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Abstract: Previous studies have extensively reported an advantage of females in identifying negative facial emotions as compared with males. Nevertheless, why females are better in performance relative to males during emotion recognition tasks is still unknown, and the neural mechanism(s) underlying this phenomenon has yet to be directly investigated. As facial affects convey emotional information which is adaptively important and the recognition of a given facial affect generally evokes individuals'' emotion of the same type [Dimberg, U., 1997. Facial reactions: rapidly evoked emotional responses. J. Psychophysiol. 11, 115–123], the present study assumes that the female advantage in emotion recognition may result from the attenuated sensitivity of males to emotionally negative stimuli of lesser valence intensity compared to that of females. In contrast, each gender may be comparably sensitive to emotionally negative stimuli of enhanced salience as suggested by the emotional negativity bias. To test this hypothesis, event-related potentials were recorded for highly negative (HN), moderately negative (MN), and Neutral deviant images while subjects (15 males, 15 females) perform a standard/deviant categorization task, irrespective of the emotional valence of deviants. The results demonstrated more negative ERP deflections during HN condition than during MN and Neutral conditions at early N2 and later P3 components, irrespective of gender. Moreover, MN condition elicited significantly more negative deflections than the Neutral condition across N2 and P3 components only in females, and the MN−Neutral difference waveform in females during 250–450 ms interval was localized to the right prefrontal cortex. Thus, apart from the increased sensitivity of both genders to the highly negative stimuli, the present study demonstrated that women, instead of men, are sensitive to emotionally negative stimuli of lesser saliency, which may be an important mechanism underlying the female advantage in identifying negative emotions, and the right prefrontal cortex may be the neural basis underlying the female-specific sensitivity to emotionally negative stimuli of lesser salience. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Nitric oxide (NO) is an important retrograde neuronal intracellular messenger which plays an important role in synaptic plasticity and is involved in learning and memory. However, evidence that NO is particularly important for the acquisition of contextual fear conditioning is mixed. Also, little is known about at which stages of the contextual fear conditioning does NO make its contribution. In the present study, we used 7-nitroindazole to temporarily inhibit neural nitric oxide synthase at either the pre-exposure stage or conditioning stage in a two-process paradigm and examined the potential contribution that NO makes to the contextually conditioned fear. Results showed that the expression of contextual fear memory was significantly impaired in rats treated with 7-nitroindazole (30 mg/kg, i.p.) prior to the pairing of context-shock ( p = 0.034, n = 8), but not after the conditioning phase ( p = 0.846, n = 8). In addition, the expression of contextual fear memory and reconsolidation was not significantly impaired by 7-nitroindazole administered prior to the context pre-exposure stage or prior to another context-shock learning. These findings suggest that NO is specifically involved in the acquisition but not the consolidation, retrieval or reconsolidation of contextual fear memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The composite face effect (CFE) is central for face recognition research, its association with attention processes has been long debated but neuroimaging evidence remains absent. • Neurocognitive correlates of the CFE were investigated by fMRI scanning, leveraging independent functional localizers, univariate and multidimensional analyses. • Multidimensional scaling identified two principal dimensions in the behavioral CFE effect, suggesting the contribution of attentional and decision components. • Beyond the face processing network, univariate GLM analysis revealed noticeable involvement of regions in the attention network in the CFE effect. • ROI-based and whole-brain representation similarity analyses showed better behavioral-neural correspondence in the attention network over the face processing network. The composite face effect (CFE) is recognized as a hallmark for holistic face processing, but our knowledge remains sparse about its cognitive and neural loci. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging with independent localizer and complete composite face task, we here investigated its neural-behavioral correspondence within face processing and attention networks. Complementing classical comparisons, we adopted a dimensional reduction approach to explore the core cognitive constructs of the behavioral CFE measurement. Our univariate analyses found an alignment effect in regions associated with both the extended face processing network and attention networks. Further representational similarity analyses based on Euclidian distances among all experimental conditions were used to identify cortical regions with reliable neural-behavioral correspondences. Multidimensional scaling and hierarchical clustering analyses for neural-behavioral correspondence data revealed two principal components underlying the behavioral CFE effect, which fit best to the neural responses in the bilateral insula and medial frontal gyrus. These findings highlight the distinct neurocognitive contributions of both face processing and attentional networks to the behavioral CFE outcome, which bridge the gaps between face recognition and attentional control models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emotional regulation is known to be associated with activity in the amygdala. The amygdala is an emotion-generative region that comprises of structurally and functionally distinct nuclei. However, little is known about the contributions of different frontal-amygdala sub-region pathways to emotion regulation. Here, we investigated how functional couplings between frontal regions and amygdala sub-regions are involved in different spontaneous emotion regulation processes by using an individual-difference approach and a generalized psycho-physiological interaction (gPPI) approach. Specifically, 50 healthy participants reported their dispositional use of spontaneous cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression in daily life and their actual use of these two strategies during the performance of an emotional-picture watching task. Results showed that functional coupling between the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and the basolateral amygdala (BLA) was associated with higher scores of both dispositional and actual uses of reappraisal. Similarly, functional coupling between the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) and the centromedial amygdala (CMA) was associated with higher scores of both dispositional and actual uses of suppression. Mediation analyses indicated that functional coupling of the right OFC-BLA partially mediated the association between reappraisal and emotional response, irrespective of whether reappraisal was measured by dispositional use (indirect effect(SE)=-0.2021 (0.0811), 95%CI (BC) = [-0.3851, -0.0655]) or actual use (indirect effect(SE)=-0.1951 (0.0796), 95%CI (BC) = [-0.3654, -0.0518])). These findings suggest that spontaneous reappraisal and suppression involve distinct frontal- amygdala functional couplings, and the modulation of BLA activity from OFC may be necessary for changing emotional response during spontaneous reappraisal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]