Explicit Emotional Processing Research Articles

Explicit vs. implicit emotional processing: The interaction between processing type and executive control

The current study examined whether the interaction between emotion and executive control (EC) is modulated by the processing type of the emotional information. Namely, whether the emotional information is explicitly processed, implicitly processed or passively viewed. In each trial, a negative or neutral picture preceded an arrow-flanker stimulus that was congruent or incongruent. Incongruent stimuli are known to recruit EC. Explicit processing of the pictures (Experiment 1a), which required responding to their emotional content, resulted in emotional interference for congruent but not for incongruent stimuli. Similar effects were shown for the passive viewing condition (Experiment 2). In contrast, implicit processing (Experiment 1b), which required responding to non-emotional content, resulted in emotional interference for both congruent and incongruent stimuli. Thus, our findings indicate that implicit emotional processing affects performance independently of EC recruitment. In contrast, explicit emotional processing and passive viewing of emotional pictures lead to reduced emotional interference when EC is recruited.

Auditory observation of infant-directed speech by mothers: experience-dependent interaction between language and emotion in the basal ganglia.

Adults address infants with a special speech register known as infant-directed speech (IDS), which conveys both linguistic and emotional information through its characteristic lexicon and exaggerated prosody (e.g., higher pitched, slower, and hyperarticulated). Although caregivers are known to regulate the usage of IDS (linguistic and emotional components) depending on their child’s development, the underlying neural substrates of this flexible modification are largely unknown. Here, using an auditory observation method and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of four different groups of females, we revealed the experience-dependent influence of the emotional component on linguistic processing in the right caudate nucleus when mothers process IDS: (1) non-mothers, who do not use IDS regularly, showed no significant difference between IDS and adult-directed speech (ADS); (2) mothers with preverbal infants, who primarily use the emotional component of IDS, showed the main effect of the emotional component of IDS; (3) mothers with toddlers at the two-word stage, who use both linguistic and emotional components of IDS, showed an interaction between the linguistic and emotional components of IDS; and (4) mothers with school-age children, who use ADS rather than IDS toward their children, showed a tendency toward the main effect of ADS. The task that was most comparable to the naturalistic categories of IDS (i.e., explicit-language and implicit-emotion processing) recruited the right caudate nucleus, but it was not recruited in the control, less naturalistic condition (explicit-emotion and implicit-language processing). Our results indicate that the right caudate nucleus processes experience-and task-dependent interactions between language and emotion in mothers’ IDS.

Explicit and implicit emotional expression in bulimia nervosa in the acute state and after recovery.

Expression of emotional state is considered to be a core facet of an individual's emotional competence. Emotional processing in BN has not been often studied and has not been considered from a broad perspective. This study aimed at examining the implicit and explicit emotional expression in BN patients, in the acute state and after recovery. Sixty-three female participants were included: 22 BN, 22 recovered BN (R-BN), and 19 healthy controls (HC). The clinical cases were drawn from consecutive admissions and diagnosed according to DSM-IV-TR diagnostic criteria. Self reported (explicit) emotional expression was measured with State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory-2, State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, and Symptom Check List-90 items-Revised. Emotional facial expression (implicit) was recorded by means of an integrated camera (by detecting Facial Feature Tracking), during a 20 minutes therapeutic video game. In the acute illness explicit emotional expression [anxiety (p<0.001) and anger (p<0.05)] was increased. In the recovered group this was decreased to an intermediate level between the acute illness and healthy controls [anxiety (p<0.001) and anger (p<0.05)]. In the implicit measurement of emotional expression patients with acute BN expressed more joy (p<0.001) and less anger (p<0.001) than both healthy controls and those in the recovered group. These findings suggest that there are differences in the implicit and explicit emotional processing in BN, which is significantly reduced after recovery, suggesting an improvement in emotional regulation.

Effect of specific psychotherapy for chronic depression on neural Responses to emotional faces

BackgroundNeurofunctional deficits in chronic depression (CD) have been understudied. Specifically there is no known published study of the effects of a specialized psychotherapy for CD (CBASP) on neurofunctional deficits. MethodsTen patients with a DSM-IV diagnosis of CD received a 12 week specialised psychotherapy (CBASP). Controls were healthy matched volunteers. All subjects participated in a prospective study with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) at baseline and after 12 weeks. During the fMRI scans, subjects performed an implicit and explicit emotional processing task while watching dynamic displays of neutral, positive (happy) and negative (fearful and sad) facial expressions. Effects of treatment were analyzed in a repeated measures design. The analysis was restricted to two anatomically defined regions of interest (ROI): the amygdala and the cingulum. Results60% of patients responded to treatment. Patients with CD reported increased arousal to negative emotional expressions. They also showed an increase in left amygdala reactivity during implicit processing of emotional expressions following psychotherapy. We found no significant effect for the cingulum. LimitationsThe main limitation of our study is the small sample size. Due to the lack of a control group it is also unclear whether the demonstrated effect is specific to the psychotherapy used in this study. ConclusionsFor the first time our study demonstrates an effect of CBASP on neural processing of facial emotions in CD. It therefore adds to the growing evidence supporting this treatment.

The Influence of Topic Structure on Emotional Updating in Discourse Context

It is shown that readers can make inferences of the protagonist's emotions during reading comprehension, and they can update their emotional representations when the emotions in the discourse shift(e.g., from positive to negative), reflected by increased reading time on the emotion-shifted sentences as compared with the emotion-continuation ones. However, during reading comprehension, not only the emotional information is processed, but also the information about discourse structure is processed by readers, and these two factors may both vary with the development of the story. So the present study was interested in whether topic structure could make influence on emotional updating in discourse context. Besides, through explicit and implicit emotional tasks, the present study investigated whether the influence of topic structure on emotional updating was modulated by the processing of emotional information. In our three experiments, two factors were manipulated: topic structure(topic-continuation, topic-shift) and emotion(emotion-continuation, emotion-shift). Through the explicit task in experiment 1, participants were instructed to read 48 critical discourses and 72 fillers(each discourse consisted of two sentences) using a sentence-by-sentence self-paced reading procedure, and were asked to choose a number from 1-9 to make judgment of the discourse emotion(1 represented for the most negative, 9 represented for the most positive). Then the rating grade and the rating time were recorded. Also, the reading time of the second sentence was recorded. In experiment 2 3, through the implicit task, participants were instructed to answer a comprehension question after reading 1/3 of the materials. In experiment 2, the reading time of the second sentence was recorded. In experiment 3, besides the second sentence, there was a third sentence which included an emotional word. Therefore, the reading time of the emotional word and the word following it were recorded. The results from Experiment 1 showed that for the explicit task where subjects were asked to make emotional judgment, topic structure did not affect emotional updating. However, the results from Experiment 2 and 3 showed that for the implicit task where subjects were asked to read for comprehension, topic structure significantly affected emotional updating in such as way that emotion-shifted sentences were read longer than emotion-continuation sentences in the topic-continuation conditions, but not in the topic-shifted condition. This suggested that the process of emotional updating was disrupted in the topic-shifted condition. To conclude, through the explicit and implicit emotional processing tasks, the present study conducted three self-paced reading experiments to investigate how topic structure influenced emotional updating in discourse context. It was shown that topic structure did not affect emotional updating under the explicit task. However, under the implicit task, emotional updating needed extra processing time for the topic-continuation conditions, but not for the topic-shifted conditions. These results provide evidence for a strong effect of discourse structure on emotional processing in discourse context.

The construction of emotional experience requires the integration of implicit and explicit emotional processes

Although we agree that a constructivist approach to emotional experience makes sense, we propose that implicit (visceromotor and somatomotor) emotional processes are dissociable from explicit (attention and reflection) emotional processes, and that the conscious experience of emotion requires an integration of the two. Assessments of implicit emotion and emotional awareness can be helpful in the neuroscientific investigation of emotion.

Implicit and explicit emotional processing in Parkinson's disease

Introduction: Our study investigated the ability of nondemented Parkinson's disease (PD) patients to explicitly identify emotional words and to show implicit sensitivity to these emotions in a task that did not require emotional processing. Methods: Twelve PD patients and 12 healthy controls, matched for age and education, performed lexical decision (LD) and emotional categorisation tasks (fear, disgust, and happiness) on the same words. Results: PD patients were specifically impaired in the explicit identification of disgust with a decreased accuracy in LD. However, a slowdown in LD latency in both PD patients and the control group suggested the persistence of emotional sensitivity to disgust. Conclusion: Despite the persistence of an automatic capture by the emotional content of disgust, PD patients may suffer from emotional deficits in recognising both the emotional and semantic components of words, resulting in blunted emotional responses.

Effective Connectivity during Processing of Facial Affect: Evidence for Multiple Parallel Pathways

The perception of facial affect engages a distributed cortical network. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging and dynamic causal modeling to characterize effective connectivity during explicit (conscious) categorization of affective stimuli in the human brain. Specifically, we examined the modulation of connectivity from posterior regions of the face-processing network to the lateral ventral prefrontal cortex (VPFC) during affective categorization and we tested for a potential role of the amygdala (AMG) in mediating this modulation. We found that explicit processing of facial affect led to prominent modulation (increase) in the effective connectivity from the inferior occipital gyrus (IOG) to the VPFC, while there was less evidence for modulation of the afferent connections from fusiform gyrus and AMG to VPFC. More specifically, the forward connection from IOG to the VPFC exhibited a selective increase under anger (as opposed to fear or sadness). Furthermore, Bayesian model comparison suggested that the modulation of afferent connections to the VPFC was mediated directly by facial affect, as opposed to an indirect modulation mediated by the AMG. Our results thus suggest that affective information is conveyed to the VPFC along multiple parallel pathways and that AMG activity is not sufficient to account for the gating of information transfer to the VPFC during explicit emotional processing.

Acute tryptophan depletion attenuates conscious appraisal of social emotional signals in healthy female volunteers.

RationaleAcute tryptophan depletion (ATD) decreases levels of central serotonin. ATD thus enables the cognitive effects of serotonin to be studied, with implications for the understanding of psychiatric conditions, including depression.ObjectiveTo determine the role of serotonin in conscious (explicit) and unconscious/incidental processing of emotional information.Materials and methodsA randomized, double-blind, cross-over design was used with 15 healthy female participants. Subjective mood was recorded at baseline and after 4 h, when participants performed an explicit emotional face processing task, and a task eliciting unconscious processing of emotionally aversive and neutral images presented subliminally using backward masking.ResultsATD was associated with a robust reduction in plasma tryptophan at 4 h but had no effect on mood or autonomic physiology. ATD was associated with significantly lower attractiveness ratings for happy faces and attenuation of intensity/arousal ratings of angry faces. ATD also reduced overall reaction times on the unconscious perception task, but there was no interaction with emotional content of masked stimuli. ATD did not affect breakthrough perception (accuracy in identification) of masked images.ConclusionsATD attenuates the attractiveness of positive faces and the negative intensity of threatening faces, suggesting that serotonin contributes specifically to the appraisal of the social salience of both positive and negative salient social emotional cues. We found no evidence that serotonin affects unconscious processing of negative emotional stimuli. These novel findings implicate serotonin in conscious aspects of active social and behavioural engagement and extend knowledge regarding the effects of ATD on emotional perception.

Implicit and explicit processing of facial emotion involves distinct neural pathways

Some authors have proposed that implicit and explicit emotional processing involve distinct neural networks. The existing literature however is inconclusive and existing studies are limited both by the use of static displays of facial emotion, which have limited ecological validity, and MRI sequences that are not optimized for visualizing the amydala. We hypothesize differenzial activation of cortical and subcortical structures with implicit and explicit emotional processing respectively. We recruited 20 right handed healthy subjects (10 female, 10 male, mean age 29yrs.). They were scanned using a protocol that we had optimized for viewing the amygdala in a 1.5T Siemens Sonata Scanner (field of view 256mm, voxel size 4×4 x 4, TR 2500ms, TE 40ms). Stimuli included 40 different film clips from 10 professional actors who displayed neutral, positive (happy) and negative (fearful and sad) facial expressions. Subjects were engaged in two different tasks: during the implicit task, they had to identify the gender of the poser. For the explicit task they had to identify the emotion displayed. As hypothesized, cortical and subcortical structures were differenzially activated during implicit and explicit processing of dynamic displays of facial emotion. While explicit processing activated the amygdala more strongly, implicit processing lead to increased activation in the frontal cortex, anterior and posterior cingulum. The paradigm presented here may be used in further studies

Changes in prefrontal and amygdala activity during olanzapine treatment in schizophrenia

Earlier imaging studies in schizophrenia have reported abnormal amygdala and prefrontal cortex activity during emotion processing. We investigated with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during emotion processing changes in activity of the amygdala and of prefrontal cortex in patients with schizophrenia during 8 weeks of olanzapine treatment. Twelve previously drug-free/naive patients with schizophrenia were treated with olanzapine for 8 weeks and underwent two fMRI scans after 4 and 8 weeks of treatment during implicit and explicit emotional processing. Twelve healthy subjects were also scanned twice to control for potential repetition effects. Results showed a diagnosis by time interaction in left amygdala and a diagnosis by time by task interaction in right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. In particular, activity in left amygdala was greater in patients than in controls at the first scan during both explicit and implicit processing, while it was lower in patients at the second relative to the first scan. Furthermore, during implicit processing, right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex activity was lower in patients than controls at the first scan, while it was greater in patients at the second relative to the first scan. These results suggest that longitudinal treatment with olanzapine may be associated with specific changes in activity of the amygdala and prefrontal cortex during emotional processing in schizophrenia.

Abnormal cerebral effective connectivity during explicit emotional processing in adults with autism spectrum disorder

Several recent studies suggest that autism may result from abnormal communication between brain regions. We directly assessed this hypothesis by testing the presence of abnormalities in a model of the functional cerebral network engaged during explicit emotion processing in adults with high functioning autism or Asperger syndrome. Comparison of structural equation models revealed abnormal patterns of effective connectivity, with the prefrontal cortex as a key site of dysfunction. These findings provide evidence that abnormal long-range connectivity between structures of the 'social brain' could explain the socio-emotional troubles that characterize the autistic pathology.

Neural Substrates of Implicit and Explicit Emotional Processes: A Unifying Framework for Psychosomatic Medicine

There are two broad themes in psychosomatic medicine research that relate emotions to physical disease outcomes. Theme 1 holds that self-reported negative affect has deleterious effects and self-reported positive affect has salubrious effects on health. Theme 2 holds that interference with the experience or expression of negative affect has adverse health consequences. From the perspective of self-report these two traditions appear contradictory. A key thesis of this paper is that the foundational distinction in cognitive neuroscience between explicit (conscious) and implicit (unconscious) processes, corresponding to Themes 1 and 2, respectively, provides a unifying framework that makes empirical research on unconscious emotional processes more tractable. A psychological model called "levels of emotional awareness" is presented first that places implicit and explicit emotional processes on a cognitive-developmental continuum. This model holds that the ability to become consciously aware of one's own feelings is a cognitive skill that goes through a developmental process similar to that which Piaget described for other cognitive functions. Empirical findings using the Levels of Emotional Awareness Scale are presented. A parallel hierarchical model of the neural substrates of emotional awareness is presented next supported by recent neuroimaging and lesion work. The evidence presented in this review suggests that the neural substrates of implicit and explicit emotional processes are distinct, that the latter have a modulatory effect on the former, and that at the neural level Theme 1 and Theme 2 phenomena share critical similarities. The implications of this psychobiological model for research in psychosomatic medicine are discussed.

Theory of emotional awareness and brain processing of emotion

Negative affect that is not experienced or expressed may be the most pathogenic response to environmental stress. The purpose of this paper is to provide a way of understanding this phenomenon from a psychological and physiological perspective. A cognitive–developmental model of emotional awareness is presented that holds that the ability to become consciously aware of one's own feelings is a cognitive skill that goes through a developmental process similar to that which Piaget described for other cognitive functions. The developmental process consists of the transition from unconscious (implicit) to conscious (explicit) processing, with explicit emotional processing having a modulatory effect on implicit processes. A parallel hierarchical model of the neural substrates of emotional experience is presented next supported by recent neuroimaging work. It is argued that the neural substrates of implicit and explicit emotional processes are distinct. The neural substrates of implicit aspects of emotion and three distinguishable aspects of explicit emotional processing are then presented: background feelings, focal attention to feelings and reflective awareness of feelings. The conscious awareness of affective states requires participation of structures that subserve attention and mental representation that are not unique to emotion. The domain-general (i.e. not specific to emotion) function of these structures may help to explain the vast individual differences that are observed clinically in the ability that people have to monitor and report their own emotions. Some of the implications of this psychobiological model for behavioral medicine research are discussed.

Becoming Aware of Feelings: Integration of Cognitive-Developmental, Neuroscientific, and Psychoanalytic Perspectives

A fundamental ingredient of psychoanalytic treatment is the ability of the analysand to become consciously aware of his or her own emotional responses. We propose that the conscious awareness of emotion is a type of information processing that can be viewed as a separate domain of cognitive function, that the transition from unconscious (implicit) to conscious (explicit) aspects of emotion can be understood developmentally in the manner described by Piaget for cognitive functions generally, and that explicit emotional processes have a modulatory effect on implicit processes. We then present a parallel hierarchical model of the neural substrates of emotional experience supported by recent neuroimaging work. We describe how the neural substrates of implicit and explicit aspects of emotion are dissociable, and we discuss the neural substrates of implicit aspects of emotion, background feelings, focal attention to feelings, and reflective awareness of feelings. This framework constitutes an alternative to traditional psychoanalytic understandings of insight. We conclude by discussing the implications of this model for psychoanalysis, including the nature of clinical change, the psychological processes involved in change with and without insight, and a framework for conceptualizing how to promote emotional change in a variety of clinical settings.

Common and distinct neural responses during direct and incidental processing of multiple facial emotions

Whether common or distinct neural systems underpin perception of different emotions and the degree to which these systems are automatically engaged during emotional perception are unresolved. We performed an event-related fMRI experiment in which subjects viewed morphed emotional faces displaying low or high intensities of disgust, fear, happiness, or sadness under two task conditions. The amygdala and fusiform cortex responded to high-intensity expressions of all emotions, independent of task. Right superior temporal sulcus showed an additive effect of the emotion-directed task and high-intensity emotion. Ventromedial prefrontal and somatosensory cortices, regions implicated in providing representations of somatic states, showed enhanced activity during explicit emotional judgments. We failed to find predicted differences between emotions. The results suggest that amygdala contributes to task-independent perceptual processing of a range of emotions. We interpret ventromedial prefrontal and somatosensory cortex activations as evidence that these regions contribute to explicit emotion processing through linking emotion perception with representations of somatic states previously engendered by emotions.

Mood congruence effect in explicit and implicit memory tasks: a comparison between depressed patients, schizophrenic patients and controls

This study investigates mood congruence effect in explicit and implicit memory tasks in 23 inpatients fulfilling DSM-III-R criteria for major depressive disorder. Performances were compared to those of 15 in- or outpatients fulfilling DSM-III-R criteria for schizophrenia, and 37 normal subjects serving as euthymics controls. All subjects were submitted to a standard cued recall test and to a word stem completion test devised to assess the effect of the initial presentation without the explicit retrieval of the words being necessary. The material used for these two tasks consisted of emotionally negative and positive words. The results show a mood congruence effect in the ;;;implicit;; memory task (and not in the ;;;explicit;; memory task) only in patients who had recovered from their major depressive episode (and not in depressed patients, schizophrenic patients, or controls). These results suggest that implicit and explicit emotional information processing differ from one another in certain respects.