Neural correlates of effective and ineffective mood induction

Emotional reactivity and the ability to modulate an emotional state, which are important factors for psychological well-being, are often dysregulated in psychiatric disorders. Neural correlates of emotional states have mostly been studied at the group level, thereby neglecting individual differences in the intensity of emotional experience. This study investigates the relationship between brain activity and interindividual variation in subjective affect ratings. A standardized mood induction (MI) procedure, using positive facial expression and autobiographical memories, was applied to 54 healthy participants (28 female), who rated their subjective affective state before and after the MI. We performed a regression analysis with brain activation during MI and changes in subjective affect ratings. An increase in positive affective ratings correlated with activity in the amygdala, hippocampus and the fusiform gyrus (FFG), whereas reduced positive affect correlated with activity of the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex. Activations in the amygdala, hippocampus and FFG are possibly linked to strategies adopted by the participants to achieve mood changes. Subgenual cingulate cortex activation has been previously shown to relate to rumination. This finding is in line with previous observations of the subgenual cingulate’s role in emotion regulation and its clinical relevance to therapy and prognosis of mood disorders.     

The role of the medial frontal cortex in the maintenance of emotional states

Evidence is accruing that people can maintain their emotional states, but how they do it and which brain regions are responsible still remains unclear. We examined whether people maintain emotional states ‘actively’, with explicit elaboration of the emotion, or ‘passively’, without elaboration. Twenty-four participants completed an emotion maintenance task in which they either maintained the emotional intensity from the first picture of a pair to compare to that of the second picture (‘maintain’ condition), or only rated their emotional response to the second picture (‘non-maintain’ condition). Supporting the ‘active’ maintenance hypothesis, when maintaining vs not maintaining emotion, participants exhibited increased height and width of activation in the dorsal medial frontal cortex (MFC) and lateral prefrontal cortex, regions associated with explicit emotion generation and manipulation of contents in working memory, respectively. Supporting the ‘passive’ maintenance hypothesis, however, when viewing negative emotional pictures (vs neutral pictures) that were not explicitly maintained, participants exhibited greater duration of activity in the rostral MFC, a region associated with implicit emotion generation. Supported by behavioral findings, this evidence that people maintain emotional states both naturally in the rMFC and strategically in the dMFC may be critical for understanding normal as well as disordered emotion regulation.     

Attachment style moderates partner presence effects on pain: a laser-evoked potentials study

Social support is crucial for psychological and physical well-being. Yet, in experimental and clinical pain research, the presence of others has been found to both attenuate and intensify pain. To investigate the factors underlying these mixed effects, we administered noxious laser stimuli to 39 healthy women while their romantic partner was present or absent, and measured pain ratings and laser-evoked potentials (LEPs) to assess the effects of partner presence on subjective pain experience and underlying neural processes. Further, we examined whether individual differences in adult attachment style (AAS), alone or in interaction with the partner’s level of attentional focus (manipulated to be either on or away from the participant) might modulate these effects. We found that the effects of partner presence vs absence on pain-related measures depended on AAS but not partner attentional focus. The higher participants’ attachment avoidance, the higher pain ratings and N2 and P2 local peak amplitudes were in the presence compared with the absence of the romantic partner. As LEPs are thought to reflect activity relating to the salience of events, our data suggest that partner presence may influence the perceived salience of events threatening the body, particularly in individuals who tend to mistrust others.     

Emotion-induced loss aversion and striatal-amygdala coupling in low-anxious individuals

Adapting behavior to changes in the environment is a crucial ability for survival but such adaptation varies widely across individuals. Here, we asked how humans alter their economic decision-making in response to emotional cues, and whether this is related to trait anxiety. Developing an emotional decision-making task for functional magnetic resonance imaging, in which gambling decisions were preceded by emotional and non-emotional primes, we assessed emotional influences on loss aversion, the tendency to overweigh potential monetary losses relative to gains. Our behavioral results revealed that only low-anxious individuals exhibited increased loss aversion under emotional conditions. This emotional modulation of decision-making was accompanied by a corresponding emotion-elicited increase in amygdala-striatal functional connectivity, which correlated with the behavioral effect across participants. Consistent with prior reports of ‘neural loss aversion’, both amygdala and ventral striatum tracked losses more strongly than gains, and amygdala loss aversion signals were exaggerated by emotion, suggesting a potential role for this structure in integrating value and emotion cues. Increased loss aversion and striatal-amygdala coupling induced by emotional cues may reflect the engagement of adaptive harm-avoidance mechanisms in low-anxious individuals, possibly promoting resilience to psychopathology.     

Anticipation of high arousal aversive and positive movie clips engages common and distinct neural substrates

The neural correlates of anxious anticipation have been primarily studied with aversive and neutral stimuli. In this study, we examined the effect of valence on anticipation by using high arousal aversive and positive stimuli and a condition of uncertainty (i.e. either positive or aversive). The task consisted of predetermined cues warning participants of upcoming aversive, positive, ‘uncertain’ (either aversive or positive) and neutral movie clips. Anticipation of all affective clips engaged common regions including the anterior insula, dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, thalamus, caudate, inferior parietal and prefrontal cortex that are associated with emotional experience, sustained attention and appraisal. In contrast, the nucleus accumbens and medial prefrontal cortex, regions implicated in reward processing, were selectively engaged during anticipation of positive clips (depicting sexually explicit content) and the mid-insula, which has been linked to processing aversive stimuli, was selectively engaged during anticipation of aversive clips (depicting graphic medical procedures); these three areas were also activated during anticipation of ‘uncertain’ clips reflecting a broad preparatory response for both aversive and positive stimuli. These results suggest that a common circuitry is recruited in anticipation of affective clips regardless of valence, with additional areas preferentially engaged depending on whether expected stimuli are negative or positive.     

Feeling anxious: anticipatory amygdalo-insular response predicts the feeling of anxious anticipation

Anticipation is a central component of anxiety and the anterior insula appears to be an important neural substrate in which this process is mediated. The anterior insula is also thought to underlie the interoceptive representation of one’s affective state. However, the degree to which individual differences in anticipation-related insula reactivity are associated with variability in the subjective experience of anxious anticipation is untested. To assess this possibility, functional magnetic resonance images were acquired while participants completed an auditory anticipation task with trial-by-trial self-report ratings of anxious anticipation. We hypothesized that the anterior insula would be positively associated with an individual’s subjective experience of anticipatory anxiety. The results provide evidence for an amygdalo-insular system involved in anxious auditory anticipation. Reactivity in the right anterior insula was predictive of individuals’ subjective experience of anxious anticipation for both aversive and neutral stimuli, whereas the amygdala was predictive of anticipatory anxiety for aversive stimuli. In addition, anxious anticipatory activation in the left insula and left amygdala covaried with participants’ level of trait anxiety, particularly when the anticipated event was proximal.     

Emotion processing in Parkinson's disease: dissociation between early neuronal processing and explicit ratings.

OBJECTIVE: Patients suffering from Parkinson's disease (PD) have a diminished ability to discriminate facial expressions of emotion. We investigated early emotion discrimination deficits in PD by means of event-related potentials (ERPs). METHODS: Emotional pictures were presented to 14 PD patients and 14 healthy controls in a rapid serial visual presentation paradigm (three frames per second) while EEG was recorded. In addition, valence and arousal ratings were obtained for a representative subsample of 54 pictures. RESULTS: PD patients rated pictures of highly arousing content as less exciting than did healthy controls. Pictures of high compared to low emotional arousal were associated with a pronounced relative negative shift in the ERP waveform over parietal and occipital sites developing about 220 ms after picture onset. This early posterior negativity (EPN) did not differ between PD and control group. CONCLUSIONS: This dissociation of affective ratings and early ERP components supports the view that PD is associated with blunted emotional responses, but there is no evidence for a deteriorated early visual processing of emotional stimuli. SIGNIFICANCE: Frequently reported deficits in emotion discrimination are likely not due to deficits in early emotion processing.     

Differences in neural activity when processing emotional arousal and valence in autism spectrum disorders

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) often have difficulty recognizing and interpreting facial expressions of emotion, which may impair their ability to navigate and communicate successfully in their social, interpersonal environments. Characterizing specific differences between individuals with ASD and their typically developing (TD) counterparts in the neural activity subserving their experience of emotional faces may provide distinct targets for ASD interventions. Thus we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and a parametric experimental design to identify brain regions in which neural activity correlated with ratings of arousal and valence for a broad range of emotional faces. Participants (51 ASD, 84 TD) were group‐matched by age, sex, IQ, race, and socioeconomic status. Using task‐related change in blood‐oxygen‐level‐dependent (BOLD) fMRI signal as a measure, and covarying for age, sex, FSIQ, and ADOS scores, we detected significant differences across diagnostic groups in the neural activity subserving the dimension of arousal but not valence. BOLD‐signal in TD participants correlated inversely with ratings of arousal in regions associated primarily with attentional functions, whereas BOLD‐signal in ASD participants correlated positively with arousal ratings in regions commonly associated with impulse control and default‐mode activity. Only minor differences were detected between groups in the BOLD signal correlates of valence ratings. Our findings provide unique insight into the emotional experiences of individuals with ASD. Although behavioral responses to face‐stimuli were comparable across diagnostic groups, the corresponding neural activity for our ASD and TD groups differed dramatically. The near absence of group differences for valence correlates and the presence of strong group differences for arousal correlates suggest that individuals with ASD are not atypical in all aspects of emotion‐processing. Studying these similarities and differences may help us to understand the origins of divergent interpersonal emotional experience in persons with ASD. Hum Brain Mapp 37:443–461, 2016. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Neural correlates of ‘distracting’ from emotion during autobiographical recollection

Remembering emotional autobiographical memories (AMs) is important for emotional well-being, and investigation of the role of emotion regulation (ER) during AM recollection has relevance for understanding mental health issues. Although significant progress has been made in understanding the brain mechanisms underlying ER and AM, less is known about the role of ER during AM recollection. The present study investigated how focusing away (or ‘distracting’) from the emotional content during AM recollection influences the subjective re-experiencing of emotions and the associated neural correlates, by manipulating the retrieval focus of participants who remembered emotional AMs while fMRI data were recorded. First, focusing away from emotion led to decreased self-reported emotional responses, along with increased engagement of ER-related regions (ventro-medial prefrontal cortex, vmPFC), and reduced activity in emotion-related regions (amygdala, AMY). Second, increased vmPFC activity was linked to reduced emotional ratings, during the non-emotional focus. Third, mediation analysis identified vmPFC as a functional hub integrating affective signals from AMY and mediating their impact on the subjective re-experiencing of emotion, according to the current retrieval focus. Collectively, these findings shed light on the neural mechanisms underlying the ability to effectively switch attentional focus away from emotions during AM recollections and have direct relevance for understanding, preventing and treating affective disorders, characterised by reduced ability to regulate emotions.     

Anticipatory brain activity predicts the success or failure of subsequent emotion regulation

Expectations about an upcoming emotional event have the power to shape one’s subsequent affective response for better or worse. Here, we used mediation analyses to examine the relationship between brain activity when anticipating the need to cognitively reappraise aversive images, amygdala responses to those images and subsequent success in diminishing negative affect. We found that anticipatory activity in right rostrolateral prefrontal cortex was associated with greater subsequent left amygdala responses to aversive images and decreased regulation success. In contrast, anticipatory ventral anterior insula activity was associated with reduced amygdala responses and greater reappraisal success. In both cases, left amygdala responses mediated the relationship between anticipatory activity and reappraisal success. These results suggest that anticipation facilitates successful reappraisal via reduced anticipatory prefrontal ‘cognitive’ elaboration and better integration of affective information in paralimbic and subcortical systems.     

Is emotion processing affected by advancing age? An event-related brain potential study

The recognition of emotions is presumably affected by advancing age, which is known from subjective reports and recognition tasks. To differentiate perception from executive function more clearly, the discrimination of emotions was investigated with event-related brain potentials (ERPs) from 21 electrodes in 14 elderly (ages 59-74) and 13 younger participants (ages 30-40) triggered by a rapid (3 Hz) serial visual presentation (RSVP) of high and low arousing pictures. Additionally, affective ratings of valence and arousal of a representative sample of 54 pictures were obtained. An early posterior negativity (EPN) as an index of early emotion discrimination was analyzed in an early (168-232 ms) and a late (232-296 ms) time window. Both groups showed an EPN associated with pictures of high emotional arousal. However, the EPN was slightly delayed in elderly participants. Thus, the affective modulation of the EPN was reduced in elderly subjects in the early time window, but not in the late time window. Ratings of valence or arousal did not differ between groups. In sum, these results point towards an age-related delay of early visual emotion discrimination. However, this delay seems not to influence further evaluative processing of emotional stimuli.     

The emotional power of music: how music enhances the feeling of affective pictures

Music is an intriguing stimulus widely used in movies to increase the emotional experience. However, no brain imaging study has to date examined this enhancement effect using emotional pictures (the modality mostly used in emotion research) and musical excerpts. Therefore, we designed this functional magnetic resonance imaging study to explore how musical stimuli enhance the feeling of affective pictures. In a classical block design carefully controlling for habituation and order effects, we presented fearful and sad pictures (mostly taken from the IAPS) either alone or combined with congruent emotional musical excerpts (classical pieces). Subjective ratings clearly indicated that the emotional experience was markedly increased in the combined relative to the picture condition. Furthermore, using a second-level analysis and regions of interest approach, we observed a clear functional and structural dissociation between the combined and the picture condition. Besides increased activation in brain areas known to be involved in auditory as well as in neutral and emotional visual-auditory integration processes, the combined condition showed increased activation in many structures known to be involved in emotion processing (including for example amygdala, hippocampus, parahippocampus, insula, striatum, medial ventral frontal cortex, cerebellum, fusiform gyrus). In contrast, the picture condition only showed an activation increase in the cognitive part of the prefrontal cortex, mainly in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Based on these findings, we suggest that emotional pictures evoke a more cognitive mode of emotion perception, whereas congruent presentations of emotional visual and musical stimuli rather automatically evoke strong emotional feelings and experiences.     

Doing good or bad: How interactions between action and emotion expectations shape the sense of agency

The emotional consequences of our own and others’ actions can influence our agentive self-awareness in social contexts. Positive outcomes are usually linked to the self and used for self-enhancement, whereas negative outcomes are more often attributed to others. In most situations, these causal attribution tendencies seem to be immediately present instead of involving reflective interpretations of the action experience. To address the question at which level of the cognitive hierarchy emotions and action perception interact, we adopted a social reward anticipation paradigm. Here, participants or their interaction partner received positive or negative action outcomes and performed speeded attribution choices regarding causation of the action outcome. Event-Related Potential (ERP) results showed that the emotional value of an outcome already influenced the classical N1 self-attenuation effect, with reduced embodied agentive self-awareness for negative outcomes at initial sensorimotor stages. At the level of the N300, the degree of updating and affective evaluation associated with the respective attributive decision was reflected and particularly associated to attribution tendencies for positive events. Our results show an early interaction between emotion and agency processes, and suggest that self-serving cognition can be grounded in embodied knowledge from low-level sensorimotor mechanisms.     

Sex differences in the neural correlates of affective experience

People believe that women are more emotionally intense than men, but the scientific evidence is equivocal. In this study, we tested the novel hypothesis that men and women differ in the neural correlates of affective experience, rather than in the intensity of neural activity, with women being more internally (interoceptively) focused and men being more externally (visually) focused. Adult men (n = 17) and women (n = 17) completed a functional magnetic resonance imaging study while viewing affectively potent images and rating their moment-to-moment feelings of subjective arousal. We found that men and women do not differ overall in their intensity of moment-to-moment affective experiences when viewing evocative images, but instead, as predicted, women showed a greater association between the momentary arousal ratings and neural responses in the anterior insula cortex, which represents bodily sensations, whereas men showed stronger correlations between their momentary arousal ratings and neural responses in the visual cortex. Men also showed enhanced functional connectivity between the dorsal anterior insula cortex and the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, which constitutes the circuitry involved with regulating shifts of attention to the world. These results demonstrate that the same affective experience is realized differently in different people, such that women’s feelings are relatively more self-focused, whereas men’s feelings are relatively more world-focused.     

Episodic memory for emotional and non-emotional words in individuals with anhedonia

Anhedonia is a symptom that plays a significant role in theories of illness such as depression and schizophrenia. Some previous research suggests that participants who report high levels of social/physical anhedonia also show deficits in both self-report and physiological measures of emotional processing, particularly for measures of emotional valence as compared with emotional arousal. Little is known about memory for emotionally valenced information or how this might be related to emotional processing in anhedonia. Participants were 391 undergraduate students participating for course credit. We administered an incidental encoding task that required participants to rate emotional words on both valence and arousal dimensions. We then administered surprise recall and recognition tasks to all participants. Results indicated that higher levels of physical and social anhedonia were associated with attenuated valence ratings of emotional words but did not influence arousal ratings or the memory pattern for emotionally valenced information. These findings suggest that there is some reduction in emotional experience in individuals with anhedonia, but that this reduction does not appear to produce a deficit in memory performance, perhaps due to the intact experience of arousal.     

Abnormal emotional word ratings in Parkinson's disease

Blunted facial expressions and diminished expressions of emotional prosody associated with Parkinson's disease (PD) could be attributed to motor rigidity/akinesia. Although impaired recognition of emotional faces and prosody in PD suggests emotional dysfunction is not entirely motor-efferent, comprehension might depend upon imitation with motor feedback. Thus, to learn if patients with PD have an emotional conceptual defect, we examined their ratings for the emotional connotations of words on a 1-9 scale for valence and arousal. When compared to control participants the valence (positive-negative) and arousal (excited-calm) ratings of the PD patients were blunted, but their ratings of the control expense words (expensive-cheap) were not. These blunted emotion ratings suggest that patients with PD have a degradation of their emotional conceptual-semantic system.     

Theory-of-mind-related neural activity for one’s romantic partner predicts partner well-being

Healthy social relationships are linked to myriad positive physical and mental health outcomes, raising the question of how to enhance relationship formation and quality. Behavioral data suggest that theory of mind (ToM) may be one such process. ToM is supported by a network of brain regions including the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ), medial prefrontal cortex and precuneus (PC). However, little research has investigated how the ToM network supports healthy social relationships. Here, we investigate whether recruitment of the ToM network when thinking about the mental states of one’s romantic partner predicts the partner’s well-being. We find that selectivity in left TPJ (LTPJ) and PC for beliefs vs physical attributes of one’s partner is positively associated with partner well-being the day of and day after a meaningful encounter. Furthermore, LTPJ and PC selectivity moderated how the partner’s perception of being understood during the encounter affected their later well-being. Finally, we find the association between ToM-related neural selectivity and well-being robust to other factors related to the relationship and the encounter. Together, these data suggest that selective engagement of the neural network supporting ToM may be a key ingredient for the development and maintenance of healthy romantic relationships.     

The neural correlates of regulating positive and negative emotions in medication-free major depression

Depressive cognitive schemas play an important role in the emergence and persistence of major depressive disorder (MDD). The current study adapted emotion regulation techniques to reflect elements of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and related psychotherapies to delineate neurocognitive abnormalities associated with modulating the negative cognitive style in MDD. Nineteen non-medicated patients with MDD and 19 matched controls reduced negative or enhanced positive feelings elicited by emotional scenes while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging. Although both groups showed significant emotion regulation success as measured by subjective ratings of affect, the controls were significantly better at modulating both negative and positive emotion. Both groups recruited regions of dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC) when regulating negative emotions. Only in controls was this accompanied by reduced activity in sensory cortices and amygdala. Similarly, both groups showed enhanced activity in VLPFC and ventral striatum when enhancing positive affect; however, only in controls was ventral striatum activity correlated with regulation efficacy. The results suggest that depression is associated with both a reduced capacity to achieve relief from negative affect despite recruitment of ventral and dorsal prefrontal cortical regions implicated in emotion regulation, coupled with a disconnect between activity in reward-related regions and subjective positive affect.     

Increased feelings with increased body signals

Since the beginning of psychology as a scientific endeavour,the question of whether the body plays a role in how a personexperiences emotion has been the centre of emotion research.Patients with structural gastrointestinal disorders, such asCrohn's disease, provide an intriguing opportunity to studythe influence of body signals on emotions and feelings. In thepresent study, emotionally salient films were presented to participantswith Crohn's disease in either the active state (Crohn's-active,CA) or silent state (Crohn's-silent, CS), and to normal comparison(NC) participants. We hypothesized that CA participants wouldhave increased feelings, compared with CS and NC participants,when viewing emotional films designed to elicit happiness, disgust,sadness and fear. Gastric myoelectrical activity (electrogastrogram,or EGG) was measured during the films, and after each film waspresented, participants rated emotion intensity (arousal) andpleasantness (valence). All groups labelled the emotions similarly.In support of the hypothesis, CA participants showed an increasein subjective arousal for negative emotions compared with CSand NC participants. The CA participants also showed increasedEGG during emotional film viewing, as well as a strong positivecorrelation of EGG with arousal ratings. Together, these findingscan be taken as evidence that aberrant feedback from the gastrointestinalsystem up-regulates the intensity of feelings of negative emotions.