Search

Emotion regulation (ER) is crucial in terms of mental health and social functioning. Attention deployment (AD) and cognitive reappraisal (CR) are both efficient cognitive ER strategies, which are based on partially dissociated neural effects. Our understanding of the neural underpinnings of ER is based on laboratory paradigms that study changes of the brain activation related to isolated emotional stimuli. To track the neural response to ER in the changing and dynamic environment of daily life, we extended the common existing paradigms by applying a sequence of emotionally provocative stimuli involving three aversive images. Eighteen participants completed an ER paradigm, in which they had to either shift their attention away from the emotionally negative images by counting backwards (AD strategy) or reinterpret the meaning of stimuli (CR strategy) to attain a down-regulation of affective responses. An increased recruitment of left-sided lateral and medial PFC was shown upon regulation of negative emotions with CR as compared to AD. Remarkably, the amygdala activation showed an increasing pattern of activation during CR. The inverse relationship between PFC and amygdala was compromised during elongated blocks of reappraisal, reflecting a reduction in engagement of the top-down prefrontal regulatory circuitry upon repeated exposure to negative stimuli. These results highlight that temporal dynamic of amygdala response and its functional connectivity differentiates AD and CR strategies in regulating emotions. Findings of the current study underscore the importance of adopting temporally variant approaches for investigating the neural effects of ER. Identifying neural systems that subserve down-regulation of negative emotions is of importance in developing treatment strategies for various forms of psychopathology.

Reappraisal is a particularly effective strategy for influencing emotional experiences, specifically for reducing the impact of negative stimuli. Although depression has repeatedly been linked to dysfunctional behavioral and neural emotion regulation, prefrontal and amygdala engagement seems to vary with clinical characteristics and the specific regulation strategy used. Whereas previous neuroimaging research has focused on down-regulating reactions to emotionally evocative scenes, the current study compared up- and down-regulation in response to angry facial expressions in patients with depression and healthy individuals. During the initial viewing of faces, patients with depression showed hypoactivation particularly in areas implicated in emotion generation, i.e., amygdala, insula and putamen. In contrast, up-regulating negative emotions yielded stronger recruitment of core face processing areas and posterior medial frontal cortex in patients than in controls. However, group differences did not extend to resting-state functional connectivity. Recurrent depression was inversely associated with amygdala activation specifically during down-regulation, but differences in medication status may limit the current findings. Despite a pattern of reduced neural emotional reactivity in mainly medicated patients, their 'successful' recruitment of the regulation network for up-regulation might point toward an effective use of reappraisal when increasing negative emotions. Future studies need to address how patients might benefit from transferring this ability to adaptive goals, such as improving interpersonal emotion regulation.

Adequate emotional control is essential for mental health. Deficiencies in emotion regulation are evident in many psychiatric disorders, including depression. Patients with depression show, for instance, disrupted neural emotion regulation in cognitive regulation regions such as lateral and medial prefrontal cortices. Since depressed individuals tend to attribute positive events to external circumstances and negative events to themselves, modifying this non-self-serving attributional style may represent a promising regulation strategy. Spontaneous causal attributions are generally processed in medial brain structures, particularly the precuneus. However, so far no study has investigated neural correlates of instructed causal attributions (e.g. instructing a person to intentionally relate positive events to the self) and their potential to regulate emotions. The current study therefore aimed to examine how instructed causal attributions of positive and negative events affect the emotional experience of depressed individuals as well as its neural bases. For this purpose pictures of sad and happy faces were presented to 26 patients with a lifetime major depression (MDD) and 26 healthy controls (HC) during fMRI. Participants should respond naturally ("view") or imagine that the person on the picture was sad/happy because of them ("internal attribution") or because something else happened ("external attribution"). Trait attributional style and depressive symptoms were assessed with questionnaires to examine potential influential factors on emotion regulation ability. Results revealed that patients compared to controls show a non-self-serving trait attributional style (i.e. more external attributions of positive events and more internal attributions of negative events). Intriguingly, when instructed to apply specific causal attributions during the emotion regulation task, patients and controls were similarly able to regulate positive and negative emotions. Regulating emotions through instructed attributions (internal/external attribution>view) generally engaged the precuneus, which was correlated with patients' trait attributional style (i.e. more precuneus activation during external>view was linked to a general tendency to relate positive events to external sources). Up-regulating happiness through internal (compared to external) attributions recruited the parahippocampal gyrus only in controls. The down-regulation of sadness (external>internal attribution), in contrast, engaged the superior frontal gyrus only in patients. Superior frontal gyrus activation thereby correlated with depression severity, which implies a greater need of cognitive resources for a successful regulation in more severely depressed. Patients and controls did not differ in activation in brain regions related to cognitive emotion regulation or attribution. However, results point to a disturbed processing of positive emotions in depression. Interestingly, increased precuneus resting-state connectivity with emotion regulation brain regions (inferior parietal lobule, middle frontal gyrus) was linked to healthier attributions (i.e. external attributions of negative events) in patients and controls. Adequate neural communication between these regions therefore seem to facilitate an adaptive trait attributional style. Findings of this study emphasize that despite patients' dysfunctional trait attributional style, explicitly applying causal attributions effectively regulates emotions. Future research should examine the efficacy of instructed attributions in reducing negative affect and anhedonia in depressed patients, for instance by means of attribution trainings during psychotherapy., (Copyright © 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Background: In-vivo observations of neural processes during human aggressive behavior are difficult to obtain, limiting the number of studies in this area. To address this gap, the present study implemented a social reactive aggression paradigm in 29 healthy men, employing non-violent provocation in a two-player game to elicit aggressive behavior in fMRI settings., Results: Participants responded more aggressively after high provocation reflected in taking more money from their opponents. Comparing aggression trials after high provocation to those after low provocation revealed activations in neural circuits involved in aggression: the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), and the insula. In general, our findings indicate that aggressive behavior activates a complex, widespread brain network, reflecting a cortico-limbic interaction and overlapping with circuits underlying negative emotions and conflicting decision-making. Brain activation during provocation in the OFC was associated with the degree of aggressive behavior in this task., Conclusion: Therefore, data suggest there is greater susceptibility for provocation, rather than less inhibition of aggressive tendencies, in individuals with higher aggressive responses. This further supports the hypothesis that reactive aggression can be seen as a consequence of provocation of aggressive emotional responses and parallel evaluative regulatory processes mediated mainly by the insula and prefrontal areas (OFC, mPFC, dlPFC, and ACC) respectively.

Self-evaluation affects one's own mental state, social interactions and everyday life. Mood, in turn, has an impact on self-evaluation. However, the influence of mood on self-evaluation at the neural level has barely been examined. In this fMRI study, the interaction of mood and self-perception was investigated in 20 healthy participants. Happy, sad and neutral music was presented while participants were instructed to immerse themselves in the mood of the music and to rate how well presented traits characterized themselves. In a lexical control condition, subjects had to count a specific letter in the word. Behavioral data reflected successful mood induction. While self-ascription of positive traits was unaffected by mood, self-ascription of negative characteristics was decreased by negative affect. A positive correlation was found between self-worth scores and the difference in the amount of self-ascribed positive versus negative traits during negative mood induction. At the neural level, amygdalo-hippocampal, superior and middle temporal structures were differently involved in self-evaluation (vs. lexical processing) depending on the mood. While activation of the amygdalo-hippocampal complex was found during sad in comparison to both happy and neutral mood, superior/middle temporal gyrus (STG/MTG) activation was only found when contrasting sad vs. neutral mood. Further, a correlation analysis with self-worth ratings revealed a positive relation to STG activation during self-ascription of trait adjectives in sad compared to neutral mood. Our results underscore the importance of the current emotional state for self-evaluation and identify some neural correlates of this effect. Our findings in healthy research participants suggest a compensatory mechanism during sad mood induction to maintain a positive self-image, which is supported by activation of limbic and fronto-temporal cortex. Studies in clinically depressed populations could reveal whether this compensatory mechanism is aberrant., (Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Background: Empathy is a basic human ability, and patients with schizophrenia show dysfunctional empathic abilities on the behavioural and neural level., Aims: These dysfunctions may precede the onset of illness; thus, it seems mandatory to examine the empathic abilities in individuals at clinical high risk for psychosis., Method: Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we measured 15 individuals at clinical high risk of psychosis (CHR group) and compared their empathy performance with 15 healthy volunteers and 15 patients with schizophrenia., Results: Behavioural data analysis indicated no significant deficit in the CHR group. Functional data analysis revealed hyperactivation in a frontotemporoparietal network including the amygdala in the CHR group compared with the other two groups., Conclusions: Despite normal behavioural performance, the CHR group activated the neural empathy network differently and specifically showed hyperactivation in regions critical for emotion processing. This could suggest a compensatory mechanism reflecting emotional hypersensitivity or dysfunctional emotion regulation. Further investigations should clarify the role of these neural alterations for development and exacerbation of psychosis., (© The Royal College of Psychiatrists 2015.)

Deficits in emotion regulation are a prominent feature of psychiatric conditions and a promising target for treatment. For instance, cognitive reappraisal is regarded as an effective strategy for emotion regulation. Neurophysiological models have established the lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) as a key structure in the regulation of emotion processing through modulations of emotion-eliciting structures such as the amygdala. Feedback of the LPFC activity by real-time functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) may thus enhance the efficacy of cognitive reappraisal. During cognitive reappraisal of aversive visual stimuli, LPFC activity was fed back to the experimental group, whereas control participants received no such information. As a result, during reappraisal, amygdala activity was lower in the experimental group than in the controls. Furthermore, an increase of inter-hemispheric functional connectivity emerged in the feedback group. The current study extends the neurofeedback literature by suggesting that fMRI feedback can modify brain activity during a given task., (Copyright © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) suffer from various impairments in emotional functioning such as affective instability, inappropriate anger and unstable relationships. These deficits may influence two fundamental motivational systems, the behavioral inhibition system (BIS) and behavioral activation system (BAS). To investigate behavioral intentions and possible impairments in BPD we applied an implicit joystick task to measure implicit behavioral tendencies in response to facial expressions (happiness, sadness, anger, fear and neutral) in 25 patients with BPD and matched 25 healthy controls (HC). Additionally, we evaluated explicit approach and avoidance reactions to these social stimuli, emotion recognition abilities and subjective behavioral ratings. Our data analysis suggests that, although BPD patients accurately identified facial emotional expressions and reacted to them similarly as HC in the joystick task, they had significantly stronger avoidance tendencies in the rating task, especially for happiness and fear. On top of this they exhibited increased BIS sensitivity and decreased BAS sensitivity in the self-report measures. Possible influences are maladaptive cognitive schemas, high negative affect, insecure attachment style and a negative evaluation bias. The observed dysfunctional avoidance ratings may influence the appraisal of socially relevant stimuli and therefore adds further knowledge on social interaction problems in BPD., (Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.)

A primary function of cognitive control is to adjust the cognitive system according to situational demands. The so-called "conflict adaptation effect" elicited in laboratory experiments is supposed to reflect the above function. Neuroimaging studies suggest that adaptation of nonemotional conflict is mediated by the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex through a top-down enhancement of task-relevant (target), relative to task-irrelevant (distractor), stimulus representation in the sensory cortices. The adaptation of emotional conflict, on the other hand, is suggested to be related to the rostral anterior cingulate inhibiting the processing of emotional distractors through a top-down modulation of amygdala responsivity. In the present study, we manipulated, on a trial-by-trial basis, the levels of semantic interference conflict triggered by the incompatibility between emotional faces (targets) and emotional words (distractors) in a modified version of the emotional Stroop task. Similar to previous observations involving nonemotional interference effects, the behavioral adaptation of emotional conflict was found to be paralleled by a stronger recruitment of the fusiform face area. Additional areas related to the conflict adaptation effect were the bilateral insula, the bilateral frontal operculum (fO), the right amygdala, the left precentral and postcentral gyri, and the parietal cortex. These findings suggest that augmentation of cortical responses to task-relevant information in emotional conflict may be related to conflict adaptation processes in a way that has been observed in nonemotional conflict, challenging the view that brain circuitries underlying the conflict adaptation effect depend only on the nature of conflict.

Facial expressions convey important emotional and social information and are frequently applied in investigations of human affective processing. Dynamic faces may provide higher ecological validity to examine perceptual and cognitive processing of facial expressions. Higher order processing of emotional faces was addressed by varying the task and virtual face models systematically. Blood oxygenation level-dependent activation was assessed using functional magnetic resonance imaging in 20 healthy volunteers while viewing and evaluating either emotion or gender intensity of dynamic face stimuli. A general linear model analysis revealed that high valence activated a network of motion-responsive areas, indicating that visual motion areas support perceptual coding for the motion-based intensity of facial expressions. The comparison of emotion with gender discrimination task revealed increased activation of inferior parietal lobule, which highlights the involvement of parietal areas in processing of high level features of faces. Dynamic emotional stimuli may help to emphasize functions of the hypothesized 'extended' over the 'core' system for face processing.

Humans tend to have a positive self-evaluation (PSE). To what extent positive self-perception is interacting with valenced self-related memories is debated. The underlying neural substrates are not adequately explained yet. To explore the cerebral correlates of PSE and its influence on memory, 24 healthy subjects were asked during fMRI to decide in two conditions whether presented positive and negative personality traits characterized their own selves (self-evaluation) or an intimate other (other-evaluation). A lexical condition served as control task. In a subsequent unannounced recognition task, trait adjectives had to be classified as old or new. Activation during positive self- vs positive other-evaluation was found in the medial ventral and dorsolateral prefrontal gyri, the parahippocampus and the supplementary motor area. Memory increased for positive personality traits and traits that had been referred to oneself or the other. In contrast to adjectives of the other-evaluation or lexical condition, recollection of negative vs positive traits of the self-evaluation condition specifically induced increased activation in the hippocampus and several prefrontal and temporal areas. Our data imply a specific network for PSE (although intimate others are perceived similarly). Moreover, memory for traits contradicting PSE resulted in activation increases indicating greater cognitive effort and emotional involvement.

Background: Emotional and non-emotional Stroop are frequently applied to study major depressive disorder (MDD). The versions of emotional Stroop used in previous studies were not, unlike the ones employed in the present study, based on semantic incongruence, making it difficult to compare the tasks., Methods: We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the neural and behavioral responses of 18 healthy subjects and 18 subjects with MDD to emotional and non-emotional word-face Stroop tasks based on semantic incompatibility between targets and distractors., Results: In both groups, the distractors triggered significant amounts of interference conflict. A between-groups comparison revealed hypoactivation in MDD during emotional task in areas supporting conflict resolution (lateral prefrontal cortex, parietal and extrastriate cortices) paralleled by increased response in the right amygdala. Response in the amygdala, however, did not vary between conflicting and non-conflicting trials. While in the emotional (compared to non-emotional) task healthy controls showed considerably stronger involvement of networks related to conflict resolution, in patients, the processing differences between the two conflict types were negligible., Limitations: The patients group was inhomogeneous in terms of medication and clinical characteristics. The number of female participants was higher, due to which gender effects could not be studied or excluded., Conclusion: Whilst healthy controls seemed able to adjust the involvement of the network supporting conflict resolution based on conflict demand, patients appeared to lack this capability. The reduced cortical involvement coupled with increased response of limbic structures might underlie the maladjustment vis-à-vis new demands in depressed mood., (Copyright © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is strongly linked to social withdrawal and interpersonal problems which characterize the disorder and further aggravate symptoms. Investigating the nature of impaired emotional-social functioning as a basis of interpersonal functioning in MDD has been widely restricted to static stimuli and behavioral emotion recognition accuracy. The present study aimed at examining higher order emotional processes, namely empathic responses and its components, emotion recognition accuracy and affective responses in 28 MDD patients and 28 healthy control participants. The dynamic stimulus material included 96 short video clips depicting actors expressing basic emotions by face, voice prosody, and sentence content. Galvanic skin conductance measurements revealed implicit processes in the multimethod assessment of empathy. Overall, patients displayed lower empathy, emotion accuracy, and affective response rates than controls. Autonomous arousal was higher in patients. A generalized emotion processing deficit is in line with the "emotional context insensitivity" (ECI) theory which proposes decreased overall responsiveness to emotional stimuli. The dissociation between hypo-reactivity in explicit and hyper-reactivity in implicit measures of emotion processing can be related to the "limbic-cortical dysregulation" model of depression. Our findings support the dissociation of autonomic and subjective emotional responses which may account for interpersonal as well as emotional deficits in depression., (Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Human communication is based on a dynamic information exchange of the communication channels facial expressions, prosody, and speech content. This fMRI study elucidated the impact of multimodal emotion processing and the specific contribution of each channel on behavioral empathy and its prerequisites. Ninety-six video clips displaying actors who told self-related stories were presented to 27 healthy participants. In two conditions, all channels uniformly transported only emotional or neutral information. Three conditions selectively presented two emotional channels and one neutral channel. Subjects indicated the actors' emotional valence and their own while fMRI was recorded. Activation patterns of tri-channel emotional communication reflected multimodal processing and facilitative effects for empathy. Accordingly, subjects' behavioral empathy rates significantly deteriorated once one source was neutral. However, emotionality expressed via two of three channels yielded activation in a network associated with theory-of-mind-processes. This suggested participants' effort to infer mental states of their counterparts and was accompanied by a decline of behavioral empathy, driven by the participants' emotional responses. Channel-specific emotional contributions were present in modality-specific areas. The identification of different network-nodes associated with human interactions constitutes a prerequisite for understanding dynamics that underlie multimodal integration and explain the observed decline in empathy rates. This task might also shed light on behavioral deficits and neural changes that accompany psychiatric diseases., (Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Emotional processing is influenced by cognitive processes and vice versa, indicating a profound interaction of these domains. The investigation of the neural mechanisms underlying this interaction is not only highly relevant for understanding the organization of human brain function. Rather, it may also help in understanding dysregulated emotions in affective disorders and in elucidating the neurobiology of cognitive behavioural therapy (e.g. in borderline personality disorder), which aims at modulating dysfunctional emotion processes by cognitive techniques, such as restructuring. In the majority of earlier studies investigating the interaction of emotions and cognition, the main focus has been on the investigation of the effects of emotional stimuli or, more general, emotional processing, e.g. instituted by emotional material that needed to be processed, on cognitive performance and neural activation patterns. Here we pursued the opposite approach and investigated the modulation of implicit processing of emotional stimuli by cognitive demands using an event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging--study on a motor short-term memory paradigm with emotional interferences. Subjects were visually presented a finger-sequence consisting either of four (easy condition) or six (difficult condition) items, which they had to memorize. After a short pause positive, negative or neutral International affective picture system pictures or a green dot (as control condition) were presented. Subjects were instructed to reproduce the memorized sequence manually as soon as the picture disappeared. Analysis showed that with increasing cognitive demand (long relative to short sequences), neural responses to emotional pictures were significantly reduced in amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex. In contrast, the more difficult task evoked stronger activation in a widespread frontoparietal network. As stimuli were task-relevant go-cues and hence had to be processed perceptually, we would interpret this as a specific attenuation of affective responses by concurrent cognitive processing--potentially reflecting a relocation of resources mediated by the frontoparietal network., (© The Author (2011). Published by Oxford University Press.)

Background: Previous studies have indicated that the processes leading to the resolution of emotional and non-emotional interference conflicts are unrelated, involving separate networks. It is also known that conflict resolution itself suggests a considerable overlap of the networks. Our study is an attempt to examine how these findings may be related., Methodology/principal Findings: We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study neural responses of 24 healthy subjects to emotional and non-emotional conflict paradigms involving the presentation of congruent and incongruent word-face pairs based on semantic incompatibility between targets and distractors. In the emotional task, the behavioral interference conflict was greater (compared to the non-emotional task) and was paralleled by involvement of the extrastriate visual and posterodorsal medial frontal cortices. In both tasks, we also observed a common network including the dorsal anterior cingulate, the supplemental motor area, the anterior insula and the inferior prefrontal cortex, indicating that these brain structures are markers of experienced conflict. However, the emotional task involved conflict-triggered networks to a considerably higher degree., Conclusions/significance: Our findings indicate that responses to emotional and non-emotional distractors involve the same systems, which are capable of flexible adjustments based on conflict demands. The function of systems related to conflict resolution is likely to be adjusted on the basis of an evaluation process that primarily involves the extrastriate visual cortex, with target playing a significant role.

Schizophrenia is a neuropsychiatric disorder entailing progressive psychotic, cognitive and affective symptoms. Several imaging studies identified brain structure abnormalities in schizophrenia patients, particularly in fronto-temporal regions and evidence for progressive anatomical changes. Here, we synthesised these findings by quantitative coordinate-based meta-analysis, assessing regions of consistently reported brain structure changes, their physiological functions and the correlation of their likelihood with disease duration. The meta-analysis revealed four significant clusters of convergent grey matter reduction, while one cluster indicated higher grey matter values in patients. A voxel-wise analysis revealed a correlation between grey matter reduction and disease duration in the left anterior insula. Functional characterisation revealed significant association with reward, affective processing and language functions. The current analysis allowed the identification of consistent morphometric changes across a large sample of studies in regions that are associated with neurophysiological functions that are altered as hallmarks of schizophrenia psychopathology. The observation that the location of presumably progressive pathology is functionally linked to language and emotion is well in line with increasing deficits in these domains with disease progression in schizophrenia.

Emotions are often encountered in a multimodal fashion. Consequently, contextual framing by other modalities can alter the way that an emotional facial expression is perceived and lead to emotional conflict. Whole brain fMRI data was collected when 35 healthy subjects judged emotional expressions in faces while concurrently being exposed to emotional (scream, laughter) or neutral (yawning) sounds. The behavioral results showed that subjects rated fearful and neutral faces as being more fearful when accompanied by screams than compared to yawns (and laughs for fearful faces). Moreover, the imaging data revealed that incongruence of emotional valence between faces and sounds led to increased activation in the middle cingulate cortex, right superior frontal cortex, right supplementary motor area as well as the right temporoparietal junction. Against expectations no incongruence effects could be found in the amygdala. Further analyses revealed that, independent of emotional valence congruency, the left amygdala was consistently activated when the information from both modalities was emotional. If a neutral stimulus was present in one modality and emotional in the other, activation in the left amygdala was significantly attenuated. These results indicate that incongruence of emotional valence in audiovisual integration activates a cingulate-fronto-parietal network involved in conflict monitoring and resolution. Furthermore in audiovisual pairing amygdala responses seem to signal also the absence of any neutral feature rather than only the presence of an emotionally charged one., (Copyright © 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Objectives: Negative emotion exerts a considerable influence on cognitive processes. This may have clinical implications in mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia, where negative emotions often prevail. Experimentally this influence can be studied by using olfactory emotion induction., Methods: Fourteen schizophrenia patients and 14 healthy volunteers were investigated with functional magnetic resonance imaging with respect to the neural correlates of emotion-cognition interactions. Emotion was induced by odorants during an n-back working memory task., Results: Similar detrimental effects of negative stimulation on working memory performance were observed in patients and control subjects. Among the neural correlates modulating this interaction a decreased activation emerged in patients in the anterior cingulate and the medial superior frontal cortex and increased activation in the medial orbitofrontal and middle frontal area., Conclusions: During emotion-cognition interaction hypoactivations were found in regions crucial for the monitoring/control of ongoing processes but also for emotion regulation. Decreased activations may reflect failure to adapt to higher task requirements. In contrast, increased activations could be indicative of a greater emotional response and irritation induced by the odour. These patterns may represent the neural correlates of an inefficient control of emotional influences on cognitive processes in patients with schizophrenia.

Objectives: Tourette's syndrome is characterised by motor and vocal tics as well as a high level of impulsivity and emotional dysregulation. Neuroimaging studies point to structural changes of the basal ganglia, prefrontal cortex and parts of the limbic system. However, there is no link between behavioural symptoms and the structural changes in the amygdala. One aspect of daily social interaction is the perception of emotional facial expressions, closely linked to amgydala function., Methods: We therefore investigated via fMRI the implicit discrimination of six emotional facial expressions in 19 adult Tourette's patients., Results: In comparison to healthy control group, Tourette's patients showed significantly higher amygdala activation, especially pronounced for fearful, angry and neutral expressions. The BOLD-activity of the left amygdala correlated negatively with the personality trait extraversion., Conclusions: We will discuss these findings as a result of either deficient frontal inhibition due to structural changes or a desynchronization in the interaction of the cortico-striato-thalamo-cortical network within structures of the limbic system. Our data show an altered pattern of implicit emotion discrimination and emphasize the need to consider motor and non-motor symptoms in Tourette's syndrome in the choice of both behavioural and pharmacological treatment.

The following fMRI study aimed to characterize the neural correlates of explicit emotion discrimination in 17 patients with schizophrenia and 17 matched healthy controls. In patients, emotion recognition impairments were found to be paralleled by cerebral dysfunctions in the affective division of the anterior cingulate cortex, the bilateral dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, the right superior temporal gyrus and the right fusiform gyrus. While the patients' responses to emotional faces were characterized predominantly by hypoactivations, the neutral faces elicited hyperactivations mainly in the frontal and cingulate areas, and the basal ganglia, along with misattribution errors. The decreased activation in the fusiform face area during responses to both emotional and neutral stimuli may be indicative of general face processing deficits. Similar although less pronounced deficits have been observed in subjects at high risk of psychosis as well as in patients with early onset. In adult schizophrenia, the evidence of an imbalanced cerebral network appears early in the course of the illness, with the dysfunctions, as indicated by correlations here, becoming more pronounced in patients with longer illness duration., ((c) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

The aim of the present study was to assess the effect of age on cerebral correlates of olfactory induced negative emotions. We investigated 15 healthy women (aged 21-47) in a functional MRI (fMRI) study during passive smelling of one negative odor (rotten yeast) and two control conditions presenting a neutral odor (vanilla) and odorless ambient air. Besides odor-specific differences in ratings of valence (yeast less pleasant than vanilla and air), intensity (yeast more intense than vanilla and air), and arousal (yeast more arousing than vanilla and air), self-ratings verified the intended mood induction effect: subjects experienced more disgust during yeast stimulation compared to ambient air and vanilla. Along with the superior temporal cortex, medial, and lateral orbitofrontal activations were found to discriminate between negative and neutral olfactory stimulation (yeast and vanilla) directly. Activations of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the caudate were correlated with age and showed stronger valence-related responses (yeast vs. vanilla) in younger compared to older women. Stronger BOLD signals within the anterior cingulate gyrus, insula and motor areas were found during negative compared to neutral stimulation and are considered to represent an attempt to down-regulate the strong emotional experience and the organisms' preparation for withdrawal, respectively. Our results stress the role of orbitofrontal and superior temporal brain regions in odor-related valence coding and stress the necessity to consider age as a modulating factor for further studies, even in relatively young samples.

Emotional facial expressions are the most salient cues in social life. Successful social interaction is based on correct recognition, interpretation and appropriate reaction to these cues. However, social skill deficits are among the most debilitating symptoms of depression, leading to social withdrawal and aggravating the disorder in various domains. We used an implicit joystick task to measure automatic behavioral tendencies in response to evoked facial expressions (anger, fear, sadness, happiness and neutral). Additionally, we implemented a rating procedure to assess explicit approach and avoidance reactions to these social stimuli. Our sample consisted of 24 depressed patients and 24 healthy controls. Data analysis indicated that depressed patients appear to understand the expression depicted on the emotional faces but react differently to these social cues. Female patients displayed stronger avoidance tendencies in the explicit condition whereas social withdrawal was less pronounced in the implicit condition. Our data suggest that a cognitive bias negatively influences the unimpaired automatic reactions to emotional expressions in depressed patients, and this bias may result in the characteristic social withdrawal., (Copyright 2010 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Background: Aberrant brain activation during facial emotion discrimination has been described in chronic schizophrenia, while little is known about early stages of the illness. The aim of the current study was to investigate valence-specific brain activation of emotion discrimination in first-episode schizophrenia. These patients provide the advantage of lacking the effects of long-term medication and chronic illness course and can hence further enhance the understanding of underlying psychopathological mechanisms., Methods: Using event-related fMRI, we investigated 18 first-episode schizophrenia patients and 18 matched healthy subjects during an explicit emotion discrimination task presenting happy, sad and neutral monochromatic facial expressions. A repeated measure analysis of variance (ANOVA) with the factors Group (patients, healthy subjects), Gender and Emotion (happy, sad, neutral) was performed on behavioural and functional data., Results: Behavioural performance did not differ between groups. Valence-independent hypoactivations in patients were observed for the anterior cingulate and orbitofrontal cortex while hyperactivations emerged in the posterior cingulate and the precuneus. Emotion-specific group differences were revealed in inferior parietal and orbitofrontal brain areas and the hippocampus., Conclusions: First-episode schizophrenia already affects areas involved in processing of both, emotions and primary facial information. Our study underlines the role of dysfunctional neural networks as the basis of disturbed social interactions in early schizophrenia.

Emotion discrimination deficits represent a well-established finding in schizophrenia. Although imaging studies addressed the cerebral dysfunctions underlying emotion perception in adult patients, the question of trait vs state characteristics is still unresolved. The investigation of juvenile patients offers the advantage of studying schizophrenia at an age where influences of illness course and long-term medication are minimized. This may enable a more detailed characterization of emotion discrimination impairments and their cerebral correlates with respect to their appearance and exact nature. A total of 12 juvenile patients with early onset schizophrenia and matched healthy juveniles participated in this study. fMRI data were acquired during an emotion discrimination task consisting of standardized photographs of faces displaying happy, sad, angry, fearful, or neutral facial expression. Similar to findings in adult patients, juvenile patients exhibited reduced performance specificity whereas sensitivity was unaffected. Independent of the valence, their processing of emotional faces was associated with hypoactivations in both fusiform gyri and in the left inferior occipital gyrus. In addition, hyperactivations in patients were found in the right cuneus common to happy, angry, and fearful faces. Further, most distinct changes were present in juvenile patients when processing sad faces. These results point to a dysfunction in cerebral circuits relevant for emotion processing already prominent in adolescent schizophrenia patients. Regions affected by a decrease in activation are related to visual and face processing, similar to deficits reported in adult patients. These changes are accompanied by hyperactivations in areas related to emotion regulation and attribution, possibly reflecting compensatory mechanisms.

Objective: Schizophrenia is among the most severe of psychiatric disorders, leading to impairments of affective and cognitive abilities. These dysfunctions affect each other mutually. Adolescent-onset schizophrenia (AOS) constitutes a particularly severe form of the disorder. In this study, possible dysfunctions of the neural correlates underlying the interaction of negative emotion and working memory in AOS were investigated., Method: During functional magnetic resonance imaging, 12 patients with AOS and 12 non-AOS adolescents performed a verbal n-back task. Intermittently, negative and neutral emotions were induced by olfactory stimulation. Group differences in working memory, emotion, and their interaction were evaluated., Results: In patients with AOS, lower performance sensitivity was observed, along with dorsolateral prefrontal, anterior cingulate, and inferior parietal hypoactivation during working memory demands. For negative versus neutral emotion induction, patients with AOS mainly showed increased brain activation compared with control subjects in widespread brain regions including the left orbitofrontal cortex and the medial frontal gyrus. Finally, during the interaction of emotion and cognition, altered patterns of activation in patients with AOS were found in the thalamocortical network, including the angular and the middle cingulate gyri extending to the precuneus. These activation differences were further decomposed by parameter estimates., Conclusions: Our results provide new insights into the neural correlates underlying the mutual influence of affective and cognitive symptoms in AOS. During the n-back task, areas typically associated with working memory performance were found hypoactivated in patients relative to the control subjects, including the dorsolateral prefrontal and parietal cortex and the anterior cingulate. However, patients with AOS mainly demonstrated increased activation in key areas of emotion processing, such as the left orbitofrontal cortex and medial frontal areas, during negative emotion induction. A dysfunctional thalamocortical network during the interaction mainly included regions involved in the integration of converging information--either on the subcortical (thalamus) or on a higher-order cortical level (comprising the angular gyrus). These findings point to dysfunctional emotion-cognition interactions in AOS, which may explain its poor prognosis.

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.

The influence of emotion on cognition plays an important role in people's everyday life as well as in psychiatric and neurological disorders. The present study used fMRI to examine the neural correlates of cognitive-emotional interactions and its inter-individual differences. Twenty-one healthy males performed a 0-back/2-back task while negative or neutral emotion was induced by negative/neutral olfactory stimulation. Subjects revealed a differential effect of emotion on cognition; in 9 subjects, negative odor had a deteriorating influence on verbal working memory ("affected group", AG) while in 12 subjects, performance was not affected in a negative way ("unaffected group", UAG). Although no brain activation differences emerged during the working memory task, the interaction of working memory and emotion yielded significant differences between the AG and the UAG. The latter showed greater activation in the fronto-parieto-cerebellar working memory (WM) network including the precuneus while the AG demonstrated stronger activation in more "emotional" areas (mainly the temporal and medial frontal cortex) as well as compensatory activations in prefrontal regions known to be essential for the cognitive down-regulation of emotions. Hence, the UAG may have been better able to counteract the detrimental influence of negative stimulation during the 2-back task and to effectively sustain or even increase activation in the task-relevant WM network. Correlation analyses for the whole group supported this interpretation; reduced working memory performance during negative stimulation was accompanied by higher activation in the inferior frontal gyrus whereas less performance impairment was related to higher activation in the precuneus. Results confirm the importance of incorporating individual differences in emotion processing and its interaction with cognitive functions in neuroimaging.

Emotional impairments are apparent at an early stage in schizophrenia. While emotion processing has been studied intensively in adult patients, investigations focusing on children and adolescents with psychoses are rare. Emotion probes for mood induction and emotion discrimination that have been standardized in healthy subjects and applied to adult schizophrenia patients were evaluated in young patients (11-20 years). Twenty children and adolescents with schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders as well as twenty healthy volunteers matched for age, gender and parental education were examined. Results reveal successful mood induction in both patients and healthy volunteers, but with more negative affect prominent in patients. While a reduced ability to discriminate negative emotional faces emerged in patients than in controls, this difference failed to reach statistical significance. The similarities between test results of children and adolescents compared with those of adults demonstrate that both tests proved to be useful when applied to younger ages. Negative affect seems to be differentially affected, a finding that which may be already evident in the early course of schizophrenia.

Objective: Deficits in emotion processing are a hallmark of schizophrenia, with consequences for social functioning and subjective well-being. However, their specificity and characteristics have not been ascertained psychometrically. The authors' purpose was to examine a differential deficit for processing emotional facets of the face compared to judgment of nonemotional features (age) and facial memory. The authors also sought to establish whether the deficit affects sensitivity or specificity of performance., Method: Participants were 20 patients with schizophrenia and 20 healthy subjects matched for age, gender, and parental education. The authors examined emotional discrimination abilities compared to age discrimination and recognition memory for faces with standardized faces displaying the universal emotions of happiness, sadness, anger, and fear. Percent correct in each condition and for each emotion were assessed as well as sensitivity (correct identification of a target emotion) and specificity (correct rejection of a nontarget emotion) for emotion recognition., Results: Patients with schizophrenia were differentially impaired in the discrimination of emotional aspects of facial expressions compared to nonemotional aspects and memory. Within the emotional task, patients showed differential impairment in specificity and insensitivity to the emotion displayed., Conclusions: When identical stimuli were used across tasks, differential impairment was seen in patients with schizophrenia for processing emotional faces, although the nonemotional task proved harder for both groups. Impairment in the specificity of emotion identification may lead to misunderstanding of social communication and may underlie difficulties in social adjustment experienced by people with schizophrenia. Emotion discrimination tests could augment the neurobehavioral evaluation of patients.

Echo time dependence of the BOLD sensitivity is an important topic in fMRI whenever brain regions are considered where the EPI data quality suffers from susceptibility gradients. Here, an fMRI study is presented showing that a reduced echo time EPI sequence significantly enhances the statistical inference in subcortical (limbic) brain regions, with special focus on the amygdala. As a consequence, to facilitate whole-brain fMRI with optimal echo times, a sequence with slice-dependent echo time is demonstrated with a focus on structures suffering from susceptibility changes. The applicability of this method is shown in a second fMRI study aimed at both, cortical, and limbic brain regions. The results are in good agreement with theoretical descriptions of the BOLD sensitivity under the influence of susceptibility gradients.

Objective: In a previous study, the authors reported that patients with schizophrenia show subcortical-limbic hypoactivity during sadness. In this study, they capitalized on those findings in order to assess the genetic influence of negative mood experience in schizophrenia patients. Brain activity was measured during mood induction in patients with schizophrenia and their first-degree nonaffected relatives., Method: Functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to investigate 13 male patients with schizophrenia, their nonaffected brothers (N=13), and a group of 26 individually matched healthy subjects unrelated to the siblings during induction of sad and happy moods as well as during a cognitive control task. A regional analysis was applied to investigate a possible subcortical-limbic dysfunction in relatives., Results: Mood induction was successful in all groups according to subjective ratings. During sadness induction, the patients and their nonaffected siblings demonstrated less activity in the amygdala compared with the healthy group of nonrelatives. Other regions of interest, such as the left orbitofrontal cortex, the left superior temporal cortex, and the left precuneus/posterior cingulate revealed significant group differences only between patients and nonrelated healthy subjects. During positive mood induction, no group differences could be found in the amygdala., Conclusions: Following induction of sad mood, both patients with schizophrenia and their nonaffected brothers displayed reduced brain activity in the amygdala. Such hypoactivity is likely to represent a genetic influence and indicates that efficient compensatory mechanisms capable of preventing the onset of the illness must exist in nonaffected relatives.

Background: High-frequency electrical stimulation of the subthalamic nucleus is a new and highly effective therapy for complications of long-term levodopa therapy and motor symptoms in advanced Parkinson disease (PD). Clinical observations indicate additional influence on emotional behavior., Methods: Electrical stimulation of deep brain nuclei with pulse rates above 100 Hz provokes a reversible, lesioning-like effect. Here, the effect of deep brain stimulation of the subthalamic nucleus on emotional, cognitive, and motor performance in patients with PD (n = 12) was examined. The results were compared with the effects of a suprathreshold dose of levodopa intended to transiently restore striatal dopamine deficiency. Patients were tested during medication off/stimulation off (STIM OFF), medication off/stimulation on (STIM ON), and during the best motor state after taking levodopa without deep brain stimulation (MED)., Results: More positive self-reported mood and an enhanced mood induction effect as well as improvement in emotional memory during STIM ON were observed, while during STIM OFF, patients revealed reduced emotional performance. Comparable effects were revealed by STIM ON and MED. Cognitive performance was not affected by the different conditions and treatments., Conclusions: Deep brain stimulation of the subthalamic nucleus selectively enhanced affective processing and subjective well-being and seemed to be antidepressive. Levodopa and deep brain stimulation had similar effects on emotion. This finding may provide new clues about the neurobiologic bases of emotion and mood disorders, and it illustrates the important role of the basal ganglia and the dopaminergic system in emotional processing in addition to the well-known motor and cognitive functions.

Temporolimbic circuits play a crucial role in the regulation of human emotion. A highly sensitive single-shot multiecho functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technique with gradient compensation of local magnetic field inhomogeneities and real-time data analysis were used to measure increases in amygdala activation during single 60-s trials of self-induced sadness. Six healthy male and female subjects performed a validated mood induction paradigm with randomized presentation of sad or neutral faces in 10 trials per scan. Subjects reported the intensity of experienced sadness after each trial. Immediate feedback of amygdala activation was given to the subjects during the ongoing scan to reinforce mood induction. Correspondence between increased intensity of predominantly left sided amygdala activation and self-rating of sadness was found in 78% of 120 sad trials, in contrast to only 14% of neutral trials. Amygdala activation was reproducible during repeated scanning sessions and displayed the strongest correlation with self-rating among all regions. These results suggest that amygdala activation may be closely associated with self-induced sadness. This novel real-time fMRI technology is applicable to a wide range of neuroscience studies, particularly those of the limbic system, and to neuropsychiatric conditions, such as depression, in which pathology of the amygdala has been implicated.

Based on the dual-process model of entertainment experiences and motivated cognition, we propose that specific affective states such as surprise, curiosity, and confusion (so-called epistemic emotions), as well as empathy, are involved in eudaimonic entertainment experiences while reading political news. We further assume that these emotions are related to normatively desirable outcomes such as deliberation within, information seeking, and knowledge acquisition about political topics. To test the hypothesized model, we conducted a between-subjects online experiment (N = 407) that used different stimuli to induce the emotions of interest while simultaneously varying news topics. Structural equation modeling revealed that the data mostly supported our hypotheses. Overall, we find that through these affective states, even soft news can enable normatively desirable outcomes. All data and materials can be accessed from . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: A disturbed self-image is central to the characteristic symptoms of borderline personality disorder (BPD). Evaluations of self-relevance (SR) are highly important in cognitive and emotional processing of information and adaptive behavior. Method: In the current study, we used affective statements to investigate if SR is altered in patients with higher scores on Borderline Symptom List (BSL-95). Forthyfemale adults with BPD and 20 healthy participants assessed a set of stimuli consisting of sentences in third-person for relevance to self. Results: BPD patients exhibited a higher SR for negative contents as compared to healthy controls (p < .001). Furthermore, a significant positive correlation coefficient was found between the increased bias in evaluating the SR of stimuli and borderline symptom severity scores, as measured by BSL-95 questionnaire (r = 0.67, p < .001). This effect persisted after controlling for depressive symptoms by a partial correlation analysis. Conclusion: Our results revealed an enhanced SR for negative statements, which was related to the severity of individuals’ BPD symptoms. These findings add to the diagnostic information regarding the disturbed organization of self in this clinical population. We suggest the maladaptive evaluation of SR offers an important treatment target for therapeutic approaches to BPD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In times of being always online and connected, cyberostracism—the feeling of being ignored or excluded over the Internet—is a serious threat to fundamental human needs: belonging, self-esteem, control, and meaningful existence. According to the temporal need-threat model, responses to ostracism lead to immediate and universal experiences of negative emotions as well as to thwarted need satisfaction. In two experiments ( N 1 = 105; N 2 = 85), we investigated these effects using a new computerized tool, Ostracism Online (Wolf et al., 2015). In both studies we found that ostracism negatively affected emotional states, belongingness, self-esteem, and meaningful existence but not control. Furthermore, Facebook use as a coping strategy after being excluded had no significant impact on need restoration. In sum, our findings highlight that Ostracism Online is a useful tool to connect the research area of social media and ostracism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Face recognition usually takes place in a social context, where faces are surrounded by other stimuli. These can act as distracting flankers which impair recognition. Previous work has suggested that flankers expressing negative emotions distract more than positive ones. However, the various negative emotions differ in their relative impact and it is unclear whether all negative emotions are equally distracting. We investigated the impact of three negative (angry, fearful, sad) and one positive (happy) facial flanker conditions on target recognition in an emotion discrimination task. We examined the effect of the receiver's gender, and the impact of two different temporal delays between flanker and target onset, as stimulus onset asynchrony is assumed to affect distractor strength. Participants identified and rated the emotional intensity of target faces surrounded by either face (emotional and neutral) or non-face flankers. Target faces were presented either simultaneously with the flankers, or delayed by 300 ms. Contrary to our hypothesis, negative flankers did not exert stronger distraction effects than positive or neutral flankers. However, happy flankers reduced recognition performance. Results of a follow-up experiment with a balanced number of emotion categories (one positive, one negative and one neutral flanker condition) suggest that the distraction effect of emotional flankers depends on the composition of the emotion categories. Additionally, congruency effects were found to be valence-specific and overruled by threat stimuli. Females responded more quickly and rated targets in happy flankers as less intense. This indicates a gender difference in emotion processing, with greater sensitivity to facial flankers in women. Targets were rated as more intense when they were presented without a temporal delay, possibly due to a stronger flanker contrast. These three experiments show that an exceptional processing of threat-related flanker stimuli depends on emotion category composition, which should be considered a mediating factor when examining emotional context effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While impairments in emotion recognition are consistently reported in schizophrenia, there is some debate on the experience of emotion. Only few studies investigated neural correlates of emotional experience in schizophrenia. The present functional magnetic resonance imaging study compared a standard visual mood induction paradigm with an audiovisual method aimed at eliciting emotions more automatically. To investigate the interplay of sensory, cognitive and emotional mechanisms during emotion experience, we examined connectivity patterns between brain areas. Sixteen schizophrenia patients and sixteen healthy subjects participated in two different mood inductions (visual and audiovisual) that were administered for different emotions (happiness, sadness and neutral). Confirming the dissociation of behavioral and neural correlates of emotion experience, patients rated their mood similarly to healthy subjects but showed differences in neural activations. Sensory brain areas were activated less, increased activity emerged in higher cortical areas, particularly during audiovisual stimulation. Connectivity was increased between primary and secondary sensory processing areas in schizophrenia. These findings support the hypothesis of a deficit in filtering and processing sensory information alongside increased higher-order cognitive effort compensating for perception deficits in the affective domain. This may suffice to recover emotion experience in ratings of clinically stable patients but may fail during acute psychosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Facial expressions, prosody, and speech content constitute channels by which information is exchanged. Little is known about the simultaneous and differential contribution of these channels to empathy when they provide emotionality or neutrality. Especially neutralised speech content has gained little attention with regards to influencing the perception of other emotional cues. Methods: Participants were presented with video clips of actors telling short-stories. One condition conveyed emotionality in all channels while the other conditions either provided neutral speech content, facial expression, or prosody, respectively. Participants judged the emotion and intensity presented, as well as their own emotional state and intensity. Skin conductance served as a physiological measure of emotional reactivity. Results: Neutralising channels significantly reduced empathic responses. Electrodermal recordings confirmed these findings. The differential effect of the communication channels on empathy prerequisites was that target emotion recognition of the other decreased mostly when the face was neutral, whereas decreased emotional responses attributed to the target emotion were especially present in neutral speech. Conclusion: Multichannel integration supports conscious and autonomous measures of empathy and emotional reactivity. Emotional facial expressions influence emotion recognition, whereas speech content is important for responding with an adequate own emotional state, possibly reflecting contextual emotion-appraisal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Successful human interaction is based on correct recognition, interpretation, and appropriate reaction to facial affect. In depression, social skill deficits are among the most restraining symptoms leading to social withdrawal, thereby aggravating social isolation and depressive affect. Dysfunctional approach and withdrawal tendencies to emotional stimuli have been documented, but the investigation of their neural underpinnings has received limited attention. We performed an fMRI study including 15 depressive patients and 15 matched, healthy controls. All subjects performed two tasks, an implicit joystick task as well as an explicit rating task, both using happy, neutral, and angry facial expressions. Behavioral data analysis indicated a significant group effect, with depressed patients showing more withdrawal than controls. Analysis of the functional data revealed significant group effects for both tasks. Among other regions, we observed significant group differences in amygdala activation, with patients showing less response particularly during approach to happy faces. Additionally, significant correlations of amygdala activation with psychopathology emerged, suggesting that more pronounced symptoms are accompanied by stronger decreases of amygdala activation. Hence, our results demonstrate that depressed patients show dysfunctional social approach and withdrawal behavior, which in turn may aggravate the disorder by negative social interactions contributing to isolation and reinforcing cognitive biases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emotional-processing deficits may be one of the characteristic features of impaired affect in individuals with psychopathy. These include shallowness and profound lack of remorse or empathy. Performances on standardized emotion discrimination tasks and mood induction tasks were compared between 17 patients with antisocial personality disorder (DSM-IV) and 17 nonpsychopaths. Subjects with psychopathic personality demonstrated poorer performance on emotion-discrimination tasks compared with controls. However, higher scores on factor “emotional detachment” of the Psychopathy Checklist (PCL-R) were associated with better discrimination ability. Subjective ratings were comparable between groups during mood induction. Although the findings support the hypothesis of a significant association between impaired emotional processing and psychopathy, they also suggest a relationship between emotional discrimination and the core personality features of psychopathy. Aggr. Behav. 28:394–400, 2002. © 2002 Wiley-Liss, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In times of permanent connectedness via mobile devices, availability demands often occur even across the boundaries between work and private life. Based on work–family border theory, this study examined how so-called setting-inconsistent pressure to be available influences employees' emotional well-being. For this purpose, an experimental 2 × 2 between-subjects design (N = 337) was conducted by manipulating setting-inconsistent pressure to be available (low vs. high) and type of setting-inconsistency (receiving a message from a colleague at home vs. receiving a message from a friend at work). Results indicated that pressure to be available beyond work–home boundaries significantly increased negative affect but had no influence on positive affect. Contrary to expectations, employees' stress resilience did not moderate this effect. Furthermore, it made no difference whether boundaries were violated through private messages in the work domain or work-related messages in the private domain. • Social pressure to be availably beyond work–home boundaries had a negative impact on employees' emotional well-being. • Availability demands in the private and in the work domain increased employees' negative affect to the same extent. • Employees' coping resources were no buffer against the negative effects of setting-inconsistent pressure to be available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A correction to the article "The Influence of Task-Irrelevant Flankers Depends on the Composition of Emotion Categories" in the 2016 issue is presented.

Abstract: Empathy is a rather elaborated human ability and several recent studies highlight significant impairments in patients suffering from psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or major depression. Therefore, the present study aimed at comparing behavioral empathy performance in schizophrenia, bipolar and depressed patients with healthy controls. All subjects performed three tasks tapping the core components of empathy: emotion recognition, emotional perspective taking and affective responsiveness. Groups were matched for age, gender, and verbal intelligence. Data analysis revealed three main findings: First, schizophrenia patients showed the strongest impairment in empathic performance followed by bipolar patients while depressed patients performed similar to controls in most tasks, except for affective responsiveness. Second, a significant association between clinical characteristics and empathy performance was only apparent in depression, indicating worse affective responsiveness with stronger symptom severity and longer duration of illness. Third, self-report data indicate that particularly bipolar patients describe themselves as less empathic, reporting less empathic concern and less perspective taking. Taken together, this study constitutes the first approach to directly compare specificity of empathic deficits in severe psychiatric disorders. Our results suggest disorder-specific impairments in emotional competencies that enable better characterization of the patient groups investigated and indicate different psychotherapeutic interventions. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Animal studies suggest a causal link between testosterone and aggression. However, in human research the exact role of this hormone is still unclear, having been linked to dominance and approach behavior rather than to aggression per se. In a social context, the induction of aggression might be confounded with dominance or status changes, which potentially influence the association between aggression and testosterone. The objective of the current study was to investigate the influence of testosterone on non-social aggression in a double-blind, placebo-controlled experiment including 90 healthy male participants. To this end, we developed an innovative paradigm in which participants were provoked by a malfunctioning joystick restraining them from a promised reward. As measures for aggression throughout the task the joystick amplitude was recorded and anger was assessed via emotional self-ratings. Participants reacted to the provocation with a significant shift to more negative emotions and increased implicit aggressive behavior, reflected in the force exerted to pull the joystick following provocation. Importantly, the study demonstrated first evidence for a modulating influence of testosterone on non-social aggression in males: Self-rated anger was significantly elevated in the testosterone group compared to the placebo group as a function of provocation. Testosterone administration did not significantly influence the implicit aggressive response. These findings demonstrate a potentiating effect of testosterone on provocation-related anger in a non-social context. Furthermore, the results highlight the importance of disentangling different components of aggression and characterizing different influencing factors when inferring on hormonal effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Background: Biased causal attribution is a critical factor in the cognitive model of depression. Whereas depressed patients interpret events negatively, healthy people show a self-serving bias (internal attribution of positive events and external attribution of negative events). Methods: Using fMRI, depressed patients (n=15) and healthy controls (n=15) were confronted with positive and negative social events and made causal attributions (internal vs. external). Functional data were analyzed using a mixed effects model. Results: Behaviourally, controls showed a self-serving bias, whereas patients demonstrated a balanced attributional pattern. Analysis of functional data revealed a significant group difference in a fronto-temporal network. Higher activation of this network was associated with non self-serving attributions in controls but self-serving attributions in patients. Applying a psycho-physiological interaction analysis, we observed reduced coupling between a dorsomedial PFC seed region and limbic areas during self-serving attributions in patients compared to controls. Limitations: Results of the PPI analysis are preliminary given the liberal statistical threshold. Conclusions: The association of the behaviourally less frequent attributional pattern with activation in a fronto-temporal network suggests that non self-serving responses may produce a self-related response conflict in controls, while self-serving responses produce this conflict in patients. Moreover, attribution-modulated coupling between the dorsomedial PFC and limbic regions was weaker in patients than controls. This preliminary finding suggests that depression may be associated with disturbances in fronto-limbic coupling during attributional decisions. Our results implicate that treatment of major depression may benefit from approaches that facilitate reinterpretation of emotional events in a more positive, more self-serving way. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Empathy is a multidimensional construct composed of several components such as emotion recognition, emotional perspective taking and affective responsiveness. Even though patients with schizophrenia demonstrate deficits in all core components of this basic social ability, the neural underpinnings of these dysfunctions are less clear. Using fMRI, we analyzed data from 15 patients meeting the DSM-IV criteria for schizophrenia and 15 matched healthy volunteers performing three separate paradigms tapping the core components of empathy, i.e. emotion recognition, perspective taking and affective responsiveness. Behavioral data analysis indicated a significant empathic deficit in patients, reflected in worse performance in all three domains. Analysis of functional data revealed hypoactivation in a fronto-temporo-parietal network including the amygdala in patients. Moreover, amygdala activation correlated negatively with severity of negative symptoms. The results suggest that schizophrenia patients not only suffer from a broad range of emotional deficits but also show cortical and subcortical abnormalities, extending previous findings on fronto-temporal cortical dysfunctions. Since empathy is related to psychosocial functioning and hence of high clinical relevance in schizophrenia, a more detailed understanding of the exact nature of these impairments is mandatory. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The “self-reference effect” describes better memory for material someone has related to one''s self previously. Schizophrenia can affect aspects of the inner self such as own thoughts or actions. Schizophrenia symptoms, therefore, might not only have an influence on the self-concept, including the self-attribution of positive or negative personality traits, but also reduce the self-reference effect. 15 schizophrenia patients and 15 matched healthy controls were asked to decide on positive and negative personality traits across three separate conditions: self-evaluation, other evaluation (of an intimate person), and during a lexical control task, respectively. An unannounced recognition task followed. Patients revealed a negative bias in the evaluation of themselves and of the well-known other person. The reference to a person (oneself, close other) increased later recognition performance. However, patients with schizophrenia revealed an overall decreased recognition performance. The amount of patients’ passivity symptoms, i.e., an increase in the permeability of their “self–other boundary”, correlated negatively with their recognition performance for previously self-referred characteristics and traits referred to the intimate other. This was not the case for lexically processed stimuli or an increase of negative symptoms. Our data underline the necessity of taking into account symptom subgroups when dealing with specific cognitive dysfunctions in schizophrenia. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]