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Prefrontal tDCS Attenuates Self-Referential Attentional Deployment: A Mechanism Underlying Adaptive Emotional Reactivity to Social-Evaluative Threat.

ABSTRACT: Social-evaluative threat (SET) - a situation in which one could be negatively evaluated by others - elicits profound (psycho)physiological reactivity which, if chronically present and not adaptively regulated, has deleterious effects on mental and physical health. Decreased self-awareness and increased other-awareness are understood to be an adaptive response to SET. Attentional deployment - the process of selectively attending to certain aspects of emotional stimuli to modulate emotional reactivity - is supported by fronto-parietal and fronto-limbic networks, with the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex being a central hub. The primary aim of the current study was to investigate the effects of active (versus sham) prefrontal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) on self and other-attentional deployment during the exposure to a SET context. Seventy-four female participants received active or sham tDCS and were subsequently exposed to a rigged social feedback paradigm. In this paradigm a series of social evaluations were presented together with a photograph of the supposed evaluator and a self- photograph of the participant, while gaze behavior (time to first fixation, total fixation time) and skin conductance responses (SCRs; a marker of emotional reactivity) were measured. For half of the evaluations, participants could anticipate the valence (negative or positive) of the evaluation a priori. Analyses showed that participants receiving active tDCS were (a) slower to fixate on their self-photograph, (b) spent less time fixating on their self-photograph, and (c) spent more time fixating on the evaluator photograph. During unanticipated evaluations, active tDCS was associated with less time spent fixating on the evaluation. Furthermore, among those receiving active tDCS, SCRs were attenuated as a function of slower times to fixate on the self-photograph. Taken together, these results suggest that in a context of SET, prefrontal tDCS decreases self-attention while increasing other-attention, and that attenuated self-referential attention specifically may be a neurocognitive mechanism through which tDCS reduces emotional reactivity. Moreover, the results suggest that tDCS reduces vigilance toward stimuli that possibly convey threatening information, corroborating past research in this area.

SUBMITTER: Allaert J

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8416079 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:Previous work suggests that relative increases in socially evaluative threat modulate the psychobiological stress response. However, few studies have compared stressors which manipulate the level of socially evaluative threat to which the participant is exposed. Here we present two studies. In the first, we assessed the integrity of an ecologically valid, laboratory stressor (direct socially evaluated multitasking) and its effects on acute psychobiological reactivity and ability to evoke an anticipatory response prior to participation. Specifically, we assessed whether the expectation and experience of direct social evaluation (multitasking while standing and facing an evaluator) evokes greater reactivity than indirect evaluation (over-the-shoulder evaluation). In the second study, we sought to replicate the findings regarding acute stress reactivity whilst extending the assessment window to assess the extent to which the stressor evokes anticipatory responses. As hypothesized, greater reactivity was observed following direct social evaluation compared with indirect observation. Increases in anxiety, heart rate and blood pressure were demonstrated across both studies and the paradigm therefore provides an ecologically valid technique for the activation of psychological and cardiovascular stress responding. Additionally, anticipation of experiencing socially evaluated multitasking led to increases in anxiety, tension, and worry prior to the event itself, supporting previous suggestions that threat anticipation may prolong the activation of stress mechanisms. In the present studies we assessed whether the expectation and experience of direct social evaluation evokes greater reactivity than indirect evaluation. The findings have demonstrated that direct social evaluation of multitasking is a more potent stressor than multitasking with indirect evaluation. Furthermore, our findings indicate that the period of anticipation of stressful events may be critical to understanding the process of stress regulation, and as such we recommend extending the sampling window to allow for the investigation of these processes.

Project description:OBJECTIVES:Implicit regulation of emotions involves medial-prefrontal cortex (mPFC) regions exerting regulatory control over limbic structures. Diminished regulation relates to aberrant mPFC functionality and psychopathology. Establishing means of modulating mPFC functionality could benefit research on emotion and its dysregulation. Here, we tested the capacity of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) targeting mPFC to modulate subjective emotional states by facilitating implicit emotion regulation. MATERIALS AND METHODS:Stimulation was applied concurrently with functional magnetic resonance imaging to validate its neurobehavioral effect. Sixteen participants were each scanned twice, counterbalancing active and sham tDCS application, while undergoing negative mood induction (clips featuring negative vs. neutral contents). Effects of stimulation on emotional experience were assessed using subjective and neural measures. RESULTS:Subjectively, active stimulation led to significant reduction in reported intensity of experienced emotions to negatively valenced (p?=?0.005) clips but not to neutral clips (p?>?0.99). Active stimulation further mitigated a rise in stress levels from pre- to post-induction (sham: p?=?0.004; active: p?=?0.15). Neurally, stimulation increased activation in mPFC regions associated with implicit emotion regulation (ventromedial-prefrontal cortex; subgenual anterior-cingulate cortex, sgACC), and in ventral striatum, a core limbic structure (all ps?<?0.05). Stimulation also altered functional connectivity (assessed using whole-brain psycho-physiological interaction) between these regions, and with additional limbic regions. Stimulation-induced sgACC activation correlated with reported emotion intensity and depressive symptoms (rs?>?0.64, ps?<?0.018), suggesting individual differences in stimulation responsivity. CONCLUSIONS:Results of this study indicate the potential capacity of tDCS to facilitate brain activation in mPFC regions underlying implicit regulation of emotion and accordingly modulate subjective emotional experiences.

Project description:ContextSocial anxiety disorder is thought to involve emotional hyperreactivity, cognitive distortions, and ineffective emotion regulation. While the neural bases of emotional reactivity to social stimuli have been described, the neural bases of emotional reactivity and cognitive regulation during social and physical threat, and their relationship to social anxiety symptom severity, have yet to be investigated.ObjectiveTo investigate behavioral and neural correlates of emotional reactivity and cognitive regulation in patients and controls during processing of social and physical threat stimuli.DesignParticipants were trained to implement cognitive-linguistic regulation of emotional reactivity induced by social (harsh facial expressions) and physical (violent scenes) threat while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging and providing behavioral ratings of negative emotion experience.SettingAcademic psychology department.ParticipantsFifteen adults with social anxiety disorder and 17 demographically matched healthy controls.Main outcome measuresBlood oxygen level-dependent signal and negative emotion ratings.ResultsBehaviorally, patients reported greater negative emotion than controls during social and physical threat but showed equivalent reduction in negative emotion following cognitive regulation. Neurally, viewing social threat resulted in greater emotion-related neural responses in patients than controls, with social anxiety symptom severity related to activity in a network of emotion- and attention-processing regions in patients only. Viewing physical threat produced no between-group differences. Regulation during social threat resulted in greater cognitive and attention regulation-related brain activation in controls compared with patients. Regulation during physical threat produced greater cognitive control-related response (ie, right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) in patients compared with controls.ConclusionsCompared with controls, patients demonstrated exaggerated negative emotion reactivity and reduced cognitive regulation-related neural activation, specifically for social threat stimuli. These findings help to elucidate potential neural mechanisms of emotion regulation that might serve as biomarkers for interventions for social anxiety disorder.

Project description:Self-referential processing refers to the processing of information relevant to oneself and plays an important role in cognition. Behavioral studies have shown that directional cue stimuli have a qualitatively different function during attentional orienting after presentation of the cue associated with the self. However, it is necessary to determine how neural activity is influenced by self-referential processing during attentional orienting. The present study involved establishing an association between non-predictive arrow cues and the "self" during a training task and then investigating the influence of self-referential processing on neural activity during attentional orienting. Enhanced neural activity was observed in cortical midline structures (CMS) during the use of self- vs. neutral-arrow cues, which suggests that the arrow associated with the "self" triggered self-referential processing during attentional orienting due to the experiences of the participant in the training task. Comparison of obtained under the incongruent and congruent conditions revealed a qualitative difference in neural activities between the self- and neutral-arrow cues associated with attentional orienting. Furthermore, when the neutral-arrow cue was treated as a baseline condition, neural activity was reduced in the frontoparietal attention networks by self-referential processing under the incongruent condition, but it was enhanced under the congruent condition. Thus, the stimulus modulated subsequent attentional neural processes after being associated with the self as a cue, which indicates that this process may be triggered by self-reference to automatically and effectively capture information. Our findings extend those of previous behavioral studies of neural activity, suggesting that directional cues were qualitatively influenced by self-referential processing, and showed different functions during attentional orienting. Moreover, the present study provides important evidence of how self-referential processing affects attentional orienting in the frontoparietal network. Highlights -Enhanced activity was observed in CMS due to self-referential processing.-The influence of self-referential processing differed in the frontoparietal network.-Activity was enhanced by self-referential processing under the congruent condition.-Activity was reduced by self-referential processing under the incongruent condition.

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Prefrontal tDCS Attenuates Self-Referential Attentional Deployment: A Mechanism Underlying Adaptive Emotional Reactivity to Social-Evaluative Threat.

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