predicted time to disease onset (r=0.45, p<0.05). Furthermore, performance on the "Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test" correlated negatively with proximity to disease onset and became progressively worse with each stage of disease. Abnormalities in the neural networks underlying social cognition and emotional processing can be detected prior to clinical diagnosis in Huntington's disease. Connectivity between the amygdala and other brain regions is impacted by the disease process in pre-manifest HD and may therefore be a useful way of identifying participants who are approaching a clinical diagnosis. Furthermore, the "Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test" is a surrogate measure of amygdala function that is clinically useful across the entire cross-section of disease stages in HD. Copyright © 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.

[Emotional Memory and Electrocortical Activity in Schizophrenia].

PubMed

Lavoie, Marc E; Champagne, Julie; Glaser, Emma; Mendrek, Adrianna

Context Abnormal emotion processing is frequent in schizophrenia and affects social and functional outcome. Past event-related potential (ERP) research investigating processing of affective stimuli in schizophrenia was done mainly with facial expressions and revealed impaired facial emotion recognition in patients relative to control subjects. Experimentations involving fMRI with this group of patients, showed alteration of limbic and frontal regions in response to emotional unpleasant images, compared to neutral stimuli during a memory task. Other studies have also noted an increase in brain activity when the activation of the stimuli was high compared to low arousal stimuli. This may indicate a different sensitivity threshold to emotional arousal and emotional valence involving frontal pathways in these patients. But very few studies attempted to separate the contributions of emotional valence and arousal within an episodic memory protocol with ERP, in that population.Goal The aim of the current research is to investigate brain electro-cortical activity in schizophrenia in response to emotional images during an episodic memory task.Method ERP components were analyzed in 16 schizophrenic and 17 control participants matched for age, sex and intelligence. ERPs were obtained from 56 EEG electrodes. The tasks consisted in a classical episodic memory task that presented 100 repeated old and 100 new photographic images divided into four categories (unpleasant-high arousal, unpleasant-low arousal, pleasant-high arousal and pleasant-low arousal) selected from the International Affective Picture System. The N200, P300 and late positive component (LPC) mean amplitude, were analyzed using repeated-measure analyses of variance (MANOVA).Results Patients with schizophrenia and control subjects gave comparable subjective evaluations of arousal and valence. However, the frontal N200 and the P300 both showed an interaction of the group x memory x valence x hemisphere (F [1.32]=8.36; p <.01). Thus, this complex interaction denotes an increase of the episodic memory effect in the right hemisphere in response to unpleasant stimuli, with schizophrenic patients. With respect to the control group, there is also an increase of this memory effect in the right hemisphere, but in response to pleasant stimuli. The schizophrenic patients presented a smaller LPC memory effect, especially at the frontal region. More specifically, the frontal LPC was reduced, and the clinical group was less reactive to the emotional arousal content, compared to the control group.Discussion Altogether, our results revealed that while the subjective evaluation of emotional pictures is equivalent across groups, cerebral differences are present in schizophrenic patients during emotional recognition. N200 and P300 results in the frontal region suggest impaired selective attention and episodic memory to unpleasant stimuli in patients, while later processes related to conscious recollection (parietal LPC) are not affected with patients affected with schizophrenia.Conclusion This finding provides further support for the notion of a possible discrepancy between the subjective experience and the physiological expression of emotions in schizophrenia patients. Those results could open the door to new clinical research investigations in psychiatry, particularly in the comprehension of a relationship between frontal cortex vulnerability and episodic memory often present in psychosis.

A face to remember: emotional expression modulates prefrontal activity during memory formation.

PubMed

Sergerie, Karine; Lepage, Martin; Armony, Jorge L

2005-01-15

Emotion can exert a modulatory role on episodic memory. Several studies have shown that negative stimuli (e.g., words, pictures) are better remembered than neutral ones. Although facial expressions are powerful emotional stimuli and have been shown to influence perception and attention processes, little is known about their effect on memory. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in humans to investigate the effects of expression (happy, neutral, and fearful) on prefrontal cortex (PFC) activity during the encoding of faces, using a subsequent memory effect paradigm. Our results show that activity in right PFC predicted memory for faces, regardless of expression, while a homotopic region in the left hemisphere was associated with successful encoding only for faces with an emotional expression. These findings are consistent with the proposed role of right dorsolateral PFC in successful encoding of nonverbal material, but also suggest that left DLPFC may be a site where integration of memory and emotional processes occurs. This study sheds new light on the current controversy regarding the hemispheric lateralization of PFC in memory encoding.

Enactive neuroscience, the direct perception hypothesis, and the socially extended mind.

PubMed

Froese, Tom

2015-01-01

Pessoa's The Cognitive-Emotional Brain (2013) is an integrative approach to neuroscience that complements other developments in cognitive science, especially enactivism. Both accept complexity as essential to mind; both tightly integrate perception, cognition, and emotion, which enactivism unifies in its foundational concept of sense-making; and both emphasize that the spatial extension of mental processes is not reducible to specific brain regions and neuroanatomical connectivity. An enactive neuroscience is emerging.

Functional neuroimaging of emotional processing in women with polycystic ovary syndrome: a case-control pilot study

PubMed Central

Marsh, Courtney A.; Berent-Spillson, Alison; Love, Tiffany; Persad, Carol C.; Pop-Busui, Rodica; Zubieta, Jon-Kar; Smith, Yolanda R.

2013-01-01

Objective To evaluate emotional processing in women with insulin-resistant polycystic ovary syndrome (IR-PCOS) and its relationship to glucose regulation and the mu-opioid system. Design Case-control pilot. Setting Tertiary referring medical center. Patient(s) Seven women with IR-PCOS and five non-insulin-resistant controls, aged 21–40 years, recruited from the general population. Intervention(s) Sixteen weeks of metformin (1,500 mg/day) in women with IR-PCOS. Main Outcome Measure(s) Assessment of mood, metabolic function, and neuronal activation during an emotional task using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and mu-opioid receptor availability using positive emission tomography (PET). Result(s) We found that insulin-resistant PCOS patients [1] had greater limbic activation during an emotion task than controls (n = 5); [2] trended toward decreased positive affect and increased trait anxiety; [3] after metformin treatment, had limbic activation that no longer differed from controls; and [4] had positive correlations between fMRI limbic activation during emotional processing and mu-opioid binding potential. Conclusion(s) Patients with IR-PCOS had greater regional activation during an emotion task than the controls, although this resolved with metformin therapy. Alterations in mu-opioid neurotransmission may underlie limbic system activity and mood disorders in IR-PCOS. Clinical Trial Registration Number NCT00670800. PMID:23557757

A polymorphism of the MAOA gene is associated with emotional brain markers and personality traits on an antisocial index.

PubMed

Williams, Leanne M; Gatt, Justine M; Kuan, Stacey A; Dobson-Stone, Carol; Palmer, Donna M; Paul, Robert H; Song, Le; Costa, Paul T; Schofield, Peter R; Gordon, Evian

2009-06-01

Association studies suggest that the low activity variant of the monoamine oxidase A (MAOA)-uVNTR polymorphism confers risk for emotional disturbances associated with antisocial traits, particularly in males. Here, we assessed the low (MAOA-L) activity variant in relation to both brain function and a behavioral index of antisocial traits. From an initial sample of 290 healthy participants, 210 had low (MAOA-L) or high (MAOA-H) activity variants. Participants underwent a brief assessment of personality traits and event-related potential (ERP) recording during an emotion-processing task. Genotype differences in ERPs were localized using LORETA. The MAOA-L genotype was distinguished by elevated scores on the index of antisocial traits. These traits were related to altered ERPs elicited 120-280ms post-stimulus, particularly for negative emotion. Altered neural processing of anger in MAOA-L genotypes was localized to medial frontal, parietal, and superior temporo-occipital regions in males, but only to the superior occipital cortex in females. The MAOA low activity variant may increase susceptibility to antisocial traits through alterations to the neural systems for processing threat-related emotion, especially for males. Monoamines such as noradrenalin and serotonin may modulate these relationships, given that their metabolism varies according to MAOA variants, and that they modulate both emotional brain systems and antisocial aggression.

Neural Correlates of Symptom Dimensions in Pediatric Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gilbert, Andrew R.; Akkal, Dalila; Almeida, Jorge R. C.; Mataix-Cols, David; Kalas, Catherine; Devlin, Bernie; Birmaher, Boris; Phillips, Mary L.

2009-01-01

The use of functional magnetic resonance imaging on a group of pediatric subjects with obsessive compulsive disorder reveals that this group has reduced activity in neural regions underlying emotional processing, cognitive processing, and motor performance as compared to control subjects.

An Emotional Go/No-Go fMRI study in adolescents with depressive symptoms following concussion.

PubMed

Ho, Rachelle A; Hall, Geoffrey B; Noseworthy, Michael D; DeMatteo, Carol

2017-10-03

Following concussion, adolescents may experience both poor inhibitory control and increased depressive symptoms. fMRI research suggests that adolescents with major depressive disorder have abnormal physiological responses in the frontostriatal pathway, and exhibit poorer inhibitory control in the presence of negatively-aroused images. The scarcity of information surrounding depression following concussion in adolescents makes it difficult to identify patients at risk of depression after injury. This is the first study to examine neural activity patterns in adolescents with post-concussive depressive symptoms. To explore the effect of depressive symptoms on inhibitory control in adolescents with concussion in the presence of emotional stimuli using fMRI. Using a prospective cohort design, 30 adolescents diagnosed with concussion between 10 and 17years were recruited. The Children's Depression Inventory questionnaire was used to divide participants into two groups: average or elevated levels of depressive symptoms. Participants completed an Emotional Go/No-Go task involving angry or neutral faces in a 3Telsa MRI scanner. Eleven participants had elevated depressive symptoms, of which 72% were hit in the occipital region of the head at the time of injury. fMRI results from the Emotional Go/No-Go task revealed activity patterns in the overall sample. Faces activated regions associated with both facial and cognitive processing. However, frontal regions that are usually associated with inhibitory control were not activated. Adolescents with elevated levels of depressive symptoms engaged more frontal lobe regions during the task than the average group. They also showed a trend towards worse symptoms following MRI scanning. Adolescents with elevated depressive symptoms engaged brain regions subserving evaluative processing of social interactions. This finding provides insight into the role the environment plays in contributing to the cognitive demands placed on adolescents recovering from concussion. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Role of interoceptive accuracy in topographical changes in emotion-induced bodily sensations

PubMed Central

Jung, Won-Mo; Ryu, Yeonhee; Lee, Ye-Seul; Wallraven, Christian; Chae, Younbyoung

2017-01-01

The emotion-associated bodily sensation map is composed of a specific topographical distribution of bodily sensations to categorical emotions. The present study investigated whether or not interoceptive accuracy was associated with topographical changes in this map following emotion-induced bodily sensations. This study included 31 participants who observed short video clips containing emotional stimuli and then reported their sensations on the body map. Interoceptive accuracy was evaluated with a heartbeat detection task and the spatial patterns of bodily sensations to specific emotions, including anger, fear, disgust, happiness, sadness, and neutral, were visualized using Statistical Parametric Mapping (SPM) analyses. Distinct patterns of bodily sensations were identified for different emotional states. In addition, positive correlations were found between the magnitude of sensation in emotion-specific regions and interoceptive accuracy across individuals. A greater degree of interoceptive accuracy was associated with more specific topographical changes after emotional stimuli. These results suggest that the awareness of one’s internal bodily states might play a crucial role as a required messenger of sensory information during the affective process. PMID:28877218

Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex activation during emotional anticipation and neuropsychological performance in posttraumatic stress disorder.

PubMed

Aupperle, Robin L; Allard, Carolyn B; Grimes, Erin M; Simmons, Alan N; Flagan, Taru; Behrooznia, Michelle; Cissell, Shadha H; Twamley, Elizabeth W; Thorp, Steven R; Norman, Sonya B; Paulus, Martin P; Stein, Murray B

2012-04-01

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has been associated with executive or attentional dysfunction and problems in emotion processing. However, it is unclear whether these two domains of dysfunction are related to common or distinct neurophysiological substrates. To examine the hypothesis that greater neuropsychological impairment in PTSD relates to greater disruption in prefrontal-subcortical networks during emotional anticipation. Case-control, cross-sectional study. General community and hospital and community psychiatric clinics. Volunteer sample of 37 women with PTSD related to intimate partner violence and 34 age-comparable healthy control women. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine neural responses during anticipation of negative and positive emotional images. The Clinician-Administered PTSD Scale was used to characterize PTSD symptom severity. The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, Third Edition, Digit Symbol Test, Delis-Kaplan Executive Function System Color-Word Interference Test, and Wisconsin Card Sorting Test were used to characterize neuropsychological performance. Women with PTSD performed worse on complex visuomotor processing speed (Digit Symbol Test) and executive function (Color-Word Interference Inhibition/Switching subtest) measures compared with control subjects. Posttraumatic stress disorder was associated with greater anterior insula and attenuated lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) activation during emotional anticipation. Greater dorsolateral PFC activation (anticipation of negative images minus anticipation of positive images) was associated with lower PTSD symptom severity and better visuomotor processing speed and executive functioning. Greater medial PFC and amygdala activation related to slower visuomotor processing speed. During emotional anticipation, women with PTSD show exaggerated activation in the anterior insula, a region important for monitoring internal bodily state. Greater dorsolateral PFC response in PTSD patients during emotional anticipation may reflect engagement of cognitive control networks that are beneficial for emotional and cognitive functioning. Novel treatments could be aimed at strengthening the balance between cognitive control (dorsolateral PFC) and affective processing (medial PFC and amygdala) networks to improve overall functioning for PTSD patients.

Quantitative prediction of perceptual decisions during near-threshold fear detection

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Pessoa, Luiz; Padmala, Srikanth

2005-04-01

A fundamental goal of cognitive neuroscience is to explain how mental decisions originate from basic neural mechanisms. The goal of the present study was to investigate the neural correlates of perceptual decisions in the context of emotional perception. To probe this question, we investigated how fluctuations in functional MRI (fMRI) signals were correlated with behavioral choice during a near-threshold fear detection task. fMRI signals predicted behavioral choice independently of stimulus properties and task accuracy in a network of brain regions linked to emotional processing: posterior cingulate cortex, medial prefrontal cortex, right inferior frontal gyrus, and left insula. We quantified the link between fMRI signals and behavioral choice in a whole-brain analysis by determining choice probabilities by means of signal-detection theory methods. Our results demonstrate that voxel-wise fMRI signals can reliably predict behavioral choice in a quantitative fashion (choice probabilities ranged from 0.63 to 0.78) at levels comparable to neuronal data. We suggest that the conscious decision that a fearful face has been seen is represented across a network of interconnected brain regions that prepare the organism to appropriately handle emotionally challenging stimuli and that regulate the associated emotional response. decision making | emotion | functional MRI

Neural substrates underlying intentional empathy.

PubMed

de Greck, Moritz; Wang, Gang; Yang, Xuedong; Wang, Xiaoying; Northoff, Georg; Han, Shihui

2012-02-01

Although empathic responses to stimuli with emotional contents may occur automatically, humans are capable to intentionally empathize with other individuals. Intentional empathy for others is even possible when they do not show emotional expressions. However, little is known about the neuronal mechanisms of this intentionally controlled empathic process. To investigate the neuronal substrates underlying intentional empathy, we scanned 20 healthy Chinese subjects, using fMRI, when they tried to feel inside the emotional states of neutral or angry faces of familiar (Asian) and unfamiliar (Caucasian) models. Skin color evaluation of the same stimuli served as a control task. Compared to a baseline condition, the empathy task revealed a network of established empathy regions, including the anterior cingulate cortex, bilateral inferior frontal cortex and bilateral anterior insula. The contrast of intentional empathy vs skin color evaluation, however, revealed three regions: the bilateral inferior frontal cortex, whose hemodynamic responses were independent of perceived emotion and familiarity and the right-middle temporal gyrus, whose activity was modulated by emotion but not by familiarity. These findings extend our understanding of the role of the inferior frontal cortex and the middle temporal gyrus in empathy by demonstrating their involvement in intentional empathy.

Effects of empathic social responses on the emotions of the recipient.

PubMed

Seehausen, Maria; Kazzer, Philipp; Bajbouj, Malek; Heekeren, Hauke R; Jacobs, Arthur M; Klann-Delius, Gisela; Menninghaus, Winfried; Prehn, Kristin

2016-03-01

Empathy is highly relevant for social behavior and can be verbally expressed by voicing sympathy and concern (emotional empathy) as well as by paraphrasing or stating that one can mentally reconstruct and understand another person's thoughts and feelings (cognitive empathy). In this study, we investigated the emotional effects and neural correlates of receiving empathic social responses after negative performance feedback and compared the effects of emotionally vs. cognitively empathic comments. 20 participants (10 male) underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging while receiving negative performance feedback for a cognitive task. Performance feedback was followed by verbal comments either expressing cognitive and emotional empathy or demonstrating a lack of empathy. Empathic comments in general led to less negative self-reported feelings and calmer breathing. At the neural level, empathic comments induced activity in regions associated with social cognition and emotion processing, specifically in right postcentral gyrus and left cerebellum (cognitively empathic comments), right precentral gyrus, the opercular part of left inferior frontal gyrus, and left middle temporal gyrus (emotionally empathic comments), as well as the orbital part of the left middle frontal gyrus and left superior parietal gyrus (emotionally empathic vs. unempathic comments). The study shows that cognitively and emotionally empathic comments appear to be processed in partially separable neural systems. Furthermore, confirming and expanding on another study on the same subject, the present results demonstrate that the social display of cognitive empathy exerts almost as positive effects on the recipient's feelings and emotions in states of distress as emotionally empathic response does. This can be relevant for professional settings in which strong negative emotions need to be de-escalated while maintaining professional impartiality, which may allow the display of cognitive but not emotional empathy. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Affective neuroscience of the emotional BrainMind: evolutionary perspectives and implications for understanding depression

PubMed Central

Panksepp, Jaak

2010-01-01

Cross-species affective neuroscience studies confirm that primary-process emotional feelings are organized within primitive subcortical regions of the brain that are anatomically, neurochemically, and functionally homologous in all mammals that have been studied. Emotional feelings (affects) are intrinsic values that inform animals how they are faring in the quest to survive. The various positive affects indicate that animals are returning to “comfort zones” that support survival, and negative affects reflect “discomfort zones” that indicate that animals are in situations that may impair survival. They are ancestral tools for living - evolutionary memories of such importance that they were coded into the genome in rough form (as primary brain processes), which are refined by basic learning mechanisms (secondary processes) as well as by higher-order cognitions/thoughts (tertiary processes). To understand why depression feels horrible, we must fathom the affective infrastructure of the mammalian brain. Advances in our understanding of the nature of primary-process emotional affects can promote the development of better preclinical models of psychiatric disorders and thereby also allow clinicians new and useful ways to understand the foundational aspects of their clients' problems. These networks are of clear importance for understanding psychiatric disorders and advancing psychiatric practice. PMID:21319497

Parametric modulation of neural activity by emotion in youth with bipolar disorder, youth with severe mood dysregulation, and healthy volunteers.

PubMed

Thomas, Laura A; Brotman, Melissa A; Muhrer, Eli J; Rosen, Brooke H; Bones, Brian L; Reynolds, Richard C; Deveney, Christen M; Pine, Daniel S; Leibenluft, Ellen

2012-12-01

CONTEXT Youth with bipolar disorder (BD) and those with severe, nonepisodic irritability (severe mood dysregulation [SMD]) exhibit amygdala dysfunction during facial emotion processing. However, studies have not compared such patients with each other and with comparison individuals in neural responsiveness to subtle changes in facial emotion; the ability to process such changes is important for social cognition. To evaluate this, we used a novel, parametrically designed faces paradigm. OBJECTIVE To compare activation in the amygdala and across the brain in BD patients, SMD patients, and healthy volunteers (HVs). DESIGN Case-control study. SETTING Government research institute. PARTICIPANTS Fifty-seven youths (19 BD, 15 SMD, and 23 HVs). MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE Blood oxygenation level-dependent data. Neutral faces were morphed with angry and happy faces in 25% intervals; static facial stimuli appeared for 3000 milliseconds. Participants performed hostility or nonemotional facial feature (ie, nose width) ratings. The slope of blood oxygenation level-dependent activity was calculated across neutral-to-angry and neutral-to-happy facial stimuli. RESULTS In HVs, but not BD or SMD participants, there was a positive association between left amygdala activity and anger on the face. In the neutral-to-happy whole-brain analysis, BD and SMD participants modulated parietal, temporal, and medial-frontal areas differently from each other and from that in HVs; with increasing facial happiness, SMD patients demonstrated increased, and BD patients decreased, activity in the parietal, temporal, and frontal regions. CONCLUSIONS Youth with BD or SMD differ from HVs in modulation of amygdala activity in response to small changes in facial anger displays. In contrast, individuals with BD or SMD show distinct perturbations in regions mediating attention and face processing in association with changes in the emotional intensity of facial happiness displays. These findings demonstrate similarities and differences in the neural correlates of facial emotion processing in BD and SMD, suggesting that these distinct clinical presentations may reflect differing dysfunctions along a mood disorders spectrum.

Neural basis of decision making guided by emotional outcomes

PubMed Central

Matsuda, Yoshi-Taka; Fujimura, Tomomi; Ueno, Kenichi; Asamizuya, Takeshi; Suzuki, Chisato; Cheng, Kang; Okanoya, Kazuo; Okada, Masato

2015-01-01

Emotional events resulting from a choice influence an individual's subsequent decision making. Although the relationship between emotion and decision making has been widely discussed, previous studies have mainly investigated decision outcomes that can easily be mapped to reward and punishment, including monetary gain/loss, gustatory stimuli, and pain. These studies regard emotion as a modulator of decision making that can be made rationally in the absence of emotions. In our daily lives, however, we often encounter various emotional events that affect decisions by themselves, and mapping the events to a reward or punishment is often not straightforward. In this study, we investigated the neural substrates of how such emotional decision outcomes affect subsequent decision making. By using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we measured brain activities of humans during a stochastic decision-making task in which various emotional pictures were presented as decision outcomes. We found that pleasant pictures differentially activated the midbrain, fusiform gyrus, and parahippocampal gyrus, whereas unpleasant pictures differentially activated the ventral striatum, compared with neutral pictures. We assumed that the emotional decision outcomes affect the subsequent decision by updating the value of the options, a process modeled by reinforcement learning models, and that the brain regions representing the prediction error that drives the reinforcement learning are involved in guiding subsequent decisions. We found that some regions of the striatum and the insula were separately correlated with the prediction error for either pleasant pictures or unpleasant pictures, whereas the precuneus was correlated with prediction errors for both pleasant and unpleasant pictures. PMID:25695644

Neural basis of decision making guided by emotional outcomes.

PubMed

Katahira, Kentaro; Matsuda, Yoshi-Taka; Fujimura, Tomomi; Ueno, Kenichi; Asamizuya, Takeshi; Suzuki, Chisato; Cheng, Kang; Okanoya, Kazuo; Okada, Masato

2015-05-01

Emotional events resulting from a choice influence an individual's subsequent decision making. Although the relationship between emotion and decision making has been widely discussed, previous studies have mainly investigated decision outcomes that can easily be mapped to reward and punishment, including monetary gain/loss, gustatory stimuli, and pain. These studies regard emotion as a modulator of decision making that can be made rationally in the absence of emotions. In our daily lives, however, we often encounter various emotional events that affect decisions by themselves, and mapping the events to a reward or punishment is often not straightforward. In this study, we investigated the neural substrates of how such emotional decision outcomes affect subsequent decision making. By using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we measured brain activities of humans during a stochastic decision-making task in which various emotional pictures were presented as decision outcomes. We found that pleasant pictures differentially activated the midbrain, fusiform gyrus, and parahippocampal gyrus, whereas unpleasant pictures differentially activated the ventral striatum, compared with neutral pictures. We assumed that the emotional decision outcomes affect the subsequent decision by updating the value of the options, a process modeled by reinforcement learning models, and that the brain regions representing the prediction error that drives the reinforcement learning are involved in guiding subsequent decisions. We found that some regions of the striatum and the insula were separately correlated with the prediction error for either pleasant pictures or unpleasant pictures, whereas the precuneus was correlated with prediction errors for both pleasant and unpleasant pictures. Copyright © 2015 the American Physiological Society.

Cerebellum and personality traits.

PubMed

Petrosini, Laura; Cutuli, Debora; Picerni, Eleonora; Laricchiuta, Daniela

2015-02-01

Personality traits are multidimensional traits comprising cognitive, emotional, and behavioral characteristics, and a wide array of cerebral structures mediate individual variability. Differences in personality traits covary with brain morphometry in specific brain regions. A cerebellar role in emotional and affective processing and on personality characteristics has been suggested. In a large sample of healthy subjects of both sexes and differently aged, the macro- and micro-structural variations of the cerebellum were correlated with the scores obtained in the Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI) by Cloninger. Cerebellar volumes were associated positively with Novelty Seeking scores and negatively with Harm Avoidance scores. Given the cerebellar contribution in personality traits and emotional processing, we investigated the cerebellar involvement even in alexithymia, construct of personality characterized by impairment in cognitive, emotional, and affective processing. Interestingly, the subjects with high alexithymic traits had larger volumes in the bilateral Crus 1. The cerebellar substrate for some personality dimensions extends the relationship between personality and brain areas to a structure up to now thought to be involved mainly in motor and cognitive functions, much less in emotional processes and even less in personality individual differences. The enlarged volumes of Crus 1 in novelty seekers and alexithymics support the tendency to action featuring both personality constructs. In fact, Novelty Seeking and alexithymia are rooted in behavior and inescapably have a strong action component, resulting in stronger responses in the structures more focused on action and embodiment, as the cerebellum is.

Supramodal representation of emotions.

PubMed

Klasen, Martin; Kenworthy, Charles A; Mathiak, Krystyna A; Kircher, Tilo T J; Mathiak, Klaus

2011-09-21

Supramodal representation of emotion and its neural substrates have recently attracted attention as a marker of social cognition. However, the question whether perceptual integration of facial and vocal emotions takes place in primary sensory areas, multimodal cortices, or in affective structures remains unanswered yet. Using novel computer-generated stimuli, we combined emotional faces and voices in congruent and incongruent ways and assessed functional brain data (fMRI) during an emotional classification task. Both congruent and incongruent audiovisual stimuli evoked larger responses in thalamus and superior temporal regions compared with unimodal conditions. Congruent emotions were characterized by activation in amygdala, insula, ventral posterior cingulate (vPCC), temporo-occipital, and auditory cortices; incongruent emotions activated a frontoparietal network and bilateral caudate nucleus, indicating a greater processing load in working memory and emotion-encoding areas. The vPCC alone exhibited differential reactions to congruency and incongruency for all emotion categories and can thus be considered a central structure for supramodal representation of complex emotional information. Moreover, the left amygdala reflected supramodal representation of happy stimuli. These findings document that emotional information does not merge at the perceptual audiovisual integration level in unimodal or multimodal areas, but in vPCC and amygdala.

A qualitative exploration of the perception of emotions in anorexia nervosa: a basic emotion and developmental perspective.

PubMed

Fox, John R E

2009-01-01

Difficulties in emotional processing have long been regarded as a core difficulty within anorexia nervosa. Recent research and theory have started to highlight how eating disorder symptoms are often used to regulate painful emotions. However, there has been a lack of theoretical sophistication in how emotions have been considered within the eating disorders. This study was designed to use qualitative methodologies to address these inadequacies and provide a richer, more thorough account of emotions within anorexia nervosa. It used a grounded theory methodology to gather and analyse interview data from 11 participants who had a diagnosis of anorexia nervosa, being seen at a regional eating disorder service (both inpatient and day patient). The results highlighted two main overarching themes regarding the perception and management of emotions within anorexia nervosa: (1) development of poor meta-emotional skills; and (2) perception and management of emotion in anorexia nervosa. These two categories comprised of a significant number of components from the qualitative analysis, including difficulties with anger, meta-emotional skills and poverty of emotional environments while growing up. Once the data had been collected and analysed, links were made between the findings of this research and the current literature base.

A Sensitive and Specific Neural Signature for Picture-Induced Negative Affect

PubMed Central

Chang, Luke J.; Gianaros, Peter J.; Manuck, Stephen B.; Krishnan, Anjali; Wager, Tor D.

2015-01-01

Neuroimaging has identified many correlates of emotion but has not yet yielded brain representations predictive of the intensity of emotional experiences in individuals. We used machine learning to identify a sensitive and specific signature of emotional responses to aversive images. This signature predicted the intensity of negative emotion in individual participants in cross validation (n =121) and test (n = 61) samples (high–low emotion = 93.5% accuracy). It was unresponsive to physical pain (emotion–pain = 92% discriminative accuracy), demonstrating that it is not a representation of generalized arousal or salience. The signature was comprised of mesoscale patterns spanning multiple cortical and subcortical systems, with no single system necessary or sufficient for predicting experience. Furthermore, it was not reducible to activity in traditional “emotion-related” regions (e.g., amygdala, insula) or resting-state networks (e.g., “salience,” “default mode”). Overall, this work identifies differentiable neural components of negative emotion and pain, providing a basis for new, brain-based taxonomies of affective processes. PMID:26098873

Emotional expressions in voice and music: same code, same effect?

PubMed

Escoffier, Nicolas; Zhong, Jidan; Schirmer, Annett; Qiu, Anqi

2013-08-01

Scholars have documented similarities in the way voice and music convey emotions. By using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) we explored whether these similarities imply overlapping processing substrates. We asked participants to trace changes in either the emotion or pitch of vocalizations and music using a joystick. Compared to music, vocalizations more strongly activated superior and middle temporal cortex, cuneus, and precuneus. However, despite these differences, overlapping rather than differing regions emerged when comparing emotion with pitch tracing for music and vocalizations, respectively. Relative to pitch tracing, emotion tracing activated medial superior frontal and anterior cingulate cortex regardless of stimulus type. Additionally, we observed emotion specific effects in primary and secondary auditory cortex as well as in medial frontal cortex that were comparable for voice and music. Together these results indicate that similar mechanisms support emotional inferences from vocalizations and music and that these mechanisms tap on a general system involved in social cognition. Copyright © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Portraying emotions at their unfolding: a multilayered approach for probing dynamics of neural networks.

PubMed

Raz, Gal; Winetraub, Yonatan; Jacob, Yael; Kinreich, Sivan; Maron-Katz, Adi; Shaham, Galit; Podlipsky, Ilana; Gilam, Gadi; Soreq, Eyal; Hendler, Talma

2012-04-02

Dynamic functional integration of distinct neural systems plays a pivotal role in emotional experience. We introduce a novel approach for studying emotion-related changes in the interactions within and between networks using fMRI. It is based on continuous computation of a network cohesion index (NCI), which is sensitive to both strength and variability of signal correlations between pre-defined regions. The regions encompass three clusters (namely limbic, medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and cognitive), each previously was shown to be involved in emotional processing. Two sadness-inducing film excerpts were viewed passively, and comparisons between viewer's rated sadness, parasympathetic, and inter-NCI and intra-NCI were obtained. Limbic intra-NCI was associated with reported sadness in both movies. However, the correlation between the parasympathetic-index, the rated sadness and the limbic-NCI occurred in only one movie, possibly related to a "deactivated" pattern of sadness. In this film, rated sadness intensity also correlated with the mPFC intra-NCI, possibly reflecting temporal correspondence between sadness and sympathy. Further, only for this movie, we found an association between sadness rating and the mPFC-limbic inter-NCI time courses. To the contrary, in the other film in which sadness was reported to commingle with horror and anger, dramatic events coincided with disintegration of these networks. Together, this may point to a difference between the cinematic experiences with regard to inter-network dynamics related to emotional regulation. These findings demonstrate the advantage of a multi-layered dynamic analysis for elucidating the uniqueness of emotional experiences with regard to an unguided processing of continuous and complex stimulation. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Impaired mixed emotion processing in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex in schizophrenia: an fMRI study.

PubMed

Szabó, Ádám György; Farkas, Kinga; Marosi, Csilla; Kozák, Lajos R; Rudas, Gábor; Réthelyi, János; Csukly, Gábor

2017-12-08

Schizophrenia has a negative effect on the activity of the temporal and prefrontal cortices in the processing of emotional facial expressions. However no previous research focused on the evaluation of mixed emotions in schizophrenia, albeit they are frequently expressed in everyday situations and negative emotions are frequently expressed by mixed facial expressions. Altogether 37 subjects, 19 patients with schizophrenia and 18 healthy control subjects were enrolled in the study. The two study groups did not differ in age and education. The stimulus set consisted of 10 fearful (100%), 10 happy (100%), 10 mixed fear (70% fear and 30% happy) and 10 mixed happy facial expressions. During the fMRI acquisition pictures were presented in a randomized order and subjects had to categorize expressions by button press. A decreased activation was found in the patient group during fear, mixed fear and mixed happy processing in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC) and the right anterior insula (RAI) at voxel and cluster level after familywise error correction. No difference was found between study groups in activations to happy facial condition. Patients with schizophrenia did not show a differential activation between mixed happy and happy facial expression similar to controls in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). Patients with schizophrenia showed decreased functioning in right prefrontal regions responsible for salience signaling and valence evaluation during emotion recognition. Our results indicate that fear and mixed happy/fear processing are impaired in schizophrenia, while happy facial expression processing is relatively intact.

A lesion model of envy and Schadenfreude: legal, deservingness and moral dimensions as revealed by neurodegeneration

PubMed Central

Santamaría-García, Hernando; Baez, Sandra; Reyes, Pablo; Santamaría-García, José A; Santacruz-Escudero, José M; Matallana, Diana; Arévalo, Analía; Sigman, Mariano; García, Adolfo M; Ibáñez, Agustín

2017-01-01

Abstract The study of moral emotions (i.e. Schadenfreude and envy) is critical to understand the ecological complexity of everyday interactions between cognitive, affective, and social cognition processes. Most previous studies in this area have used correlational imaging techniques and framed Schadenfreude and envy as unified and monolithic emotional domains. Here, we profit from a relevant neurodegeneration model to disentangle the brain regions engaged in three dimensions of Schadenfreude and envy: deservingness, morality, and legality. We tested a group of patients with behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD), patients with Alzheimer’s disease, as a contrastive neurodegeneration model, and healthy controls on a novel task highlighting each of these dimensions in scenarios eliciting Schadenfreude and envy. Compared with the Alzheimer’s disease and control groups, patients with bvFTD obtained significantly higher scores on all dimensions for both emotions. Correlational analyses revealed an association between envy and Schadenfreude scores and greater deficits in social cognition, inhibitory control, and behaviour disturbances in bvFTD patients. Brain anatomy findings (restricted to bvFTD and controls) confirmed the partially dissociable nature of the moral emotions’ experiences and highlighted the importance of socio-moral brain areas in processing those emotions. In all subjects, an association emerged between Schadenfreude and the ventral striatum, and between envy and the anterior cingulate cortex. In addition, the results supported an association between scores for moral and legal transgression and the morphology of areas implicated in emotional appraisal, including the amygdala and the parahippocampus. By contrast, bvFTD patients exhibited a negative association between increased Schadenfreude and envy across dimensions and critical regions supporting social-value rewards and social-moral processes (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, angular gyrus and precuneus). Together, this study provides lesion-based evidence for the multidimensional nature of the emotional experiences of envy and Schadenfreude. Our results offer new insights into the mechanisms subsuming complex emotions and moral cognition in neurodegeneration. Moreover, this study presents the exacerbation of envy and Schadenfreude as a new potential hallmark of bvFTD that could impact in diagnosis and progression. PMID:29112719

Insular cortex activity and the evocation of laughter.

PubMed

Wattendorf, Elise; Westermann, Birgit; Lotze, Martin; Fiedler, Klaus; Celio, Marco R

2016-06-01

The insular cortex is fundamentally involved in the processing of interoceptive information. It has been postulated that the integrative monitoring of the bodily responses to environmental stimuli is crucial for the recognition and experience of emotions. Because emotional arousal is known to be closely coupled to functions of the anterior insula, we suspected laughter to be associated primarily with neuronal activity in this region. An anatomically constrained re-analysis of our imaging data pertaining to ticklish laughter, to inhibited ticklish laughter, and to voluntary laughter revealed regional differences in the levels of neuronal activity in the posterior and mid-/anterior portions of the insula. Ticklish laughter was associated specifically with right ventral anterior insular activity, which was not detected under the other two conditions. Hence, apparently, only laughter that is evoked as an emotional response bears the signature of autonomic arousal in the insular cortex. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Face Generation Using Emotional Regions for Sensibility Robot

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Gotoh, Minori; Kanoh, Masayoshi; Kato, Shohei; Kunitachi, Tsutomu; Itoh, Hidenori

We think that psychological interaction is necessary for smooth communication between robots and people. One way to psychologically interact with others is through facial expressions. Facial expressions are very important for communication because they show true emotions and feelings. The ``Ifbot'' robot communicates with people by considering its own ``emotions''. Ifbot has many facial expressions to communicate enjoyment. We developed a method for generating facial expressions based on human subjective judgements mapping Ifbot's facial expressions to its emotions. We first created Ifbot's emotional space to map its facial expressions. We applied a five-layer auto-associative neural network to the space. We then subjectively evaluated the emotional space and created emotional regions based on the results. We generated emotive facial expressions using the emotional regions.

Functional MRI of facial emotion processing in left temporal lobe epilepsy.

PubMed

Szaflarski, Jerzy P; Allendorfer, Jane B; Heyse, Heidi; Mendoza, Lucy; Szaflarski, Basia A; Cohen, Nancy

2014-03-01

Temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) may negatively affect the ability to recognize emotions. This study aimed to determine the cortical correlates of facial emotion processing (happy, sad, fearful, and neutral) in patients with well-characterized left TLE (LTLE) and to examine the effect of seizure control on emotion processing. We enrolled 34 consecutive patients with LTLE and 30 matched healthy control (HC) subjects. Participants underwent functional MRI (fMRI) with an event-related facial emotion recognition task. The seizures of seventeen patients were controlled (no seizure in at least 3months; LTLE-sz), and 17 continued to experience frequent seizures (LTLE+sz). Mood was assessed with the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) and the Profile of Mood States (POMS). There were no differences in demographic characteristics and measures of mood between HC subjects and patients with LTLE. In patients with LTLE, fMRI showed decreased blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) signal in the hippocampus/parahippocampus and cerebellum in processing of happy faces and increased BOLD signal in occipital regions in response to fearful faces. Comparison of groups with LTLE+sz and LTLE-sz showed worse BDI and POMS scores in LTLE+sz (all p<0.05) except for POMS tension/anxiety (p=0.067). Functional MRI revealed increased BOLD signal in patients with LTLE+sz in the left precuneus and left parahippocampus for "fearful" faces and in the left periarcheocortex for "neutral" faces. There was a correlation between the fMRI and Total Mood Disturbance in the left precuneus in LTLE-sz (p=0.019) and in LTLE+sz (p=0.018). Overall, LTLE appears to have a relatively minor effect on the cortical underpinnings of facial emotion processing, while the effect of seizure state (controlled vs. not controlled) is more pronounced, indicating a significant relationship between seizure control and emotion processing. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Basic emotion processing and the adolescent brain: Task demands, analytic approaches, and trajectories of changes.

PubMed

Del Piero, Larissa B; Saxbe, Darby E; Margolin, Gayla

2016-06-01

Early neuroimaging studies suggested that adolescents show initial development in brain regions linked with emotional reactivity, but slower development in brain structures linked with emotion regulation. However, the increased sophistication of adolescent brain research has made this picture more complex. This review examines functional neuroimaging studies that test for differences in basic emotion processing (reactivity and regulation) between adolescents and either children or adults. We delineated different emotional processing demands across the experimental paradigms in the reviewed studies to synthesize the diverse results. The methods for assessing change (i.e., analytical approach) and cohort characteristics (e.g., age range) were also explored as potential factors influencing study results. Few unifying dimensions were found to successfully distill the results of the reviewed studies. However, this review highlights the potential impact of subtle methodological and analytic differences between studies, need for standardized and theory-driven experimental paradigms, and necessity of analytic approaches that are can adequately test the trajectories of developmental change that have recently been proposed. Recommendations for future research highlight connectivity analyses and non-linear developmental trajectories, which appear to be promising approaches for measuring change across adolescence. Recommendations are made for evaluating gender and biological markers of development beyond chronological age. Copyright © 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.

Basic emotion processing and the adolescent brain: Task demands, analytic approaches, and trajectories of changes

PubMed Central

Del Piero, Larissa B.; Saxbe, Darby E.; Margolin, Gayla

2016-01-01

Early neuroimaging studies suggested that adolescents show initial development in brain regions linked with emotional reactivity, but slower development in brain structures linked with emotion regulation. However, the increased sophistication of adolescent brain research has made this picture more complex. This review examines functional neuroimaging studies that test for differences in basic emotion processing (reactivity and regulation) between adolescents and either children or adults. We delineated different emotional processing demands across the experimental paradigms in the reviewed studies to synthesize the diverse results. The methods for assessing change (i.e., analytical approach) and cohort characteristics (e.g., age range) were also explored as potential factors influencing study results. Few unifying dimensions were found to successfully distill the results of the reviewed studies. However, this review highlights the potential impact of subtle methodological and analytic differences between studies, need for standardized and theory-driven experimental paradigms, and necessity of analytic approaches that are can adequately test the trajectories of developmental change that have recently been proposed. Recommendations for future research highlight connectivity analyses and nonlinear developmental trajectories, which appear to be promising approaches for measuring change across adolescence. Recommendations are made for evaluating gender and biological markers of development beyond chronological age. PMID:27038840

Alexithymia in Neurodegenerative Disease

PubMed Central

Sturm, Virginia E.; Levenson, Robert W.

2012-01-01

We investigated alexithymia, a deficit in the ability to identify and describe one’s emotions, in a sample that included patients with neurodegenerative disease and healthy controls. In addition, we investigated the relationship that alexithymia has with behavioral disturbance and with regional gray matter volumes. Alexithymia was examined with the Toronto Alexithymia Scale-20, behavioral disturbance was assessed with the Neuropsychiatric Inventory, and regional gray matter volumes were obtained from structural magnetic resonance images. Group analyses revealed higher levels of alexithymia in patients than controls. Alexithymia scores were positively correlated with behavioral disturbance (apathy and informant distress, in particular) and negatively correlated with the gray matter volume of the right pregenual anterior cingulate cortex, a region of the brain that is thought to play an important role in self and emotion processing. PMID:21432723

Are Plasma Oxytocin and Vasopressin Levels Reflective of Amygdala Activation during the Processing of Negative Emotions? A Preliminary Study.

PubMed

Motoki, Kosuke; Sugiura, Motoaki; Takeuchi, Hikaru; Kotozaki, Yuka; Nakagawa, Seishu; Yokoyama, Ryoichi; Kawashima, Ryuta

2016-01-01

Plasma oxytocin (OT) and arginine vasopressin (AVP) are associated with individual differences in emotional responses and behaviors. The amygdala is considered to be an important brain region for regulating emotion-based behavior, with OT and AVP modulating activity in the amygdala during the processing of negative emotions. In particular, increased OT levels may diminish amygdala activation (anxiolytic effects) and enhanced AVP levels may augment amygdala activation (anxiogenic effects) when negative emotions are processed. A growing body of research has shown that the effects of OT and AVP are modulated by sex: the aforementioned anxiolytic effects of OT and the anxiogenic effects of AVP occur in men, but not in women. However, we have little knowledge regarding the biological mechanisms underlying OT and AVP plasma levels or their respective anxiogenic and anxiolytic effects; similarly, little is known about the causes and nature of sex differences related to these neuropeptides and their effects on emotional processing. In the current study, we focused on the neural functions associated with the biological mechanisms underlying such effects. We hypothesized that amygdala activation would correlate with trait plasma OT (anxiolytic effects) and AVP (anxiogenic effects) levels because the amygdala is thought to affect the coordinated release of these neuropeptides following affective experiences. We further hypothesized that the effects would be modulated by sex. We assessed 51 participants (male and female) using a paradigm involving negative emotion in conjunction with functional magnetic resonance imaging and measurements of plasma OT and AVP levels. We determined that increased plasma AVP levels were positively associated with amygdala activation (anxiogenic effects) in men, but not in women. These findings highlight the potential underlying neural mechanisms of plasma AVP levels in men.

Abnormal brain activation during emotion processing of euthymic bipolar patients taking different mood stabilizers.

PubMed

Li, Linling; Ji, Erni; Tang, Fei; Qiu, Yunhai; Han, Xue; Zhang, Shengli; Zhang, Zhiguo; Yang, Haichen

2018-06-16

Numerous functional magnetic resonance imaging studies have been conducted to elucidate emotion processing of patients with bipolar disorder (BD), but due to different inclusion criteria used, especially for the history of medication use, the results for euthymic BD patients are inconsistent. For this reason, brain functional effects of psychopharmacological treatments on BD patients have been investigated by numerous fMRI studies, but there is no existing report for brain functional effects of different mood stabilizers. In this study, we compared the emotion processing in BD patients treated by two popularly used mood stabilizer, lithium (N = 13; 30 ± 9 years) and valproate (N = 16; 33 ± 8 years), as well as healthy controls (HC; N = 16; 29 ± 7 years). Two emotional tasks were applied in this study: one used emotional pictures of everyday objects and scenes, and another used emotional facial expression pictures. The main findings were that BD on lithium showed increased fMRI activation in the right dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and bilateral lingual gyrus in response to the positive pictures relative to neutral pictures compared with BD on valproate and HC. Besides, no abnormal activation was observed in the amygdala. Limitations of this study comprise the small sample size and the cross-sectional design. Therefore, the results were suggestive of a different effect of lithium and valproate on brain activities during emotion processing but no causal role can be proposed. The enduring impairments in euthymic state could provide clues to the brain regions involved in the primary pathology of BD.

Positive and negative affective processing exhibit dissociable functional hubs during the viewing of affective pictures.

PubMed

Zhang, Wenhai; Li, Hong; Pan, Xiaohong

2015-02-01

Recent resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies using graph theory metrics have revealed that the functional network of the human brain possesses small-world characteristics and comprises several functional hub regions. However, it is unclear how the affective functional network is organized in the brain during the processing of affective information. In this study, the fMRI data were collected from 25 healthy college students as they viewed a total of 81 positive, neutral, and negative pictures. The results indicated that affective functional networks exhibit weaker small-worldness properties with higher local efficiency, implying that local connections increase during viewing affective pictures. Moreover, positive and negative emotional processing exhibit dissociable functional hubs, emerging mainly in task-positive regions. These functional hubs, which are the centers of information processing, have nodal betweenness centrality values that are at least 1.5 times larger than the average betweenness centrality of the network. Positive affect scores correlated with the betweenness values of the right orbital frontal cortex (OFC) and the right putamen in the positive emotional network; negative affect scores correlated with the betweenness values of the left OFC and the left amygdala in the negative emotional network. The local efficiencies in the left superior and inferior parietal lobe correlated with subsequent arousal ratings of positive and negative pictures, respectively. These observations provide important evidence for the organizational principles of the human brain functional connectome during the processing of affective information. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Reliability of an fMRI Paradigm for Emotional Processing in a Multisite Longitudinal Study

PubMed Central

Gee, Dylan G.; McEwen, Sarah C.; Forsyth, Jennifer K.; Haut, Kristen M.; Bearden, Carrie E.; Addington, Jean; Goodyear, Bradley; Cadenhead, Kristin S.; Mirzakhanian, Heline; Cornblatt, Barbara A.; Olvet, Doreen; Mathalon, Daniel H.; McGlashan, Thomas H.; Perkins, Diana O.; Belger, Aysenil; Seidman, Larry J.; Thermenos, Heidi; Tsuang, Ming T.; van Erp, Theo G.M.; Walker, Elaine F.; Hamann, Stephan; Woods, Scott W.; Constable, Todd; Cannon, Tyrone D.

2015-01-01

Multisite neuroimaging studies can facilitate the investigation of brain-related changes in many contexts, including patient groups that are relatively rare in the general population. Though multisite studies have characterized the reliability of brain activation during working memory and motor functional magnetic resonance imaging tasks, emotion processing tasks, pertinent to many clinical populations, remain less explored. A traveling participants study was conducted with eight healthy volunteers scanned twice on consecutive days at each of the eight North American Longitudinal Prodrome Study sites. Tests derived from generalizability theory showed excellent reliability in the amygdala (Eρ2=0.82), inferior frontal gyrus (IFG;Eρ2=0.83), anterior cingulate cortex (ACC;Eρ2=0.76), insula (Eρ2=0.85), and fusiform gyrus (Eρ2=0.91) for maximum activation and fair to excellent reliability in the amygdala (Eρ2=0.44), IFG (Eρ2=0.48), ACC (Eρ2=0.55), insula (Eρ2=0.42), and fusiform gyrus (Eρ2=0.83) for mean activation across sites and test days. For the amygdala, habituation (Eρ2=0.71) was more stable than mean activation. In a second investigation, data from 111 healthy individuals across sites were aggregated in a voxelwise, quantitative meta-analysis. When compared with a mixed effects model controlling for site, both approaches identified robust activation in regions consistent with expected results based on prior single-site research. Overall, regions central to emotion processing showed strong reliability in the traveling participants study and robust activation in the aggregation study. These results support the reliability of blood oxygen level-dependent signal in emotion processing areas across different sites and scanners and may inform future efforts to increase efficiency and enhance knowledge of rare conditions in the population through multisite neuroimaging paradigms. PMID:25821147

Impaired recognition of body expressions in the behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia.

PubMed

Van den Stock, Jan; De Winter, François-Laurent; de Gelder, Beatrice; Rangarajan, Janaki Raman; Cypers, Gert; Maes, Frederik; Sunaert, Stefan; Goffin, Karolien; Vandenberghe, Rik; Vandenbulcke, Mathieu

2015-08-01

Progressive deterioration of social cognition and emotion processing are core symptoms of the behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD). Here we investigate whether bvFTD is also associated with impaired recognition of static (Experiment 1) and dynamic (Experiment 2) bodily expressions. In addition, we compared body expression processing with processing of static (Experiment 3) and dynamic (Experiment 4) facial expressions, as well as with face identity processing (Experiment 5). The results reveal that bvFTD is associated with impaired recognition of static and dynamic bodily and facial expressions, while identity processing was intact. No differential impairments were observed regarding motion (static vs. dynamic) or category (body vs. face). Within the bvFTD group, we observed a significant partial correlation between body and face expression recognition, when controlling for performance on the identity task. Voxel-Based Morphometry (VBM) analysis revealed that body emotion recognition was positively associated with gray matter volume in a region of the inferior frontal gyrus (pars orbitalis/triangularis). The results are in line with a supramodal emotion recognition deficit in bvFTD. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Emotion and the prefrontal cortex: An integrative review.

PubMed

Dixon, Matthew L; Thiruchselvam, Ravi; Todd, Rebecca; Christoff, Kalina

2017-10-01

The prefrontal cortex (PFC) plays a critical role in the generation and regulation of emotion. However, we lack an integrative framework for understanding how different emotion-related functions are organized across the entire expanse of the PFC, as prior reviews have generally focused on specific emotional processes (e.g., decision making) or specific anatomical regions (e.g., orbitofrontal cortex). Additionally, psychological theories and neuroscientific investigations have proceeded largely independently because of the lack of a common framework. Here, we provide a comprehensive review of functional neuroimaging, electrophysiological, lesion, and structural connectivity studies on the emotion-related functions of 8 subregions spanning the entire PFC. We introduce the appraisal-by-content model, which provides a new framework for integrating the diverse range of empirical findings. Within this framework, appraisal serves as a unifying principle for understanding the PFC's role in emotion, while relative content-specialization serves as a differentiating principle for understanding the role of each subregion. A synthesis of data from affective, social, and cognitive neuroscience studies suggests that different PFC subregions are preferentially involved in assigning value to specific types of inputs: exteroceptive sensations, episodic memories and imagined future events, viscero-sensory signals, viscero-motor signals, actions, others' mental states (e.g., intentions), self-related information, and ongoing emotions. We discuss the implications of this integrative framework for understanding emotion regulation, value-based decision making, emotional salience, and refining theoretical models of emotion. This framework provides a unified understanding of how emotional processes are organized across PFC subregions and generates new hypotheses about the mechanisms underlying adaptive and maladaptive emotional functioning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved).

Congruence of happy and sad emotion in music and faces modifies cortical audiovisual activation.

PubMed

Jeong, Jeong-Won; Diwadkar, Vaibhav A; Chugani, Carla D; Sinsoongsud, Piti; Muzik, Otto; Behen, Michael E; Chugani, Harry T; Chugani, Diane C

2011-02-14

The powerful emotion inducing properties of music are well-known, yet music may convey differing emotional responses depending on environmental factors. We hypothesized that neural mechanisms involved in listening to music may differ when presented together with visual stimuli that conveyed the same emotion as the music when compared to visual stimuli with incongruent emotional content. We designed this study to determine the effect of auditory (happy and sad instrumental music) and visual stimuli (happy and sad faces) congruent or incongruent for emotional content on audiovisual processing using fMRI blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) signal contrast. The experiment was conducted in the context of a conventional block-design experiment. A block consisted of three emotional ON periods, music alone (happy or sad music), face alone (happy or sad faces), and music combined with faces where the music excerpt was played while presenting either congruent emotional faces or incongruent emotional faces. We found activity in the superior temporal gyrus (STG) and fusiform gyrus (FG) to be differentially modulated by music and faces depending on the congruence of emotional content. There was a greater BOLD response in STG when the emotion signaled by the music and faces was congruent. Furthermore, the magnitude of these changes differed for happy congruence and sad congruence, i.e., the activation of STG when happy music was presented with happy faces was greater than the activation seen when sad music was presented with sad faces. In contrast, incongruent stimuli diminished the BOLD response in STG and elicited greater signal change in bilateral FG. Behavioral testing supplemented these findings by showing that subject ratings of emotion in faces were influenced by emotion in music. When presented with happy music, happy faces were rated as more happy (p=0.051) and sad faces were rated as less sad (p=0.030). When presented with sad music, happy faces were rated as less happy (p=0.008) and sad faces were rated as sadder (p=0.002). Happy-sad congruence across modalities may enhance activity in auditory regions while incongruence appears to impact the perception of visual affect, leading to increased activation in face processing regions such as the FG. We suggest that greater understanding of the neural bases of happy-sad congruence across modalities can shed light on basic mechanisms of affective perception and experience and may lead to novel insights in the study of emotion regulation and therapeutic use of music. Copyright © 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Neural correlates of empathic accuracy in adolescence

PubMed Central

Kral, Tammi R A; Solis, Enrique; Mumford, Jeanette A; Schuyler, Brianna S; Flook, Lisa; Rifken, Katharine; Patsenko, Elena G

2017-01-01

Abstract Empathy, the ability to understand others’ emotions, can occur through perspective taking and experience sharing. Neural systems active when adults empathize include regions underlying perspective taking (e.g. medial prefrontal cortex; MPFC) and experience sharing (e.g. inferior parietal lobule; IPL). It is unknown whether adolescents utilize networks implicated in both experience sharing and perspective taking when accurately empathizing. This question is critical given the importance of accurately understanding others’ emotions for developing and maintaining adaptive peer relationships during adolescence. We extend the literature on empathy in adolescence by determining the neural basis of empathic accuracy, a behavioral assay of empathy that does not bias participants toward the exclusive use of perspective taking or experience sharing. Participants (N = 155, aged 11.1–15.5 years) watched videos of ‘targets’ describing emotional events and continuously rated the targets’ emotions during functional magnetic resonance imaging scanning. Empathic accuracy related to activation in regions underlying perspective taking (MPFC, temporoparietal junction and superior temporal sulcus), while activation in regions underlying experience sharing (IPL, anterior cingulate cortex and anterior insula) related to lower empathic accuracy. These results provide novel insight into the neural basis of empathic accuracy in adolescence and suggest that perspective taking processes may be effective for increasing empathy. PMID:28981837

An fMRI study of caring vs self-focus during induced compassion and pride.

PubMed

Simon-Thomas, Emiliana R; Godzik, Jakub; Castle, Elizabeth; Antonenko, Olga; Ponz, Aurelie; Kogan, Aleksander; Keltner, Dacher J

2012-08-01

This study examined neural activation during the experience of compassion, an emotion that orients people toward vulnerable others and prompts caregiving, and pride, a self-focused emotion that signals individual strength and heightened status. Functional magnetic resonance images (fMRI) were acquired as participants viewed 55 s continuous sequences of slides to induce either compassion or pride, presented in alternation with sequences of neutral slides. Emotion self-report data were collected after each slide condition within the fMRI scanner. Compassion induction was associated with activation in the midbrain periaqueductal gray (PAG), a region that is activated during pain and the perception of others' pain, and that has been implicated in parental nurturance behaviors. Pride induction engaged the posterior medial cortex, a region that has been associated with self-referent processing. Self-reports of compassion experience were correlated with increased activation in a region near the PAG, and in the right inferior frontal gyrus (IFG). Self-reports of pride experience, in contrast, were correlated with reduced activation in the IFG and the anterior insula. These results provide preliminary evidence towards understanding the neural correlates of important interpersonal dimensions of compassion and pride. Caring (compassion) and self-focus (pride) may represent core appraisals that differentiate the response profiles of many emotions.

An fMRI study of caring vs self-focus during induced compassion and pride

PubMed Central

Godzik, Jakub; Castle, Elizabeth; Antonenko, Olga; Ponz, Aurelie; Kogan, Aleksander; Keltner, Dacher J.

2012-01-01

This study examined neural activation during the experience of compassion, an emotion that orients people toward vulnerable others and prompts caregiving, and pride, a self-focused emotion that signals individual strength and heightened status. Functional magnetic resonance images (fMRI) were acquired as participants viewed 55 s continuous sequences of slides to induce either compassion or pride, presented in alternation with sequences of neutral slides. Emotion self-report data were collected after each slide condition within the fMRI scanner. Compassion induction was associated with activation in the midbrain periaqueductal gray (PAG), a region that is activated during pain and the perception of others’ pain, and that has been implicated in parental nurturance behaviors. Pride induction engaged the posterior medial cortex, a region that has been associated with self-referent processing. Self-reports of compassion experience were correlated with increased activation in a region near the PAG, and in the right inferior frontal gyrus (IFG). Self-reports of pride experience, in contrast, were correlated with reduced activation in the IFG and the anterior insula. These results provide preliminary evidence towards understanding the neural correlates of important interpersonal dimensions of compassion and pride. Caring (compassion) and self-focus (pride) may represent core appraisals that differentiate the response profiles of many emotions. PMID:21896494

Emotion and sex of facial stimuli modulate conditional automaticity in behavioral and neuronal interference in healthy men.

PubMed

Kohn, Nils; Fernández, Guillén

2017-12-06

Our surrounding provides a host of sensory input, which we cannot fully process without streamlining and automatic processing. Levels of automaticity differ for different cognitive and affective processes. Situational and contextual interactions between cognitive and affective processes in turn influence the level of automaticity. Automaticity can be measured by interference in Stroop tasks. We applied an emotional version of the Stroop task to investigate how stress as a contextual factor influences the affective valence-dependent level of automaticity. 120 young, healthy men were investigated for behavioral and brain interference following a stress induction or control procedure in a counter-balanced cross-over-design. Although Stroop interference was always observed, sex and emotion of the face strongly modulated interference, which was larger for fearful and male faces. These effects suggest higher automaticity when processing happy and also female faces. Supporting behavioral patterns, brain data show lower interference related brain activity in executive control related regions in response to happy and female faces. In the absence of behavioral stress effects, congruent compared to incongruent trials (reverse interference) showed little to no deactivation under stress in response to happy female and fearful male trials. These congruency effects are potentially based on altered context- stress-related facial processing that interact with sex-emotion stereotypes. Results indicate that sex and facial emotion modulate Stroop interference in brain and behavior. These effects can be explained by altered response difficulty as a consequence of the contextual and stereotype related modulation of automaticity. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Facial emotion processing in patients with social anxiety disorder and Williams–Beuren syndrome: an fMRI study

PubMed Central

Binelli, Cynthia; Muñiz, Armando; Subira, Susana; Navines, Ricard; Blanco-Hinojo, Laura; Perez-Garcia, Debora; Crippa, Jose; Farré, Magi; Pérez-Jurado, Luis; Pujol, Jesus; Martin-Santos, Rocio

2016-01-01

Background Social anxiety disorder (SAD) and Williams–Beuren syndrome (WBS) are 2 conditions with major differences in terms of genetics, development and cognitive profiles. Both conditions are associated with compromised abilities in overlapping areas, including social approach, processing of social emotional cues and gaze behaviour, and to some extent they are associated with opposite behaviours in these domains. We examined common and distinct patterns of brain activation during a facial emotion processing paradigm in patients with SAD and WBS. Methods We examined patients with SAD and WBS and healthy controls matched by age and laterality using functional MRI during the processing of happy, fearful and angry faces. Results We included 20 patients with SAD and 20 with WBS as well as 20 matched controls in our study. Patients with SAD and WBS did not differ in the pattern of limbic activation. We observed differences in early visual areas of the face processing network in patients with WBS and differences in the cortical prefrontal regions involved in the top–down regulation of anxiety and in the fusiform gyrus for patients with SAD. Compared with those in the SAD and control groups, participants in the WBS group did not activate the right lateral inferior occipital cortex. In addition, compared with controls, patients with WBS hypoactivated the posterior primary visual cortex and showed significantly less deactivation in the right temporal operculum. Participants in the SAD group showed decreased prefrontal activation compared with those in the WBS and control groups. In addition, compared with controls, participants with SAD showed decreased fusiform activation. Participants with SAD and WBS also differed in the pattern of activation in the superior temporal gyrus, a region that has been linked to gaze processing. Limitations The results observed in the WBS group are limited by the IQ of the WBS sample; however, the specificity of findings suggests that the pattern of brain activation observed for WBS is more likely to reflect a neurobiological substrate rather than intellectual impairment per se. Conclusion Patients with SAD and WBS showed common and specific patterns of brain activation. Our results highlight the role of cortical regions during facial emotion processing in individuals with SAD and WBS. PMID:26624523

Emotional conflict in interpersonal interactions.

PubMed

Ruz, María; Tudela, Pío

2011-01-15

Facial displays of emotions can help to infer the mental states of other individuals. However, the expectations we generate on the basis of people's emotions can mismatch their actual behaviour in certain circumstances, which generates conflict. In the present study, we explored the neural mechanisms of emotional conflict during interpersonal interactions. Participants had to accept or reject economic offers made by several partners who displayed emotional expressions. On every trial, a cue informed participants of whether they could trust the emotion of their partner or not. Trustworthy (low-conflict) partners with happy facial expressions were cooperative and those with angry expressions did not cooperate. Untrustworthy (high-conflict) partners, on the other hand, cooperated when their expression was angry and did not cooperate when they displayed a happy emotion. Behavioural responses were faster for trustworthy than for untrustworty partners. High-conflict partners activated the anterior cingulate and the anterior insula. In turn, trustworthy partners were associated with activations in the left precuneus. Our results suggest that the emotion displayed by another person affects our decision-making in social contexts. When emotional expressions are linked to their natural consequences, they engage ToM processes. In contrast, untrustworthy emotional expressions engage conflict-related brain regions. Copyright © 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Neural Correlates of Facial Mimicry: Simultaneous Measurements of EMG and BOLD Responses during Perception of Dynamic Compared to Static Facial Expressions

PubMed Central

Rymarczyk, Krystyna; Żurawski, Łukasz; Jankowiak-Siuda, Kamila; Szatkowska, Iwona

2018-01-01

Facial mimicry (FM) is an automatic response to imitate the facial expressions of others. However, neural correlates of the phenomenon are as yet not well established. We investigated this issue using simultaneously recorded EMG and BOLD signals during perception of dynamic and static emotional facial expressions of happiness and anger. During display presentations, BOLD signals and zygomaticus major (ZM), corrugator supercilii (CS) and orbicularis oculi (OO) EMG responses were recorded simultaneously from 46 healthy individuals. Subjects reacted spontaneously to happy facial expressions with increased EMG activity in ZM and OO muscles and decreased CS activity, which was interpreted as FM. Facial muscle responses correlated with BOLD activity in regions associated with motor simulation of facial expressions [i.e., inferior frontal gyrus, a classical Mirror Neuron System (MNS)]. Further, we also found correlations for regions associated with emotional processing (i.e., insula, part of the extended MNS). It is concluded that FM involves both motor and emotional brain structures, especially during perception of natural emotional expressions. PMID:29467691

Emotional Processing in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis of 25 Functional Neuroimaging Studies.

PubMed

Thorsen, Anders Lillevik; Hagland, Pernille; Radua, Joaquim; Mataix-Cols, David; Kvale, Gerd; Hansen, Bjarne; van den Heuvel, Odile A

2018-06-01

Patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) experience aversive emotions in response to obsessions, motivating avoidance and compulsive behaviors. However, there is considerable ambiguity regarding the brain circuitry involved in emotional processing in OCD, especially whether activation is altered in the amygdala. We conducted a systematic literature review and performed a meta-analysis-seed-based d mapping-of 25 whole-brain neuroimaging studies (including 571 patients and 564 healthy control subjects) using functional magnetic resonance imaging or positron emission tomography, comparing brain activation of patients with OCD and healthy control subjects during presentation of emotionally valenced versus neutral stimuli. Meta-regressions were employed to investigate possible moderators. Patients with OCD, compared with healthy control subjects, showed increased activation in the bilateral amygdala, right putamen, orbitofrontal cortex extending into the anterior cingulate and ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and middle temporal and left inferior occipital cortices during emotional processing. Right amygdala hyperactivation was most pronounced in unmedicated patients. Symptom severity was related to increased activation in the orbitofrontal and anterior cingulate cortices and precuneus. Greater comorbidity with mood and anxiety disorders was associated with higher activation in the right amygdala, putamen, and insula as well as with lower activation in the left amygdala and right ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Patients with OCD show increased emotional processing-related activation in limbic, frontal, and temporal regions. Previous mixed evidence regarding the role of the amygdala in OCD has likely been influenced by patient characteristics (such as medication status) and low statistical power. Copyright © 2018 Society of Biological Psychiatry. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

A Preliminary Study of DBH (Encoding Dopamine Beta-Hydroxylase) Genetic Variation and Neural Correlates of Emotional and Motivational Processing in Individuals With and Without Pathological Gambling.

PubMed

Yang, Bao-Zhu; Balodis, Iris M; Lacadie, Cheryl M; Xu, Jiansong; Potenza, Marc N

2016-06-01

Background and aims Corticostriatal-limbic neurocircuitry, emotional and motivational processing, dopaminergic and noradrenergic systems and genetic factors have all been implicated in pathological gambling (PG). However, allelic variants of genes influencing dopaminergic and noradrenergic neurotransmitters have not been investigated with respect to the neural correlates of emotional and motivational states in PG. Dopamine beta-hydroxylase (DBH) converts dopamine to norepinephrine; the T allele of a functional single-nucleotide polymorphism rs1611115 (C-1021T) in the DBH gene is associated with less DBH activity and has been linked to emotional processes and addiction. Here, we investigate the influence of rs1611115 on the neural correlates of emotional and motivational processing in PG and healthy comparison (HC) participants. Methods While undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging, 18 PG and 25 HC participants, all European Americans, viewed gambling-, sad-, and cocaine-related videotapes. Analyses focused on brain activation differences related to DBH genotype (CC/T-carrier [i.e., CT and TT]) and condition (sad/gambling/cocaine). Results CC participants demonstrated greater recruitment of corticostriatal-limbic regions, relative to T-carriers. DBH variants were also associated with altered corticostriatal-limbic activations across the different videotape conditions, and this association appeared to be driven by greater activation in CC participants relative to T-carriers during the sad condition. CC relative to T-carrier subjects also reported greater subjective sadness to the sad videotapes. Conclusions Individual differences in genetic composition linked to aminergic function contribute significantly to emotional regulation across diagnostic groups and warrant further investigation in PG.

Brain responses to 40-Hz binaural beat and effects on emotion and memory.

PubMed

Jirakittayakorn, Nantawachara; Wongsawat, Yodchanan

2017-10-01

Gamma oscillation plays a role in binding process or sensory integration, a process by which several brain areas beside primary cortex are activated for higher perception of the received stimulus. Beta oscillation is also involved in interpreting received stimulus and occurs following gamma oscillation, and this process is known as gamma-to-beta transition, a process for neglecting unnecessary stimuli in surrounding environment. Gamma oscillation also associates with cognitive functions, memory and emotion. Therefore, modulation of the brain activity can lead to manipulation of cognitive functions. The stimulus used in this study was 40-Hz binaural beat because binaural beat induces frequency following response. This study aimed to investigate the neural oscillation responding to the 40-Hz binaural beat and to evaluate working memory function and emotional states after listening to that stimulus. Two experiments were developed based on the study aims. In the first experiment, electroencephalograms were recorded while participants listened to the stimulus for 30min. The results suggested that frontal, temporal, and central regions were activated within 15min. In the second experiment, word list recall task was conducted before and after listening to the stimulus for 20min. The results showed that, after listening, the recalled words were increase in the working memory portion of the list. Brunel Mood Scale, a questionnaire to evaluate emotional states, revealed changes in emotional states after listening to the stimulus. The emotional results suggested that these changes were consistent with the induced neural oscillations. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The Impact of Anxiety-Inducing Distraction on Cognitive Performance: A Combined Brain Imaging and Personality Investigation

PubMed Central

Denkova, Ekaterina; Wong, Gloria; Dolcos, Sanda; Sung, Keen; Wang, Lihong; Coupland, Nicholas; Dolcos, Florin

2010-01-01

Background Previous investigations revealed that the impact of task-irrelevant emotional distraction on ongoing goal-oriented cognitive processing is linked to opposite patterns of activation in emotional and perceptual vs. cognitive control/executive brain regions. However, little is known about the role of individual variations in these responses. The present study investigated the effect of trait anxiety on the neural responses mediating the impact of transient anxiety-inducing task-irrelevant distraction on cognitive performance, and on the neural correlates of coping with such distraction. We investigated whether activity in the brain regions sensitive to emotional distraction would show dissociable patterns of co-variation with measures indexing individual variations in trait anxiety and cognitive performance. Methodology/Principal Findings Event-related fMRI data, recorded while healthy female participants performed a delayed-response working memory (WM) task with distraction, were investigated in conjunction with behavioural measures that assessed individual variations in both trait anxiety and WM performance. Consistent with increased sensitivity to emotional cues in high anxiety, specific perceptual areas (fusiform gyrus - FG) exhibited increased activity that was positively correlated with trait anxiety and negatively correlated with WM performance, whereas specific executive regions (right lateral prefrontal cortex - PFC) exhibited decreased activity that was negatively correlated with trait anxiety. The study also identified a role of the medial and left lateral PFC in coping with distraction, as opposed to reflecting a detrimental impact of emotional distraction. Conclusions These findings provide initial evidence concerning the neural mechanisms sensitive to individual variations in trait anxiety and WM performance, which dissociate the detrimental impact of emotion distraction and the engagement of mechanisms to cope with distracting emotions. Our study sheds light on the neural correlates of emotion-cognition interactions in normal behaviour, which has implications for understanding factors that may influence susceptibility to affective disorders, in general, and to anxiety disorders, in particular. PMID:21152391

Adolescent Emotional Maturation through Divergent Models of Brain Organization

PubMed Central

Oron Semper, Jose V.; Murillo, Jose I.; Bernacer, Javier

2016-01-01

In this article we introduce the hypothesis that neuropsychological adolescent maturation, and in particular emotional management, may have opposing explanations depending on the interpretation of the assumed brain architecture, that is, whether a componential computational account (CCA) or a dynamic systems perspective (DSP) is used. According to CCA, cognitive functions are associated with the action of restricted brain regions, and this association is temporally stable; by contrast, DSP argues that cognitive functions are better explained by interactions between several brain areas, whose engagement in specific functions is temporal and context-dependent and based on neural reuse. We outline the main neurobiological facts about adolescent maturation, focusing on the neuroanatomical and neurofunctional processes associated with adolescence. We then explain the importance of emotional management in adolescent maturation. We explain the interplay between emotion and cognition under the scope of CCA and DSP, both at neural and behavioral levels. Finally, we justify why, according to CCA, emotional management is understood as regulation, specifically because the cognitive aspects of the brain are in charge of regulating emotion-related modules. However, the key word in DSP is integration, since neural information from different brain areas is integrated from the beginning of the process. Consequently, although the terms should not be conceptually confused, there is no cognition without emotion, and vice versa. Thus, emotional integration is not an independent process that just happens to the subject, but a crucial part of personal growth. Considering the importance of neuropsychological research in the development of educational and legal policies concerning adolescents, we intend to expose that the holistic view of adolescents is dependent on whether one holds the implicit or explicit interpretation of brain functioning. PMID:27602012

Event-related potentials in response to emotional words in patients with major depressive disorder and healthy controls.

PubMed

Liu, Hong; Yin, Hui-fang; Wu, Da-xing; Xu, Shu-jing

2014-01-01

Dysfunctional cognitive processing and abnormal brain activation in response to emotional stimuli have long been recognized as core features of the major depressive disorder (MDD). The aim of this study was to examine how Chinese patients with MDD process Chinese emotional words presented to either the left (LH) or right hemisphere (RH). Reaction time (RT) and the late positive component of the event-related potential were measured while subjects judged the valence (positive or negative) of emotional words written in Chinese. Compared to healthy controls, patients with MDD exhibited slower RTs in response to negative words. In all subjects, the RTs in response to negative words were significantly faster than RTs in response to positive words presented to the LH, as well as significantly faster than responses to negative words presented to the RH. Compared to healthy controls, MDD patients exhibited reduced activation of the central and left regions of the brain in response to both negative and positive words. In healthy controls, the posterior brain areas were more active than the anterior brain areas when responding to negative words. All individuals showed faster RTs in response to negative words compared to positive words. In addition, MDD patients showed lateralization of brain activity in response to emotional words, whereas healthy individuals did not show this lateralization. Posterior brain areas appear to play an especially important role in discriminating and experiencing negative emotional words. This study provides further evidence in support of the negative bias hypothesis and the emotional processing theory.

Adolescents’ risky decision-making activates neural networks related to social cognition and cognitive control processes

PubMed Central

Rodrigo, María José; Padrón, Iván; de Vega, Manuel; Ferstl, Evelyn C.

2014-01-01

This study examines by means of functional magnetic resonance imaging the neural mechanisms underlying adolescents’ risk decision-making in social contexts. We hypothesize that the social context could engage brain regions associated with social cognition processes and developmental changes are also expected. Sixty participants (adolescents: 17–18, and young adults: 21–22 years old) read narratives describing typical situations of decision-making in the presence of peers. They were asked to make choices in risky situations (e.g., taking or refusing a drug) or ambiguous situations (e.g., eating a hamburger or a hotdog). Risky as compared to ambiguous scenarios activated bilateral temporoparietal junction (TPJ), bilateral middle temporal gyrus (MTG), right medial prefrontal cortex, and the precuneus bilaterally; i.e., brain regions related to social cognition processes, such as self-reflection and theory of mind (ToM). In addition, brain structures related to cognitive control were active [right anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), bilateral orbitofrontal cortex], whereas no significant clusters were obtained in the reward system (ventral striatum). Choosing the dangerous option involved a further activation of control areas (ACC) and emotional and social cognition areas (temporal pole). Adolescents employed more neural resources than young adults in the right DLPFC and the right TPJ in risk situations. When choosing the dangerous option, young adults showed a further engagement in ToM related regions (bilateral MTG) and in motor control regions related to the planning of actions (pre-supplementary motor area). Finally, the right insula and the right superior temporal gyrus were more activated in women than in men, suggesting more emotional involvement and more intensive modeling of the others’ perspective in the risky conditions. These findings call for more comprehensive developmental accounts of decision-making in social contexts that incorporate the role of emotional and social cognition processes. PMID:24592227

Resting-state networks associated with cognitive processing show more age-related decline than those associated with emotional processing.

PubMed

Nashiro, Kaoru; Sakaki, Michiko; Braskie, Meredith N; Mather, Mara

2017-06-01

Correlations in activity across disparate brain regions during rest reveal functional networks in the brain. Although previous studies largely agree that there is an age-related decline in the "default mode network," how age affects other resting-state networks, such as emotion-related networks, is still controversial. Here we used a dual-regression approach to investigate age-related alterations in resting-state networks. The results revealed age-related disruptions in functional connectivity in all 5 identified cognitive networks, namely the default mode network, cognitive-auditory, cognitive-speech (or speech-related somatosensory), and right and left frontoparietal networks, whereas such age effects were not observed in the 3 identified emotion networks. In addition, we observed age-related decline in functional connectivity in 3 visual and 3 motor/visuospatial networks. Older adults showed greater functional connectivity in regions outside 4 out of the 5 identified cognitive networks, consistent with the dedifferentiation effect previously observed in task-based functional magnetic resonance imaging studies. Both reduced within-network connectivity and increased out-of-network connectivity were correlated with poor cognitive performance, providing potential biomarkers for cognitive aging. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Neural Bases of Social Anxiety Disorder: Emotional Reactivity and Cognitive Regulation During Social and Physical Threat

PubMed Central

Goldin, Philippe R.; Manber, Tali; Hakimi, Shabnam; Canli, Turhan; Gross, James J.

2014-01-01

Context Social anxiety disorder is thought to involve emotional hyper-reactivity, cognitive distortions, and ineffective emotion regulation. While the neural bases of emotional reactivity to social stimuli have been described, the neural bases of emotional reactivity and cognitive regulation during social and physical threat, and their relationship to social anxiety symptom severity, have yet to be investigated. Objective This study investigated behavioral and neural correlates of emotional reactivity and cognitive regulation in patients and controls during processing of social and physical threat stimuli. Design Participants were trained to implement cognitive-linguistic regulation of emotional reactivity induced by social (harsh facial expressions) and physical (violent scenes) threat while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging and providing behavioral ratings of negative emotion experience. Setting Academic psychology department. Participants 15 adults with social anxiety disorder and 17 demographically-matched healthy controls. Main Outcome Measures Blood oxygen level dependent signal and negative emotion ratings. Results Behaviorally, patients reported greater negative emotion than controls during social and physical threat, but showed equivalent reduction in negative emotion following cognitive regulation. Neurally, viewing social threat resulted in greater emotion-related neural responses in patients than controls, with social anxiety symptom severity related to activity in a network of emotion and attention processing regions in patients only. Viewing physical threat produced no between-group differences. Regulation during social threat resulted in greater cognitive and attention regulation-related brain activation in controls compared to patients. Regulation during physical threat produced greater cognitive control-related response (i.e., right DLPFC) in patients compared to controls. Conclusions Compared to controls, patients demonstrated exaggerated negative emotion reactivity and reduced cognitive regulation related neural activation, specifically for social threat stimuli. These findings help to elucidate potential neural mechanisms of emotion regulation that might serve as biomarkers for interventions for social anxiety disorder. PMID:19188539

Neural representation of emotion regulation goals.

PubMed

Morawetz, Carmen; Bode, Stefan; Baudewig, Juergen; Jacobs, Arthur M; Heekeren, Hauke R

2016-02-01

The use of top-down cognitive control mechanisms to regulate emotional responses as circumstances change is critical for mental and physical health. Several theoretical models of emotion regulation have been postulated; it remains unclear, however, in which brain regions emotion regulation goals (e.g., the downregulation of fear) are represented. Here, we examined the neural mechanisms of regulating emotion using fMRI and identified brain regions representing reappraisal goals. Using a multimethodological analysis approach, combining standard activation-based and pattern-information analyses, we identified a distributed network of lateral frontal, temporal, and parietal regions implicated in reappraisal and within it, a core system that represents reappraisal goals in an abstract, stimulus-independent fashion. Within this core system, the neural pattern-separability in a subset of regions including the left inferior frontal gyrus, middle temporal gyrus, and inferior parietal lobe was related to the success in emotion regulation. Those brain regions might link the prefrontal control regions with the subcortical affective regions. Given the strong association of this subsystem with inner speech functions and semantic memory, we conclude that those cognitive mechanisms may be used for orchestrating emotion regulation. Hum Brain Mapp 37:600-620, 2016. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Abnormalities in emotion processing within cortical and subcortical regions in criminal psychopaths: evidence from a functional magnetic resonance imaging study using pictures with emotional content.

PubMed

Müller, Jürgen L; Sommer, Monika; Wagner, Verena; Lange, Kirsten; Taschler, Heidrun; Röder, Christian H; Schuierer, Gerhardt; Klein, Helmfried E; Hajak, Göran

2003-07-15

Neurobiology of psychopathy is important for our understanding of current neuropsychiatric questions. Despite a growing interest in biological research in psychopathy, its neural underpinning remains obscure. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to study the influence of affective contents on brain activation in psychopaths. Series containing positive and negative pictures from the International Affective Picture System were shown to six male psychopaths and six male control subjects while 100 whole-brain echo-planar-imaging measurements were acquired. Differences in brain activation were evaluated using BrainVoyager software 4.6. In psychopaths, increased activation through negative contents was found right-sided in prefrontal regions and amygdala. Activation was reduced right-sided in the subgenual cingulate and the temporal gyrus, and left-sided in the dorsal cingulate and the parahippocampal gyrus. Increased activation through positive contents was found left-sided in the orbitofrontal regions. Activation was reduced in right medial frontal and medial temporal regions. These findings underline the hypotheses that psychopathy is neurobiologically reflected by dysregulation and disturbed functional connectivity of emotion-related brain regions. These findings may be interpreted within a framework including prefrontal regions that provide top-down control to and regulate bottom-up signals from limbic areas. Because of the small sample size, the results of this study have to be regarded as preliminary.

Neural Reactivity to Emotional Faces May Mediate the Relationship Between Childhood Empathy and Adolescent Prosocial Behavior.

PubMed

Flournoy, John C; Pfeifer, Jennifer H; Moore, William E; Tackman, Allison M; Masten, Carrie L; Mazziotta, John C; Iacoboni, Marco; Dapretto, Mirella

2016-11-01

Reactivity to others' emotions not only can result in empathic concern (EC), an important motivator of prosocial behavior, but can also result in personal distress (PD), which may hinder prosocial behavior. Examining neural substrates of emotional reactivity may elucidate how EC and PD differentially influence prosocial behavior. Participants (N = 57) provided measures of EC, PD, prosocial behavior, and neural responses to emotional expressions at ages 10 and 13. Initial EC predicted subsequent prosocial behavior. Initial EC and PD predicted subsequent reactivity to emotions in the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and inferior parietal lobule, respectively. Activity in the IFG, a region linked to mirror neuron processes, as well as cognitive control and language, mediated the relation between initial EC and subsequent prosocial behavior. © 2016 The Authors. Child Development © 2016 Society for Research in Child Development, Inc.