Search

Abstract: Expectation decreased the susceptibility to fearful stimuli in prior studies using distracting tasks. The present study tests whether expectation remains effective in decreasing this susceptibility, when subjects focus attention on emotional properties. Event-related potentials were recorded for fearful and neutral faces, while subjects performed a modified emotion evaluation task during unpredictable and predictable conditions. Behavioral data showed faster response latencies during predictable versus unpredictable conditions. ERP data showed prolonged peak latencies in N1 (80–130ms) and larger amplitudes in P2 (130–180ms) and N200-300 components, for unpredictable fearful versus neutral faces. Conversely, all these components showed similar responses to predictable fearful and neutral faces. Source analysis suggested that medial temporal lobe mediated ERPs elicited by unpredictable fearful faces, while ventromedial prefrontal cortex mediated those elicited by predictable fearful faces, in the 130–180ms interval. Thus, we propose emotional expectation as a cognitive regulation strategy that reliably dampens human susceptibility to fearful stimuli. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

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

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]

Methamphetamine (hereafter, meth) addiction results in various emotional problems linked to structural impairments in the prefrontal cortex (PFC). In this paper, we investigated whether high-frequency (10 Hz) repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) of the left dorsolateral PFC (DLPFC) can improve emotional attention. Thirty-one meth addicts were randomly assigned to a 10 Hz or sham rTMS group; additionally, 31 healthy participants were enrolled, who were required to respond as correctly and quickly as possible to a yellow arrow embedded in an image depicting emotional content (neutral, fear, sadness, or disgust). Results showed that the healthy participants responded more rapidly to negative compared to neutral stimuli, while meth addicts responded indiscriminately to stimuli representing disgust, fear, and neutral content. The randomization check showed no significant differences in the pretest of emotional attention measures between the 10 Hz and sham groups. However, 10 Hz rTMS yielded faster response to negative pictures than to neutral pictures, which was similar to the performance of healthy participants but Sham not. However, this attention bias effect persisted in the 10 Hz group 2 weeks later. These results demonstrate that high-frequency rTMS of the left DLPFC can improve the emotional attention of meth addicts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Eriksen Flanker task has been widely used as a measurement of cognitive control, however till now information is still scarce about how the neuroanatomical properties are related to performance in this task. Using voxel-based morphometry technique (VBM), the current study identified a set of distributed areas where the gray matter volume (GM) correlated positively with participants’ efficiency in interference inhibition. These areas included the bilateral prefrontal gyri, left insula and inferior temporal gyrus, the left inferior parietal lobule. Further analysis using a novel machine learning algorithm with balanced cross-validation procedure confirmed that in these areas the GM-behavioral association was unlikely a byproduct of outlier values, instead, the gray matter volume could predict reliably participants’ interference inhibition efficiency. These results underscore the importance of the fronto-parietal and insula systems to the brain functioning of interference inhibition from the neuroanatomical perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

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