Pleasant Visual Stimuli Research Articles

Effects of pleasant visual stimulation on attention, working memory, and anxiety in college students.

emotional reactions can be induced by the presentation of visual stimuli with affective content. Emotional stimuli are processed and linked with cognitive functions, such as attention, memory, and anxiety, and have implications in the mental health field. Previous studies have reported that positive and negative emotions tend to change cognitive processes in individuals, ultimately resulting in better and worse performance, respectively. Many studies have emphasized the crucial role of affect in directing attention to relevant stimuli, enhancing learning and memory, facilitating decision making, selecting goals, and conflict resolution. The aim of the present study was to investigate the influence of pleasant visual stimuli on memory, focused attention, and anxiety and further understand the effects of emotional induction. The study investigated the effects of presenting a pleasant visual stimulus in a 1.5 min video to a sample of 145 college students on focused attention, working memory (Personnel Selection Testing, memory subtest), and anxiety (State-Trait Anxiety Inventory). Nonsignificant differences were observed in focused attention, working memory, and anxiety state. Statistically significant differences were found in trait anxiety and the comparison between men and women with regard to memory and anxiety. The positive stimulus was not sufficient to alter cognition or emotion in our research participants. Emotion was found to not be the only factor that influences memory, and other factors appear to be important, such as prior knowledge and cognitive, social, and physiological factors, including personal history, the environment, and culture. Keywords: stimulus, emotion, cognition, neuropsychology.

Crossmodal transfer of arousal, but not pleasantness, from the musical to the visual domain.

Arousal and valence (pleasantness) are considered primary dimensions of emotion. However, the degree to which these dimensions interact in emotional processing across sensory modalities is poorly understood. We addressed this issue by applying a crossmodal priming paradigm in which auditory primes (Romantic piano solo music) varying in arousal and/or pleasantness were sequentially paired with visual targets (IAPS pictures). In Experiment 1, the emotion spaces of 120 primes and 120 targets were explored separately in addition to the effects of musical training and gender. Thirty-two participants rated their felt pleasantness and arousal in response to primes and targets on equivalent rating scales as well as their familiarity with the stimuli. Musical training was associated with elevated familiarity ratings for high-arousing music and a trend for elevated arousal ratings, especially in response to unpleasant musical stimuli. Males reported higher arousal than females for pleasant visual stimuli. In Experiment 2, 40 nonmusicians rated their felt arousal and pleasantness in response to 20 visual targets after listening to 80 musical primes. Arousal associated with the musical primes modulated felt arousal in response to visual targets, yet no such transfer of pleasantness was observed between the two modalities. Experiment 3 sought to rule out the possibility of any order effect of the subjective ratings, and responses of 14 nonmusicians replicated results of Experiment 2. This study demonstrates the effectiveness of the crossmodal priming paradigm in basic research on musical emotions.

Neuronal Basis of Haedonic Appraisal in Early Onset Schizophrenia: fMRI Investigation

The most important symptoms associated with schizophrenia are affective flattening, decreased expression of emotions, anhedonia and social isolation. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the neural response to disgusting and pleasant visual stimuli in healthy subjects and in patients with first-episode schizophrenia. Twelve subjects in the first episode of schizophrenia (DSM-IV-R, APA, 2000) with a normal IQ and 12 healthy volunteers selected for age and education underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during observation of pleasant and disgusting visual stimuli. Analysis showed that in healthy subjects, the prefrontal cortex and limbic areas are activated in response to pleasant and disgusting visual stimuli, whereas this does not occur in subjects with schizophrenia since the first episode of illness.

Pleasure Rather Than Salience Activates Human Nucleus Accumbens and Medial Prefrontal Cortex

Recent human functional imaging studies have linked the processing of pleasant visual stimuli to activity in mesolimbic reward structures. However, whether the activation is driven specifically by the pleasantness of the stimulus, or by its salience, is unresolved. Here we find in two studies that free viewing of pleasant images of erotic and romantic couples prompts clear, reliable increases in nucleus accumbens (NAc) and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) activity, whereas equally arousing (salient) unpleasant images, and neutral pictures, do not. These data suggest that in visual perception, the human NAc and mPFC are specifically reactive to pleasant, rewarding stimuli and are not engaged by unpleasant stimuli, despite high stimulus salience.

Neural Coding of Reward-Prediction Error Signals During Classical Conditioning With Attractive Faces

Attractive faces can be considered to be a form of visual reward. Previous imaging studies have reported activity in reward structures including orbitofrontal cortex and nucleus accumbens during presentation of attractive faces. Given that these stimuli appear to act as rewards, we set out to explore whether it was possible to establish conditioning in human subjects by pairing presentation of arbitrary affectively neutral stimuli with subsequent presentation of attractive and unattractive faces. Furthermore, we scanned human subjects with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they underwent this conditioning procedure to determine whether a reward-prediction error signal is engaged during learning with attractive faces as is known to be the case for learning with other types of reward such as juice and money. Subjects showed changes in behavioral ratings to the conditioned stimuli (CS) when comparing post- to preconditioning evaluations, notably for those CSs paired with attractive female faces. We used a simple Rescorla-Wagner learning model to generate a reward-prediction error signal and entered this into a regression analysis with the fMRI data. We found significant prediction error-related activity in the ventral striatum during conditioning with attractive compared with unattractive faces. These findings suggest that an arbitrary stimulus can acquire conditioned value by being paired with pleasant visual stimuli just as with other types of reward such as money or juice. This learning process elicits a reward-prediction error signal in a main target structure of dopamine neurons: the ventral striatum. The findings we describe here may provide insights into the neural mechanisms tapped into by advertisers seeking to influence behavioral preferences by repeatedly exposing consumers to simple associations between products and rewarding visual stimuli such as pretty faces.

Trait anxiety impact on the EEG theta band power changes during appraisal of threatening and pleasant visual stimuli

The main objective of the present investigation was to examine whether trait anxiety construct would influence EEG event-related synchronization (ERS) of the theta power during viewing of visual threatening stimuli. The 62-channel EEG was recorded while low (LA, n=18) and high (HA, n=18) trait-anxious subjects viewed sequentially presented neutral, threatening and pleasant pictures. Between-group differences, related to stimulus emotionality, were linked to the test period of 0–1000 ms after stimulus onset. In the low theta (4–6 Hz) at prefrontal sites HA exhibited deficient ERS in response to both threatening and pleasant stimuli in the right hemisphere, whereas LA yielded larger right than left hemisphere ERS in response to all the three stimulus categories. In the upper theta (6–8 Hz) group differences were associated with posterior cortical regions: HA exhibited the largest ERS to threatening and the lowest to pleasant stimuli, whereas LA prompted the largest ERS to pleasant and the lowest to neutral pictures. It is suggested that low theta right prefrontal hypoactivation favoring left hemispheric (i.e. more analytical) activity along with higher upper theta ERS of posterior cortical regions (i.e. enhanced higher order visual processing) to threatening stimuli could form the basis for neuropsychologically observed general bias towards threatening information in HA.

Multifocal slow potential generation revealed by high-resolution EEG and current density reconstruction

In this work we used high-resolution EEG (123 channels) and current density reconstruction (CDR) to analyze the generators of slow potentials (SPs) in 31 healthy individuals. SPs were obtained during a task–performance feedback anticipation paradigm. The task consisted of a visual paired-associate memory test, with correct performance on single trials indicated by pleasant visual stimuli and incorrect performance by an unpleasant sound. We used realistic models of each subject's head based on their magnetic resonance images (MRIs) to estimate the potentials in the intracranial compartments and to define the source space using individual cortical geometry. Source reconstruction was performed by an Lp-norm minimization algorithm. Results showed a multifocal pattern of current density foci in various association cortices, including prefrontal areas 9 and 10 of Brodmann in all subjects. Posterior cortical areas also contributed importantly to the SP, for instance extrastriate area 19 and parietal area 7, in 90% of the subjects. According to our modeling, we conclude that even the pure stimulus-anticipation SP obtained here, as opposed to traditional motor-task contigent negative variation (CNVs), is not exclusively prefrontal in origin, being generated by multiple association areas. We discuss our results with respect to new possibilities in large-scale cortical physiology and with respect to their application in psychiatry.