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Although empathy for pain plays an important role in positive interpersonal relationships and encourages engagement in prosocial behavior, it remains largely unknown whether empathy for pain could be effectively altered by psychophysiological techniques. This study aimed to investigate the impact of a single session of diaphragmatic breathing practice on empathy for pain and examine the potential mechanism involving interoceptive awareness. A total of 66 healthy participants were randomly assigned to the intervention group or the control group. The intervention group received a 15‐minute diaphragmatic breathing (DB) practice with real‐time biofeedback, while the control group was to gaze at a black screen at rest and not engaged in any other activities. Before and after the invention, all participants were instructed to evaluate the intensity and unpleasantness of empathy for pain while watching different pictures with pain or non‐pain conditions. The Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness (MAIA) was then administered to measure interoceptive awareness. The results indicated a significant interaction between group and time with regard to empathy for pain and MAIA. The DB group showed a statistically significant decrease in both pain intensity and unpleasantness during the pain picture condition, as well as a noteworthy increase in MAIA scores. The control group did not demonstrate any substantial changes. More importantly, the regulation of attention, a dimension of MAIA, had a significant mediating effect on the impact of diaphragmatic breathing on reported unpleasantness. Diaphragmatic breathing could serve as a simple, convenient, and practical strategy to optimize human empathy for pain that warrants further investigation, which has important implications not only for individuals with impaired empathy for pain but also for the improvement of interoceptive awareness. This is the first RCT study to adopt a single session of intervention to influence empathy for pain by using an experimental evaluation paradigm. The results showed that 15‐minute diaphragmatic breathing significantly decreased pain intensity and unpleasantness caused by empathy for pain, and interoceptive awareness mediated the effect of diaphragmatic breathing on the unpleasantness level of empathy for pain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The promoter of prosocial behavior in fighting against the COVID-19 pandemic needs to be examined. Here, we examined the effect of experienced awe through cross-sectional (Study 1), a 3-wave longitudinal (Study 2) and experimental (Study 3–4) approaches. Study 1 showed that dispositional awe positively predicted one's prosocial behavior in the pandemic (N = 1281). Study 2 (N = 332) observed that experienced awe predicted higher prosociality, and this relationship was serially mediated by connectedness and empathy. Study 3 (N = 153) and 4 (N = 156) confirmed that elicited awe, compared to that of amusement and neutrality, promoted multiple types of prosociality (Study 3) and willingness of blood donation (Study 4) via serial mediation of connectedness and empathy. These findings suggest that the experience of awe increases one's connectedness to the world, which in turn enhances empathic concern and prosociality in pandemic fighting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines whether the modality effect can be used to improve visual time perception. In Experiment 1, we used a time-reproduction task to explore the accuracy (i.e., deviation of reproduced time from veridical time) and precision (i.e., variability of reproduced time) of time perception under auditory, visual, or audiovisual conditions. Results confirmed the existence of a modality effect. Experiments 2a and 2b and Experiment 3 examined whether adding auditory stimuli improves visual time perception. In Experiments 2a and 2b, participants were required to sound when the visual stimuli appeared. Results showed that the addition of sound to visual stimuli perception is associated with higher time perception accuracy than viewing visual stimuli alone. Given that sounding is not always applicable, we conducted Experiment 3, with participants asked to imagine sounds instead of sounding. Results showed that imaginary sounds improved accuracy. However, in Experiments 2a, 2b, and 3, neither sounding nor imagining sounds changed the precision of time perception. The findings of this study indicate that adding auditory stimuli reliably improves the accuracy of visual-time perception, irrespective of whether the sound is real or imagined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Automatic emotion regulation (AER) plays a vital role in the neuropathology underlying both suicide and self-harm via modifying emotional impact effortlessly. However, both the effortless account and the neural mechanisms of AER are undetermined. To investigate the neural changes at AER, we collected functional MRI (fMRI) in 31 participants who attended to neutral and disgust pictures in three conditions: watching, goal intention (GI), and reappraisal by implementation intention (RII). Results showed that RII (but not GI) decreased negative feelings and bilateral amygdala activity without increasing cognitive efforts, evidenced by the reduced effort rating and less prefrontal engagement during RII compared with during watching and GI. These emotion-regulatory effects of RII cannot be explained by emotional habituation, as the supplementary experiment (N = 31) showed no emotional habituation effects when the same disgust pictures were presented repeatedly three times for each watching and GI condition. Task-based network analysis showed both RII and GI relative to watching increased functional connectivities (FCs) of the ventral anterior cingulate cortex to the left insula and right precuneus during conditions, two FCs subserving goal setup. However, RII relative to GI exhibited weaker FCs in brain networks subserving effortful control, memory retrieval, aversive anticipation, and motor planning. In these FCs, the FC intensity of putamen-operculum/lingual and paracentral-superior temporal gyri positively predicted regulatory difficulty ratings. These findings suggest that the setup of implementation intention automatizes emotion regulation by reducing the online mobilization of emotion-coping neural systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anxiety has been found to lengthen time perception, especially the time perception of negative stimuli. This anxiety-related time overestimation is thought to be mainly associated with massively increased arousal. Suppression, which can be achieved either deliberately or automatically, has been demonstrated to be effective in reducing arousal. Consequently, the present study explored the effectiveness of both deliberate suppression (Experiment 1) and automatic suppression (Experiment 2) in reducing the time distortion in anxiety. A temporal bisection task (TBT), featuring negative and neutral pictures, was used to measure time perception, while the self-reported arousal was used to assess arousal. The deliberate suppression was manipulated by asking participants to suppress their emotional expressions; while automatic suppression was manipulated through a sentence-unscrambling task featuring suppression-related words, which can unconsciously prime suppression. The results of Experiment 1 showed that deliberate suppression did not reduce the anxiety-related time overestimation and arousal. However, Experiment 2 showed that automatic suppression significantly reduced the anxiety-related time overestimation, with significant arousal reduction being observed. In conclusion, automatic suppression, but not deliberate suppression, is effective for reducing the effect of anxiety on time perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Family socioeconomic status (SES) is known to have a powerful influence on adolescent depression. However, the mechanisms underlying this association are unclear. Here, we explore this issue by testing the potential mediating roles of social support (interpersonal resource) and optimism (intrapersonal resource), based on the predictions of the reserve capacity model (RCM). Participants were 652 adolescents [age range: 11–20 years old, M age = 14.55 years, SD = 1.82; 338 boys (51.80%)] from two junior and two senior high schools in Wuhan, China. They completed questionnaires measuring family SES, perceived social support, optimism, and depression. Results showed, as predicted, (1) SES negatively predicted adolescent depression; (2) social support and optimism serially mediated the relations between SES and depression, consistent with the predictions by the RCM. Specifically, higher SES predicted greater social support and increased optimism, which in turn contributed to reduced depression. The implications of these data to the prevention and interventions of adolescent depression were discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Implementation intention has proven effective in regulating intense emotions but is found to be difficult when instructed regulation is used. Here, we aim to test whether automatic reappraisal-based implementation intention (RII) downregulates intense negative emotion more efficiently than controlled reappraisal (CR) using a two-phase event-related potential decreased subjective experiences of negative emotion relative to passive watching, irrespective of emotional intensity. Moreover, RII reduced the central–parietal late positive potential (LPP) amplitudes for both intensities in the 300–1,700-ms epoch after picture onset, whereas CR reduced LPP amplitudes just in the 500–700-ms interval. Moreover, the application of RII but not CR produced a reliable long-term LPP attenuation compared to passive watching in the unexpected re-exposure phase. These findings demonstrate that reappraisal-based implementation intention yields an earlier and more sustainable emotion regulatory effects than controlled reappraisal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The linearity and stationarity of fMRI time series need to be understood due to their important roles in the choice of approach for brain network analysis. In this paper, we investigated the stationarity and linearity of resting-state fMRI (rs-fMRI) time-series data from the Midnight Scan Club datasets. The degree of stationarity (DS) and the degree of non-linearity (DN) were, respectively, estimated for the time series of all gray matter voxels. The similarity and difference between the DS and DN were assessed in terms of voxels and intrinsic brain networks, including the visual network, somatomotor network, dorsal attention network, ventral attention network, limbic network, frontoparietal network, and default-mode network. The test-retest scans were utilized to quantify the reliability of DS and DN. We found that DS and DN maps had overlapping spatial distribution. Meanwhile, the probability density estimate function of DS had a long tail, and that of DN had a more normal distribution. Specifically, stronger DS was present in the somatomotor, limbic, and ventral attention networks compared to other networks, and stronger DN was found in the somatomotor, visual, limbic, ventral attention, and default-mode networks. The percentage of overlapping voxels between DS and DN in different networks demonstrated a decreasing trend in the order default mode, ventral attention, somatomotor, frontoparietal, dorsal attention, visual, and limbic. Furthermore, the ICC values of DS were higher than those of DN. Our results suggest that different functional networks have distinct properties of non-stationarity and non-linearity owing to the complexity of rs-fMRI time series. Thus, caution should be taken when analyzing fMRI data (both resting-state and task-activation) using simplified models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Instructed fear, which denotes fearful emotions learned from others' verbal instructions, is an important form of fear acquisition in humans. Maladaptive instructed fear produces detrimental effects on health, but little is known about performing an efficient regulation of instructed fear and its underlying neural substrates. To address this question, 26 subjects performed an instructed fear task where emotional experiences and functional neuroimages were recorded during watching, explicit regulation (calmness imagination), and implicit regulation (calmness priming) conditions. Results indicated that implicit regulation decreased activity in the left amygdala and left insula for instructed fear; however, these effects were absent in explicit regulation. The implementation of implicit regulation did not increase activity in the frontoparietal control regions, while explicit regulation increased dorsolateral prefrontal cortex activity. Furthermore, implicit regulation increased functional connectivity between the right amygdala and right fusiform gyrus, and decreased functional connectivity between the right medial temporal gyrus and left inferior frontal gyrus, which are key nodes of memory retrieval and cognitive control networks, respectively. These findings suggest a favourable effect of implicit regulation on instructed fear, which is subserved by less involvement of control-related brain mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study investigated how unconscious priming of impulsivity control helps improve the performance of behavioral inhibitory control (BIC) using a Go/No‐go task and a two‐choice oddball task. Participants were divided into three priming conditions: impulsivity‐avoiding (IA), calmness‐pursuit (CP), and control group. Accuracy (ACC) cost (frequent–infrequent) in both tasks and reaction‐time (RT) cost (infrequent–frequent) in the two‐choice oddball task were used to assess BIC ability before and after the unconscious priming. The ACC cost, either in the Go/No‐go or in the two‐choice oddball task, was enhanced posttest relative to pretest, as indicated by the main effect of time. This effect arose from significantly increased ACC cost during posttest relative to pretest in the control group but not the IA and CP groups. Although no interaction of time and group was found in ACC cost analysis in either task, the analysis of RT cost in the two‐choice oddball task showed a significant interaction between group and time. Specifically, the IA group showed similar RT cost during posttest versus pretest, while the RT cost was significantly enhanced during posttest versus pretest in the CP and control groups. These results suggest that unconscious pursuit of an impulsivity‐avoidance goal is more effective in preventing one's impulsive behavior pattern than that of a calmness pursuit. Moreover, RT cost in the two‐choice oddball task is a more sensitive index than the traditional ACC cost in assessing one's BIC function. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cognitive reappraisal is associated with major depressive disorder (MDD), while spontaneous activity patterns of the default mode network (DMN) is implicated in reappraisal and MDD. However, neural mechanisms subserving the close association of spontaneous reappraisal and depression are unclear. Spontaneous reappraisal, depression and resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rsfMRI) were measured from 105 healthy subjects. We assessed the temporal complexity (Hurst exponent), Regional Homogeneity (ReHo) and fractional Amplitude of Low Frequency Fluctuation (fALFF) profiles of DMN, a network involved in both reappraisal and depression. Mediation effects of these standard measures on the relationship between reappraisal and depression, and the contributions of each DMN subregion, were assessed. Results indicated that Hurst exponent (H) of DMN, whether extracted by independent component analysis (ICA) or region of interest (ROI), was significantly associated with reappraisal scores. An individual with a higher reappraisal score has a lower Hurst value of DMN. Mediation analyses suggest that H of DMN partially mediates the association between reappraisal and the degree of depression, and this mediation effect arises from the contribution of medial prefrontal cortex. Neither ReHo nor fALFF showed a similar correlation or mediation effect. These findings suggest that temporal dynamics of DMN play an important role in emotion regulation and its association with depression. H of DMN may serve as a neural marker mediating the association between reappraisal and depression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Renewal of fear outside treatment context is a challenge for behavioral therapies. Prior studies suggest a social buffering effect that fear response is attenuated in the presence of social company. However, few studies have examined the role of social company in reducing fear renewal. Here, we used a Pavlovian fear conditioning procedure including acquisition, extinction and test stages to examine social buffering effect on fear memory renewal in male rats. The test context was manipulated to be either different from the extinction one in ABC model, or same as that in ACC model. All conditioned subjects underwent extinction individually in Experiment 1 but with a partner in Experiment 2. In test, both experiments manipulated social company (alone vs. accompanied) and context (ABC vs. ACC). Experiment 1 showed more freezing in ABC than in ACC model during the test-alone condition, indicating a fear renewal effect which, however, was absent during the test-accompanied condition. Also, accompanied subjects showed less freezing compared to alone subjects in the ABC model. In Experiment 2, animals showed a similar freezing in ABC and ACC models despite being tested alone, implying that social company offered at extinction disrupted fear renewal. Again, we observed reduced freezing in accompanied relative to alone subjects in the test. These results suggest that social company is effective in disrupting fear renewal after leaving treatment context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study investigated how pubertal development and sex interact to influence humans' emotion susceptibility during adolescence. Event-related potentials were recorded for highly emotional, mildly emotional and neutral stimuli in positive and negative blocks, when 73 adolescents (36 pre-/early pubertal students, 19 boys, 10-12 years old; 37 mid-/late pubertal students, 18 boys, 11-13 years old) performed an implicit emotion task. Behavioral analysis showed higher positive mood ratings for pre-/early compared to mid-/late pubertal subjects, irrespective of sex and block. ERP analysis demonstrated increasing Late Positive Potential (LPP) amplitudes from neutral, Mildly Positive (MP) to Highly Positive (HP) stimuli in pre-/early pubertal, but not in mid-/late pubertal adolescents. However, girls exhibited higher P3a amplitudes during mid-/late relative to pre-/early puberty for negative stimuli irrespective of intensity; while this puberty effect was absent in boys. In addition, girls compared to boys exhibited a more pronounced LPP enhancement effect for Highly Negative (HN) stimuli and a lower threshold of responding to negative stimuli in P3b amplitudes, regardless of puberty. These results suggest that, though there is a puberty-independent sensitivity to negative stimuli in girls relative to boys, puberty selectively intensifies girls' attention bias for negative stimuli and reduces experiential sensitivity to positive stimuli in both sexes. The implication of these results for the sex-related psychopathology during adolescence were discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]