Comment: Respecifying Emotional Influence.
Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Parkinson B
PROVIDER: S-EPMC5542128 | biostudies-other | 2017 Jul
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-other
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Project description: Not available
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Project description:Moral decisions and social relationships are often characterized by strong feelings of ambivalence which can be a catalyst for emotional distress and several health-related problems. The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) has been identified as a key brain region in monitoring conflicting information, but the neurobiological substrates of ambivalence processing are still widely unknown. We have conducted two randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments involving 70 healthy male volunteers to investigate the effects of the neuropeptide oxytocin (OXT) on neural and behavioral correlates of ambivalence. We chose moral decision-making and the imagery of partner infidelity as examples to probe volitional and emotional ambivalence. In both experiments, intranasal OXT diminished neural responses in the ACC to ambivalence. Under OXT, moral dilemma vignettes also elicited a reduced activation in the orbitofrontal cortex, and the imagery of partner infidelity was rated as less arousing. Interestingly, the OXT-induced differential activation in the ACC predicted the magnitude of arousal reduction. Taken together, our findings reveal an unprecedented role of OXT in causing a domain-general decrease of neural responses to ambivalence. By alleviating emotional distress, OXT may qualify as a treatment option for psychiatric disorders with heightened ambivalence sensitivity such as schizophrenia or obsessive-compulsive disorder.
| S-EPMC4483569 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Research on emotional processing in schizophrenia suggests relatively intact subjective responses to affective stimuli "in the moment." However, neuroimaging evidence suggests diminished activation in brain regions associated with emotional processing in schizophrenia. We asked whether given a more vulnerable cognitive system in schizophrenia, individuals with this disorder would show increased or decreased modulation of working memory (WM) as a function of the emotional content of stimuli compared with healthy control subjects. In addition, we examined whether higher anhedonia levels were associated with a diminished impact of emotion on behavioral and brain activation responses. In the present study, 38 individuals with schizophrenia and 32 healthy individuals completed blocks of a 2-back WM task in a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanning session. Blocks contained faces displaying either only neutral stimuli or neutral and emotional stimuli (happy or fearful faces), randomly intermixed and occurring both as targets and non-targets. Both groups showed higher accuracy but slower reaction time for negative compared to neutral stimuli. Individuals with schizophrenia showed intact amygdala activity in response to emotionally evocative stimuli, but demonstrated altered dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and hippocampal activity while performing an emotionally loaded WM-task. Higher levels of social anhedonia were associated with diminished amygdala responses to emotional stimuli and increased DLPFC activity in individuals with schizophrenia. Emotional arousal may challenge dorsal-frontal control systems, which may have both beneficial and detrimental influences. Our findings suggest that disturbances in emotional processing in schizophrenia relate to alterations in emotion-cognition interactions rather than to the perception and subjective experience of emotion per se.
| S-EPMC3160211 | biostudies-other
Project description:BackgroundMajor power theories assume that social power can play an important role in an individual's goal-related behaviors. However, the specific psychological mechanisms through which this occurs remain unclear. Some studies suggested that having power enhanced individuals' goal-related behaviors, by contrast, other studies suggested that low-power individuals were associated with a greater performance in goal-directed tasks. We were particularly interested in how social power changes individuals' goal-related behaviors during an emotional face-word Stroop task.MethodSocial power was primed by asking participants to recall a past situation in which they were in a position of power (high-power individuals), or a situation in which they were lacking power (low-power individuals). Afterward, participants were asked to complete an emotional face-word Stroop task. In the task, words representing specific emotions were written in a prominent red color across a face, and these words and facial expressions were either congruent or incongruent. The participant's task was to judge the emotion of the face while ignoring the red emotional words.ResultsOur behavioral data showed that these individuals displayed faster reaction time and better accuracy in congruent conditions, slower reaction time for fearful faces and worse accuracy for happy faces in both incongruent and congruent conditions. The event-related potential analyses showed that, compared with low-power individuals, high-power individuals showed greater P1 amplitudes when faced with emotional stimuli (both incongruent and congruent conditions), indicating that power affects individuals' attention in the early sensory processing of emotional stimuli. For the N170 component, low-power individuals showed more negative amplitudes when facing emotional stimuli, indicated that low-power individuals paid more attention to the construct information of emotional stimuli. For the N450 component, compared with congruent conditions, incongruent conditions elicited more negative amplitudes for both high- and low-power individuals. More importantly, fearful faces provoked enhanced P1 amplitudes in incongruent conditions than in congruent conditions only for low-power individuals, while, happy faces elicited larger P1 amplitudes in congruent conditions than in incongruent conditions only for high-power individuals. The findings suggested that during the initial stage of stimuli processing low-power individuals are more sensitive to negative stimuli than high-power individuals.ConclusionThese findings provided electrophysiological evidence that the differences in the emotional conflict process between high- and low-power individuals mainly lies in the early processing stages of emotional information. Furthermore, evidence from P1 and N170 showed that there was also a redistribution of attentional resources in low-power individuals.
| S-EPMC8048403 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Faces are a primary means of conveying social information between humans. One important factor modulating the perception of human faces is emotional expression. Face inversion also affects perception, including judgments of emotional expression, possibly through the disruption of configural processing. One intriguing inversion effect is an illusion whereby faces appear to be physically smaller when upright than when inverted. This illusion appears to be highly selective for faces. In this study, we investigated whether the emotional expression of a face (neutral, happy, afraid, and angry) modulates the magnitude of this size illusion. Results showed that for all four expressions, there was a clear bias for inverted stimuli to be judged as larger than upright ones. This demonstrates that there is no influence of emotional expression on the size underestimation of upright faces, a surprising result given that recognition of different emotional expressions is known to be affected unevenly by inversion. Results are discussed considering recent neuroimaging research which used population receptive field (pRF) mapping to investigate the neural mechanisms underlying face perception features and which may provide an explanation for how an upright face appears smaller than an inverted one. Elucidation of this effect would lead to a greater understanding of how humans communicate.
| S-EPMC10833517 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundCatechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) regulates cortical dopaminergic transmission and prefrontal-dependent cognitive function. However, its role in other cognitive processes, including emotional processing, is relatively unexplored. We therefore investigated the separate and interactive influences of COMT inhibition and Val158Met (rs4680) genotype on performance on an emotional test battery.MethodsWe recruited 74 healthy men homozygous for the functional COMT Val158Met polymorphism. Volunteers were administered either a single 200 mg dose of the brain-penetrant COMT inhibitor tolcapone or placebo in a double-blind, randomised manner. Emotional processing was assessed using the emotional test battery, and mood was rated using visual analogue scales and the Profile of Mood States (POMS) questionnaire across the test day.ResultsThere were no main or interactive effects of Val158Met genotype or tolcapone on any of the emotional processing measures or mood ratings.ConclusionsOur findings suggest that, at least in healthy adult men, COMT has little or no effect on emotional processing or mood. These findings contrast with several neuroimaging studies that suggest that COMT modulates neural activity during emotional processing. Thus, further studies are required to understand how COMT impacts on the relationship between behavioural output and neural activity during emotional processing. Nevertheless, our data suggest that novel COMT inhibitors under development for treating cognitive dysfunction are unlikely to have acute off target effects on emotional behaviours.
| S-EPMC9150146 | biostudies-literature
Project description:This study aimed to reveal the influence of emotional valence and sensory modality on neural activity in response to multimodal emotional stimuli using scalp EEG. In this study, 20 healthy participants completed the emotional multimodal stimulation experiment for three stimulus modalities (audio, visual, and audio-visual), all of which are from the same video source with two emotional components (pleasure or unpleasure), and EEG data were collected using six experimental conditions and one resting state. We analyzed power spectral density (PSD) and event-related potential (ERP) components in response to multimodal emotional stimuli, for spectral and temporal analysis. PSD results showed that the single modality (audio only/visual only) emotional stimulation PSD differed from multi-modality (audio-visual) in a wide brain and band range due to the changes in modality and not from the changes in emotional degree. The most pronounced N200-to-P300 potential shifts occurred in monomodal rather than multimodal emotional stimulations. This study suggests that emotional saliency and sensory processing efficiency perform a significant role in shaping neural activity during multimodal emotional stimulation, with the sensory modality being more influential in PSD. These findings contribute to our understanding of the neural mechanisms involved in multimodal emotional stimulation.
| S-EPMC10221168 | biostudies-literature
Project description:From an evolutionary perspective, environmental threats relevant for survival constantly challenged human beings. Current research suggests the evolution of a fear processing module in the brain to cope with these threats. Recently, humans increasingly encountered modern threats (e.g., guns or car accidents) in addition to evolutionary threats (e.g., snakes or predators) which presumably required an adaptation of perception and behavior. However, the neural processes underlying the perception of these different threats remain to be elucidated. We investigated the effect of image content (i.e., evolutionary vs. modern threats) on the activation of neural networks of emotion processing. During functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) 41 participants watched affective pictures displaying evolutionary-threatening, modern-threatening, evolutionary-neutral and modern-neutral content. Evolutionary-threatening stimuli evoked stronger activations than modern-threatening stimuli in left inferior frontal gyrus and thalamus, right middle frontal gyrus and parietal regions as well as bilaterally in parietal regions, fusiform gyrus and bilateral amygdala. We observed the opposite effect, i.e., higher activity for modern-threatening than for evolutionary-threatening stimuli, bilaterally in the posterior cingulate and the parahippocampal gyrus. We found no differences in subjective arousal ratings between the two threatening conditions. On the valence scale though, subjects rated modern-threatening pictures significantly more negative than evolutionary-threatening pictures, indicating a higher level of perceived threat. The majority of previous studies show a positive relationship between arousal rating and amygdala activity. However, comparing fMRI results with behavioral findings we provide evidence that neural activity in fear processing areas is not only driven by arousal or valence, but presumably also by the evolutionary content of the stimulus. This has also fundamental methodological implications, in the sense to suggest a more elaborate classification of stimulus content to improve the validity of experimental designs.
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Project description:Emotion regulation is hypothesized to be mediated by the interactions between emotional reactivity and regulation networks during the dynamic unfolding of the emotional episode. Yet, it remains unclear how to delineate the effective relationships between these networks. In this study, we examined the aforementioned networks' information flow hierarchy during viewing of an anger provoking movie excerpt. Anger regulation is particularly essential for averting individuals from aggression and violence, thus improving prosocial behavior. Using subjective ratings of anger intensity we differentiated between low and high anger periods of the film. We then applied the Dependency Network Analysis (DEPNA), a newly developed graph theory method to quantify networks' node importance during the two anger periods. The DEPNA analysis revealed that the impact of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) was higher in the high anger condition, particularly within the regulation network and on the connections between the reactivity and regulation networks. We further showed that higher levels of vmPFC impact on the regulation network were associated with lower subjective anger intensity during the high-anger cinematic period, and lower trait anger levels. Supporting and replicating previous findings, these results emphasize the previously acknowledged central role of vmPFC in modulating negative affect. We further show that the impact of the vmPFC relies on its correlational influence on the connectivity between reactivity and regulation networks. More importantly, the hierarchy network analysis revealed a link between connectivity patterns of the vmPFC and individual differences in anger reactivity and trait, suggesting its potential therapeutic role.
| S-EPMC5897670 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The regulatory effect of embodied emotion on one's general emotion and the impact of the compatibility or incompatibility of the two types of emotion on creative thinking are still debatable. The purpose of this study is to investigate these issues experimentally. In Experiment 1, participants completed an explicit positive and negative emotion test [Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS)] and an implicit positive and negative emotion test [Implicit Positive and Negative Affect Test (IPANAT)] twice on a computer after emotional video priming was used to induce negative emotions and facial expression manipulation was performed to induce embodied positive or negative emotions. It was found that maintaining the expression of a suppressed smile was helpful in regulating negative emotions (p = 0.047). Specifically, the implicit negative emotions induced by facial expression manipulation had a positive regulating effect on the implicit negative emotions induced by the video (T1, M = 47.813; to T2, M = 44.188). In Experiment 2, the positive or negative emotions of the participants were induced using emotional videos, and facial expression manipulation was used to induce their embodied positive or negative emotions. Then, the participants completed a creative test by completing alternative use tasks (AUTs) and Chinese character riddles. The AUT fluency score in the emotionally compatible group was significantly higher than that in the emotionally incompatible group (p = 0.032), but while experiencing negative emotions, the emotionally compatible group had a significantly higher originality score and insight in Chinese character riddle score than the emotionally incompatible group (p = 0.017, p = 0.004). Therefore, embodied negative emotion has a significant regulating effect on implicit negative emotion. The compatibility of emotion activated by facial expression and viewing a video contributes to creative thinking, whereas the incompatibility of emotion hinders creative thinking. The compatibility of emotion under positive emotions improved thinking fluency, whereas under negative emotions, it activated originality and insight in creative thinking. The influence of such emotional compatibility on creative thinking may be due to the regulating effect of embodied emotions on implicit emotions induced by emotional stimuli.
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