Negative Stimuli Research Articles

Not feeling it: lack of robust emotion effects on breadth of attention

ABSTRACT Emotional states are believed to broaden or to narrow the focus of attention. However, numerous inconsistent findings call for renewed efforts to understand the conditions under which such effects occur. We conducted a pair of high-powered web experiments. Emotional states were manipulated across valence categories and appraisal dimensions using autobiographical recall (Experiment 1) and emotional images (Experiment 2). Breadth of attention was assessed using the Navon task coupled with induction sensitivity and mouse tracking analyses. We did not find robust evidence for emotional effects on breadth of attention. Negative images led surprisingly to slightly broader attention in Experiment 2, but this may reflect the slow release of cognitive resources from preceding negative stimuli amplifying the global precedence effect. Breadth of attention also had very small positive relationships with goal-congruence appraisal in the first and control appraisal in the second experiment. We also found no evidence for moderation by mood or personality. Taken together, our findings add to the growing list of failures to observe emotional modulation of breadth of attention and call for continued efforts to chart the boundary conditions of these effects.

The Impact of Ageing on Episodic Memory Retrieval: How Valence Influences Neural Functional Connectivity

Age-related decline in episodic memory is often linked to structural and functional changes in the brain. Here, we investigated how these alterations might affect functional connectivity during memory retrieval following exposure to emotional stimuli. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), participants viewed images with varying emotional valences (positive, negative, and neutral) followed by unrelated non-arousing videos and were then asked to retrieve an episodic detail from the previously shown video. We conducted Multivariate Pattern Analysis (MVPA) to identify regions with divergent responses between age groups, which then served as seeds in Seed-Based Connectivity (SBC) analyses. The results revealed an age-related decline in behavioural performance following exposure to negative stimuli but preserved performance following positive stimuli. Young adults exhibited increased functional connectivity following negative valence. Conversely, old adults displayed increased connectivity more scarcely, and only following positive valence. These findings point to an adaptive response of the impact of emotions on task performance that depends on neural adaptations related to ageing. This suggests that age-related changes in functional connectivity might underlie how emotions influence memory, highlighting the need to tailor memory support strategies in older adulthood.

Comparison of Cortisol Levels in the Hair of Male European Roe Deer at the Beginning and End of the Stalking Hunting Season

Roe deer (Capreolus capreolus), as a representative of the Cervidae family, are particularly sensitive to negative environmental stimuli due to their need to maintain increased vigilance during feeding. Intensive hunting seasons are undoubtedly also a stressful factor for this species. The aim of this study was to analyze the cortisol levels in the hair of male roe deer collected at the beginning and the end of the hunting season in eastern Poland. In total, hair samples from 26 individuals collected in May and 31 individuals collected in September were analyzed. The concentration of cortisol in the hair was determined using the EIA kit. It was shown that the concentration of cortisol was significantly higher in samples collected in September compared to those collected in May (Pr. > |t| = 0.0017). Moreover, the age of animals and carcass mass did not significantly affect the concentration of the tested hormone. In summary, the concentration of cortisol in the fur of male roe deer depended on the season and was not influenced by the carcass mass or age of the animals studied.

Emotional stimuli boost incidental learning through predictive processing.

Extracting regularities and probabilities from the environment is a fundamental and critical ability in an ever-changing surrounding. Previous findings showed that people are highly efficient in learning these regularities and that emotional stimuli are better learned than neutral ones. Yet, the generality and the underlying mechanism of this benefit are poorly understood. Here, participants viewed a stream of images with negative and neutral valence. Unbeknownst, the items recurred in regularity as triplets. Then, to assess learning, a surprised familiarity test was conducted. The results of Experiment 1, using two sets of stimuli, found better statistical learning for negative triplets than for neutral triplets. Experiment 2 revealed similar benefits even when only a single negative item was in the triplet at the second or third position, suggesting the advantage is not cumulative. We speculated that the predictability of the negative items is driving the effect. Consequently, Experiment 3 confirmed that the memory for neutral items preceding negative items was better than for neutral items preceding neutral items. Together, these findings provide novel insights into the mechanism of how the learning of incidental temporal associations is influenced by negative stimuli and the role of predictability in the negative valence benefit.

Intercalated amygdala dysfunction drives avoidance extinction deficits in the Sapap3 mouse model of obsessive-compulsive disorder

The avoidance of aversive stimuli through negative reinforcement learning is critical for survival in real-world environments, which demand dynamic responding to both positive and negative stimuli that often conflict with each other. Individuals with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) commonly exhibit impaired negative reinforcement and extinction, perhaps involving deficits in amygdala functioning. An amygdala subregion of particular interest is the intercalated nuclei of the amygdala (ITC) which has been linked to negative reinforcement and extinction, with distinct clusters mediating separate aspects of behavior. This study focuses on the dorsal ITC cluster (ITCd) and its role in negative reinforcement during a complex behavior that models real-world dynamic decision making. We investigated the impact of ITCd function on negative reinforcement and extinction by applying fiber photometry measurement of GCamp6f signals and optogenetic manipulations during a platform-mediated avoidance task in a mouse model of OCD-like behavior: the Sapap3-null mouse. We find impaired neural activity in the ITCd of male and female Sapap3-null mice to the encoding of negative stimuli during platform-mediated avoidance. Sapap3-null mice also exhibit deficits in extinction of avoidant behavior, which is modulated by ITCd neural activity. Sapap3-null mice fail to extinguish avoidant behavior in platform-mediated avoidance, due to heightened ITCd activity. This deficit can be rescued by optogenetically inhibiting ITCd during extinction. Together, our results provide insight into the neural mechanisms underpinning negative reinforcement deficits in the context of OCD, emphasizing the necessity of ITCd in responding to negative stimuli in complex environments.

Constrained Emotional Sentence Production in Parkinson's Disease.

Deficits in the processing and production of emotional cues are well documented in the Parkinson's disease (PD) literature; however, few have ventured to explore how impairments may impact emotional language use in this population, particularly beyond the word level. Emotional language is an important multidimensional manner of communicating one's wants and needs; thus, the current study sought to explore how various aspects of language production may be impacted by the emotionality of a stimulus. Eighteen persons with PD and 22 healthy adults completed a constrained emotional sentence production task in which the affective target word was either a noun or a verb. Output was analyzed for fluency, grammaticality, completeness, and response initiation times. Cognitive (i.e., working memory [WM], inhibition, and switching) and mood (i.e., depression and apathy) measures were examined as factors influencing performance. Individuals with PD produced fewer fluent responses than healthy controls. Furthermore, they had fewer grammatical responses in their production of negative sentences and exhibited reduced information completeness when producing sentences containing positive stimuli. Group differences could not be wholly attributed to individual differences in WM or apathy. Our results support those of others that document language production deficits in individuals with PD above and beyond those impairments that can be explained by the select cognitive abilities explored here. Moreover, the emotionality of the topic may impact various aspects of communicative competence in persons with PD. For instance, disease processes associated with degeneration of neural substrates important for processing negative stimuli may also impact the grammaticality of productions containing negatively valenced content. Thus, it is important to consider how individuals in this population communicate during emotional circumstances. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.27289413.

Impacts of early life adversity on the neurocircuitry of emotional memory in children.

Similar to adults with posttraumatic stress disorder, children with early life adversity show bias in memory for negative emotional stimuli. However, it is not well understood how childhood adversity impacts mechanisms underlying emotional memory. N = 56 children (8-14 years, 48% female) reported on adverse experiences including potentially traumatic events and underwent fMRI while attending to emotionally pleasant, neutral, or negative images. Post-scan, participants completed a cued recall test to assess memory for these images. Emotional difference-in-memory (DM) scores were computed by subtracting negative or positive from neutral recall performance. All children showed enhancing effects of emotion on recall, with no effect of trauma load. However, children with less trauma showed a larger emotional DM for both positive and negative stimuli when amygdala or anterior hippocampal activity was higher. In contrast, highly trauma-exposed children demonstrated a lower emotional DM with greater amygdala or hippocampal activity. This suggested that alternative neural mechanisms might support emotional enhancement of encoding in children with greater trauma load. Whole-brain analyses revealed that right fusiform activity during encoding positively correlated with both trauma load and successful later recall of positive images. Therefore, highly trauma-exposed children may use alternative, potentially adaptive neural pathways via the ventral visual stream to encode positive emotional events.

Exploring distinct and joint contributions of the locus coeruleus and the substantia nigra/ventral tegmental area complex to reward and valence processing using high-resolution fMRI

Abstract Dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra and the ventral tegmental area (SN/VTA) are classically viewed as key mediators in reward processing, while noradrenergic cells in the locus coeruleus (LC) are thought to modulate (negative) saliency processing. However, this conventional distinction is being revised by more recent research in animals. To explore the respective contributions of both the LC and SN/VTA in reward and valence processing in humans, we assessed fMRI data during stimulus encoding and response phase of a rewarded emotion-discrimination task (n = 38). Participants responded significantly faster to reward predicting and negative valence stimuli compared with their non-salient counterparts. LC activity was overall higher during trials involving reward prospect, and in particular for reward trials featuring positive valence, demonstrating an additive effect of reward and positive valence in LC. Moreover, LC activity was differentially increased for negative compared with positive valence in the response phase, indexing its role in invigorating responses to negative events. The SN/VTA showed increased activity in the response phase of reward trials (neutral valence) and negative valence trials (no reward), which aligns with coding relative saliency of these events in their respective contexts. LC modulations were accompanied by covariations in occipital cortex, suggesting noradrenergic contributions to visual prioritization of salient events. The findings underscore the sensitivity of both LC and SN/VTA to reward prospects and negative valence, challenging the dominant view of SN/VTA’s involvement in merely positive events and emphasizing their essential role in action invigoration above and beyond mere stimulus encoding. The intricate roles of the DA and NA system in reward and emotional valence processing in humans warrant further exploration and validation, given the limitations inherent to neuroimaging of deep brain structures.

The Effect of Emotion Priming on Risk Attitudes among Southern Chinese College Students

Abstract: The correlation between emotions and risk attitudes has been thoroughly substantiated in various disciplines such as behavioral economics, finance, and psychology. Evidence has revealed that emotions, influenced by a range of emotional factors, have the potential to significantly affect risk attitudes. Building upon prior research, this study investigates the impact of certain emotional triggers on risk attitudes in a sample of university students in southern China. A total of 55 valid subjects, including 42 females (76.4%), were enrolled in the experiment. Their risk attitudes were assessed using multiple scales, and they were randomly assigned into three groups to receive positive, neutral, and negative emotional stimuli before making risky decisions separately. The findings demonstrated that individuals who were emotionally primed with a positive emotion video were more inclined to undertake hazardous decisions compared to those exposed to negative emotional priming. This outcome aligns with earlier studies indicating that positive emotions are linked with a heightened fondness for risky behavior. In conclusion, this study corroborates the relevance of this theory to a group of undergraduates in the south of China.

Impulsive adolescents exhibit inefficient processing and a low decision threshold when decoding facial expressions of emotions.

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a debilitating psychiatric illness whose symptoms frequently emerge during adolescence. Initial studies in adults suggest that the interpersonal difficulties common in BPD may emerge from disrupted processing of social and emotional stimuli. Less is known about these processes in adolescents with BPD symptoms, despite substantial changes in socioemotional processing during this developmental period. 86 adolescents and young adults with and without BPD symptoms completed an emotional interference task involving the identification of a facial emotion expression in the presence of a conflicting or congruent emotion word. We used hierarchical drift diffusion modeling to index speed of processing and decision boundary. Using Bayesian multilevel regression, we characterized age-related differences in facial emotion processing. We then examined whether BPD symptom dimensions were associated with facial emotion processing on this task. To determine the specificity of our effects, we analyzed behavioral data from a corresponding nonemotional interference task. Impulsivity, but not negative affectivity or interpersonal dysfunction, predicted inefficient processing when presented with conflicting negative emotional stimuli. Across both tasks, impulsivity in adolescents was further associated with a lower decision boundary. Impulsive adolescents were especially likely to make fast, but inaccurate decisions about another person's emotional state. Impulsive adolescents with BPD symptoms are prone to making errors when appraising facial expressions of emotions, which may potentiate or worsen interpersonal conflicts. Our findings highlight the role of lower-level social cognitive processes in interpersonal difficulties among vulnerable youth during a sensitive developmental window.

Spraying drones: efficacy of integrating an avian repellent with drone hazing to elicit blackbird flock dispersal and abandonment of sunflower fields

Multiple management strategies exist to combat bird damage to agriculture. We explored combining two tools, drones as frightening devices and an avian repellent, to assess effectiveness of an integrated method to deter large flocks on complex landscapes. We evaluated the ability of a spraying drone (DJI Agras MG‐1P) deploying Avian Control (i.e. active ingredient: methyl anthranilate; hereafter MA) or water to elicit abandonment, flock reductions, latency to return, and behavioral changes of blackbirds (Icteridae) foraging in sunflower Helianthus annuus. Following hazing and spraying (MA = 32; water = 32 trials), the percent of flocks abandoning, partially abandoning, or remaining was 56%, 31%, and 13% for MA and 50%, 25%, and 25% for water, respectively. Following full abandonment, 14% more flocks returned following MA (83%) than water (69%), averaging 3.96 min ± 3.51 (SD) to return (MA = 4.12 min ± 4.03; water = 3.73 min ± 2.68). When reduction occurred, average decline was 47% ± 35 (SD) with MA and 44% ± 39 (SD) with water. Site conditions impacted the ability to maneuver the drone and observe flock behaviors, potentially resulting in variables other than treatment explaining the probability of abandonment and flock reduction. When controlling for flock size, number of lift‐offs following water treatments (0.23 min−1 ± 0.17 SD) was statistically less than the pre‐hazing period (0.43 min−1 ± 0.28 SD), however no relationship existed for MA treatments (post: 0.29 min−1 ± 0.32 SD; pre: 0.31 min−1 ± 0.20 SD). This difference may be due to a longer latency to return, decreasing the post‐hazing time period, or flightier birds after MA exposure. We found eight mins of hazing, and a 9‐l tank of repellent, was insufficient to elicit differences between water and repellent applications. We suggest extended hazing or additional negative stimuli (e.g. multiple drones, increased repellent) to increase efficacy.

Leveraging how animals learn in conservation science: Behavioral responses of reintroduced bison to management interventions

AbstractReintroduction programs have increased amid unprecedented biodiversity loss, yet the success of these programs lag. A prominent reason for program failure is dispersal beyond the planned range of the population. Management techniques, such as hazing, can be used to prevent movement beyond set boundaries, but to be effective long‐term, the animals must learn to avoid the areas where they are hazed. Although concepts of animal learning have been used to improve reintroduction programs, learning is not often explicitly tested or used as an indicator of program success. We used a conservation behavior framework to evaluate how a range of management techniques influenced learning in a reintroduced population of bison in Banff National Park, Canada. We hypothesized exposure to stronger negative stimuli would enhance learning, leading to more pronounced behavioral responses. Specifically, we tested the degree to which management actions (i.e., drift fence encounters, foot, horseback, helicopter, and combined hazing) elicited behavioral responses and how they facilitated learning. Consistent with our predictions, drift fence interactions and foot and horseback hazing elicited fewer behavioral responses of a smaller magnitude than helicopter hazing or combined methods, suggesting these techniques cause less disturbance to the bison. Bison continually returned to locations where they encountered management actions that caused the least disturbance, demonstrating a lack of associative learning. Bison appeared to form negative associations with locations where they were hazed via helicopter or combined methods, however, and rarely returned to these locations. Evaluating management techniques is essential for improving conservation success. We demonstrate that by bridging the fields of conservation biology and animal learning, we can understand how management techniques influence learning and behavior thereby facilitating effective conservation plans that incorporate disruption levels of the animals, financial costs, and overall effectiveness. Effective conservation plans, in turn, improve our likelihood of successfully managing and recovering species.

Contextual memory bias in emotional events: Neurobiological correlates and depression risk

BackgroundContextual memory loss of emotional events plays a critical role in depression psychopathology. Individuals with depression, clinical or subclinical, exhibit enhanced and impaired memory for emotionally negative stimuli and context in an event, respectively. This suggests that contextual encoding may fail because of attentional interference caused by concurrent negative stimuli, possibly leading to contextual memory loss as a depression risk. Amygdala–prefrontal connectivity and cortisol may underlie the mechanism; however, the relationships remain unknown. MethodsOne hundred twenty participants, including 34 with subclinical depression, underwent behavioral tasks, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans, and saliva collection. Encoding and 24 h later recollection performance of visuoperceptual/spatial/temporal context in a series of events, where fearful (vs. neutral) faces appeared, were measured via contextual memory tasks. Overgeneral autobiographical memory (OGM), a more remote form of contextual memory loss, was also assessed via the Autobiographical Memory Test. Amygdala connectivity was measured by fMRI during attentional interference by fearful (vs. neutral) faces to differentiate selective attention from encoding. Basal cortisol levels were assayed through saliva collected at encoding during the visit day and across 2 consecutive days in the following week (12 time points in total). We explored whether contextual memory encoding failure would explain depressive symptoms through OGM under possible moderation of amygdala connectivity and cortisol. ResultsIn individuals with subclinical depression compared to those without, fearful faces disturbed memory encoding of the visuoperceptual context rather than 24 h later recollection, while neutral faces in their temporal proximity contrastingly augmented it. The more the contextual memory encoding bias (fearful vs. neutral) intensified, the more the amygdala’s functional connectivity with the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) weakened. Higher total cortisol output tended to be correlated with poorer 24-h later recollection of the temporal context. Moderated mediation effects of the amygdala-vmPFC connectivity and cortisol were not significant; however, contextual encoding bias explained depressive symptoms through negatively valenced OGM. ConclusionsNegative stimuli appearing in an event might impair memory encoding of the visuoperceptual context under attentional interference, represented as weakened amygdala-vmPFC connectivity implicated in emotion-related attentional dysregulation. Conversely, negative stimuli might enhance temporally proximal visuoperceptual encoding after their disappearance. Contextual encoding bias could explain the overgeneralization (or lower coherence) of autobiographical memory and increase the risk of depression. The possible role of cortisol in recollecting the context of emotional events over time warrants further investigation.

Changes in P300 amplitude to negative emotional stimuli correlate with treatment responsiveness to sertraline in adolescents with depression

ObjectiveAdolescents with depression is characterized by high rates of recurrence and functional impairment, with a significant association with suicide risk. Antidepressants are commonly prescribed to treat depression, yet few reproducible neurobiological markers for depression and antidepressant treatment response have been identified. Therefore, discovering a stable and reliable neurobiological marker holds significant value for both the clinical diagnosis and treatment of depression in adolescents. MethodsOne hundred and seven patients with major depressive disorder (MDD group, 30 males, 77 females, mean age: 14.80 years), and 25 healthy subjects (HC group, 13 males, 12 females, mean age: 15.72 years) were recruited to perform a two-choice oddball task related to negative emotional cues. All participants completed a self-administered questionnaire to gather demographic information. A trained psychiatrist administered the Hamilton Depression Scale (HAMD-17) to assess depression severity. Of the 107 adolescents with depression, 61 received antidepressant medication for 8 weeks, and 61 of these patients were followed up. Multichannel EEG was recorded continuously from 64 scalp electrodes using the Curry 8 system. EEG signal preprocessing and analysis was performed offline using the EEGLAB toolbox in MATLAB. The ERP component characteristics associated with emotional processing were extracted from the difference waves and statistically analyzed. ResultsAdolescents with depression exhibited significantly larger P300 amplitudes than healthy controls in response to both neutral and negative emotional cues. Following sertraline treatment, both depression scores and P300 amplitudes decreased significantly in adolescents with depression. Moreover, a strong positive correlation was observed between changes in depression scores and changes in P300 amplitude in response to negative emotional cues before and after treatment. ConclusionsChanges in neural reactivity to negative emotional stimuli among adolescents with depression can be selectively modulated by sertraline and are significantly associated with improvements in depressive symptoms. SignificanceChanges in P300 amplitude to negative emotional stimuli significantly correlate with treatment responsiveness to sertraline in adolescents with depression.

Nucleus reuniens: Modulating emotional overgeneralization in peri-adolescents with anxiety.

Anxiety affects 4.4-million children in the USA with an onset between childhood and adolescence, a period marked by neural changes that impact emotions and memory. Negative overgeneralization - or responding similarly to innocuous events that share features with past aversive experiences - is common in anxiety but remains mechanistically underspecified. The nucleus reuniens (RE) has been considered a crucial candidate in the modulation of memory specificity. Our study investigated its activation and functional connectivity with the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and hippocampus (HPC) as neurobiological mechanisms of negative overgeneralization in anxious youth. As part of a secondary data analysis, we examined data from 34 participants between 9 and 14years of age (mean age ± SD, 11.4 ± 2.0years; 16 females) with varying degrees of anxiety severity. During the Study session participants rated images as negative, neutral, and positive. After 12h, participants returned for a Test session, where they performed a memory recognition test with repeated (targets) and similar (lures) images. Labeling negative relative to neutral lures as "old" (false alarms) was our operational definition of negative overgeneralization. Negative relative to neutral false alarmed stimuli displayed elevated RE activation (at Study and Test) and increased functional connectivity with the Cornu Ammonis (CA) 1 (at Test). Elevated anxiety severity was associated with reductions in the RE-mPFC functional coupling for neutral relative to negative stimuli. Exploratory analyses revealed similar patterns in activation and functional connectivity with positive stimuli. Our findings demonstrate the importance of the RE in negative overgeneralization and anxiety.

Effect of negative emotional stimuli on working memory: Impact of voluntary and automatic attention.

Emotions are known to influence cognitive performance, particularly working memory (WM) in both its aspects, processing, and maintenance. One explanatory mechanism might be that negative stimuli capture attentional resources, leaving fewer resources for attentional maintenance and processing of information in WM. However, this attentional capture was only investigated using WM tasks in which participants were explicitly asked to process negative items. The aim of this paper was to determine whether explicit processing of emotional stimuli is necessary to impair WM performance, or if their mere presence is enough to capture attention. For this purpose, participants performed a complex span task in which they alternated between memorizing a series of neutral words and processing either emotional images or neutral ones. In Experiment 1, participants were instructed to explicitly process emotional images, whereas in Experiment 2, emotional images were presented without any processing being required. In both experiments, we observed a decrease in memory performance when the images were negative compared to neutral. Whether or not voluntary processing is involved, emotional images seem to capture attentional resources, which in turn leads to a decline in memory performance. These results were discussed in relation to attentional theories and the influence of emotion on the specific mechanisms of WM.

Dynamic changes of media prefrontal cortex astrocytic activity in response to negative stimuli in male mice

Astrocytes play significant roles in regulating the central stress response. Chronic stress impairs the structure and function of astrocytes in many brain regions such as media prefrontal cortex (mPFC) in multiple neuropsychiatric conditions, but the astrocytic dynamics on the timescale of behavior remains unclear. Here, we recorded mPFC astrocytic activity in freely behaving mice and found that astrocytes are activated immediately by different aversive stimuli. Astrocyte specific GCaMP6s calcium indicator were virally expressed in mPFC astrocytes and fiber photometry experiments revealed that astrocytes are activated by tail-restraint (TRT), foot shock (FS), open arm exploration, stressor of height, predator odor and social defeat (SD) stress. ΔF/F analyses demonstrated that an unpredictable stimulus such as elevated platform stress (EPS) at the initial encounter induced the most intense and rapid changes in astrocytic calcium activity, while a predictable 2,5-dihydro-2,4,5-trimethylthiazoline (TMT) stimulus resulted in the weakest response with a longer peak latency. In TRT, FS or SD test, a somatic stimulus led to higher average calcium activity level and faster average peak latency in repeated trails. Similar to TMT stimulus, astrocytic calcium activity in elevated plus maze (EPM) test exhibited a smaller average change in amplitude and the longest peak latency during open arm exploration. Moreover, astrocytic calcium activity exhibited different changes across behavioral states in SD tests. Our findings show that mPFC astrocytes exhibit distinct patterns of calcium activity in response to various negative stimuli, indicating that the dynamic activity of astrocytes may reflect the stress-related behavioral state under different stimulus conditions.

Differential effects of mindfulness treatment and mobile neurofeedback on event-related potentials in early posterior negativity in cancer patients: a clinical-experimental parallel group design.

Cancer frequently leads to psychological challenges, among them emotion regulation problems. These can be alleviated with the help of mindfulness therapies or neurofeedback (NF) interventions. Possible intervention effects on emotion procession can be detected in clinical EEG studies by exploring event-related potentials, e.g., early posterior negativity (EPN), which recently has been established to investigate emotional processing and represents very early attention to affective stimuli. Therefore, this clinical-experimental study investigated the efficacy of mindfulness and NF (10 sessions each) on the EPN in oncology patients. The study enrolled 42 cancer patients (age: 31-73 years; gender: 28 female, 14 male). The study design was an RCT with a parallel group [NF (n = 21) versus mindfulness (n = 21)] waitlist paradigm. EEG recordings in an oddball task with neutral, rare positive and negative valence and high and low arousal stimuli were performed at three measurement time points (T0 = before waitlist, T1 = before intervention, T2 = after intervention). Following preprocessing, data from electrodes O1, Oz and O2 were analyzed for EPN amplitudes. Response time did not differ across groups and conditions. Comparing EPN at T1 and T2, there was a significant interaction of time, valence, and intervention (p = 0.042). Descriptive statistics showed increased EPN for negative stimuli after the NF intervention (T1 to T2), while EPN for positive stimuli only slightly increased. For mindfulness, positive stimuli evoked stronger amplitudes after the intervention, while EPN for negative stimuli increased from T1 to T2. Distinct effects were observed for the EPN for pictures with negative valence. Here, it is presumed that mindfulness treatment led to a refocusing of attention with a focus on positive valence, whereas NF seems to entail a different processing of images with negative valence and is therefore to be seen more in the sense of a confrontational approach. Our results suggest that both interventions are suitable for modulating EPN. However, it is not clear to what extent the effects are due to the interventions alone and how other factors might have affected the amplitudes, which highlights the need for further research in this area.

The Role of Gender in Cognitive Processing of Affective Linguistic Stimuli in Bilinguals

This study aims to compare the emotional reactions of bilingual men and women to affective valence by manipulating positive and negative linguistic stimuli. To achieve this aim, the semantic decision task was used. 56 Persian-English bilinguals, who were divided into two equal groups considering their gender (28 female and 28 male), were asked to decide whether the adjectives loaded with positive or negative valence (i.e., target words) were related in meaning to the preceding nouns (i.e., prime words). In order to find out whether there is any potential interaction between the valence of primes and targets, mixed factorial repeated measure ANOVA was run on reaction time and error rate data. The results of the present study on cognitive gender differences show that males and females, despite some few differences, generally follow a similar pattern in processing affective meaning of words in their second language.

Posttraumatic growth modulates the response to negative emotions related to COVID-19: An event-related potentials study.

There is increasing interest in identifying how posttraumatic growth (PTG) impacts emotional processing following traumatic events (e.g., the COVID-19 pandemic). Previous research suggests that high PTG levels may lead to enduring changes in positive emotional processing. Despite this fact, little is known regarding brain activation and responses to stressful emotional stimuli. The present study utilised event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate whether individual differences in emotional responses toward neutral and negative emotional stimuli related to COVID-19 are related to self-reported PTG levels. A total of 77 participants were analysed: 21 in the high PTG group and 56 in the control group. The amplitude of the N2 was smaller in the high PTG group compared to the control group under both negative and neutral conditions. When viewing the negative emotion pictures (vs. neutral pictures), the N2 amplitude significantly decreased for the high PTG group in the right occipital and frontal-parietal areas, whereas no significant change was observed among the control group. In the time window Late Positive Potential (LPP) 600-1000ms, emotional stimuli and the group interaction were significant. Viewing negative pictures (vs. neutral pictures) decreased the LPP 600-1000ms amplitudes for the control group, mainly originating from the brain's frontal regions. However, there were no such significant differences for the PTG group. Due to the limited sample size and cultural differences, the applicability of these results to other regions or countries needs to be verified. The presented findings suggest that the impact of PTG during emotional response is reflected in both bottom-up (evidenced by the early ERP components) and top-down (evidenced by the later ERP components) processes. Individuals with high PTG may use a meditation-related emotional regulation strategy of acceptance at the basic stage and non-judgement at a later stage.