Impaired Attentional Disengagement from Stimuli Matching the Contents of Working Memory in Social Anxiety

Although many cognitive models in anxiety propose that an impaired top-down control enhances the processing of task-irrelevant stimuli, few studies have paid attention to task-irrelevant stimuli under a cognitive load task. In the present study, we investigated the effects of the working memory load on attention to task-irrelevant stimuli in trait social anxiety. The results showed that as trait social anxiety increased, participants were unable to disengage from task-irrelevant stimuli identical to the memory cue under low and high working memory loads. Impaired attentional disengagement was positively correlated with trait social anxiety. This impaired attentional disengagement was related to trait social anxiety, but not state anxiety. Our findings suggest that socially anxious people have difficulty in disengaging attention from a task-irrelevant memory cue owing to an impaired top-down control under a working memory load.     

Attentional Modulation of Emotional Conflict Processing with Flanker Tasks

Emotion processing has been shown to acquire priority by biasing allocation of attentional resources. Aversive images or fearful expressions are processed quickly and automatically. Many existing findings suggested that processing of emotional information was pre-attentive, largely immune from attentional control. Other studies argued that attention gated the processing of emotion. To tackle this controversy, the current study examined whether and to what degrees attention modulated processing of emotion using a stimulus-response-compatibility (SRC) paradigm. We conducted two flanker experiments using color scale faces in neutral expressions or gray scale faces in emotional expressions. We found SRC effects for all three dimensions (color, gender, and emotion) and SRC effects were larger when the conflicts were task relevant than when they were task irrelevant, suggesting that conflict processing of emotion was modulated by attention, similar to those of color and face identity (gender). However, task modulation on color SRC effect was significantly greater than that on gender or emotion SRC effect, indicating that processing of salient information was modulated by attention to a lesser degree than processing of non-emotional stimuli. We proposed that emotion processing can be influenced by attentional control, but at the same time salience of emotional information may bias toward bottom-up processing, rendering less top-down modulation than that on non-emotional stimuli.     

Emotional Modulation of the Attentional Blink Is Awareness-Dependent

It is well known that emotion can modulate attentional processes. Previous studies have shown that even under restricted awareness, emotional facial expressions (especially threat-related) can guide the direction of spatial attention. However, it remains unclear whether emotional facial expressions under restricted awareness can affect temporal attention. To address this issue, we used a modified attentional blink (AB) paradigm in which masked (Experiment 1) or unmasked (Experiment 2) emotional faces (fearful or neutral) were presented before the AB sequence. We found that, in comparison with neutral faces, masked fearful faces significantly decreased the AB magnitude (Experiment 1), whereas unmasked fearful faces significantly increased the AB magnitude (Experiment 2). These results indicate that effects of emotional expression on the AB are modulated by the level of awareness.     

Attentional load modulates responses of human primary visual cortex to invisible stimuli

Visual neuroscience has long sought to determine the extent to which stimulus-evoked activity in visual cortex depends on attention and awareness. Some influential theories of consciousness maintain that the allocation of attention is restricted to conscious representations [1, 2]. However, in the load theory of attention [3], competition between task-relevant and task-irrelevant stimuli for limited-capacity attention does not depend on conscious perception of the irrelevant stimuli. The critical test is whether the level of attentional load in a relevant task would determine unconscious neural processing of invisible stimuli. Human participants were scanned with high-field fMRI while they performed a foveal task of low or high attentional load. Irrelevant, invisible monocular stimuli were simultaneously presented peripherally and were continuously suppressed by a flashing mask in the other eye [4]. Attentional load in the foveal task strongly modulated retinotopic activity evoked in primary visual cortex (V1) by the invisible stimuli. Contrary to traditional views [1, 2, 5, 6], we found that availability of attentional capacity determines neural representations related to unconscious processing of continuously suppressed stimuli in human primary visual cortex. Spillover of attention to cortical representations of invisible stimuli (under low load) cannot be a sufficient condition for their awareness.     

Selective Control of Attention Supports the Positivity Effect in Aging

There is emerging evidence for a positivity effect in healthy aging, which describes an age-specific increased focus on positive compared to negative information. Life-span researchers have attributed this effect to the selective allocation of cognitive resources in the service of prioritized emotional goals. We explored the basic principles of this assumption by assessing selective attention and memory for visual stimuli, differing in emotional content and self-relevance, in young and old participants. To specifically address the impact of cognitive control, voluntary attentional selection during the presentation of multiple-item displays was analyzed and linked to participants'' general ability of cognitive control. Results revealed a positivity effect in older adults'' selective attention and memory, which was particularly pronounced for self-relevant stimuli. Focusing on positive and ignoring negative information was most evident in older participants with a generally higher ability to exert top-down control during visual search. Our findings highlight the role of controlled selectivity in the occurrence of a positivity effect in aging. Since the effect has been related to well-being in later life, we suggest that the ability to selectively allocate top-down control might represent a resilience factor for emotional health in aging.     

Prefrontal morphology, 5‐HTTLPR polymorphism and biased attention for emotional stimuli

Biased attention for emotional stimuli has been associated with vulnerability to psychopathology. This study examines the neural substrates of biased attention. Twenty‐three adult women completed high‐resolution structural imaging followed by a standard behavioral measure of biased attention (i.e. spatial cueing task). Participants were also genotyped for the serotonin transporter‐linked promoter region (5‐HTTLPR) gene. Results indicated that lateral prefrontal cortex (lPFC) morphology was inversely associated with maintained attention for positive and negative stimuli, but only among short 5‐HTTLPR allele carriers. No such associations were observed for the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) or the amygdala. Results from this study suggest that brain regions involved in cognitive control of emotion are also associated with attentional biases for emotion stimuli among short 5‐HTTLPR allele carriers.     

Emotional voice and emotional body postures influence each other independently of visual awareness

Multisensory integration may occur independently of visual attention as previously shown with compound face-voice stimuli. We investigated in two experiments whether the perception of whole body expressions and the perception of voices influence each other when observers are not aware of seeing the bodily expression. In the first experiment participants categorized masked happy and angry bodily expressions while ignoring congruent or incongruent emotional voices. The onset between target and mask varied from -50 to +133 ms. Results show that the congruency between the emotion in the voice and the bodily expressions influences audiovisual perception independently of the visibility of the stimuli. In the second experiment participants categorized the emotional voices combined with masked bodily expressions as fearful or happy. This experiment showed that bodily expressions presented outside visual awareness still influence prosody perception. Our experiments show that audiovisual integration between bodily expressions and affective prosody can take place outside and independent of visual awareness.     

Effects of unconscious processing on implicit memory for fearful faces

Emotional stimuli can be processed even when participants perceive them without conscious awareness, but the extent to which unconsciously processed emotional stimuli influence implicit memory after short and long delays is not fully understood. We addressed this issue by measuring a subliminal affective priming effect in Experiment 1 and a long-term priming effect in Experiment 2. In Experiment 1, a flashed fearful or neutral face masked by a scrambled face was presented three times, then a target face (either fearful or neutral) was presented and participants were asked to make a fearful/neutral judgment. We found that, relative to a neutral prime face (neutral-fear face), a fearful prime face speeded up participants' reaction to a fearful target (fear-fear face), when they were not aware of the masked prime face. But this response pattern did not apply to the neutral target. In Experiment 2, participants were first presented with a masked faces six times during encoding. Three minutes later, they were asked to make a fearful/neutral judgment for the same face with congruent expression, the same face with incongruent expression or a new face. Participants showed a significant priming effect for the fearful faces but not for the neutral faces, regardless of their awareness of the masked faces during encoding. These results provided evidence that unconsciously processed stimuli could enhance emotional memory after both short and long delays. It indicates that emotion can enhance memory processing whether the stimuli are encoded consciously or unconsciously.     

Women's Greater Ability to Perceive Happy Facial Emotion Automatically: Gender Differences in Affective Priming

There is evidence that women are better in recognizing their own and others' emotions. The female advantage in emotion recognition becomes even more apparent under conditions of rapid stimulus presentation. Affective priming paradigms have been developed to examine empirically whether facial emotion stimuli presented outside of conscious awareness color our impressions. It was observed that masked emotional facial expression has an affect congruent influence on subsequent judgments of neutral stimuli. The aim of the present study was to examine the effect of gender on affective priming based on negative and positive facial expression. In our priming experiment sad, happy, neutral, or no facial expression was briefly presented (for 33 ms) and masked by neutral faces which had to be evaluated. 81 young healthy volunteers (53 women) participated in the study. Subjects had no subjective awareness of emotional primes. Women did not differ from men with regard to age, education, intelligence, trait anxiety, or depressivity. In the whole sample, happy but not sad facial expression elicited valence congruent affective priming. Between-group analyses revealed that women manifested greater affective priming due to happy faces than men. Women seem to have a greater ability to perceive and respond to positive facial emotion at an automatic processing level compared to men. High perceptual sensitivity to minimal social-affective signals may contribute to women's advantage in understanding other persons' emotional states.     

Attention,self-regulation and consciousness.

Consciousness has many aspects. These include awareness of the world, feelings of control over one''s behaviour and mental state (volition), and the notion of continuing self. Focal (executive) attention is used to control details of our awareness and is thus closely related to volition. Experiments suggest an integrated network of neural areas involved in executive attention. This network is associated with our voluntary ability to select among competing items, to correct error and to regulate our emotions. Recent neuroimaging studies suggest that these various functions involve separate areas of the anterior cingulate. We have adopted a strategy of using marker tasks, shown to activate the brain area by imaging studies, as a means of tracing the development of attentional networks. Executive attention appears to develop first to regulate distress during the first year of life. During later childhood the ability to regulate conflict among competing stimuli builds upon the earlier cingulate anatomy to provide a means of cognitive control. During childhood the activation of cingulate structures relates both to the child''s success on laboratory tasks involving conflict and to parental reports of self-regulation and emotional control. These studies indicate a start in understanding the anatomy, circuitry and development of executive attention networks that serve to regulate both cognition and emotion.     

Neural Correlates of Emotional Interference in Social Anxiety Disorder

Disorder-relevant but task-unrelated stimuli impair cognitive performance in social anxiety disorder (SAD); however, time course and neural correlates of emotional interference are unknown. The present study investigated time course and neural basis of emotional interference in SAD using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Patients with SAD and healthy controls performed an emotional stroop task which allowed examining interference effects on the current and the succeeding trial. Reaction time data showed an emotional interference effect in the current trial, but not the succeeding trial, specifically in SAD. FMRI data showed greater activation in the left amygdala, bilateral insula, medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), and left opercular part of the inferior frontal gyrus during emotional interference of the current trial in SAD patients. Furthermore, we found a positive correlation between patients’ interference scores and activation in the mPFC, dorsal ACC and left angular/supramarginal gyrus. Taken together, results indicate a network of brain regions comprising amygdala, insula, mPFC, ACC, and areas strongly involved in language processing during the processing of task-unrelated threat in SAD. However, specifically the activation in mPFC, dorsal ACC, and left angular/supramarginal gyrus is associated with the strength of the interference effect, suggesting a cognitive network model of attentional bias in SAD. This probably comprises exceeded allocation of attentional resources to disorder-related information of the presented stimuli and increased self-referential and semantic processing of threat words in SAD.     

Effects of AKAP5 Pro100Leu Genotype on Working Memory for Emotional Stimuli

Recent investigations addressing the role of the synaptic multiadaptor molecule AKAP5 in human emotion and behavior suggest that the AKAP5 Pro100Leu polymorphism (rs2230491) contributes to individual differences in affective control. Carriers of the less common Leu allele show a higher control of anger as indicated by behavioral measures and dACC brain response on emotional distracters when compared to Pro homozygotes. In the current fMRI study we used an emotional working memory task according to the n-back scheme with neutral and negative emotional faces as target stimuli. Pro homozygotes showed a performance advantage at the behavioral level and exhibited enhanced activation of the amygdala and fusiform face area during working memory for emotional faces. On the other hand, Leu carriers exhibited increased activation of the dACC during performance of the 2-back condition. Our results suggest that AKAP5 Pro100Leu effects on emotion processing might be task-dependent with Pro homozygotes showing lower control of emotional interference, but more efficient processing of task-relevant emotional stimuli.     

“Disorganized in time”: Impact of bottom-up and top-down negative emotion generation on memory formation among healthy and traumatized adolescents

“Travelling in time,” a central feature of episodic memory is severely affected among individuals with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) with two opposite effects: vivid traumatic memories are unorganized in temporality (bottom-up processes), non-traumatic personal memories tend to lack spatio-temporal details and false recognitions occur more frequently that in the general population (top-down processes). To test the effect of these two types of processes (i.e. bottom-up and top-down) on emotional memory, we conducted two studies in healthy and traumatized adolescents, a period of life in which vulnerability to emotion is particularly high. Using negative and neutral images selected from the international affective picture system (IAPS), stimuli were divided into perceptual images (emotion generated by perceptual details) and conceptual images (emotion generated by the general meaning of the material). Both categories of stimuli were then used, along with neutral pictures, in a memory task with two phases (encoding and recognition). In both populations, we reported a differential effect of the emotional material on encoding and recognition. Negative perceptual scenes induced an attentional capture effect during encoding and enhanced the recollective distinctiveness. Conversely, the encoding of conceptual scenes was similar to neutral ones, but the conceptual relatedness induced false memories at retrieval. However, among individuals with PTSD, two subgroups of patients were identified. The first subgroup processed the scenes faster than controls, except for the perceptual scenes, and obtained similar performances to controls in the recognition task. The second subgroup group desmonstrated an attentional deficit in the encoding task with no benefit from the distinctiveness associated with negative perceptual scenes on memory performances. These findings provide a new perspective on how negative emotional information may have opposite influences on memory in normal and traumatized individuals. It also gives clues to understand how intrusive memories and overgeneralization takes place in PTSD.     

Putative human pheromone androstadienone attunes the mind specifically to emotional information

The putative human pheromone Δ4,16-androstadien-3-one (androstadienone), a non-androgenic steroid found in sweat and saliva, modulates psychological, physiological and hormonal responses without detection as an odor. To determine the specific psychological processes altered by androstadienone, four studies were completed by 50 men and women after solutions of 250 μM androstadienone or clove-odor control carrier, on separate days, were applied to their upper lip: (1) face pairs were subliminally presented, with one face neutral and the other happy or angry. Androstadienone accelerated speed to locate a subsequent dot probe appearing on the same side as emotional faces, without affecting overall reaction times, indicating that androstadienone specifically enhanced automatic attention to emotional information. (2) In two Stroop paradigms, emotional or mismatched color words interfered with ink color identification. Androstadienone slowed ink color identification of emotional words, demonstrating greater allocation of attentional resources towards emotional information, with no effect on the cognitive Stroop. (3) To test effects on social cognition, participants performed two working memory tasks with distinct stimuli, neutral faces or shapes. Androstadienone did not alter attention to either the social or nonsocial images. (4) The ameliorative effects of androstadienone on self-reported attentiveness were replicated, consistent with increased attention to emotional visual stimuli. Moreover, androstadienone did not alter positive or negative mood, as participants were alone during testing, which removed emotional stimuli from social interactions with a tester. Taken together, these findings demonstrate that subliminal androstadienone guides psychological resources to specifically engage stimuli with emotional significance and does not alter attention to social or general cognitive information.     

心理疲劳对情绪图片注意偏向的研究

目的:探讨在实验室中诱发心理疲劳后是否会对带有负性情绪的图片产生注意偏向。方法:选取34名某军医大学本科生为被试者,记录被试者完成认知负荷任务后的主观情绪体验成绩及疲劳量表得分,并采集被试者对情绪性图片进行的点探测任务的反应时及错误率。结果:在主观报告上,被试者的负性情绪和躯体疲劳感得分显著高于完成认知任务前,在点探测任务的行为数据上,被试者对于带有负性情绪的图片的反应时长于带有正性情绪的图片,反应错误率也高于正性图片。结论:认知负荷任务能够有效诱发被试者的躯体疲劳感和负性情绪。具有疲劳感和负性情绪的被试者并未对带有负性情绪的图片产生注意偏向。     

Emotion modulation of visual attention: categorical and temporal characteristics

Background

Experimental research has shown that emotional stimuli can either enhance or impair attentional performance. However, the relative effects of specific emotional stimuli and the specific time course of these differential effects are unclear.

Methodology/Principal Findings

In the present study, participants (n = 50) searched for a single target within a rapid serial visual presentation of images. Irrelevant fear, disgust, erotic or neutral images preceded the target by two, four, six, or eight items. At lag 2, erotic images induced the greatest deficits in subsequent target processing compared to other images, consistent with a large emotional attentional blink. Fear and disgust images also produced a larger attentional blinks at lag 2 than neutral images. Erotic, fear, and disgust images continued to induce greater deficits than neutral images at lag 4 and 6. However, target processing deficits induced by erotic, fear, and disgust images at intermediate lags (lag 4 and 6) did not consistently differ from each other. In contrast to performance at lag 2, 4, and 6, enhancement in target processing for emotional stimuli was observed in comparison to neutral stimuli at lag 8.

Conclusions/Significance

These findings suggest that task-irrelevant emotion information, particularly erotica, impairs intentional allocation of attention at early temporal stages, but at later temporal stages, emotional stimuli can have an enhancing effect on directed attention. These data suggest that the effects of emotional stimuli on attention can be both positive and negative depending upon temporal factors.     

The scope and limits of top-down attention in unconscious visual processing

Attentional selection plays a critical role in conscious perception. When attention is diverted, even salient stimuli fail to reach visual awareness. Attention can be voluntarily directed to a spatial location or a visual feature for facilitating the processing of information relevant to current goals. In everyday situations, attention and awareness are tightly coupled. This has led some to suggest that attention and awareness might be based on a common neural foundation, whereas others argue that they are mediated by distinct mechanisms. A body of evidence shows that visual stimuli can be processed at multiple stages of the visual-processing streams without evoking visual awareness. To illuminate the relationship between visual attention and conscious perception, we investigated whether top-down attention can target and modulate the neural representations of unconsciously processed visual stimuli. Our experiments show that spatial attention can target only consciously perceived stimuli, whereas feature-based attention can modulate the processing of invisible stimuli. The attentional modulation of unconscious signals implies that attention and awareness can be dissociated, challenging a simplistic view of the boundary between conscious and unconscious visual processing.     

Attentional Demands Influence Vocal Compensations to Pitch Errors Heard in Auditory Feedback

Auditory feedback is required to maintain fluent speech. At present, it is unclear how attention modulates auditory feedback processing during ongoing speech. In this event-related potential (ERP) study, participants vocalized/a/, while they heard their vocal pitch suddenly shifted downward a ½ semitone in both single and dual-task conditions. During the single-task condition participants passively viewed a visual stream for cues to start and stop vocalizing. In the dual-task condition, participants vocalized while they identified target stimuli in a visual stream of letters. The presentation rate of the visual stimuli was manipulated in the dual-task condition in order to produce a low, intermediate, and high attentional load. Visual target identification accuracy was lowest in the high attentional load condition, indicating that attentional load was successfully manipulated. Results further showed that participants who were exposed to the single-task condition, prior to the dual-task condition, produced larger vocal compensations during the single-task condition. Thus, when participants’ attention was divided, less attention was available for the monitoring of their auditory feedback, resulting in smaller compensatory vocal responses. However, P1-N1-P2 ERP responses were not affected by divided attention, suggesting that the effect of attentional load was not on the auditory processing of pitch altered feedback, but instead it interfered with the integration of auditory and motor information, or motor control itself.     

The Effects of a Distracting N-Back Task on Recognition Memory Are Reduced by Negative Emotional Intensity

Memory performance is usually impaired when participants have to encode information while performing a concurrent task. Recent studies using recall tasks have found that emotional items are more resistant to such cognitive depletion effects than non-emotional items. However, when recognition tasks are used, the same effect is more elusive as recent recognition studies have obtained contradictory results. In two experiments, we provide evidence that negative emotional content can reliably reduce the effects of cognitive depletion on recognition memory only if stimuli with high levels of emotional intensity are used. In particular, we found that recognition performance for realistic pictures was impaired by a secondary 3-back working memory task during encoding if stimuli were emotionally neutral or had moderate levels of negative emotionality. In contrast, when negative pictures with high levels of emotional intensity were used, the detrimental effects of the secondary task were significantly attenuated.     

Exploring the behavioral and cognitive phenotype of KBG syndrome

KBG syndrome is a neurodevelopmental disorder, caused by dominant mutations in ANKRD11, that is characterized by developmental delay/intellectual disability, mild craniofacial dysmorphisms, and short stature. Behavior and cognition have hardly been studied, but anecdotal evidence suggests higher frequencies of ADHD‐symptoms and social‐emotional impairments. In this study, the behavioral and cognitive profile of KBG syndrome will be investigated in order to examine if and how cognitive deficits contribute to behavioral difficulties. A total of 18 patients with KBG syndrome and a control group consisting of 17 patients with other genetic disorders with comparable intelligence levels, completed neuropsychological assessment. Age‐appropriate tasks were selected, covering overall intelligence, attention, memory, executive functioning, social cognition and visuoconstruction. Results were compared using Cohen's d effect sizes. As to behavior, fewer difficulties in social functioning and slightly more attentional problems, hyperactivity, oppositional defiant behavior and conduct problems were found in the KBG syndrome group. Regarding cognitive functioning, inspection of the observed differences shows that patients with KBG syndrome showed lower scores on sustained attention, cognitive flexibility, and visuoconstruction. In contrast, the KBG syndrome group demonstrated higher scores on visual memory, social cognition and emotion recognition. The cognitive profile of KBG syndrome in this sample indicates problems in attention and executive functioning that may underlie the behavior profile which primarily comprises impulsive behavior. Contrary to expectations based on previous (case) reports, no deficits were found in social cognitive functioning. These findings are important for counseling purposes, for tailored education planning, and for the development of personalized intervention.