Regional frontal lobe response magnitudes during affective shifting covary with resting heart rate variability in healthy volunteers: A preliminary report.
We hypothesized that in healthy subjects differences in resting heart rate variability (rHRV) would be associated with differences in emotional reactivity within the medial visceromotor network (MVN). We also probed whether this MVN-rHRV relationship was diminished in depression. Eleven healthy adults and nine depressed subjects performed the emotional counting stroop task in alternating blocks of emotion and neutral words during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The correlation between rHRV outside the scanner and BOLD signal reactivity (absolute value of change between adjacent blocks in the BOLD signal) was ...
Source: Journal of Psychophysiology - August 7, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Smith, Ryan; Allen, John J. B.; Thayer, Julian F.; Lane, Richard D. Source Type: research
The relationship between interoception and metacognition: A pilot study.
Recently, Garfinkel and Critchley (2013) proposed to distinguish between three facets of interoception: interoceptive sensibility, interoceptive accuracy, and interoceptive awareness. This pilot study investigated how these facets interrelate to each other and whether interoceptive awareness is related to the metacognitive awareness of memory performance. A sample of 24 healthy students completed a heartbeat perception task (HPT) and a memory task. Judgments of confidence were requested for each task. Participants filled in questionnaires assessing interoceptive sensibility, depression, anxiety, and socio-demographic chara...
Source: Journal of Psychophysiology - June 5, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Meessen, Judith; Mainz, Verena; Gauggel, Siegfried; Volz-Sidiropoulou, Eftychia; Sütterlin, Stefan; Forkmann, Thomas Source Type: research
Psychophysiological changes associated with self-regulation of sleepiness and cessation from a hazard perception task.
This study assessed the capacity of drivers to identify sleepiness and to self-regulate their own simulated driving cessation. Twenty-six young adults completed a validated hazard perception simulated task when moderately sleep deprived after a 05:00 wakeup. Participants were instructed to stop driving if they thought they were too sleepy to drive safely on the road. Physiological (EEG, EOG, and ECG) and subjective (Karolinska Sleepiness scale) measures were used to examine self-regulation of simulated driving cessation. The behavioral validity of the participants’ subjective sleepiness was then examined with a 30 min na...
Source: Journal of Psychophysiology - June 5, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Watling, Christopher N.; Smith, Simon S.; Horswill, Mark S. Source Type: research
Modulation of executive control in the task switching paradigm with transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS).
Executive processing in the task switching paradigm is primarily associated with activation of the lateral prefrontal cortex (lPFC), demonstrated in numerous functional imaging studies (e.g., Brass & von Cramon, 2002). However, there are only very few attempts to modulate neural activation related with executive functions and to investigate the effects of this modulation on the performance in this paradigm. To modulate lPFC activity here, we used the non-invasive transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS; atDCS [1 mA, 20 min] vs. ctDCS [1 mA, 20 min] vs. sham stimulation [1 mA, 30 s]) over the left inferior frontal jun...
Source: Journal of Psychophysiology - June 5, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Strobach, Tilo; Antonenko, Daria; Schindler, Tamara; Flöel, Agnes; Schubert, Torsten Source Type: research
A biomarker of risk-prone behavioral phenotype correlates with winning in a game of skill.
In this study we explored whether this biomarker is also indicative of risk proneness in a game situation where serious real-life adaptations and motivations are absent or minimized and risk is more or less symbolic. We adapted a game of skill where in order to get a high score “risky” actions had to be taken by the players. Scores obtained in the game correlated with the (relatively low) platelet MAO activity. Our results show that (1) the same markers that are informative for real-life behavior and adaptations involving risk and/or sensorimotor skills based performan ce may be informative also in a game setting, (2) ...
Source: Journal of Psychophysiology - May 8, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Otsa, Maive; Paaver, Marika; Harro, Jaanus; Bachmann, Talis Source Type: research
Slow wave activity related to working memory maintenance in the N-back task.
Working memory supports our ability to maintain goal-relevant information that guides cognition in the face of distraction or competing tasks. The N-back task has been widely used in cognitive neuroscience to examine the functional neuroanatomy of working memory. Fewer studies have capitalized on the temporal resolution of event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to examine the time course of neural activity in the N-back task. The primary goal of the current study was to characterize slow wave activity observed in the response-to-stimulus interval in the N-back task that may be related to maintenance of information between t...
Source: Journal of Psychophysiology - May 8, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Bailey, Kira; Mlynarczyk, Gregory; West, Robert Source Type: research
Modality difference in N2 and P3 components between visual and auditory Go/No-go paradigms.
We investigated the modality difference in the N2 and P3 components of event-related potentials (ERPs) between visual and auditory Go/No-go paradigms. We evaluated the relationship between RT and the amplitudes and latencies of N2 and P3 in visual and auditory Go/No-go paradigms. No significant differences were observed in the latencies of N2 and P3 between visual and auditory paradigms. Significant correlations were observed between RT and the latency of P3 in the visual and auditory paradigms. In contrast, the amplitudes of N2 and P3 were significantly larger in the visual paradigm than in the auditory paradigm. A signif...
Source: Journal of Psychophysiology - May 8, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Nakata, Hiroki; Arakawa, Natsumi; Suzuki, Chiharu; Nakayama, Michiko Source Type: research
Disgust proneness and the perception of disgust-evoking pictures: An eye-tracking experiment.
Disgust has been conceptualized as an emotion which promotes disease-avoidance behavior. The present eye-tracking experiment investigated whether disgust-evoking stimuli provoke specific eye movements and pupillary responses. Forty-three women viewed images depicting disgusting, fear-eliciting, neutral items and fractals while their eye movements (fixation duration and frequency, blinking rate, saccade amplitude) and pupil size were recorded. Disgust and fear ratings for the pictures as well as trait disgust and trait anxiety were assessed. The disgust pictures evoked the target emotion specifically and prompted characteri...
Source: Journal of Psychophysiology - May 8, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Schienle, Anne; Übel, Sonja; Gremsl, Andreas; Schöngassner, Florian; Körner, Christof Source Type: research
Neural correlates of emotional contagion induced by happy and sad expressions.
Facial expressions play a significant role in displaying feelings. A person ’s facial expression automatically induces a similar emotional feeling in an observer; this phenomenon is known as emotional contagion. However, little is known about the neural mechanisms underlying such emotional responses. We conducted an event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMR I) study to examine the neural substrates involved in automatic responses and emotional feelings induced by movies of another person’s happy and sad facial expressions. The fMRI data revealed observing happiness (vs. sadness) evoked activity in the le...
Source: Journal of Psychophysiology - May 8, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Harada, Tokiko; Hayashi, Akiko; Sadato, Norihiro; Iidaka, Tetsuya Source Type: research
The relation between aerobic fitness and cognitive performance: Is it mediated by brain potentials?
This study aimed to assess whether brain potentials have significant influences on the relationship between aerobic fitness and cognition. Behavioral and electroencephalographic (EEG) data was collected from 48 young adults when performing a Posner task. Higher aerobic fitness is related to faster reaction times (RTs) along with greater P3 amplitude and shorter P3 latency in the valid trials, after controlling for age and body mass index. Moreover, RTs were selectively related to P3 amplitude rather than P3 latency. Specifically, the bootstrap-based mediation model indicates that P3 amplitude mediates the relationship betw...
Source: Journal of Psychophysiology - May 8, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Wang, Chun-Hao; Shih, Chun-Ming; Tsai, Chia-Liang Source Type: research
The medial frontal cortex mediates self-other discrimination in the joint Simon task: A tDCS study.
Interacting with other individuals confronts cognitive control systems with the problem of how to distinguish between self-generated (internally triggered) and other-generated (externally triggered) action events. Recent neuroscience studies identified two core brain regions, the anterior medial frontal cortex (aMFC) and the right temporo-parietal junction (rTPJ), to be potentially involved in resolving this problem either by enhancing self-generated versus other-generated event representations (via aMFC) and/or by inhibiting event representations that are externally triggered (via rTPJ). Using transcranial direct current ...
Source: Journal of Psychophysiology - May 8, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Liepelt, Roman; Klempova, Bibiana; Dolk, Thomas; Colzato, Lorenza S.; Ragert, Patrick; Nitsche, Michael A.; Hommel, Bernhard Source Type: research
Emotions under the skin: Autonomic reactivity to emotional pictures in insecure attachment.
The present study examined physiological reactivity to emotional stimuli as a function of attachment style. Skin conductance responses (SCRs) and heart rate (HR) changes were simultaneously recorded while participants engaged in a visual attentional task. The task included positive, neutral, and negative emotional pictures, and required the identification of a target (neutral picture rotated 90° to the left or right), among a stream of pictures in which an emotional distracter (positive or negative) was presented. Participants additionally rated each of the emotional distracters for valence and arousal. Behavioral results...
Source: Journal of Psychophysiology - December 21, 2015 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Silva, Catarina; Ferreira, Ana Cláudia; Soares, Isabel; Esteves, Francisco Source Type: research
Motivational state and personality in relation to emotion, stress, and HRV responses to aerobic exercise.
This study examined emotion, stress, and performance during aerobic exercise performed in the telic and paratelic states, in relation to telic and paratelic dominance. The study tested the misfit effect and is the first to examine heart rate variability (HRV) responses to exercise in relation to both personality and motivational state. Based on their Paratelic Dominance Scale scores, participants identified as telic dominant (TD) and paratelic dominant (PD) completed ramp tests following telic and paratelic state manipulations (repeated measures). In each condition, participants watched “serious” (telic) or “playful...
Source: Journal of Psychophysiology - December 21, 2015 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Kuroda, Yusuke; Hudson, Joanne; Thatcher, Rhys Source Type: research
Emotional reactivity to visual content as revealed by ERP component clustering.
In the study, the neural basis of emotional reactivity was investigated. Reactivity was operationalized as the impact of emotional pictures on the self-reported ongoing affective state. It was used to divide the subjects into high- and low-responders groups. Independent sources of brain activity were identified, localized with the DIPFIT method, and clustered across subjects to analyse the visual evoked potentials to affective pictures. Four of the identified clusters revealed effects of reactivity. The earliest two started about 120 ms from the stimulus onset and were located in the occipital lobe and the right temporopar...
Source: Journal of Psychophysiology - December 21, 2015 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Wyczesany, Miroslaw; Grzybowski, Szczepan J.; Kaiser, Jan Source Type: research
tDCS of medial prefrontal cortex does not enhance interpersonal trust.
Interpersonal trust is an essential ingredient of many social relationships. Previous research has suggested that the medial Prefrontal Cortex (mPFC) may be a critical component in mediating the degree to which people trust others. Here we assessed the role of the mPFC in modulating interpersonal trust by means of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). Participants (n = 60) were randomly and equally assigned to receive anodal, cathodal, or sham stimulation while performing the Trust Game, an index of interpersonal trust that assesses the money units one participant (the trustor) transfers to another (the trustee)....
Source: Journal of Psychophysiology - December 21, 2015 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Colzato, Lorenza S.; Sellaro, Roberta; van den Wildenberg, Wery P. M.; Hommel, Bernhard Source Type: research
