Just another face in the crowd: Evidence for decreased detection of angry faces in children with Williams syndrome

The detection of social threat is crucial for adaptive behaviour. Previous studies have shown that angry faces capture attention and are processed more efficiently than happy faces. While this anger superiority effect has been found in typical and atypical development, it is unknown whether it exists in individuals with Williams syndrome (WS), who show reduced social fear and atypical sociability. In this study, children with WS searched for angry or happy target faces surrounded by 2, 5 or 8 distracters (happy or angry faces, respectively). Performance was compared to that of mental age-matched controls. Results revealed no group differences for happy faces, however for angry faces, the WS, but not the control group, showed a significant performance decrease for the 8-distracters condition, indicating the absence of an anger superiority effect, in good agreement with evidence for abnormal structure and function in brain areas for social threat processing in WS.     

Individual interregional perfusion between the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex stimulation targets and the subgenual anterior cortex predicts response and remission to aiTBS treatment in medication-resistant depression: The influence of behavioral inhibition

BackgroundAccelerated intermittent Theta Burst Stimulation (aiTBS) has been put forward as an effective treatment to alleviate depressive symptoms. Baseline functional connectivity (FC) patterns between the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and the subgenual anterior cortex (sgACC) have gained a lot of attention as a potential biomarker for response. However, arterial spin labeling (ASL) - measuring regional cerebral blood flow - may allow a more straightforward physiological interpretation of such interregional functional connections.ObjectivesWe investigated whether baseline covariance perfusion connectivity between the individually stimulated left DLPFC targets and sgACC could predict meaningful clinical outcome. Considering that individual characteristics may influence efficacy prediction, all patients were also assessed with the Behavioral Inhibition System/Behavioral Activation System (BIS/BAS) scale.MethodsAfter baseline ASL scanning, forty-one medication-resistant depressed patients received twenty sessions of neuronavigated left DLPFC aiTBS in an accelerated sham-controlled crossover fashion, where all stimulation sessions were spread over four days (Trial registration: http://clinicaltrials.gov/show/NCT01832805).ResultsStronger individual baseline interregional covariance perfusion connectivity patterns predicted response and/or remission. Furthermore, responders and remitters with higher BIS scores displayed stronger baseline interregional perfusion connections.ConclusionsTargeting the left DLPFC with aiTBS based on personal structural imaging data only may not be the most optimal method to enhance meaningful antidepressant responses. Individual baseline interregional perfusion connectivity could be an important added brain imaging method for individual optimization of more valid stimulation targets within the left DLPFC. Additional therapies dealing with behavioral inhibition may be warranted.     

Behavioural inhibition and early neural processing of happy and angry faces interact to predict anxiety: a longitudinal ERP study

Limited prospective research has examined whether attention biases to emotion moderate associations between Behavioural Inhibition (BI) and anxiety in preschool-aged children. Furthermore, there has been an over-reliance on behavioral measures in previous studies. Accordingly, we assessed anxiety in a sample of preschool-aged children (3–4 years) at baseline, and again approximately 6 and 11 months later, after they started school. At baseline, children completed an assessment of BI and an EEG task where they were presented with angry, happy, and neutral faces. EEG analyses focused on ERPs (P1, P2, N2) associated with specific stages of attention allocation. Interactions between BI and emotion bias (ERP amplitude for emotional versus neutral faces) were found for N2 and P1. For N2, BI was significantly associated with higher overall anxiety when an angry bias was present. Interestingly for P1, BI was associated with higher overall anxiety when a happy bias was absent. Finally, interactions were found between linear time and happy and angry bias for P1, with a greater linear decrease in anxiety over time when biases were high. These results suggest that attention to emotional stimuli moderates the BI-anxiety relationship across early development.     

In the eye of the beholder: individual differences in perceived social isolation predict regional brain activation to social stimuli

Prior research has shown that perceived social isolation (loneliness) motivates people to attend to and connect with others but to do so in a self-protective and paradoxically self-defeating fashion. Although recent research has shed light on the neural correlates of social perception, cooperation, empathy, rejection, and love, little is known about how individual differences in loneliness relate to neural responses to social and emotional stimuli. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we show that there are at least two neural mechanisms differentiating social perception in lonely and nonlonely young adults. For pleasant depictions, lonely individuals appear to be less rewarded by social stimuli, as evidenced by weaker activation of the ventral striatum to pictures of people than of objects, whereas nonlonely individuals showed stronger activation of the ventral striatum to pictures of people than of objects. For unpleasant depictions, lonely individuals were characterized by greater activation of the visual cortex to pictures of people than of objects, suggesting that their attention is drawn more to the distress of others, whereas nonlonely individuals showed greater activation of the right and left temporo-parietal junction to pictures of people than of objects, consistent with the notion that they are more likely to reflect spontaneously on the perspective of distressed others.     

Fractionating negative and positive affectivity in handedness: Insights from the Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory of personality

The Annett Hand Preference Questionnaire (AHPQ), as modified by Briggs and Nebes [(1975). Patterns of hand preference in a student population. Cortex, 11(3), 230–238. doi:10.1016/s0010-9452(75)80005-0], was administered to a sample of 177 participants alongside the Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory of Personality Questionnaire [RST-PQ; Corr, P. J., & Cooper, A. (2016). The Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory of Personality Questionnaire (RST-PQ): Development and validation. Psychological Assessment. doi:10.1037/pas000], which measures two factors of defensive negative emotion, motivation and affectivity—the Behavioural Inhibition System (BIS) and the Fight–Flight–Freeze System (FFFS)—and one positive-approach dimension related to reward sensitivity, persistence and reactivity—the Behavioural Approach System. We sought to clarify the nature of negative, and positive, affectivity in relation to handedness. ANOVAs and multiple regression analyses converged on the following conclusions: left-handers were higher on the BIS, not the FFFS, than right-handers; in right-handers only, strength of hand preference was positively correlated with the FFFS, not the BIS. The original assessment method proposed by Annett was also used to assess handedness, but associations with RST-PQ factors were not found. These findings help us to clarify existing issues in the literature and raise new ones for future research.     

Withholding response in the face of a smile: age-related differences in prefrontal sensitivity to Nogo cues following happy and angry faces

The modulation of control processes by stimulus salience, as well as associated neural activation, changes over development. We investigated age-related differences in the influence of facial emotion on brain activation when an action had to be withheld, focusing on a developmental period characterized by rapid social-emotional and cognitive change. Groups of kindergarten and young school-aged children and a group of young adults performed a modified Go/Nogo task. Response cues were preceded by happy or angry faces. After controlling for task performance, left orbitofrontal regions discriminated trials with happy vs. angry faces in children but not in adults when a response was withheld, and this effect decreased parametrically with age group. Age-related changes in prefrontal responsiveness to facial expression were not observed when an action was required, nor did this region show age-related activation changes with the demand to withhold a response in general. Such results reveal age-related differences in prefrontal activation that are specific to stimulus valence and depend on the action required.     

Individual differences in executive functioning modulate age effects on the ERP correlates of retrieval success

The present study aimed to investigate whether the level of executive functioning modulated the effects of aging on episodic memory performance and on the electrophysiological correlates of retrieval success (‘old/new effect’). We used a differential approach in which young and older adults were divided into four groups of 14 participants according to their scores on a composite executive index: young-high, young-low, old-high and old-low. ERPs were recorded while participants performed a word-stem cued-recall task. Behavioral results demonstrated that age-related deficits in memory performance were reduced but not eliminated in individuals with a higher executive functioning level. Young participants exhibited ERP old/new effects on frontal and parietal areas. At posterior sites, the effect was entirely left-sided for young-low adults while for young-high participants it was bilateral, maximal at left sites and of greater amplitude. For the old-low group, both frontally-based and parietally-based processes appeared to be affected by the aging process. They also demonstrated a late frontal negative component, which might indicate an unsuccessful additional attempt to cope with retrieval difficulties. In the old-high group, ERP effects on frontal areas were relatively intact while the parietal effect was impaired compared to young adults. However, old-high subjects exhibited earlier, larger and more symmetrical effects than did old-low adults, which was in line with their better memory performance. These findings provide some support for the executive decline hypothesis of cognitive aging by showing that neural correlates of retrieval success in episodic memory are differentially affected by aging according to executive functioning level. They are consistent with the view that a high executive functioning level may help older adults recruit a cerebral pattern which enables them to perform a memory task more efficiently.     

Investigating the impact of parental status and depression symptoms on the early perceptual coding of infant faces: An event-related potential study

Infant faces are highly salient social stimuli that appear to elicit intuitive parenting behaviors in healthy adult women. Behavioral and observational studies indicate that this effect may be modulated by experiences of reproduction, caregiving, and psychiatric symptomatology that affect normative attention and reward processing of infant cues. However, relatively little is known about the neural correlates of these effects. Using the event-related potential (ERP) technique, this study investigated the impact of parental status (mother, non-mother) and depression symptoms on early visual processing of infant faces in a community sample of adult women. Specifically, the P1 and N170 ERP components elicited in response to infant face stimuli were examined. While characteristics of the N170 were not modulated by parental status, a statistically significant positive correlation was observed between depression symptom severity and N170 amplitude. This relationship was not observed for the P1. These results suggest that depression symptoms may modulate early neurophysiological responsiveness to infant cues, even at sub-clinical levels.     

Untangling the neurobiology of coping styles in rodents: Towards neural mechanisms underlying individual differences in disease susceptibility

Considerable individual differences exist in trait-like patterns of behavioral and physiological responses to salient environmental challenges. This individual variation in stress coping styles has an important functional role in terms of health and fitness. Hence, understanding the neural embedding of coping style variation is fundamental for biobehavioral neurosciences in probing individual disease susceptibility. This review outlines individual differences in trait-aggressiveness as an adaptive component of the natural sociobiology of rats and mice, and highlights that these reflect the general style of coping that varies from proactive (aggressive) to reactive (docile). We propose that this qualitative coping style can be disentangled into multiple quantitative behavioral domains, e.g., flexibility/impulse control, emotional reactivity and harm avoidance/reward processing, that each are encoded into selective neural circuitries. Since functioning of all these brain circuitries rely on fine-tuned serotonin signaling, autoinhibitory control mechanisms of serotonergic neuron (re)activity are crucial in orchestrating general coping style. Untangling the precise neuromolecular mechanisms of different coping styles will provide a roadmap for developing better therapeutic strategies of stress-related diseases.     

Norman Geschwind’s contribution to the understanding of behavioral changes in temporal lobe epilepsy: The February 1974 lecture

Norman Geschwind catalyzed academic interest in the study of interictal behavioral changes in temporal lobe epilepsy. His contributions to this area comprise a series of 11 articles, chapters, editorials, and commentaries published between 1973 and 1984. This article summarizes, both chronologically and by behavioral topic, Geschwind’s contributions and opinions on behavioral changes in temporal lobe epilepsy. A previously unpublished lecture (see article in this issue), “Personality Change in Temporal Lobe Epilepsy,” from his course at Harvard Medical School on The Neurology of Behavior (1974), is also quoted to further illustrate his views on specific features of this syndrome. Notably, many of Geschwind’s observations and formulations regarding this topic were highly developed in 1974, reflecting his long-standing interest in behavioral changes in epilepsy.Geschwind and his collaborators viewed temporal lobe epilepsy as an important model of behavioral change resulting from a stimulating lesion in the limbic system. This neurobiology accounted for the overarching increased interictal emotionality that underlay the increased religious interests, hypergraphia, increased aggression, increased moral and philosophical concerns, viscosity, and seriousness (lack of humor). Hyposexuality was the exception, although it was consistent with a discharging lesion altering this emotion-driven behavior. Geschwind provided a series of arguments to support the existence of this limbic syndrome and explain why alternative views (e.g., destructive lesion, psychological factors) and arguments against the syndrome’s existence are inconsistent with the data.     

I spy with my little eye: The detection of changes in emotional faces and the influence of facial feedback in Parkinson disease

Background and purpose

Parkinson disease (PD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder that affects the motor system but also involves deficits in emotional processing such as facial emotion recognition. In healthy participants, it has been shown that facial mimicry, the automatic imitation of perceived facial expressions, facilitates the interpretation of the emotional states of our counterpart. In PD patients, recent studies revealed reduced facial mimicry and consequently reduced facial feedback, suggesting that this reduction might contribute to the prominent emotion recognition deficits found in PD.

Methods

We investigated the influence of facial mimicry on facial emotion recognition. Twenty PD patients and 20 healthy controls (HCs) underwent a classical facial mimicry manipulation (holding a pen with the lips, teeth, or nondominant hand) while performing an emotional change detection task with faces.

Results

As expected, emotion recognition was significantly influenced by facial mimicry manipulation in HCs, further supporting the hypothesis of facial feedback and the related theory of embodied simulation. Importantly, patients with PD, generally and independent from the facial mimicry manipulation, were impaired in their ability to detected emotion changes. Our data further show that PD patients' facial emotional recognition abilities are completely unaffected by mimicry manipulation, suggesting that PD patients cannot profit from an artificial modulation of the already impaired facial feedback.

Conclusions

These findings suggest that it is not the hypomimia and the absence of facial feedback per se, but a disruption of the facial feedback loop, that leads to the prominent emotion recognition deficit in PD patients.     

Emotional responses to psychosocial stress in schizophrenia: the role of individual differences in affective traits and coping

Despite the well-established association between psychosocial stress and symptom exacerbation in schizophrenia, factors that account for variability in stress reactivity among individuals with this disorder are unknown. This study examined the association between affective traits, coping style, and neurocognitive functioning and subjective emotional responses during putatively stressful social interactions among individuals with schizophrenia. Self-reported mood was assessed in male schizophrenia outpatients (n=36) and matched nonpsychiatric controls (n=15) during a role-play test (RPT) comprised of simulated social encounters requiring assertive or affiliative skills. During the RPT, schizophrenia patients and controls reported similar elevations in negative mood and decreases in positive mood as compared to baseline mood during assertion scenes. Affiliation scenes resulted only in similar decreases in positive mood across groups as compared to baseline mood. Among schizophrenia patients, trait negative affectivity (NA) and maladaptive coping style accounted for one quarter of the variance in negative mood during the assertion RPTs, and these relationships held after controlling for baseline mood, clinical symptoms, and neurocognitive functioning. Results provide preliminary support for the validity of the social RPT as a paradigm for examining psychosocial stress in schizophrenia and suggest that trait negative affectivity and maladaptive coping are associated with individual differences in emotional responses to psychosocial stressors in schizophrenia.     

Individual differences in experiencing intrusive memories: the role of the ability to resist proactive interference

This study explored whether a relatively poor ability to resist or inhibit interference from irrelevant information in working memory is associated with experiencing undesirable intrusive memories. Non-selected participants (N = 91) completed a self-report measure of intrusive memories, and carried out experimental tasks intended to measure two different types of inhibition: resistance to proactive interference and response inhibition (i.e., the ability to prevent automatically triggered responses). The results showed a significant relationship between inhibition at the cognitive level (i.e., resistance to proactive interference) and the frequency of intrusive memories (especially in the group of female participants) whereas no such relationship with measures of response inhibition emerged. These findings are consistent with the idea that deficient inhibitory control reflects a vulnerability factor for experiencing intrusive memories. Implications for research investigating risk factors for the development of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are discussed.     

Individual differences in neural responses to social rejection: the joint effect of self-esteem and attentional control

Individuals with low self-esteem have been found to react more negatively to signs of interpersonal rejection than those with high self-esteem. However, previous research has found that individual differences in attentional control can attenuate negative reactions to social rejection among vulnerable, low self-esteem individuals. The current fMRI study sought to elucidate the neurobiological substrate of this buffering effect. We hypothesized and found that while looking at scenes of social rejection (vs negative scenes) low self-esteem high attentional control individuals engaged the rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC), an area of the brain associated with emotional control, more than their low self-esteem low attentional control peers. Furthermore, we found that low self-esteem high attentional control individuals evaluated social rejection as less arousing and less rejecting in a separate behavioral task. Importantly, activation in the rACC fully mediated the relationship between the interaction of self-esteem and attentional control and emotional evaluations, suggesting that the rACC activation underlies the buffering effects of attentional control. Results are discussed in terms of individual differences in emotional vulnerability and protection and by highlighting the role of rACC in emotion regulation.     

Alterations of the early auditory evoked gamma-band response in first-degree relatives of patients with schizophrenia: hints to a new intermediate phenotype

Background

There is growing evidence of abnormalities of high-frequency oscillations in the gamma-range of the electroencephalography in schizophrenia. The generation of neural activity in the gamma-band was shown to be critically related to a glutamatergic and GABAergic microcircuit which is also known to be involved in the pathophysiology of schizophrenia. Recently, a reduction of the early auditory evoked gamma-band response (eGBR) in schizophrenic patients was reported. In order to investigate the possible applicability of this neurophysiological marker as an intermediate phenotype for schizophrenia, this is the main question of our investigation: Is the early eGBR decreased regarding evoked power and phase locking in first-degree relatives of patients with schizophrenia?

Methods

We investigated the early eGBR in 17 unaffected first-degree relatives of patients with schizophrenia and in age-, gender- and education-matched groups of schizophrenic patients and healthy controls using an auditory reaction task.

Results

First-degree relatives of patients with schizophrenia and schizophrenic patients showed a significant reduction of evoked power and phase locking of the early eGBR compared to healthy controls.

Conclusion

This study shows significantly reduced evoked power and phase locking of the early auditory eGBR in first-degree relatives of patients with schizophrenia pointing to the applicability of this marker as a heritable intermediate phenotype for schizophrenia. The findings are in line with the hypothesis of a disturbed GABAergic interneural modulation of pyramidal cells in schizophrenia and findings of different schizophrenia risk genes associated with transmission at glutamatergic and GABAergic synapses.     

Sex differences in susceptibility to viral infection of the central nervous system

We have characterized striking differences in recovery of male and female BALB/c and BALB/c-H-2^dm2 (dm2) mice from an experimental neurotropic viral infection of the central nervous system (CNS). Following intranasal inoculation of vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV), assays of tissue homogenates from female mice produced lower viral titers. There was also a significant reduction in the spread of virus from the rostral to caudal end of the brain in female mice. Enhanced recovery by female mice of both strains in response to this viral insult correlates with increased levels of Nitric Oxide Synthase (NOS) types I, II, and III expression, an increased prevalence of reactive astrocytes, earlier and enhanced levels of expression of Major Histocompatabilty Complex (MHC) class II molecules on astrocytes, endothelial and microglial cells, and increased T cell infiltration in the female BALB/c mouse. Taken together, these findings document sexual dimorphism in CNS immunity, and may provide an understanding of some of the mechanisms underlying many sex-biased diseases.     

Expression analysis of cadherins in the songbird brain: relationship to vocal system development

Songbirds learn their songs as juveniles. The brains of songbirds have a series of nuclei and neural circuits called the song system, which is indispensable for vocal learning and production. In the present study we analyzed the expression patterns of cell adhesion molecules, cadherins, in the Bengalese finch (Lonchura striata var. domestica) to investigate their potential involvement in song nuclei and neural circuit formation. We found that cadherin-6B was expressed in many song nuclei of the juvenile and adult brain, while R-cadherin was complementarily expressed in surrounding areas. On the other hand, cadherin-7 was expressed in the robust nucleus of the arcopallium (RA) in the sensory learning stage, and its expression was downregulated during the sensorimotor learning stage. This downregulation of cadherin-7 was sexually dimorphic, suggesting its involvement in song development. Other cadherins, including cadherin-9, -10, and -12, showed different song-nuclei-related expression profiles. These patterns of song nuclei related expression suggest the possibility that cadherins are involved in the formation and maintenance of the song nuclei or neural pathways of the song system.     

N-cadherin expression in endothelial cells during early angiogenesis in the eye and brain of the chicken: relation to blood-retina and blood-brain barrier development

The factors responsible for the induction and maintenance of blood-brain barrier properties are still undefined. The process of blood-brain barrier formation is thought to take place in a two-stage manner: the initial commitment of vascular sprouts by neuroectodermal cells may be followed by the stabilization of barrier properties. In the present study, we investigated the expression pattern of neural (N)-cadherin during early angiogenesis in the brain and the pecten oculi of the chicken. The pecten has been introduced previously as a model for the investigation of the formation and maturation of barrier properties in the central nervous system. Whereas perineural and choroid vessels remained immunonegative for N-cadherin, vascular sprouts invading both the brain and the pecten primordium acquired anti-N-cadherin immunoreactivity. Confocal laser scanning and immunoelectron microscopy indicated that the antigen was located at the ablumenal endothelial membrane in contact with subendothelial cells. With the onset of barrier differentiation as determined by junctional restriction of the tight junction protein occludin, N-cadherin labelling rapidly decreased. Specific intraneuroectodermal upregulation and decline of endothelial N-cadherin was confirmed by in situ hybridization and suggests that N-cadherin expression by cerebral and pecteneal endothelial cells represents an initial and transient signal which may be involved in the commitment of early blood vessels to express blood-brain and blood-retina barrier properties.