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One major characteristic of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is problems with social interaction and communication. The present study explored ASD-related alterations in perceiving emotions expressed via body movements. 16 participants with ASD and 16 healthy controls observed video scenes of human interactions conveyed by point-light displays. They rated the valence of the depicted emotions in terms of their intensity and judged their confidence in their ratings. Results showed that healthy participants rated emotional interactions displaying positive emotionality as being more intense and were more confident about their ratings than ASD subjects. Results support the idea that patients with ASD have an altered perception of emotions. This extends research on subjective features (intensity, confidence) of emotion perception to the domain of emotional body movements and kinematics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: White matter lesions and subclinical cerebral ischemia (SCI) are described as risk factors for postoperative cognitive decline (POCD) following cardiac surgery. This report aims to investigate the effect of brain lesions on postoperative cognitive training outcomes., Methods: In a randomized, treatment-as-usual controlled trial, elderly patients scheduled for elective heart valve surgery participated. The postoperative cognitive training comprised paper-and-pencil exercises. Neuropsychological parameters were assessed preoperatively, at discharge from rehabilitation (immediately post-training), and at the 3-month follow-up. In addition, depression and anxiety (HADS) as well as health-related quality of life (SF-36) were evaluated. Brain lesions were identified using magnetic resonance imaging (training group: n = 18; control group: n = 21). Specifically, periventricular white matter lesions (PVWML) and deep white matter lesions (DWML) were assessed using T2-weighted/FLAIR sequences and categorized according to Fazekas scale. Volumetric analysis of SCI was conducted using diffusion-weighted imaging. To statistically control the impact of brain lesions on training outcomes, we employed analysis of covariance., Results: Three-month follow-up results: When controlling for the independence of SCI on training outcomes, effects were evident for global cognition (p = 0.022) and SF-36 mental component summary (p = 0.003). Considering the impact of PVWML on training outcomes, trained participants showed better values in depression (p = 0.046) and SF-36 mental component summary (p = 0.013). In a subgroup analysis for patients with PVWML the training group demonstrated superior performance for language (p = 0.037). After adjusting for DWML, training effects were noticeable in the SF-36 mental component summary (p = 0.013)., Conclusion: Patients with brain lesions may benefit from cognitive training after cardiac surgery., (Copyright © 2025 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Inflammatory processes have been implicated in the pathophysiology of depression. In human studies, inflammation has been shown to act as a critical disease modifier, promoting susceptibility to depression and modulating specific endophenotypes of depression. However, there is scant documentation of how inflammatory processes are associated with neural activity in patients with depression. We therefore tested the hypothesis that the peripheral inflammation markers IL-6 and TNF-α correlate with neural resting state network functional connectivity in depression using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and compared it with healthy controls. We used fMRI to investigate the functional connectivity (FC) of the resting state Default Mode Network (DMN) and Salience/Ventral Attention Network (SAL) and their association with the peripheral inflammation markers IL-6 and TNF-α in 25 patients with depression and compared it to 24 healthy subjects. Results of this imaging study revealed that both DMN and SAL resting state networks are differentially associated with distinct immunological pathways depending on whether a person has a depressive phenotype or is healthy. While the DMN FC correlated with the concentration of the cytokine IL-6 in healthy subjects, SAL FC's connectivity correlated with the cytokine TNF-α's concentration. This study highlights the importance of peripheral inflammatory processes in depression and suggests a modulatory effect on neural resting state networks depending on the state of depression., Competing Interests: Declarations. Competing interests: Gerhard Gründer has served as a consultant for Boehringer Ingelheim, Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG), Janssen-Cilag, Lundbeck, MindMed, Otsuka, Recordati, Roche, ROVI, Sage, and Takeda. He has served on the speakers’ bureau of Gedeon Richter, Janssen Cilag, Lundbeck, Otsuka, Recordati, and ROVI. He has received grant support from Beckley Psytech and Boehringer Ingelheim. He is co-founder and/or shareholder of Mind and Brain Institute GmbH, OVID Health Systems GmbH and MIND Foundation gGmbH. The remaining authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as potential conflict of interest. Funding: This study is part of a project entitled: “Correlations between systemic inflammation, brain endophenotypes and fatigue in participants with depression”. This project has received a financial support from the German Exchange Academic Program (DAAD). This program included also the financial support of the project, that involved mainly material expenses and participants’ expenses for participation. Additionally, the authors of this project contacted the owner of the “Immunität und Seele” foundation (Prof. Dr. Norbert Müller), that awarded this project and supported financially. Both supporters have no role in the design of the study, data collection, analysis and interpretation of results. Ethics approval and consent to participate: Ethical approval and consent to participate: This study was approved by the ethic committee of Faculty of Medicine of the Justus Liebig University. Additionally, this study is part of a big project to investigate inflammatory factors and fatigue in patients with depression and multiple sclerosis. The code of this project in the ethic committee is AZ 81/18. Ethical approval and the informed consents in its original language (German) are by request. Consent for publication: Not applicable., (© 2025. The Author(s).)

Objectives: Bilateral stimulation is a core element of Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Therapy, a psychotherapeutic intervention for the treatment of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Promising previous findings showed measurable physiological effects of bilateral stimulation in healthy individuals, but studies that replicated these findings in PTSD patients are sparse., Methods: 23 patients with PTSD and 30 healthy controls were confronted with affective standard scripts (pleasant, neutral, unpleasant) while bilateral tactile stimulation was applied. Monolateral and no stimulation served as control conditions. Noise-induced startle reflex response (valence measure) and galvanic skin response (arousal measure) were used for physiological responses and the valence and arousal scale of the Self-Assessment-Manikin for subjective responses., Results: Both groups showed a subjective distress reduction for unpleasant scripts and a subjective attention increase for positive scripts under bilateral stimulation. In healthy individuals, this was also for physiological measures, and a general startle-reducing effect of bilateral stimulation in the absence of affective stimuli was found. In PTSD patients, however, the effects were restricted on the subjective level, and no concomitant physiological effects were observed., Conclusions and Significance: The findings indicate, that generalizing the effects of BLS in healthy individuals to PTSD patients may be problematic. The herein-reported group differences can be explained by PTSD-specific peculiarities in emotion processing and cognitive processing style., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2024 Pape, Sammer, Hanewald, Schäflein, Rauschenbach and Stingl.)

Objectives: Postoperative cognitive decline (POCD) or decreased health-related quality of life (HQL) have been reported after cardiac surgery. A previous investigation showed beneficial effects of postoperative cognitive training on POCD and HQL 3 months after heart surgery. Here, we present the 12-month follow-up results., Methods: This bicentric, 1:1 randomised and treatment-as-usual controlled trial included elderly patients scheduled for elective heart valve surgery. The training consisted of paper-and-pencil-based exercises practising multiple cognitive functions for 36 min/day 6 days/week over a period of 3 weeks. Neuropsychological tests and questionnaires assessing HQL (36-Item Short Form Health Survey (SF-36)) and cognitive failures in daily living (Cognitive Failures Questionnaire) were performed presurgery and 12 months after training., Results: Twelve months post training, the training group (n=30) showed improvements in HQL compared with the control group (n=28), especially in role limitations due to physical health (U=-2.447, p=0.015, η 2 =0.109), role limitations due to emotional problems (U=-2.245, p=0.025, η 2 =0.092), pain (U=-1.979, p=0.049, η 2 =0.068), average of all SF-36 factors (U=-3.237, p<0.001, η 2 =0.181), health change from the past year to the present time (U=-2.091, p=0.037, η 2 =0.075), physical component summary (U=-2.803, p=0.005, η 2 =0.138), and mental component summary (U=-2.350, p=0.018, η 2 =0.095). Furthermore, the training group (n=19) showed an improvement compared with the control group (n=27) in visual recognition memory (U=-2.137, p=0.034, η 2 =0.099). POCD frequency was 22% (n=6) in the control group and 11% (n=2) in the training group (χ²(1) =1.06, p=0.440; OR=2.43, 95% CI 0.43 to 13.61)., Conclusion: In conclusion, postoperative cognitive training shows enhancing effects on HQL in cardiac surgery patients after 12 months., Competing Interests: Competing interests: None declared., (© Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2023. Re-use permitted under CC BY-NC. No commercial re-use. See rights and permissions. Published by BMJ.)

Over the past few years, evidence of a positive relationship between inflammation and depression has grown steadily. The aim of the current study was to investigate whether such depression-related inflammation could also be associated with altered microstructural changes in the white matter. FA and serum cytokines (IL-1β, IL-6, TNF-α, and IFN-γ) were measured in 25 patients with depression (DE) and 24 healthy controls (HC). Diffusion tensor imaging was performed. Fractional anisotropy (FA) was calculated using the FSL pipeline for Tract-Based Spatial Statistics (TBSS). Both voxelwise and mean whole-brain FA were analyzed using general linear models (GLM). Higher concentrations of IL-1β were associated with lower whole-brain fractional anisotropy, particularly in people with depression (ρ = - 0.67; p < 0.001). TNF-α shared some variance with IL-1β and also showed a negative relationship between TNF-α concentrations and FA in depression (F 1,46  = 11.13, p = 0.002, η 2 p = 0.21). In detail, the voxelwise analysis showed that the regression slopes of IL-1β on FA were more negative in the DE group than in the HC group, mainly in the corpus callosum (cluster statistics: genu corpus callosum, p = 0.022; splenium of corpus callosum, p = 0.047). Similar effects were not found for the other remaining cytokines. This study clearly demonstrated an association between peripherally measured IL-1β and white matter integrity in depression as assessed by DTI. The results suggest that microstructural changes in the corpus callosum are associated with increased peripheral IL-1β concentrations in depression., (© 2022. The Author(s).)

Dysfunctional social communication is one of the most stable characteristics in patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorder (SSD) that severely affects quality of life. Interpreting abstract speech and integrating nonverbal information is particularly affected. Considering the difficulty to treat communication dysfunctions with usual intervention, we investigated the possibility to apply a multimodal speech-gesture (MSG) training. In the MSG training, we offered 8 sessions (60 min each) including perceptive and expressive tasks as well as meta-learning elements and transfer exercises to 29 patients with SSD. In a within-group crossover design, patients were randomized to a TAU-first (treatment as usual first, then MSG training) group (N = 20) or a MSG-first (MSG training first, then TAU only) group (N = 9), and were compared to healthy controls (N = 17). Outcomes were quality of life and related changes in the neural processing of abstract speech-gesture information, which were measured pre-post training through standardized psychological questionnaires and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, respectively. Pre-training, patients showed reduced quality of life as compared to controls but improved significantly during the training. Strikingly, this improvement was correlated with neural activation changes in the middle temporal gyrus for the processing of abstract multimodal content. Improvement during training, self-report measures and ratings of relatives confirmed the MSG-related changes. Together, we provide first promising results of a novel multimodal speech-gesture training for patients with schizophrenia. We could link training induced changes in speech-gesture processing to changes in quality of life, demonstrating the relevance of intact communication skills and gesture processing for well-being., (Copyright © 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Since our environment typically contains more information than can be processed at any one time due to the limited capacity of our visual system, we are bound to differentiate between relevant and irrelevant information. This process, termed attentional selection, is usually categorized into bottom-up and top-down processes. However, recent research suggests reward might also be an important factor in guiding attention. Monetary reward can bias attentional selection in favor of task-relevant targets and reduce the efficiency of visual search when a reward-associated, but task-irrelevant distractor is present. This study is the first to investigate reward-related target and distractor processing in an additional singleton task using neurophysiological measures and source space analysis. Based on previous studies, we hypothesized that source space analysis would find enhanced neural activity in regions of the value-based attention network, such as the visual cortex and the anterior cingulate. Additionally, we went further and explored the time courses of the underlying attentional mechanisms. Our neurophysiological results showed that rewarding distractors led to a stronger attentional capture. In line with this, we found that reward-associated distractors (compared with reward-associated targets) enhanced activation in frontal regions, indicating the involvement of top-down control processes. As hypothesized, source space analysis demonstrated that reward-related targets and reward-related distractors elicited activation in regions of the value-based attention network. However, these activations showed time-dependent differences, indicating that the neural mechanisms underlying reward biasing might be different for task-relevant and task-irrelevant stimuli.

Schizophrenia is characterized by marked communication dysfunctions encompassing potential impairments in the processing of social-abstract and non-social-concrete information, especially in everyday situations where multiple modalities are present in the form of speech and gesture. To date, the neurobiological basis of these deficits remains elusive. In a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, 17 patients with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder, and 18 matched controls watched videos of an actor speaking, gesturing (unimodal), and both speaking and gesturing (bimodal) about social or non-social events in a naturalistic way. Participants were asked to judge whether each video contains person-related (social) or object-related (non-social) information. When processing social-abstract content, patients showed reduced activation in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) only in the gesture but not in the speech condition. For non-social-concrete content, remarkably, reduced neural activation for patients in the left postcentral gyrus and the right insula was observed only in the speech condition. Moreover, in the bimodal conditions, patients displayed improved task performance and comparable activation to controls in both social and non-social content. To conclude, patients with schizophrenia displayed modality-specific aberrant neural processing of social and non-social information, which is not present for the bimodal conditions. This finding provides novel insights into dysfunctional multimodal communication in schizophrenia, and may have potential therapeutic implications., (Copyright © 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)