Increasing Cognitive Load Reduces Interference from Masked Appetitive and Aversive but Not Neutral Stimuli

Interactions between cognition and emotion are important for survival, often occurring in the absence of awareness. These interactions have been proposed to involve competition between cognition and emotion for attentional resources. Emotional stimuli have been reported to impair performance on cognitive tasks of low, but not high, load if stimuli are consciously perceived. This study explored whether this load-dependent interference effect occurred in response to subliminal emotional stimuli. Masked emotional (appetitive and aversive), but not neutral, stimuli interfered with performance accuracy but not response time on a cognitive task (n-back) at low (1-back), but not high (2-back) load. These results show that a load-dependent interference effect applies to masked emotional stimuli and that the effect generalises across stimulus categories with high motivational value. This supports models of selective attention that propose that cognition and emotion compete for attentional resources. More specifically, interference from masked emotional stimuli at low load suggests that attention is biased towards salient stimuli, while dissipation of interference under high load involves top-down regulation of attention. Our data also indicate that top-down goal-directed regulation of attention occurs in the absence of awareness and does not require metacognitive monitoring or evaluation of bias over behaviour, i.e., some degree of self-regulation occurs at a non-conscious level.     

Distinct Contributions of the Dorsolateral Prefrontal and Orbitofrontal Cortex during Emotion Regulation

The lateral prefrontal and orbitofrontal cortices have both been implicated in emotion regulation, but their distinct roles in regulation of negative emotion remain poorly understood. To address this issue we enrolled 58 participants in an fMRI study in which participants were instructed to reappraise both negative and neutral stimuli. This design allowed us to separately study activations reflecting cognitive processes associated with reappraisal in general and activations specifically related to reappraisal of negative emotion. Our results confirmed that both the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and the lateral orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) contribute to emotion regulation through reappraisal. However, activity in the DLPFC was related to reappraisal independently of whether negative or neutral stimuli were reappraised, whereas the lateral OFC was uniquely related to reappraisal of negative stimuli. We suggest that relative to the lateral OFC, the DLPFC serves a more general role in emotion regulation, perhaps by reflecting the cognitive demand that is inherent to the regulation task.     

Right Limbic FDG-PET Hypometabolism Correlates with Emotion Recognition and Attribution in Probable Behavioral Variant of Frontotemporal Dementia Patients

The behavioural variant of frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) is a rare disease mainly affecting the social brain. FDG-PET fronto-temporal hypometabolism is a supportive feature for the diagnosis. It may also provide specific functional metabolic signatures for altered socio-emotional processing. In this study, we evaluated the emotion recognition and attribution deficits and FDG-PET cerebral metabolic patterns at the group and individual levels in a sample of sporadic bvFTD patients, exploring the cognitive-functional correlations. Seventeen probable mild bvFTD patients (10 male and 7 female; age 67.8±9.9) were administered standardized and validated version of social cognition tasks assessing the recognition of basic emotions and the attribution of emotions and intentions (i.e., Ekman 60-Faces test-Ek60F and Story-based Empathy task-SET). FDG-PET was analysed using an optimized voxel-based SPM method at the single-subject and group levels. Severe deficits of emotion recognition and processing characterized the bvFTD condition. At the group level, metabolic dysfunction in the right amygdala, temporal pole, and middle cingulate cortex was highly correlated to the emotional recognition and attribution performances. At the single-subject level, however, heterogeneous impairments of social cognition tasks emerged, and different metabolic patterns, involving limbic structures and prefrontal cortices, were also observed. The derangement of a right limbic network is associated with altered socio-emotional processing in bvFTD patients, but different hypometabolic FDG-PET patterns and heterogeneous performances on social tasks at an individual level exist.     

Eveningness diurnal preference associated with poorer socioemotional cognition and social functioning among healthy adolescents and young adults

Recently there has been growing interest in associations between sleep, emotion, and social functioning. Less is known about relationships between chronotype preference and socioemotional cognition and functioning, particularly among adolescents, who experience dramatic normative shifts in diurnal preference, affective functioning, and social competence. Fifty-five healthy adolescents and young adults completed a self-report chronotype preference measure, a computerized measure of socioemotional cognition, and a semi-structured clinical interview assessing interpersonal functioning. Greater eveningness preference was associated with poorer socioemotional cognition and social functioning in this age group. Future studies should assess these relationships across development and using objective measures of circadian timing.     

The amygdala and reward

The amygdala -- an almond-shaped group of nuclei at the heart of the telencephalon -- has been associated with a range of cognitive functions, including emotion, learning, memory, attention and perception. Most current views of amygdala function emphasize its role in negative emotions, such as fear, and in linking negative emotions with other aspects of cognition, such as learning and memory. However, recent evidence supports a role for the amygdala in processing positive emotions as well as negative ones, including learning about the beneficial biological value of stimuli. Indeed, the amygdala's role in stimulus-reward learning might be just as important as its role in processing negative affect and fear conditioning.     

The Insular Cortex: Relationship to Skin Conductance Responses to Facial Expression of Emotion in Temporal Lobe Epilepsy

The insula plays an important role both in emotion processing and in the generation of epileptic seizures. In the current study we examined thickness of insular cortices and bilateral skin conductance responses (SCR) in healthy subjects in addition to a small number of patients with temporal lobe epilepsy. SCR measures arousal and is used to assess non-conscious responses to emotional stimuli. We used two emotion tasks, one explicitly about emotion and the other implicit. The explicit task required judgments about emotions being expressed in photographs of faces, while the implicit one required judgments about the age of the people in the photographs. Patients and healthy differed in labeling neutral faces, but not other emotions. They also differed in their SCR to emotions, though the profile depended on which hand the recordings were from. Finally, we found relationships between the thickness of the insula and SCR to each task: in the healthy group the thickness of the left insula was related to SCR to the emotion-labeling task; in the patient group it was between the thickness of the right insula and SCR in the age-labeling task. These patterns were evident only for the right hand recordings, thus underscoring the importance of bilateral recordings.     

Regional brain responses in nulliparous women to emotional infant stimuli

Infant cries and facial expressions influence social interactions and elicit caretaking behaviors from adults. Recent neuroimaging studies suggest that neural responses to infant stimuli involve brain regions that process rewards. However, these studies have yet to investigate individual differences in tendencies to engage or withdraw from motivationally relevant stimuli. To investigate this, we used event-related fMRI to scan 17 nulliparous women. Participants were presented with novel infant cries of two distress levels (low and high) and unknown infant faces of varying affect (happy, sad, and neutral) in a randomized, counter-balanced order. Brain activation was subsequently correlated with scores on the Behavioral Inhibition System/Behavioral Activation System scale. Infant cries activated bilateral superior and middle temporal gyri (STG and MTG) and precentral and postcentral gyri. Activation was greater in bilateral temporal cortices for low- relative to high-distress cries. Happy relative to neutral faces activated the ventral striatum, caudate, ventromedial prefrontal, and orbitofrontal cortices. Sad versus neutral faces activated the precuneus, cuneus, and posterior cingulate cortex, and behavioral activation drive correlated with occipital cortical activations in this contrast. Behavioral inhibition correlated with activation in the right STG for high- and low-distress cries relative to pink noise. Behavioral drive correlated inversely with putamen, caudate, and thalamic activations for the comparison of high-distress cries to pink noise. Reward-responsiveness correlated with activation in the left precentral gyrus during the perception of low-distress cries relative to pink noise. Our findings indicate that infant cry stimuli elicit activations in areas implicated in auditory processing and social cognition. Happy infant faces may be encoded as rewarding, whereas sad faces activate regions associated with empathic processing. Differences in motivational tendencies may modulate neural responses to infant cues.     

Mood modulates auditory laterality of hemodynamic mismatch responses during dichotic listening

Hemodynamic mismatch responses can be elicited by deviant stimuli in a sequence of standard stimuli even during cognitive demanding tasks. Emotional context is known to modulate lateralized processing. Right-hemispheric negative emotion processing may bias attention to the right and enhance processing of right-ear stimuli. The present study examined the influence of induced mood on lateralized pre-attentive auditory processing of dichotic stimuli using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Faces expressing emotions (sad/happy/neutral) were presented in a blocked design while a dichotic oddball sequence with consonant-vowel (CV) syllables in an event-related design was simultaneously administered. Twenty healthy participants were instructed to feel the emotion perceived on the images and to ignore the syllables. Deviant sounds reliably activated bilateral auditory cortices and confirmed attention effects by modulation of visual activity. Sad mood induction activated visual, limbic and right prefrontal areas. A lateralization effect of emotion-attention interaction was reflected in a stronger response to right-ear deviants in the right auditory cortex during sad mood. This imbalance of resources may be a neurophysiological correlate of laterality in sad mood and depression. Conceivably, the compensatory right-hemispheric enhancement of resources elicits increased ipsilateral processing.     

Confidence in emotion perception in point-light displays varies with the ability to perceive own emotions

One central issue in social cognitive neuroscience is that perceiving emotions in others relates to activating the same emotion in oneself. In this study we sought to examine how the ability to perceive own emotions assessed with the Toronto Alexithymia Scale related to both the ability to perceive emotions depicted in point-light displays and the confidence in these perceptions. Participants observed video scenes of human interactions, rated the depicted valence, and judged their confidence in this rating. Results showed that people with higher alexithymia scores were significantly less confident about their decisions, but did not differ from people with lower alexithymia scores in the valence of their ratings. Furthermore, no modulating effect of social context on the effect of higher alexithymia scores was found. It is concluded that the used stimuli are fit to investigate the kinematic aspect of emotion perception and possibly separate people with high and low alexithymia scores via confidence differences. However, a general difference in emotion perception was not detected in the present setting.     

Understanding others: Emotion recognition in humans and other animals

Emotion recognition represents the ability to encode an ensemble of sensory stimuli providing information about the emotional state of another individual. This ability is not unique to humans. An increasing number of studies suggest that many aspects of higher order social functions, including emotion recognition, might be present in species ranging from primates to rodents, indicating a conserved role in social animals. The aim of this review is to examine and compare how emotions are communicated and perceived in humans and other animals, with the intent to highlight possible new behavioral approaches and research perspectives. We summarize the evidence from human emotion recognition, and latest advances in the development of nonhuman animal behavioral tests, using or implying the use of this cognitive function. The differential implication of sensory modalities used by animals to communicate and decipher emotional states is also discussed. The opportunity to measure emotion recognition abilities in rodents may allow us to better identify the neural mechanisms mediating this complex function, thus promoting the development of new intervention strategies for several neuropsychiatric disorders characterized by social cognitive dysfunctions.     

Nonlinear Dynamics of Emotion-Cognition Interaction: When Emotion Does not Destroy Cognition?

Emotion (i.e., spontaneous motivation and subsequent implementation of a behavior) and cognition (i.e., problem solving by information processing) are essential to how we, as humans, respond to changes in our environment. Recent studies in cognitive science suggest that emotion and cognition are subserved by different, although heavily integrated, neural systems. Understanding the time-varying relationship of emotion and cognition is a challenging goal with important implications for neuroscience. We formulate here the dynamical model of emotion-cognition interaction that is based on the following principles: (1) the temporal evolution of cognitive and emotion modes are captured by the incoming stimuli and competition within and among themselves (competition principle); (2) metastable states exist in the unified emotion-cognition phase space; and (3) the brain processes information with robust and reproducible transients through the sequence of metastable states. Such a model can take advantage of the often ignored temporal structure of the emotion-cognition interaction to provide a robust and generalizable method for understanding the relationship between brain activation and complex human behavior. The mathematical image of the robust and reproducible transient dynamics is a Stable Heteroclinic Sequence (SHS), and the Stable Heteroclinic Channels (SHCs). These have been hypothesized to be possible mechanisms that lead to the sequential transient behavior observed in networks. We investigate the modularity of SHCs, i.e., given a SHS and a SHC that is supported in one part of a network, we study conditions under which the SHC pertaining to the cognition will continue to function in the presence of interfering activity with other parts of the network, i.e., emotion.     

Combining oxytocin administration and positive emotion inductions: Examining social perception and analytical performance

Intranasal administration of the hypothalamic neuropeptide oxytocin (OT) has, in some studies, been associated with positive effects on social perception and cognition. Similarly, positive emotion inductions can improve a range of perceptual and performance-based behaviors. In this exploratory study, we examined how OT administration and positive emotion inductions interact in their associations with social and analytical performance. Participants (N = 124) were randomly assigned to receive an intranasal spray of OT (40 IU) or placebo and then viewed one of three videos designed to engender one of the following emotion states: social warmth, pride, or an affectively neutral state. Following the emotion induction, participants completed social perception and analytical tasks. There were no significant main effects of OT condition on social perception tasks, failing to replicate prior research, or on analytical performance. Further, OT condition and positive emotion inductions did not interact with each other in their associations with social perception performance. However, OT condition and positive emotion manipulations did significantly interact in their associations with analytical performance. Specifically, combining positive emotion inductions with OT administration was associated with worse analytical performance, with the pride induction no longer benefiting performance and the warmth induction resulting in worse performance. In sum, we found little evidence for main or interactive effects of OT on social perception but preliminary evidence that OT administration may impair analytical performance when paired with positive emotion inductions.     

Developmental changes in emotion recognition from full-light and point-light displays of body movement

To date, research on the development of emotion recognition has been dominated by studies on facial expression interpretation; very little is known about children's ability to recognize affective meaning from body movements. In the present study, we acquired simultaneous video and motion capture recordings of two actors portraying four basic emotions (Happiness Sadness, Fear and Anger). One hundred and seven primary and secondary school children (aged 4-17) and 14 adult volunteers participated in the study. Each participant viewed the full-light and point-light video clips and was asked to make a forced-choice as to which emotion was being portrayed. As a group, children performed worse than adults for both point-light and full-light conditions. Linear regression showed that both age and lighting condition were significant predictors of performance in children. Using piecewise regression, we found that a bilinear model with a steep improvement in performance until 8.5 years of age, followed by a much slower improvement rate through late childhood and adolescence best explained the data. These findings confirm that, like for facial expression, adolescents' recognition of basic emotions from body language is not fully mature and seems to follow a non-linear development. This is in line with observations of non-linear developmental trajectories for different aspects of human stimuli processing (voices and faces), perhaps suggesting a shift from one perceptual or cognitive strategy to another during adolescence. These results have important implications to understanding the maturation of social cognition.     

Increased Neural Habituation in the Amygdala and Orbitofrontal Cortex in Social Anxiety Disorder Revealed by fMRI

A characterizing symptom of social anxiety disorder (SAD) is increased emotional reactivity towards potential social threat in combination with impaired emotion and stress regulation. While several neuroimaging studies have linked SAD with hyperreactivity in limbic brain regions when exposed to emotional faces, little is known about habituation in both the amygdala and neocortical regulation areas. 15 untreated SAD patients and 15 age- and gender-matched healthy controls underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging during repeated blocks of facial emotion () and object discrimination tasks (). Emotion processing networks were defined by a task-related contrast (). Linear regression was employed for assessing habituation effects in these regions. In both groups, the employed paradigm robustly activated the emotion processing and regulation network, including the amygdalae and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). Statistically significant habituation effects were found in the amygdalae, OFC, and pulvinar thalamus of SAD patients. No such habituation was found in healthy controls. Concurrent habituation in the medial OFC and the amygdalae of SAD patients as shown in this study suggests intact functional integrity and successful short-term down-regulation of neural activation in brain areas responsible for emotion processing. Initial hyperactivation may be explained by an insufficient habituation to new stimuli during the first seconds of exposure. In addition, our results highlight the relevance of the orbitofrontal cortex in social anxiety disorders.     

Not As Good as You Think? Trait Positive Emotion Is Associated with Increased Self-Reported Empathy but Decreased Empathic Performance

How is positive emotion associated with our ability to empathize with others? Extant research provides support for two competing predictions about this question. An empathy amplification hypothesis suggests positive emotion would be associated with greater empathy, as it often enhances other prosocial processes. A contrasting empathy attenuation hypothesis suggests positive emotion would be associated with lower empathy, because positive emotion promotes self-focused or antisocial behaviors. The present investigation tested these competing perspectives by examining associations between dispositional positive emotion and both subjective (i.e., self-report) and objective (i.e., task performance) measures of empathy. Findings revealed that although trait positive emotion was associated with increased subjective beliefs about empathic tendencies, it was associated with both increases and decreases in task-based empathic performance depending on the target’s emotional state. More specifically, trait positive emotion was linked to lower overall empathic accuracy toward a high-intensity negative target, but also a higher sensitivity to emotion upshifts (i.e., shifts in emotion from negative to positive) toward positive targets. This suggests that trait positive affect may be associated with decreased objective empathy in the context of mood incongruent (i.e., negative) emotional stimuli, but may increase some aspects of empathic performance in the context of mood congruent (i.e., positive) stimuli. Taken together, these findings suggest that trait positive emotion engenders a compelling subjective-objective gap regarding its association with empathy, in being related to a heightened perception of empathic tendencies, despite being linked to mixed abilities in regards to empathic performance. (Word count: 242).     

Neural correlates of parent–child HPA axis coregulation

Parents and children have been found to show coordination or coregulation of the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis. This coordination may be reflected in adolescents' neural activation to parent stimuli, particularly in regions of the brain associated with social information processing.This study reports on 22 adolescents (13 males, mean age 17 years), recruited from a longitudinal study to participate in a functional MRI (fMRI) scanning protocol. Approximately 1.5 years before the scan, these same adolescents participated in a family conflict discussion in the lab with both parents, and all three family members provided samples of salivary cortisol five times, before and after the discussion. Multilevel models found positive cross-sectional and time-lagged associations between parents' and youth cortisol. Empirical Bayes (EB) coefficients, extracted from these models to reflect the strength of the relationship between parent and adolescent cortisol, were tested in conjunction with adolescents' neural activation to video clips of their parents taken from the conflict discussion. For both mothers and fathers, youth who showed stronger cortisol coregulation with each parent (both in cross-sectional and time-lagged analyses) showed more activation to that same parent in posteromedial regions (precuneus, posterior cingulate, and retrosplenial cortex) that have been linked with social cognition, e.g. mentalizing about others' emotions. Youths' adrenocortical coregulation with their parents may be reflected in their neural processing of stimuli featuring those same parents.     

Regulation of the neural circuitry of emotion by compassion meditation: effects of meditative expertise

Recent brain imaging studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have implicated insula and anterior cingulate cortices in the empathic response to another's pain. However, virtually nothing is known about the impact of the voluntary generation of compassion on this network. To investigate these questions we assessed brain activity using fMRI while novice and expert meditation practitioners generated a loving-kindness-compassion meditation state. To probe affective reactivity, we presented emotional and neutral sounds during the meditation and comparison periods. Our main hypothesis was that the concern for others cultivated during this form of meditation enhances affective processing, in particular in response to sounds of distress, and that this response to emotional sounds is modulated by the degree of meditation training. The presentation of the emotional sounds was associated with increased pupil diameter and activation of limbic regions (insula and cingulate cortices) during meditation (versus rest). During meditation, activation in insula was greater during presentation of negative sounds than positive or neutral sounds in expert than it was in novice meditators. The strength of activation in insula was also associated with self-reported intensity of the meditation for both groups. These results support the role of the limbic circuitry in emotion sharing. The comparison between meditation vs. rest states between experts and novices also showed increased activation in amygdala, right temporo-parietal junction (TPJ), and right posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) in response to all sounds, suggesting, greater detection of the emotional sounds, and enhanced mentation in response to emotional human vocalizations for experts than novices during meditation. Together these data indicate that the mental expertise to cultivate positive emotion alters the activation of circuitries previously linked to empathy and theory of mind in response to emotional stimuli.     

Resolving emotional conflict: a role for the rostral anterior cingulate cortex in modulating activity in the amygdala

Effective mental functioning requires that cognition be protected from emotional conflict due to interference by task-irrelevant emotionally salient stimuli. The neural mechanisms by which the brain detects and resolves emotional conflict are still largely unknown, however. Drawing on the classic Stroop conflict task, we developed a protocol that allowed us to dissociate the generation and monitoring of emotional conflict from its resolution. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we find that activity in the amygdala and dorsomedial and dorsolateral prefrontal cortices reflects the amount of emotional conflict. By contrast, the resolution of emotional conflict is associated with activation of the rostral anterior cingulate cortex. Activation of the rostral cingulate is predicted by the amount of previous-trial conflict-related neural activity and is accompanied by a simultaneous and correlated reduction of amygdalar activity. These data suggest that emotional conflict is resolved through top-down inhibition of amygdalar activity by the rostral cingulate cortex.     

Face pictures reduce behavioural, autonomic, endocrine and neural indices of stress and fear in sheep

Faces are highly emotive stimuli and we find smiling or familiar faces both attractive and comforting, even as young babies. Do other species with sophisticated face recognition skills, such as sheep, also respond to the emotional significance of familiar faces? We report that when sheep experience social isolation, the sight of familiar sheep face pictures compared with those of goats or inverted triangles significantly reduces behavioural (activity and protest vocalizations), autonomic (heart rate) and endocrine (cortisol and adrenaline) indices of stress. They also increase mRNA expression of activity-dependent genes (c-fos and zif/268) in brain regions specialized for processing faces (temporal and medial frontal cortices and basolateral amygdala) and for emotional control (orbitofrontal and cingulate cortex), and reduce their expression in regions associated with stress responses (hypothalamic paraventricular nucleus) and fear (central and lateral amygdala). Effects on face recognition, emotional control and fear centres are restricted to the right brain hemisphere. Results provide evidence that face pictures may be useful for relieving stress caused by unavoidable social isolation in sheep, and possibly other animal species, including humans. The finding that sheep, like humans, appear to have a right brain hemisphere involvement in the control of negative emotional experiences also suggests that functional lateralization of brain emotion systems may be a general feature in mammals.     

Impaired Recognition of Communicative Interactions from Biological Motion in Schizophrenia

BackgroundPatients with schizophrenia are deficient in multiple aspects of social cognition, including biological motion perception. In the present study we investigated the ability to read social information from point-light stimuli in schizophrenia.Conclusions/SignificanceThese findings are consistent with theories of “overmentalizing” (excessive attribution of intentionality) in schizophrenia, and suggest that processing social information from biological motion does rely on social cognition abilities.