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The article is an editorial from the journal Personality Neuroscience, discussing the progress and future prospects of the field. It highlights the importance of studying the links between personality and neuroscience, as well as the challenges and opportunities in the field. The editorial emphasizes the need for reproducible research and larger sample sizes in order to better understand individual differences in brain structure and function. It also mentions the diverse range of topics covered in the journal, including psychopathology, neuroanatomy, and personality traits. The editorial board expresses optimism about the future of the field and the potential for integrating personality neuroscience with other disciplines, such as psychiatry and developmental neuroscience. [Extracted from the article]

University teaching, whether by professors, lecturers, or instructors, draws on a number of skills including communicating and simplifying complex ideas, to inspiring students and teaching critical thinking. Rule 9: Provide positive, kind, inclusive, and encouraging feedback The bidirectional nature of teaching is reflected in teachers posing questions that students answer, students proposing ideas that teachers critique. When feedback was accompanied by an assurance of the student's capacity to reach the teacher's high standards (e.g., statements like "I have high standards and I know you can meet them"), black students responded as positively as white students, engendering trust rather than stereotype threat. When student disagreement or criticism arises, teachers should respectfully listen, adopt currently accepted semantics, and acknowledge the limitations of outdated semantics in assigned readings or other works. [Extracted from the article]

The movements an organism makes provide insights into its internal states and motives. This principle is the foundation of the new field of computational ethology, which links rich automatic measurements of natural behaviors to motivational states and neural activity. Computational ethology has proven transformative for animal behavioral neuroscience. This success raises the question of whether rich automatic measurements of behavior can similarly drive progress in human neuroscience and psychology. New technologies for capturing and analyzing complex behaviors in real and virtual environments enable us to probe the human brain during naturalistic dynamic interactions with the environment that so far were beyond experimental investigation. Inspired by nonhuman computational ethology, we explore how these new tools can be used to test important questions in human neuroscience. We argue that application of this methodology will help human neuroscience and psychology extend limited behavioral measurements such as reaction time and accuracy, permit novel insights into how the human brain produces behavior, and ultimately reduce the growing measurement gap between human and animal neuroscience. Computational ethology has revolutionized comparative neuroscience through automated measurement of naturalistic behavior. Mobbs et al. formulize how such approaches can benefit human neuroscience, providing richer behavioral assays and narrowing the measurement gap between human and animal studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comparative research suggests that the hypothalamus is critical in switching between survival behaviors, yet it is unclear if this is the case in humans. Here, we investigate the role of the human hypothalamus in survival switching by introducing a paradigm where volunteers switch between hunting and escape in response to encounters with a virtual predator or prey. Given the small size and low tissue contrast of the hypothalamus, we used deep learning-based segmentation to identify the individual-specific hypothalamus and its subnuclei as well as an imaging sequence optimized for hypothalamic signal acquisition. Across 2 experiments, we employed computational models with identical structures to explain internal movement generation processes associated with hunting and escaping. Despite the shared structure, the models exhibited significantly different parameter values where escaping or hunting were accurately decodable just by computing the parameters of internal movement generation processes. In experiment 2, multi-voxel pattern analyses (MVPA) showed that the hypothalamus, hippocampus, and periaqueductal gray encode switching of survival behaviors while not encoding simple motor switching outside of the survival context. Furthermore, multi-voxel connectivity analyses revealed a network including the hypothalamus as encoding survival switching and how the hypothalamus is connected to other regions in this network. Finally, model-based fMRI analyses showed that a strong hypothalamic multi-voxel pattern of switching is predictive of optimal behavioral coordination after switching, especially when this signal was synchronized with the multi-voxel pattern of switching in the amygdala. Our study is the first to identify the role of the human hypothalamus in switching between survival behaviors and action organization after switching. Studies in animal models suggest that the hypothalamus is critical for modulating the switch between survival behaviors. In this study, neuroimaging combined with computational modeling shows that the hypothalamus also modulates switching between survival actions in humans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Naturalistic observations show that decisions to avoid or escape predators occur at different spatiotemporal scales and that they are supported by different computations and neural circuits. At their extremes, proximal threats are addressed by a limited repertoire of reflexive and myopic actions, reflecting reduced decision and state spaces and model-free (MF) architectures. Conversely, distal threats allow increased information processing supported by model-based (MB) operations, including affective prospection, replay, and planning. However, MF and MB computations are often intertwined, and under conditions of safety the foundations for future effective reactive execution can be laid through MB instruction of MF control. Together, these computations are associated with distinct population codes embedded within a distributed defensive circuitry whose goal is to determine and realize the best policy. Decisions to avoid or escape predators occur at different spatiotemporal scales, resulting in different computations and neural circuits. At their extremes, surprising or proximal threats will reduce decision and state space and utilize model-free architectures, while distant threats allow increased information processing supported by model-based operations. Model-free and model-based computations, however, are often intertwined. Furthermore, under conditions of safety the foundations for effective reactive execution in the future can be laid through model-based instruction of model-free control. Prospective planning can also be enabled. Together, these computations reflect distinct population codes embedded within a distributed defensive circuitry whose goal is to determine and realize the best policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The midbrain periaqueductal gray (PAG) has been recognized for decades as having a central role in the control of a wide variety of defensive responses. Initial discoveries relied primarily on lesions, electrical stimulation and pharmacology. Recent developments in neural activity imaging and in methods to control activity with anatomical and genetic specificity have revealed additional streams of data informing our understanding of PAG function. Here, we discuss both classic and modern studies reporting on how PAG-centered circuits influence innate as well as learned defensive actions in rodents and humans. Though early discoveries emphasized the PAG's role in rapid induction of innate defensive actions, emerging new data indicate a prominent role for the PAG in more complex processes, including representing behavioral states and influencing fear learning and memory. This article is part of the Special Issue on "Fear, Anxiety and PTSD". • Review of classic and modern data on the role of the periaqueductal gray in defense. • Discussion of the PAG's role during exposure to both innate and conditioned threats. • Overview of results from both rodents and human subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the views of the authors on the dual implicit process model (DIPM), focusing on the adaptive survival circuits in humans that gives them a distinct survival advantage to detect and respond to ecological dangers. It discusses the focus of DIPM on the implicit and evaluative sorting of information, explains the premise of DIPM regarding threat superiority, and aspect of DIPM on implicit evaluative decision processes.

Real behaviors are binding consequential commitments to a course of action, such as harming another person, buying an Apple watch, or fleeing from danger. Cognitive scientists are generally interested in the psychological and neural processes that cause such real behavior. However, for practical reasons, many scientific studies measure behavior using only hypothetical or imagined stimuli. Generalizing from such studies to real behavior implicitly assumes that the processes underlying the two types of behavior are similar. We review evidence of similarity and differences in hypothetical and real mental processes. In many cases, hypothetical choice tasks give an incomplete picture of brain circuitry that is active during real choice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fearful faces are believed to be prioritized in visual perception. However, it is unclear whether the processing of low-level facial features alone can facilitate such prioritization or whether higher-level mechanisms also contribute. We examined potential biases for fearful face perception at the levels of perceptual decision-making and perceptual confidence. We controlled for lower-level visual processing capacity by titrating luminance contrasts of backward masks, and the emotional intensity of fearful, angry and happy faces. Under these conditions, participants showed liberal biases in perceiving a fearful face, in both detection and discrimination tasks. This effect was stronger among individuals with reduced density in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a region linked to perceptual decision-making. Moreover, participants reported higher confidence when they accurately perceived a fearful face, suggesting that fearful faces may have privileged access to consciousness. Together, the results suggest that mechanisms in the prefrontal cortex contribute to making fearful face perception special. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the risks, people enjoy giving advice. One explanation is that giving beneficial advice can result in reflected glory, ego boosts or reputation enhancement. However, giving poor advice can be socially harmful (being perceived as incompetent or untrustworthy). In both circumstances, we have a vested interest in the advice follower's success or failure, especially when it reflects specifically on us compared with when it is diffused between multiple advisors. We examined these dynamics using an Advisor-Advisee Game, where subjects acted as an Advisor to a confederate Advisee who selected one of the three options when trying to win money: accept the subject's advice, accept the advice of a second confederate Advisor or accept both Advisors' advice. Results showed that having one's advice accepted, compared with being rejected, resulted in activity in the ventral striatum–a core reward area. Furthermore, the ventral striatum was only active when the subject's advice led to the advisee winning, and not when the advisee won based on the confederate's advice. Finally, the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) was more active when the Advisee won or lost money based solely on the subject's advice compared with when the second Advisor's advice was accepted. One explanation for these findings is that the MPFC monitors selfrelevant social information, while the ventral striatum is active when others accept advice and when their success leads to reflected glory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research has illustrated that the brain regions implicated in moral cognition comprise a robust and broadly distributed network. However, understanding how these brain regions interact and give rise to the complex interplay of cognitive processes underpinning human moral cognition is still in its infancy. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine patterns of activation for ‘difficult’ and ‘easy’ moral decisions relative to matched non-moral comparators. This revealed an activation pattern consistent with a relative functional double dissociation between the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) and ventro-medial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). Difficult moral decisions activated bilateral TPJ and deactivated the vmPFC and OFC. In contrast, easy moral decisions revealed patterns of activation in the vmPFC and deactivation in bilateral TPJ and dorsolateral PFC. Together these results suggest that moral cognition is a dynamic process implemented by a distributed network that involves interacting, yet functionally dissociable networks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Input-matching is a key mechanism by which animals optimally distribute themselves across habitats to maximize net gains based on the changing input values of food supply rate and competition. To examine the neural systems that underlie this rule in humans, we created a continuous-input foraging task where subjects had to decide to stay or switch between two habitats presented on the left and right ofthe screen. The subject's decision to stay or switch was based on changing input values of reward-token supply rate and competition density. High density of competition or low-reward token rate was associated with decreased chance of winning. Therefore, subjects attempted to maximize their gains by switching to habitats that possessed low competition density and higher token rate. When it was increasingly disadvantageous to be in a habitat, we observed increased activity in brain regions that underlie preparatory motor actions, including the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and the supplementary motor area, as well as the insula, which we speculate may be involved in the conscious urge to switch habitats. Conversely, being in an advantageous habitat is associated with activity in the reward systems, namely the striatum and medial prefrontal cortex. Moreover, amygdala and dorsal putamen activity steered interindividual preferences in competition avoidance and pursuing reward. Our results suggest that input-matching decisions are made as a net function of activity in a distributed set of neural systems. Furthermore, we speculate that switching behaviors are related to individual differences in compe-tition avoidance and reward drive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Protection often involves the capacity to prospectively plan the actions needed to mitigate harm. The computational architecture of decisions involving protection remains unclear, as well as whether these decisions differ from other beneficial prospective actions such as reward acquisition. Here we compare protection acquisition to reward acquisition and punishment avoidance to examine overlapping and distinct features across the three action types. Protection acquisition is positively valenced similar to reward. For both protection and reward, the more the actor gains, the more benefit. However, reward and protection occur in different contexts, with protection existing in aversive contexts. Punishment avoidance also occurs in aversive contexts, but differs from protection because punishment is negatively valenced and motivates avoidance. Across three independent studies (Total N = 600) we applied computational modeling to examine model-based reinforcement learning for protection, reward, and punishment in humans. Decisions motivated by acquiring protection evoked a higher degree of model-based control than acquiring reward or avoiding punishment, with no significant differences in learning rate. The context-valence asymmetry characteristic of protection increased deployment of flexible decision strategies, suggesting model-based control depends on the context in which outcomes are encountered as well as the valence of the outcome. Author summary: Acquiring protection is a ubiquitous way humans achieve safety. Humans make future-oriented decisions to acquire safety when they anticipate the possibility of future danger. These prospective safety decisions likely engage model-based control systems, which facilitate goal-oriented decision making by creating a mental map of the external environment. Inability to effectively use model-based control may reveal new insights into how safety decisions go awry in psychopathology. However, computational decision frameworks that can identify contributions of model-based control have yet to be applied to safety. Clinical science instead dominates and investigates decisions to seek out safety as a maladaptive response to threat. Focusing on maladaptive safety prevents a full understanding of how humans make decisions motivated by adaptive goals. The current studies apply computational models of decision control systems to understand how humans make adaptive decisions to acquire protection compared with acquiring reward and avoiding threat. Safety-motivated decisions elicited increased model-based control compared to reward- or threat-motivated decisions. These findings demonstrate that safety is not simply reward seeking or threat avoidance in a different form, but instead safety elicits distinct contributions of decision control systems important for goal-directed behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Moral ideals are strongly ingrained within society and individuals alike, but actual moral choices are profoundly influenced by tangible rewards and consequences. Across two studies we show that real moral decisions can dramatically contradict moral choices made in hypothetical scenarios (Study 1). However, by systematically enhancing the contextual information available to subjects when addressing a hypothetical moral problem—thereby reducing the opportunity for mental simulation—we were able to incrementally bring subjects’ responses in line with their moral behaviour in real situations (Study 2). These results imply that previous work relying mainly on decontextualized hypothetical scenarios may not accurately reflect moral decisions in everyday life. The findings also shed light on contextual factors that can alter how moral decisions are made, such as the salience of a personal gain. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Phylogenetic threats such as spiders evoke our deepest primitive fears. When close or looming, such threats engage evolutionarily conserved monitoring systems and defense reactions that promote self-preservation. With the use of a modified behavioral approach task within functional MRI, we show that, as a tarantula was placed closer to a subject's foot, increased experiences of fear coincided with augmented activity in a cascade of fear-related brain networks including the periaqueductal gray, amygdala, and bed nucleus of the stria terminalis. Activity in the amygdala was also associated with underprediction of the tarantula's threat value and, in addition to the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, with monitoring the tarantula's threat value as indexed by its direction of movement. Conversely, the orbitofrontal cortex was engaged as the tarantula grew more distant, suggesting that this region emits safety signals or expels fear. Our findings fractionate the neurobiological mechanisms associated with basic fear and potentially illuminate the pertyrbed reactions that characterize clinical phobias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humans are creatures of routine and habit. When faced with situations in which a default option is available, people show a consistent tendency to stick with the default. Why this occurs is unclear. To elucidate its neural basis, we used a novel gambling task in conjunction with functional magnetic resonance imaging. Behavioral results revealed that participants were more likely to choose the default card and felt enhanced emotional responses to outcomes after making the decision to switch.Weshow that increased tendency to switch away from the default during the decision phase was associated with decreased activity in the anterior insula; activation in this same area in reaction to "switching away from the default and losing" was positively related with experienced frustration. In contrast, decisions to choose the default engaged the ventral striatum, the same reward area as seen in winning. Our findings highlight aversive processes in the insula as underlying the default bias and suggest that choosing the default may be rewarding in itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Postencounter and circa-strike defensive contexts represent two adaptive responses to potential and imminent danger. In the context of a predator, the post encounter reflects the initial detection of the potential threat, whereas the circa-strike is associated with direct predatory attack. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate the neural organization of anticipation and avoidance of artificial predators with high or low probability of capturing the subject across analogous postencounter and circa-strike contexts of threat. Consistent with defense systems models, post encounter threat elicited activity in forebrain areas, including subgenual anterior cingulate cortex (sgACC), hippocampus, and amygdala. Conversely, active avoidance during circa-strike threat increased activity in mid-dorsal ACC and midbrain areas. During the circa-strike condition, subjects showed increased coupling between the midbrain and mid-dorsal ACC and decreased coupling with the sgACC, amygdala, andh ippocampus. Greater activity was observed in the right pregenual ACCfor high compared with low probability of capture during circa-strike threat. This region showed decreased coupling with the amygdala, insula, and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Finally, we found that locomotor errors correlated with subjective reports of panic for the high compared with low probability of capture during the circa-strike threat, and these panic-related locomotor errors were correlated with midbrain activity. These findings support models suggesting that higher forebrain areas are involved in early-threat responses, including the assignment and control of fear, whereas imminent danger results in fast, likely "hard-wired," defensive reactions mediated by the midbrain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A pernicious paradox in human motivation is the occasional reduced performance associated with tasks and situations that involve larger-than-average rewards. Three broad explanations that might account for such performance decrements are attentional competition (distraction theories), inhibition by conscious processes (explicit-monitoring theories), and excessive drive and arousal (overmotivation theories). Here, we report incentive-dependent performance decrements in humans in a reward-pursuit task; subjects were less successful in capturing a more valuable reward in a computerized maze. Concurrent functional magnetic resonance imaging revealed that increased activity in ventral midbrain, a brain area associated with incentive motivation and basic reward responding, correlated with both reduced number of captures and increased number of near-misses associated with imminent high rewards. These data cast light on the neurobiological basis of choking under pressure and are consistent with overmotivation accounts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humans, like other animals, alter their behavior depending on whether a threat is dose or distant. We investigated spatial imminence of threat by developing an active avoidance paradigm in which volunteers were pursued through a maze by a virtual predator endowed with an ability to chase, capture, and inflict pain. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we found that as the virtual predator grew closer, brain activity shifted from the ventromedial prefrontal cortex to the periaqueductal gray. This shift showed maximal expression when a high degree of pain was anticipated. Moreover, imminence-driven periaqueductal gray activity correlated with increased subjective degree of dread and decreased confidence of escape. Our findings cast light on the neural dynamics of threat anticipation and have implications for the neurobiology of human anxiety-related disorders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Williams syndrome (WS) has provided researchers with an exciting opportunity to understand the complex interplay among genes, neurobiological and cognitive functions. However, despite a well-characterized cognitive and behavioral phenotype, little attention has been paid to the marked deficits in social and behavioral inhibition. Here we explore the neural systems that mediate response inhibition in WS. Methods: We used functional MRI (fMRI) to obtain blood oxygenation level dependence (BOLD) signal maps during the performance of a Go/NoGo response inhibition task from 11 clinically and genetically diagnosed WS patients and 11 age- and gender-matched typically developing (TD) control subjects. Correlations between behavioral, neuropsychological measures, and BOLD signal were also conducted. Results: Although TD control subjects showed significantly faster response times, no group differences in behavioral accuracy were observed. Compared with control subjects, WS participants demonstrated significantly reduced activity in the striatum, dorsolateral prefrontal, and dorsal anterior cingulate cortices. These findings support the hypothesis that persons with WS fail to activate critical cortical and subcortical structures involved in behavioral inhibition. Conclusions: Our results provide important evidence for reduced engagement of the frontostriatal circuits in WS and provide putative biological markers for the deficits in response inhibition and the unusual social phenotype. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Several lines of investigation suggest that individuals with Williams syndrome (WS), a neurodevelopmental disorder of well-characterized genetic etiology, have selective impairments in integrating local image elements into global configurations. We compared global processing abilities in 10 clinically and genetically diagnosed participants with WS (eight females, two males; mean age 31y 10mo [SD 9y 7mo], range 15y 5mo-48y 4mo) with a typically developed (TD) age- and sex-matched comparison group (seven females, one male; mean age 35y 2mo [SD 10y 10mo], range 24y-54y 7mo) using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Behavioral data showed participants with WS to be significantly less accurate ( p<0.042) together with a non-significant trend to be slower than the TD comparison group while performing the global processing task. fMRI data showed participants with WS to possess reduced activation in the visual and parietal cortices. Participants with WS also showed relatively normal activation in the ventral occipitotemporal cortex, but elevated activation in several posterior thalamic nuclei. These preliminary results largely confirm previous research findings and neural models implicating neurodevelopmental abnormalities in extended subcortical and cortical visual systems in WS, most notably dorsal-stream pathways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an essay which points out that biological advances in understanding human brain architecture and function may overlap in important ways with legal inquiries. The author also stresses that new studies of the criminal brain may provide moral views on responsibility and free will, which in turn will have a great impact on how legal systems punish and treat criminals.

Filmmakers have long recognized the importance of editing techniques to guide the audiences' perceptions and enhance the impact of a scene. We demonstrate behaviorally that pairing identical faces with either neutral or emotionally salient contextual movies, an editing technique referred to as the 'Kuleshov Effect', results in both altered attributions of facial expression and mental-state. Using functional neuroimaging (fMRI), we show that faces paired with emotional movies enhance BOLD responses in the bilateral temporal pole, anterior cingulate cortices, amygdala and bilateral superior temporal sulcus relative to identical faces juxtaposed with neutral movies. An interaction was observed in the right amygdala when subtle happy and fear faces were juxtaposed with positive and negative movies, respectively. An interaction between happy faces and negative context was also observed in bilateral amygdala suggesting that the amygdala may act to prime or tag affective value to faces. A parametric modulation of BOLD signal by attribution ratings indicated a dissociation between ventrolateral and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex for negative and positive contextually evoked attributions, respectively. These prefrontal regions may act to guide appropriate choices across altering contexts. Together, these findings offer a neurobiological basis for contextual framing effects on social attributions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research and theory suggest that two stable personality dimensions, extroversion and neuroticism, differentially influence emotional reactivity to a variety of pleasurable phenomena. Here, we use event-related functional MRI to address the putative neural and behavioral associations between humor appreciation and the personality dimensions of introversion-extroversion and emotional stability-neuroticism. Our analysis showed extroversion to positively correlate with humor-driven blood oxygenation level- dependent signal in discrete regions of the right orbital frontal cortex, ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, and bilateral temporal cortices. Introversion correlated with increased activation in several regions, most prominently the bilateral amygdala. Although neuroticism did not positively correlate with any whole-brain activation, emotional stability (i.e., the inverse of neuroticism) correlated with increased activation in the mesocortical-mesolimbic reward circuitry encompassing the right orbital frontal cortex, caudate, and nucleus accumbens. Our findings tie together existing neurobiological studies of humor appreciation and are compatible with the notion that personality style plays a fundamental role in the neurobiological systems subserving humor appreciation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With recent investigation beginning to reveal the cortical and subcortical neuroanatomical correlates of humor appreciation, the present event-related functional MRI (fMRI) study was designed to elucidate sex-specific recruitment of these humor related net- works. Twenty healthy subjects (10 females) underwent fMRI scanning while subjectively rating 70 verbal and nonverbal achromatic cartoons as funny or unfunny. Data were analyzed by comparing blood oxygenation-level-dependent signal activation during funny and unfunny stimuli. Males and females share an extensive humor-response strategy as indicated by recruitment of similar brain regions: both activate the temporal-occipital junction and temporal pole, structures implicated in semantic knowledge and juxtaposition, and the inferior frontal gyrus, likely to be involved in language processing. Females, however, activate the left prefrontal cortex more than males, suggesting a greater degree of executive processing and language-based decoding. Females also exhibit greater activation of mesolimbic regions, including the nucleus accumbens, implying greater reward network response and possibly less reward expectation. These results indicate sex-specific differences in neural response to humor with implications for sex-based disparities in the integration of cognition and emotion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humor plays an essential role in many facets of human life including psychological, social, and somatic functioning. Recently, neuroimaging has been applied to this critical human attribute, shedding light on the affective, cognitive, and motor networks involved in humor processing. To date, however, researchers have failed to demonstrate the subcortical correlates of the most fundamental feature of humor—reward. In an effort to elucidate the neurobiological substrate that subserves the reward components of humor, we undertook a high-field (3 Tesla) event-related functional MRI study. Here we demonstrate that humor modulates activity in several cortical regions, and we present new evidence that humor engages a network of subcortical regions including the nucleus accumbens, a key component of the mesolimbic dopaminergic reward system. Further, the degree of humor intensity was positively correlated with BOLD signal intensity in these regions. Together, these findings offer new insight into the neural basis of salutary aspects of humor. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Approximately 3% of Americans declare to have had a near-death experience . These experiences classically involve the feeling that one''s soul has left the body, approaches a bright light and goes to another reality, where love and bliss are all encompassing. Contrary to popular belief, research suggests that there is nothing paranormal about these experiences. Instead, near-death experiences are the manifestation of normal brain function gone awry, during a traumatic, and sometimes harmless, event. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Accurately estimating safety is critical to pursuing nondefensive survival behaviors. However, little attention has been paid to how the human brain computes safety. We conceptualize a model that consists of two components: (i) threat-oriented evaluations that focus on threat value, imminence, and predictability; and (ii) self-oriented evaluations that focus on the agent's experience, strategies, and ability to control the situation. Our model points to the dynamic interaction between these two components as a mechanism of safety estimation. Based on a growing body of human literature, we hypothesize that distinct regions of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) respond to threat and safety to facilitate survival decisions. We suggest safety is not an inverse of danger, but reflects independent computations that mediate defensive circuits and behaviors. Survival decisions often hinge on the perception that one is safe. Without safety, defensive behaviors are prioritized at the expense of other behaviors. Underestimations of safety can therefore hinder survival and self-actualization. Extant accounts of threat-related decision making implicitly suggest safety is an inverse of threat, or, in other words, as threat reduces, safety increases. While this may be true under certain conditions, we argue that safety computations are often distinct from threat systems due to separable metacognitive processes. We propose that the human ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) integrates sensory information about threats with top-down predictions about self-oriented coping ability to drive safety decisions. Building on evidence from threat-focused paradigms, we identify the anterior vmPFC as a candidate hub of safety decision making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Understanding the emotional responsivity style and neurocognitive profiles of depression‐related processes in at‐risk youth may be helpful in revealing those most likely to develop affective disorders. However, the multiplicity of biopsychosocial risk factors makes it difficult to disentangle unique and combined effects at a neurobiological level. Methods: In a population‐derived sample of 56 older adolescents (aged 17–20), we adopted partial least squares regression and correlation models to explore the relationships between multivariate biopsychosocial risks for later depression, emotional response style, and fMRI activity, to rejecting and inclusive social feedback. Results: Behaviorally, higher depressive risk was associated with both reduced negative affect following negative social feedback and reduced positive affect following positive social feedback. In response to both cues of rejection and inclusion, we observed a general neural pattern of increased cingulate, temporal, and striatal activity in the brain. Secondly, in response to rejection only, we observed a pattern of activity in ostensibly executive control‐ and emotion regulation‐related brain regions encompassing fronto‐parietal brain networks including the angular gyrus. Conclusion: The results suggest that risk for depression is associated with a pervasive emotional insensitivity in the face of positive and negative social feedback. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Financial incentives are commonly used as motivational tools to enhance performance. Decades of research have established that the neurotransmitter dopamine (DA) is the fuel that propels reward-motivated behavior, yet a new PET study questions whether dopamine is beneficial to performance, showing that tonic DA synthesis predicts performance decrements when incentives are high. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During social interaction, the brain has the enormous task of interpreting signals that are fleeting, subtle, contextual, abstract, and often ambiguous. Despite the signal complexity, the human brain has evolved to be highly successful in the social landscape. Here, we propose that the human brain makes sense of noisy dynamic signals through accumulation, integration, and prediction, resulting in a coherent representation of the social world. We propose that successful social interaction is critically dependent on a core set of highly connected hubs that dynamically accumulate and integrate complex social information and, in doing so, facilitate social tuning during moment-to-moment social discourse. Successful interactions, therefore, require adaptive flexibility generated by neural circuits composed of highly integrated hubs that coordinate context-appropriate responses. Adaptive properties of the neural substrate, including predictive and adaptive coding, and neural reuse, along with perceptual, inferential, and motivational inputs, provide the ingredients for pliable, hierarchical predictive models that guide our social interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses research on the psychophysiology of vicarious reward through experimentation with individuals who were shown films of contestants competing in game shows. In the experiments, volunteers made subjective ratings of socially desirable and undesirable contestants. As the volunteers watched, magnetic resonance brain imaging was conducted to assess the reward that they perceived.

In the natural world, stimulus-outcome associations are often ambiguous, and most associations are highly complex and situation-dependent. Learning to disambiguate these complex associations to identify which specific outcomes will occur in which situations is critical for survival. Pavlovian occasion setters are stimuli that determine whether other stimuli will result in a specific outcome. Occasion setting is a well-established phenomenon, but very little investigation has been conducted on how occasion setters are disambiguated when they themselves are ambiguous (i.e., when they do not consistently signal whether another stimulus will be reinforced). In two preregistered studies, we investigated the role of higher-order Pavlovian occasion setting in humans. We developed and tested the first computational model predicting direct associative learning, traditional occasion setting (i.e., 1st-order occasion setting), and 2nd-order occasion setting. This model operationalizes stimulus ambiguity as a mechanism to engage in higher-order Pavlovian learning. Both behavioral and computational modeling results suggest that 2nd-order occasion setting was learned, as evidenced by lack and presence of transfer of occasion setting properties when expected and the superior fit of our 2nd-order occasion setting model compared to the 1st-order occasion setting or direct associations models. These results provide a controlled investigation into highly complex associative learning and may ultimately lead to improvements in the treatment of Pavlovian-based mental health disorders (e.g., anxiety disorders, substance use). Author summary: In everyday life, we learn to associate various situations with various outcomes. For example, perhaps a specific person usually receives praise (outcome) when giving a public speech (situation), but if they give a speech after a particularly charismatic speaker (situational factor), their speech might receive less praise than usual. In our report, we conducted two experiments investigating how people learn about highly complex associations. By highly complex, we mean that whether stimulus 1 (S1) leads to outcome 1 (O1) depends on whether stimulus 2 (S2) was present or absent, and S2's effect on the S1/O1 association may further depend on whether stimulus 3 (S3) was present. Previous work has shown that S2 will modulate S1's association with O1 using two hierarchies of stimulus value, where S2 is a higher-order stimulus that affects the lower-order S1/O1 association. We hypothesized a third hierarchical value exists if S3 affects how S2 modulates the S1/OS1 association. We created formulas predicting three hierarchical levels of learning, and we tested our three-level hypothesis and formulas in two experiments, finding strong support for both. Through the experiments, we show that humans have the ability to learn highly complex associations, which suggests we may do so in everyday life. Our formulas provide insight into the computations our brains may engage in while learning. This has relevance for increasing our understanding of associative learning (which has been largely limited to a two-level hierarchy to date), as well as mental health disorders related to associative learning (e.g., anxiety, substance use). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Threats elicit physiological responses, the frequency and intensity of which have implications for survival. Ethical and practical limitations on human laboratory manipulations present barriers to studying immersive threat. Furthermore, few investigations have examined group effects and concordance with subjective emotional experiences to threat. The current preregistered study measured electrodermal activity in 156 adults while they participated in small groups in a 30-min haunted-house experience involving various immersive threats. Results revealed positive associations between (a) friends and tonic arousal, (b) unexpected attacks and phasic activity (frequency and amplitude), (c) subjective fear and phasic frequency, and (d) dissociable sensitization effects linked to baseline orienting response. Findings demonstrate the relevance of (a) social dynamics (friends vs. strangers) for tonic arousal and (b) subjective fear and threat predictability for phasic arousal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advantageous inequality (AI) aversion, or paying at a personal cost to achieve equal reward distribution, represents a unique feature of human behavior. Here, we show that individuals have strong preferences for fairness in both disadvantageous (DI) and advantageous inequality (AI) situations, such that they alter others' payoff at a personal financial cost. At the neural level, we found that both types of inequality activated the putamen, orbitofrontal cortex, and insula, regions implicated in motivation. Individual difference analyses found that those who spent more money to increase others' payoff had stronger activity in putamen when they encountered AI and less functional connectivity between putamen and both orbitofrontal cortex and anterior insula. Conversely, those who spent more money to reduce others' payoff had stronger activity in amygdala in response to DI and less functional connectivity between amygdala and ventral anterior cingulate cortex. These dissociations suggest that both types of inequality are processed by similar brain areas, yet modulated by different neural pathways. Hum Brain Mapp 35:3290-3301, 2014. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: To determine whether expertise in the attribution of emotion from basic facial expressions in high-functioning individuals with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) is supported by the amygdala, fusiform, and prefrontal regions of interest (ROl) and is comparable to that of typically developing individuals. Method: Functional magnetic resonance imaging scans were acquired from 14 males with ASD and 10 matched adolescent controls white performing emotion match (EM) (perceptual), emotion label (EL) (linguistic), and control tasks. Accuracy, response time, and average activation were measured for each AOl. Results: There was no significant difference in accuracy, response time, or AOl activation between groups performing the EL task. The ASD group was as accurate as the control group performing the EM task but had a significantly longer response time and lower average fusiform activation. Conclusions: Expertise in the attribution of emotion from basic facial expressions was task-dependent in the high-functioning ASD group. The hypothesis that the high-functioning ASD group would be less expert and would have reduced fusiform activation was supported in the perceptual task but not the linguistic task. The reduced fusiform activation in the perceptual task was not explained by reduced expertise; it is therefore concluded that reduced fusiform activation is associated with the diagnosis of ASD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The social environment presents the human brain with the most complex information processing demands. The computations that the brain must perform occur in parallel, combine social and nonsocial cues, produce verbal and nonverbal signals and involve multiple cognitive systems, including memory, attention, emotion and learning. This occurs dynamically and at timescales ranging from milliseconds to years. Here, we propose that during social interactions, seven core operations interact to underwrite coherent social functioning; these operations accumulate evidence efficiently—from multiple modalities—when inferring what to do next. We deconstruct the social brain and outline the key components entailed for successful human–social interaction. These include (i) social perception; (ii) social inferences, such as mentalizing; (iii) social learning; (iv) social signaling through verbal and nonverbal cues; (v) social drives (e.g. how to increase one's status); (vi) determining the social identity of agents, including oneself and (vii) minimizing uncertainty within the current social context by integrating sensory signals and inferences. We argue that while it is important to examine these distinct aspects of social inference, to understand the true nature of the human social brain, we must also explain how the brain integrates information from the social world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most of life's decisions involve risk and uncertainty regarding whether reward or loss will follow. Decision makers often face uncertainty not only about the likelihood of outcomes (what are the chances that I will get a raise if I ask my supervisor? What are the chances that my supervisor will be upset with me for asking?) but also the magnitude of outcomes (if I do get a raise, how large will it be? If my supervisor gets upset, how bad will the consequences be for me?). Only a few studies have investigated economic decision making with ambiguous likelihoods, and even fewer have investigated ambiguous outcome magnitudes. In the present report, we investigated the effects of ambiguous outcome magnitude, risk, and gains/losses in an economic decision-making task with low stakes (Study 1; $3.60-$5.70; N = 367) and high stakes (Study 2; $6-$48; N = 210) using a within-subjects design. We conducted computational modeling to determine individuals' preferences/aversions for ambiguous outcome magnitudes, risk, and gains/losses. We additionally investigated the association between trait anxiety and trait depression and decision-making parameters. Our results show that increasing stakes increased ambiguous gain aversion and unambiguous risk aversion but increased ambiguous sure loss preference; participants also became more averse to ambiguous sure gains relative to unambiguous risky gains. There were no significant effects of trait anxiety or trait depression on economic decision making. Our results suggest that as stakes increase, people tend to avoid uncertainty in the gain domain (especially ambiguous gains) but prefer ambiguous vs unambiguous sure losses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A large proportion of human cognitive processes may operate outside of conscious awareness. Subliminally presented visual stimuli that are not consciously perceived have a pervasive effect on behavioral and autonomic responses. Recent studies have claimed that placebo/nocebo effects, which are previously thought to require conscious expectancies, can be elicited to comparable levels regardless of whether the stimuli were consciously perceived or not. We systematically explored the role of consciousness in conditioned analgesic and hyperalgesic pain responses using both classical delay conditioning procedure and trace conditioning procedure. In 2 experiments (total N = 247), we found that analgesic and hyperalgesic responses were differentially dependent on the conscious awareness of the relevant stimuli. Specifically, the analgesic response was only significant when stimuli were supraliminal in both conditioning/acquisition phase and test/activation phases. While the hyperalgesic responses were acquired and activated irrespective of stimulus exposure (supraliminal/subliminal), the magnitude of this response was larger when stimuli were supraliminal in the test stage. Our results indicate that analgesic responses require both conscious conditioning and conscious activation, challenging the view that classical conditioning of analgesic pain responses operates without conscious awareness. Hyperalgesic responses are generally not dependent on the consciousness of stimuli, suggesting the presence of a valence-specific rapid regulatory mechanism to enable adaptive responses in threatening circumstances. Our study demonstrates a nascent role of consciousness in the learning of complex cognitive processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fear and anxiety play a central role in mammalian life, and there is considerable interest in clarifying their nature, identifying their biological underpinnings, and determining their consequences for health and disease. Here we provide a roundtable discussion on the nature and biological bases of fear- and anxiety-related states, traits, and disorders. The discussants include scientists familiar with a wide variety of populations and a broad spectrum of techniques. The goal of the roundtable was to take stock of the state of the science and provide a roadmap to the next generation of fear and anxiety research. Much of the discussion centered on the key challenges facing the field, the most fruitful avenues for future research, and emerging opportunities for accelerating discovery, with implications for scientists, funders, and other stakeholders. Understanding fear and anxiety is a matter of practical importance. Anxiety disorders are a leading burden on public health and existing treatments are far from curative, underscoring the urgency of developing a deeper understanding of the factors governing threat-related emotions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The defining pathological features of social anxiety disorder primarily concern the social landscape, yet few empirical studies have examined the potentially aberrant behavioral and neural patterns in this population using socially interactive paradigms. We addressed this issue by investigating the behavioral and neural patterns associated with social conformity in patients with social anxiety disorder. We recorded event-related potentials when healthy subjects (n = 19), and patients with social anxiety disorder (n = 20) made attractiveness judgements of unfamiliar others, while at the same time, being exposed to congruent/incongruent peer ratings. Afterwards, participants were asked to rerate the same faces without the presence of peer ratings. When compared with healthy controls, social anxiety disorder patients exhibited more positive attitudes to unfamiliar others and conformed more with peers-higher feedback. These behavioral effects were in parallel with neural responses associated with social conflict in the N400 signal, showing higher conformity to peers-higher feedback compared with peers-lower or peers-agree feedback among social anxiety disorder patients. Our findings provide evidence on the behavioral and neural patterns of social anxiety disorder during social interactions, and support the hypothesis that individuals with social anxiety disorder are more motivated to pursue social acceptance and possibly avoid social rejection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Flight initiation distance (FID), the distance at which an organism flees from an approaching threat, is an ecological metric of cost-benefit functions of escape decisions. We adapted the FID paradigm to investigate how fast- or slow-attacking "virtual predators" constrain escape decisions. We show that rapid escape decisions rely on "reactive fear" circuits in the periaqueductal gray and midcingulate cortex (MCC), while protracted escape decisions, defined by larger buffer zones, were associated with "cognitive fear" circuits, which include posterior cingulate cortex, hippocampus, and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, circuits implicated in more complex information processing, cognitive avoidance strategies, and behavioral flexibility. Using a Bayesian decision-making model, we further show that optimization of escape decisions under rapid flight were localized to the MCC, a region involved in adaptive motor control, while the hippocampus is implicated in optimizing decisions that update and control slower escape initiation. These results demonstrate an unexplored link between defensive survival circuits and their role in adaptive escape decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Informational social influence theory posits that under conditions of uncertainty, we are inclined to look to others for advice. This leaves us remarkably vulnerable to being influenced by others' opinions or advice. Rational agents, however, do not blindly seek and act on arbitrary information, but often consider the quality of its source before committing to a course of action. Here, we ask the question of whether a collaborator's reputation can increase their social influence and, in turn, bias perception and anxiety under changing levels of uncertainty. Human male and female participants were asked to provide estimations of dot direction using the random dot motion (RDM) perceptual discrimination task and were paired with transient collaborators of high or low reputation whom provided their own estimations. The RDM varied in degrees of uncertainty and joint performance accuracy was linked to risk of an electric shock. Despite providing identical information, we show that collaborating with a high reputation compared with a low reputation partner, led to significantly more conformity during the RDM task for uncertain perceptual decisions. Consequently, high reputation partners decreased the subjects' anxiety during the anticipatory shock periods. fMRI data showed that parametric changes in conformity resulted in increased activity in the ventromedial PFC, whereas dissent was associated with increased in activity in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC). Furthermore, the dACC and insula, regions involved in anticipatory pain, were significantly more active when collaborating with a low reputation partner. These results suggest that information about reputation can influence both cognitive and affective processes and in turn alter the neural circuits that underlie decision-making and emotion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With depictions of others facing threats common in the media, the experience of vicarious anxiety may be prevalent in the general population. However, the phenomenon of vicarious anxiety--the experience of anxiety in response to observing others expressing anxiety--and the interpersonal mechanisms underlying it have not been fully investigated in prior research. In 4 studies, we investigate the role of empathy in experiencing vicarious anxiety, using film clips depicting target victims facing threats. In Studies 1 and 2, trait emotional empathy was associated with greater self-reported anxiety when observing target victims, and with perceiving greater anxiety to be experienced by the targets. Study 3 extended these findings by demonstrating that trait empathic concern--the tendency to feel concern and compassion for others--was associated with experiencing vicarious anxiety, whereas trait personal distress--the tendency to experience distress in stressful situations--was not. Study 4 manipulated state empathy to establish a causal relationship between empathy and experience of vicarious anxiety. Participants who took an empathic perspective when observing target victims, as compared to those who took an objective perspective using reappraisal-based strategies, reported experiencing greater anxiety, risk-aversion, and sleep disruption the following night. These results highlight the impact of one's social environment on experiencing anxiety, particularly for those who are highly empathic. In addition, these findings have implications for extending basic models of anxiety to incorporate interpersonal processes, understanding the role of empathy in social learning, and potential applications for therapeutic contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social interaction inherently involves the subjective evaluation of cues salient to social inclusion and exclusion. Testifying to the importance of such social cues, parts of the neural system dedicated to the detection of physical pain, the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) and anterior insula (AI), have been shown to be equally sensitive to the detection of social pain experienced after social exclusion. However, recent work suggests that this dACC-AI matrix may index any socially pertinent information. We directly tested the hypothesis that the dACC-AI would respond to cues of both inclusion and exclusion, using a novel social feedback fMRI paradigm in a population-derived sample of adolescents. We show that the dACC and left AI are commonly activated by feedback cues of inclusion and exclusion. Our findings suggest that theoretical accounts of the dACC-AI network as a neural alarm system restricted within the social domain to the processing of signals of exclusion require significant revision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]