Emotional Modulation Research Articles (Page 5)

Corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH) neurons are densely distributed in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), which plays a crucial role in integrating and processing emotional and cognitive inputs from other brain regions. Therefore, it is important to know the neural afferent patterns of mPFCCRH neurons, which are still unclear. Here, we utilized a rabies virus-based monosynaptic retrograde tracing system to map the presynaptic afferents of the mPFCCRH neurons throughout the entire brain. The results show that the mPFCCRH neurons receive inputs from three main groups of brain regions: (1) the cortex, primarily the orbital cortex, somatomotor areas, and anterior cingulate cortex; (2) the thalamus, primarily the anteromedial nucleus, mediodorsal thalamic nucleus, and central medial thalamic nucleus; and (3) other brain regions, primarily the basolateral amygdala, hippocampus, and dorsal raphe nucleus. Taken together, our results are valuable for further investigations into the roles of the mPFCCRH neurons in normal and neurological disease states. These investigations can shed light on various aspects such as cognitive processing, emotional modulation, motivation, sociability, and pain.

BackgroundThe negative emotional valence of a stimulus can be altered if paired with a pleasant stimulus, a phenomenon referred to as evaluative conditioning. Disgust, as a central emotion in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), particularly in the contamination subtype, may be an appropriate target for such a method. We know that disgust processing and OCD pathophysiology share in some brain areas, including the orbitofrontal cortex, as the neuromodulation techniques targeted in this area have been able to decrease OCD symptoms. We aim to conduct a randomized clinical trial to investigate the evaluative conditioning effect on disgust reduction in patients with contamination-based OCD when administered with or without neuromodulation targeted orbitofrontal cortex.MethodIn a single-blind randomized control trial (RCT), 55 patients with contamination-based OCD will be randomly assigned to four arms. In a factorial design, they will receive 10 sessions of evaluative conditioning training (either sham or real) plus cathodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over the orbitofrontal cortex (either sham or real). The intensity of disgust experience and clinical symptoms will be investigated as primary outcomes and quantitative electroencephalogram and cognitive functions as secondary outcomes. The data will be collected at three assessment levels: baseline, after completing intervention sessions, and 2-month follow-up.DiscussionThe present RCT is the first study that applies evaluative conditioning training in the OCD clinical sample. It will clarify the effect of the evaluative conditioning method alone and with tDCS on disgust reduction in patients with contamination-based OCD. It will provide initial evidence for such an emotion modulation method in the OCD population. The effect of this emotion-focused protocol on cognitive functions and electroencephalogram components is also of interest.Trial registrationClinicalTrials.gov, NCT05907369. Registered on 16 June 2023. Retrospectively registered.

Reward and emotion are tightly intertwined, so there is a growing interest in mapping their interactions. However, our knowledge of these interactions in the human brain, especially during the consummatory phase of reward is limited. To address this critical gap, we conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging study to investigate the effects of negative emotion on reward outcome processing. We employed a novel design where emotional valence (negative or neutral) indicated the type of outcome (reward or no-reward) in a choice task. We focused our functional magnetic resonance imaging analysis on the ventro-medial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), ventral striatum and amygdala, which were frequently implicated in reward outcome processing. In these regions of interest, we performed multi-voxel pattern analysis to specifically probe how negative emotion modulates reward outcome processing. In vmPFC, using decoding analysis, we found evidence consistent with the reduced discriminability of multi-variate activity patterns of reward vs no-reward outcomes when signaled by a negative relative to a neutral image, suggesting an emotional modulation of reward processing along the plausible common value/valence dimension. These findings advance our limited understanding of the basic brain mechanisms underlying the influence of negative emotion on consummatory reward processing, with potential implications for mental disorders, particularly anxiety and depression.

ABSTRACT Co-regulation refers to warm, receptive, and supportive interactions between caregiver and child that provide guidance and modulation of the child's emotions, behaviours, and thoughts. This study identifies basic elements of co-regulation between parents and children in relatively well-functioning interactions. The data material consists of 24 video clips of eight dyadic parent-child relationships (child age = 2-8 years), drawn from the Marte Meo therapeutic method. The video analysis indicates that parental responses to an initiative, negotiation, and parental attunement emerge as basic elements and form part of a complex interplay with each other. The findings further imply that parental attunement represents a key element in defining the quality of the processes of initiation and negotiation between children and adults. The issue of balance between power/responsibility vested in adults and children's right to autonomy during these co-regulative interactions is also discussed. The paper ends with potential avenues for future research.

ABSTRACT This paper explores therapeutic stillness as a relation between body and landscape, which unfolds through interactions with the environment that are embodied, encultured and increasingly technologized. I consider how stillness is produced, narrated, valued and experienced in relation to what the health geographical literature terms ‘therapeutic landscapes’, referring to places that are associated with wellbeing. Stillness, as concept, practice and experience, encompasses a rich set of cultural meanings that have consequences for relations with, and valorizations of, landscape, that are reflected in contemporary therapeutic geographies. I introduce and elaborate on what I call ‘cocooning’ and ‘immersive’ modes of stillness and outline a research agenda on stillness within work on wellbeing and environment. Cocooning and immersing can be understood as two variant alignments between body and place, which describe the modulation of bodily capacities and emotions in productions of affective sanctuary through stillness. Attention to practices of cocooning and immersing reveals the cultural narratives that intersect with the valorization and cultivation of green and blue spaces as therapeutic landscapes and emphasizes the affective and sensory dimensions of experiencing wellbeing within such landscapes.

Emotional information prioritizes human behavior. How much emotions influence ongoing behavior critically depends on the extent of executive control functions in a given context. One form of executive control is based on stimulus-stop associations (i.e., habitual inhibition) that rapidly and effortlessly elicits control over the interruption of ongoing behavior. So far, no behavioral accounts have explored the emotional impact on habitual inhibition. We aimed to examine the emotional modulation on habitual inhibition and associated psycho-physiological changes. A go/no-go association task asked participants to learn stimulus-stop and stimulus-response associations during 10-day training to form habitual inhibition (without emotional interference). Probabilistic feedback guided learning with varying probabilities of congruent feedback, generating stronger versus weaker pairings. A reversal test measured habitual inhibition strength counteracted by emotional cues (high-arousal positive and negative stimuli compared with neutral ones). Our training protocol induced stable behavioral and psycho-physiological responses compatible with habitual behavior. At reversal, habitual inhibition was evident as marked by significant speed costs of reversed no-go trials for strongly associated stimuli. Positive and negative emotional cues produced larger impact on habitual inhibition. We report first evidence on a cognitive control mechanism that is vulnerable to emotional stimuli and suggest alternative explanations on how emotions may boost or counteract certain behavioral abnormalities mediated by habitual inhibition.

The noradrenaline (NA) system is one of the brain's major neuromodulatory systems; it originates in a small midbrain nucleus, the locus coeruleus (LC), and projects widely throughout the brain.1,2 The LC-NA system is believed to regulate arousal and attention3,4 and is a pharmacological target in multiple clinical conditions.5,6,7 Yet our understanding of its role in health and disease has been impeded by a lack of direct recordings in humans. Here, we address this problem by showing that electrochemical estimates of sub-second NA dynamics can be obtained using clinical depth electrodes implanted for epilepsy monitoring. We made these recordings in the amygdala, an evolutionarily ancient structure that supports emotional processing8,9 and receives dense LC-NA projections,10 while patients (n= 3) performed a visual affective oddball task. The task was designed to induce different cognitive states, with the oddball stimuli involving emotionally evocative images,11 which varied in terms of arousal (low versus high) and valence (negative versus positive). Consistent with theory, the NA estimates tracked the emotional modulation of attention, with a stronger oddball response in a high-arousal state. Parallel estimates of pupil dilation, a common behavioral proxy for LC-NA activity,12 supported a hypothesis that pupil-NA coupling changes with cognitive state,13,14 with the pupil and NA estimates being positively correlated for oddball stimuli in a high-arousal but not a low-arousal state. Our study provides proof of concept that neuromodulator monitoring is now possible using depth electrodes in standard clinical use.

Research on emotional modulation of attention in gaze cueing has resulted in contradictory findings. Some studies found larger gaze cueing effects (GCEs) in response to a fearful gaze cue, whereas others did not. A recent study explained this discrepancy within a cognitive resource account, in which perceptual demands of the task promote a bias toward either a local (discrimination task) or global (localization task) processing strategy. During local processing, the integration of emotional expression with gaze direction is assumed to be impaired, whereas during global processing integration is assumed to be facilitated. In the current study, we investigated the cognitive resource account in three experiments. In Experiment 1, we manipulated task demands by adopting a detection or a localization task whilst both should allow global processing. In Experiments 2 and 3, we induced either a local or global perceptual processing strategy by presenting local or global targets (Experiment 2) or by priming local or global perception prior to the gaze cueing task (Experiment 3). Results showed faster orienting in response to a fearful face cue independent of task demands in Experiment 1. Inducing local and global processing strategies in Experiments 2 and 3 did not affect emotional modulation of the GCE. In contrast, Bayesian analyses provided evidence of absence of such an effect, demonstrating that local or global processing strategies cannot explain the mixed findings obtained in emotional modulation of gaze cueing. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Background. Osteoarthritis (OA) is one of the leading causes of chronic pain in adults, wherein half of the cases is coupled to a neuropathic component. Agents with chondroprotective properties such as chondroitin sulfate (CS) and glucosamine sulfate (GS) have been successfully used in the treatment of OA-related pain. CS/GS exhibit diverse analgesic, anti-inflammatory, antioxidant and chondroregenerative effects that contribute to the restoration of cartilage tissue.Objective: to analyze the misconceptions associated with the medical terminology used for CS/HS in the treatment of OA-related pain, approaches to standardize the quantitative and qualitative composition of CS/HS extracts.Material and methods. Expert analysis was performed along with computational linguistics methods (sentiment analysis, i.e. analysis of text-related emotional modality). Sentiment analysis was carried out using the topological theory of data analysis and algorithms, with 90% accuracy allowing to classify texts into 16 classes of sentiment (manipulative constructs, research without positive results, propaganda, data falsification, etc.). This technique was tested earlier on 20 million publications retrieved from PubMed/MEDLINE database.Results. In recent years, the use of highly dubious terms such as “symptomatic slow acting drug for osteoarthritis, SYSADOA”, etc., has been extensively promoted at certain international conferences. The introduction of such barely scientific terms is not justified neither by the results of basic research nor clinical practice. Using the methods of computational linguistics and data mining of the biomedical literature, we have shown that some misconceptions actively promoted at the so-called "grand conferences" and "international congresses" virtually lack in real-world published scientific literature. Such misconceptions, logically contradicting the entire system of other medical terms, confuse scientific terminology. Moreover, texts promoting this misconceptions are easily recognized as manipulative not only by experts in the analysis of medical literature, but also by artificial intelligence algorithms.Conclusion. A number of misconceptions associated with inadequate interpretation of data obtained during basic and clinical studies of CS/GS has been explored. Specific examples show how practitioners can distinguish between manipulative propaganda and a balanced presentation of research data.

Although alpha-band activity has long been a focus of psychophysiological research, its modulation by emotional value during picture perception has only recently been studied systematically. Here, we review these studies and report that the most consistent alpha oscillatory pattern indexing emotional processing is an enhanced desynchronization (ERD) over posterior sensors when viewing emotional compared with neutral pictures. This enhanced alpha ERD is not specific to unpleasant picture content, as previously proposed for other measures of affective response, but has also been observed for pleasant stimuli. Evidence suggests that this effect involves a desynchronization of the upper alpha band and of the lower beta frequencies (10-20 Hz). The emotional modulation of alpha ERD occurs even after massive stimulus repetition and when emotional cues serve as task-irrelevant distractors, consistent with the hypothesis that evaluative processes are mandatory in emotional picture processing. A similar enhanced ERD has been observed for other significant cues (e.g., conditioned aversive stimuli, or in anticipation of a potential threat), suggesting that it reflects cortical excitability associated with the engagement of the motivational systems.

In making analogical arguments about actions, is more similarity between the source and target cases always better? No: all things considered, more similarity is not always better, even if the similarities are all relevant. The reason is that the context of the argument, including emotional considerations, modulates the selection of the source case to service the goals of the argument. If the goals of the argument include persuasion and even modifying someone’s emotional state, increasing the overall similarity between the source and target may be counterproductive.

Empirical research suggests that motive states modulate perception affecting perceptual processing either directly, or indirectly through the modulation of spatial attention. The affective modulation of perception occurs at various latencies, some of which fall within late vision, that is, after 150 ms. poststimulus. Earlier effects enhance the C1 and P1 ERP components in early vision, the former enhancement being the result of direct emotive effects on perceptual processing, and the latter being the result of indirect effects of emotional stimuli on perceptual processing that automatically capture exogenous attention. Other research suggests that emotional stimuli do not capture attention automatically but attentional capture is conditioned on the context. Since context dependent effects are first registered with the elicitation of N1 ERP component about 170 ms. poststimulus, emotional stimuli affect late vision. However, the early affective modulation of early vision by emotive states threatens the cognitive impenetrability of early vision since emotive states are associated with learning and past experiences. I argue that the emotive modulation of early vision does not entail the cognitive penetrability of early vision. First, the early indirect affective modulation of P1 is akin to the effects of spatial pre-cueing by non-emotive cues and these preparatory effects do not signify the cognitive impenetrability of early vision. Second, because the direct modulation of C1 signifies an initial, involuntary appraisal of threat in the incoming stimulus that precedes any cognitive states.

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Greater Early Posttrauma Activation in the Right Inferior Frontal Gyrus Predicts Recovery From Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Symptoms

ABSTRACT Emotional expressive flexibility (EEF) is an important social ability that has prompted scholars to examine its benefits to human mental health. However, the neural underpinnings of individual differences in the EEF remain unclear. In neuroscience, frontal alpha asymmetry (FAA) is regarded as a sensitive indicator of certain emotional modalities and affective styles. To the best of our knowledge, no study has linked FAA with EEF to examine whether FAA could be a potential neural indicator of EEF. In the present study, 47 participants (M age = 22.38 years, 55.3% women) underwent a resting electroencephalogram and completed the flexible regulation of emotional expression scale (FREE). The results revealed that after controlling for gender, resting FAA scores positively predicted EEF, with relative left frontal activity associated with higher EEF. Additionally, this prediction was reflected in both the enhancement and suppression dimensions of EEF. Furthermore, individuals with relative left frontal activity reported greater enhancement and EEF than individuals with relative right frontal activity. The present study indicated that FAA may be a neural marker of EEF. In the future, more empirical studies are needed to provide causal evidence that the improvement in FAA can enhance EEF.

The reinforcement and extinction in conditioned reflex have been studied extensively, but memristor-based generalization and differentiation circuits under different emotional conditions are rarely studied. Therefore, a memristor-based generalization and differentiation circuit under positive and negative emotional conditions is presented in this paper. The circuit includes emotion module, synapse module, voltage selection module and output module. The emotion module is divided into positive emotion and negative emotion modules. Different emotions have different effects on the synapse module, which in turn affects the output module. The memristor-based circuit proposed in this paper can not only realize the process of generalization and differentiation under the influence of different emotions, but also realize the function of secondary differentiation. The results presented in this paper can be verified in PSPICE. By analyzing the effects of different emotions on differentiation and generalization, this paper provides some references for future researches in the field of generalization and differentiation.

IGF‐I modulation of emotion and social interaction through Locus Coeruleus in aging and AD mice

Social directional cues (e.g., gaze direction; walking direction) can trigger reflexive attentional orienting, a phenomenon known as social attention. Here, we examined whether this reflexive social attention could be modulated by the emotional content embedded in social cues. By introducing emotional (happy and sad) biological motion (BM) stimuli to the modified central cuing paradigm, we found that the happy but not the sad emotional gait could significantly boost attentional orienting effect relative to the neutral gait. Critically, this "happiness advantage" effect could be extended to social attention induced by gaze. Furthermore, the observed differential emotional modulations could not be simply explained by low-level physical differences between the emotional stimuli, as inverted social cues (i.e., BM and face) failed to produce such modulation effects. Overall, these findings highlight the role of emotional information in modulating the processing of social signals, and further suggest the existence of a general emotional modulation on social attention triggered by different types of social signals. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Modulation of interoception and emotion by high-density transcranial direct current stimulation (HD-tDCS) of the anterior insula

The pathogenesis of pain in fibromyalgia is still not completely understood. A disrupted emotional modulation could affect the physiology of nociception and contributes to an altered perception of pain. The aim of this study was to test the role of emotional arousal and valence in pain susceptibility in fibromyalgia using the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) paradigm and the Fibromyalgia Severity Scale (FSS). The study focused on comparing emotional arousal and valence between patients with fibromyalgia and the control group. The secondary objective was to examine the correlation between emotional indices and scores on the FSS and the duration of the disease. The 20 patients with fibromyalgia enrolled showed a higher mean arousal score for all the stimuli, including a higher score for unpleasant and socially unpleasant stimuli. The valence scores for social-relevant stimuli were also higher. Increased arousal to unpleasant and socially unpleasant images and increased valence of them correlated with the duration of the disease and the severity of symptoms and could reflect impairment in social cognition and marked sensitivity to pain in interaction with central nociceptive dysregulation.