Spatial visual attention prioritizes specific locations while disregarding others. The location of spatial attention can be deployed without overt movements (covertly). Spatial dynamics of covert attention is exceptionally difficult to measure due to its hidden nature. One way to implicitly index the location of covert attention is via pupillary light responses (PLR), as the strength of PLR is modulated by where attention is allocated. However, this method has so-far necessitated simplistic stimuli. Here we report on a novel pupillometric method that allows to track covert attention even with highly complex stimuli. Participants (n = 36) watched movie clips while they either passively viewed the movie, or they top-down shifted covert attention to targets in the left, right, or both sides of the visual field. Using a recent toolbox (Open-DPSM), we evaluated whether luminance changes in regions presumably receiving more attention contribute more strongly to the pupillary responses – and thereby reveal covert attention. Three independent and established effects of covert attention on pupil responses were found: (1) a bottom-up effect suggesting more attention drawn to more dynamic regions in the movie, (2) a top-down effect suggesting more attention towards the instructed direction, and (3) an overall tendency to attend the left side (i.e., pseudoneglect). These findings show that pupil responses can physiologically index covert attention with our approach, even in highly dynamic and complex environments. We see considerable potential in measuring covert attention with our method in many real-life scenarios that were impossible to study before.

jabbrv-ltwa-all.ldf jabbrv-ltwa-en.ldf Everyday sounds can elicit a range of emotional and physiological responses. For individuals with misophonia, some sounds can produce strong feelings of disgust, annoyance, and anger, often accompanied by increased perspiration and heart rate. Presently, methods of diagnosing misophonia rely on clinical interviews and self-assessment scales. Our study asks whether pupillometry can be an objective measure that correlates with self-reported misophonia severity. Previous studies show that both unpleasant and pleasant sounds increase pupil diameter (Partala and Surakka, 2003; Nakakoga et al., 2020); however, these have not compared pupil responses to disgust versus other emotions. Given prior indications that the response to visually disgusting stimuli is pupil constriction (Ayzenberg et al., 2018), we asked whether the pupil dilation to auditorily disgusting stimuli would be smaller than for other emotional sounds. In our listening task, we monitored pupil size changes while participants listened to positive and negative emotional sounds from the IADS database (Bradley and Lang, 2007) along with “triggers” known to be especially aversive to misophonics. Participants reported the intensity of their emotional reactions (disgust, anger, annoyance, happiness, sadness, fear) as well as valence and arousal. Misophonic listeners reported greater emotion intensity for emotions associated with triggers (disgust, anger, annoyance) as well as for fear. For all listeners, there was a positive association between changes in pupil diameter and emotion intensity. Overall, misophonics had greater pupil dilation than non-misophonics, but after equating for emotion category of the sounds, misophonic pupil dilation was only larger for trigger sounds (and marginally, disgusting sounds).

Emotion regulation is pivotal in human interactions and well-being. Modulating one’s emotional state is intricately linked with psychological, behavioral, and physiological responses. Extensive research has explored how individuals with varying attachment orientations manage emotions, predominantly through self-report measures and behavioral assessments. However, the influence of attachment orientations on temporal electrophysiological dynamics during emotion regulation tasks remains underexplored. Here, 90 adults’ EEG brain activity was recorded while they engaged in tasks of attending to, reappraising, or suppressing emotions elicited by unpleasant images. Their attachment orientations were assessed using the Experiences in Close Relationships-12 (ECR-12) questionnaire to explore the association between Late Positive Potential (LPP) and attachment anxiety and avoidance amidst the deployment of emotion regulation strategies. Using Linear Mixed-Effects Model analysis our results revealed a lower amplitude of the LPP during cognitive reappraisal, suggesting the efficacy of this strategy in diminishing emotional intensity. Moreover, higher attachment anxiety exhibited increased LPP amplitude during both Reappraisal and Suppression, as well as during the negative natural condition, indicating heightened emotional responses. This study provides novel insights into the relationship between attachment orientations and emotion regulation, as evidenced by EEG-based measurements of the LPP. The findings indicate that individuals with higher attachment anxiety display distinct electrophysiological responses, particularly in emotional scenarios.

Introduction: Individuals with hearing disorders such as tinnitus often experience high levels of stress, anxiety, depression, and decreased sound tolerance. These factors may be related to maladaptive autonomic regulation, affecting their response to acute stress. Heart rate variability (HRV) is a reliable measure of autonomic activity, but its interaction with psychological factors is not well understood. Objectives: The aim was to develop a multimodal stress induction protocol in a non-clinical population and to determine how psychological factors influence physiological responses. Methods: Electrocardiograms were recorded from 30 healthy young adults during three stress tasks: mental arithmetic, noise exposure, and a cold pressor test. Heart rate (HR) and root mean square of successive differences (RMSSD) were used to index autonomic activity. Participants also completed questionnaires on perceived stress, noise sensitivity, anxiety, and depression to examine relationships with HRV. Results: All tasks produced significant time-dependent effects on HRV features, but to different extents. Mental arithmetic produced the largest increase in HR and decrease in RMSSD. In contrast, the noise task showed a significant decrease in HR without a change in RMSSD, suggesting that the task induced relaxation. In the CPT, females showed increased HR but a decrease in RMSSD, whereas males showed the reverse pattern. Psychological factors significantly interacted with HRV dynamic changes during mental and noise tasks, but not during CPT. Conclusions: HRV responses to acute stress are non-stationary and influenced by psychological factors. Thus, this protocol presents an original approach to study autonomic activity in stress-related conditions such as tinnitus.

Auditory rhythm perception involves bottom-up encoding of timing information and top-down maintenance of a particular interpretation. Beats in musical rhythms can be grouped to form metres, such as duple (two-beat groupings) or triple (three-beat groupings). Subjective (top-down) metre perception can be measured using electroencephalographic responses like mismatch negativity (MMN), P3a, and Steady-State Evoked Potentials (SSEPs). Previously we showed infants could be primed to perceive an ambiguous 6-beat rhythm as either duple or triple by adding loudness accents to every second, or third beat, respectively. For the subsequently presented unaccented rhythm, infants exhibited larger mismatch responses for pitch deviants on primed strong beats, particularly after duple priming (Flaten et al., 2022). Here we applied the same protocol to adults in two experiments. In Experiment 1, adults were passively primed to perceive the rhythm as duple or triple identically as the infants in the previous study. In Experiment 2, participants actively imagined the accents. Results showed that MMN and P3a were not enhanced for strong beats; however, P3a showed significant enhancement for duple beats regardless of priming or attention, driven mainly by musically experienced participants. SSEPs were enhanced at the primed frequency but only when participants actively imagined the metre. As with infants, effects were stronger in the duple group. These results suggest a strong bias toward duple metre in adults that requires attention to overcome, and which likely relates to enculturation to Western music as it was enhanced by music and dance experience.

Touch has an affective dimension, conveyed through low-threshold mechanoreceptors known as C-tactile (CT) afferents, which are activated by gentle, caress-like contact. While there is evidence that these fibers modulate nociceptive input, their influence in the processing of other somatosensory afferent activity remains largely unknown. In this study, we explored how slow brushing (CT-optimal stimulation) modulates somatosensory evoked potentials (SEPs) compared to vibration and no touch in 30 healthy participants. Our results did not show differences across conditions in the amplitude of early SEPs recorded over the somatosensory cortex (N20, P25, N30, and P45). However, a reduced frontocentral P150 SEP component was observed during slow brushing compared to the other conditions. This suggests that early cortical processing of somatosensory information is not affected by brushing. Nonetheless, the reduced P150 amplitude indicates that CT-optimal touch may influence both nociceptive afferents and somatosensory input through the lemniscal system, possibly engaging brain areas involved in attentional and cognitive processing.

This study investigated the relationship between relational integration and semantic processing in numerical inductive reasoning using event-related potentials (ERPs). Participants were required to identify hidden rules in three-digit sequences and judged whether fourth probes were congruent with these rules. The experiment manipulated relational complexity: simple and hierarchical rules (e.g., ”12, 13, 14, 15” or ”12, 13, 15, 18”) shared identical first two numbers but differed in the third, in order to isolate the relational integration process. The type of cue was also manipulated: the no-cue condition presented only a fixation point, providing no rule information; the part-cue condition introduced operands (such as “+” or “–”) to ensure rules could be identified after presenting second numbers and confirmed after the onset of third numbers. Both the time domain and mass univariate ERP results locked to the third numbers revealed independent main effects of relational complexity and cue type on both the Late Negative Component (LNC) . The independent effects especially on the LNC implies that high-order numerical reasoning distinct from semantic processing.

Body leaning (indicating directional movements of approach or avoidance) and sway (indicating reduced mobility or freezing) are often used to assess respectively approach/avoidance and freezing in response to emotional stimuli. These responses are typically quantified using force plates that monitor the displacement of the Center of Pressure. In this article, meta-analytical analyses were conducted to synthesize findings from 44 studies (total N participants = 1756) identified from 5 databases, that manipulated the valence of stimuli displayed —pleasant, neutral, or unpleasant—and measured corresponding body sway and leaning. The analyses revealed significant heterogeneity in the reported effects across the studies. Overall, only contrasting pleasant to unpleasant conditions (vs contrasting pleasant to neutral, or unpleasant to neutral conditions) resulted in a small meta-analytical effect size. Moderating variables such as the type of design used and the duration of exposure to stimuli question the nature of the effects reported in the literature and indicate a risk of potential confounding variables. Recommendations for future studies, with an emphasis on mitigating false negative rate by ensuring a large enough sample size, are discussed.

Inhibitory control represents a fundamental cognitive function essential to human behavior. However, the precise neural mechanisms underlying this process remain incompletely elucidated. This study investigated the dynamic representation of inhibitory control by using a Go/No-Go task and the multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA). Decoding analysis revealed that neural representations of inhibitory control emerged around 100 ms post-stimulus, earlier than traditionally observed ERP components. Temporal generalization analysis identified distinct phases of static and dynamic neural representations, suggesting a complex, multi-stage process of inhibitory control. Weight projection analysis highlighted the involvement of occipital, prefrontal, and parietal regions, indicating the recruitment of diverse neural networks throughout the task. Additionally, brain and behavior correlation results found that decoding accuracy between 340-500 ms post-stimulus was significantly correlated with response times, linking neural representations to behavioral outcomes. These findings provide new insights into the temporal dynamics and neural mechanisms of inhibitory control, extending beyond conventional ERP analyses. The study demonstrates the utility of MVPA in uncovering subtle neural patterns associated with cognitive control processes and offers a more comprehensive understanding of the neural basis of inhibitory control.

Pupil size is a well-established marker of the level of cognitive effort, with greater efforts leading to larger pupils. This is particularly true for pupil size during task performance itself, whereas findings on anticipatory effort triggered by a cue stimulus are less consistent. For example, a recent report by Frömer et al. (2021) found that in a cued Stroop task, behavioural performance and electrophysiological markers of preparatory effort allocation were modulated by cued reward and ‘efficacy’ (the degree to which rewards depended on good performance), but pupil size did not show a comparable pattern. Here, we conceptually replicated this study in a pupillometry study. In line with previous findings, we found no modulation of absolute pupil size in the cue-to-target interval. Instead, we observed a significant difference in the rate of pupil dilation in anticipation of the target: Pupils dilated more rapidly for high-reward trials in which rewards depended on good performance. This was followed by a significant difference in absolute pupil size within the first hundreds of milliseconds following Stroop stimulus onset, likely reflecting a lagging effect of anticipatory effort allocation. Finally, the slope of pupil dilation was significantly correlated with behavioural response times, and this association was strongest for the high-reward, high-efficacy trials, further supporting that the rate of anticipatory pupil dilation reflects anticipatory effort. We conclude that pupil size is modulated by anticipatory effort, but in a highly temporally-specific manner, which is best reflected by the rate of dilation in the moments just prior to stimulus onset.

Transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation (taVNS) is a non-invasive technique stimulating vagal afferent fibers, showing promise in treating neurological and mental disorders. taVNS is believed to activate the locus coeruleus (LC), promoting noradrenergic activation (NA), which enhances arousal and attention. However, evidence for the LC-NA hypothesis is mixed, and investigations in different sensory modalities are lacking. This study investigated whether taVNS enhances standard NA markers along with neural processing in three sensory modalities (auditory, respiratory, and somatosensory). In a two-day Sham-controlled crossover protocol, 45 healthy adults received taVNS at the cymba concha and Sham stimulation at the earlobe. During stimulation, participants experienced paired auditory clicks, inspiratory occlusions and electrocutaneous stimuli, while EEG was acquired. Salivary alpha-amylase (sAA) and subjective experienced arousal were measured at pre-/end-stimulation. Resting-state EEG was measured pre-/post-stimulation to assess alpha-band (8-13Hz) oscillation power, and participants rated the intensity and unpleasantness of all stimuli. Auditory-, respiratory-related-, and somatosensory evoked potentials were measured, specifically P50, N1, and P2 components, as well as the P50/N1 amplitude difference of the second and the first stimulus in the pair (neural gating; S2-S1). Although no effects in P50 or N1 amplitudes were observed, P2 amplitudes in auditory and somatosensory blocks increased during taVNS. Self-reported arousal increased in the taVNS condition, with no effects on neural gating, sAA concentration, or resting-state alpha power. taVNS had no effect on self-reported intensity/unpleasantness of stimuli. These results highlight certain limitations posed by combining taVNS and EEG, and underline the need for further mechanistic and clinical taVNS research.

Current data on the nature of aggressive individuals’ difficulties in reappraising their spontaneous hostile intent attribution are contradictory: they are impulsive and don’t seek out for additional nonhostile cues vs. they pay attention to nonhostile cues but fail to integrate them into their hostile schemas. To better understand the nature of aggressive people’s reappraisal difficulties, we developed an event-related brain potential (ERP) protocol inspired by Zaki’s (2013) cue integration model. The objective of this study was to track the neural activity associated with the violation of expectations about hostile vs. nonhostile intentions in aggressive and nonaggressive individuals when facing conflicting contextual and behavioral cues in a given social situation. We hypothesized that aggressive individuals do not integrate nonhostile contextual information and, therefore, overestimate the behavioral hostile cues. Our sample consisted of women from the community (n=23) and a prison (n=20). Taken together, the results suggest that aggressive individuals demonstrate an impulsivity in their decision-making about other people’s intentions. This would be the case, not because they fail to seek out mitigating information, but rather because they fail to complete the inferential processes about the hostile and nonhostile information before making a judgement about the other’s intent. In contrast with aggressive individuals, non-aggressive people would be able to make a decision when facing conflicting information about the other’s mental state by privileging contextual cues in order to attenuate their attribution of hostile intention based on the behavior of others.

While physiological stress responses have been well investigated in individuals, the effects of stress on interpersonal physiological processes have been studied less frequently. In the current study, we focused on how stress affects physiological synchrony (PS) – i.e., the alignment of physiological changes across individuals – an established phenomenon characterizing social interactions. We hypothesized that PS, specifically cardiac PS, would be altered in romantic couples if one of the partners was exposed to a standardized stressor. In a preregistered study, N = 75 couples (mean age = 22.66 ±2.99, 51% female) were separated upon arrival in the laboratory. In n = 38 dyads, one partner was exposed to a laboratory stressor while the other completed a non-stressful control task (stress dyads), in the other dyads both partners underwent the control paradigm (control dyads). Afterward, partners were reunited, completing a non-verbal synchronization, a walking, and a free interaction task. Partners rated their own and each others’ affect throughout the experiment. Compared to a non-interactive baseline, PS increased during the partners’ interaction. Cardiac synchrony related to parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) activity was lower in stress compared to control dyads. Further, participants were more accurate in estimating their partner’s emotional valence if their partner was non-stressed. Our findings indicate the disruption of especially PNS-related PS. This highlights that stress is not only an intra- but also interpersonal phenomenon whose effects on the interpersonal physiology of social interactions should be further investigated.

Emotional states influence postural control, but previous studies have primarily focused on postural dynamics during quiet standing while viewing emotional pictures, using the center of pressure as a measure. However, the effects of emotions on neuromuscular activities related to postural control remain unclear. During quiet standing, neuromuscular activities of ankle plantarflexors are crucial for maintaining postural balance, both in terms of and synchronized muscle activity. This study aimed to clarify the emotional effects on the individual and synchronized neuromuscular activities of ankle plantarflexors during quiet standing. Twenty-four healthy male participants were instructed to view emotional pictures for 72 seconds while standing. The task was repeated four times with four picture conditions, which composed of two arousals (High and Low) and two valences (Pleasant and Unpleasant). During the task, electromyograms (EMG) of the tibialis anterior (TA), soleus (SOL), and medial (MG) and lateral gastrocnemius muscles (LG) were recorded. The EMG signals were rectified, and mean amplitude was calculated to assess individual neuromuscular activity. Inter-muscular coherence (IMC) between ankle plantarflexors was calculated to assess synchronized neuromuscular activity, with mean IMC calculated at 0–4 Hz and 8–12 Hz. Results showed that aroused emotions induced a reduction in SOL neuromuscular activity, leading to partial backward body leaning. Furthermore, synchronized neuromuscular activities at 8–12 Hz in the SOL-MG and MG-LG pairs were increased under aroused emotional states, indicating enhanced physiological tremor and a reduced capacity for postural adjustment. These findings deepen our understanding of the emotional impacts on standing postural control.

javascript:void(0) Recently, we found that continuous transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation (taVNS) facilitates the encoding and later recollection of emotionally relevant information, as indicated by enhanced late positive potential (LPP), memory performance, and late ERP Old/New effect. Here, we aimed to conceptually replicate and extend these findings by investigating the effects of different time-dependent taVNS stimulation protocols. In Study 1, an identical paradigm to our previous study was employed with interval stimulation (30-sec on/off). Participants viewed unpleasant and neutral scenes on two consecutive days while receiving taVNS or sham stimulation and completed a recognition test one week later. In line with our previous results, unpleasant images encoded under taVNS, compared to sham stimulation, elicited larger LPP amplitudes and Old/New effects. However, no effects of taVNS on memory performance were found, suggesting that interval stimulation may lower the effects of taVNS on memory. In Study 2, we followed up on these findings by synchronizing the stimulation cycle with image presentation to determine the taVNS effects for images encoded during the on and off cycles. We could replicate the enhancing effects of taVNS on brain potentials (LPP and late Old/New effect) and found that taVNS improved recollection-based memory performance for both unpleasant and neutral images, independently of the stimulation cycle. Overall, our results suggest that taVNS increases electrophysiological correlates of emotional encoding and retrieval in a time-independent manner, substantiating the vagus nerve’s role in emotional processing and memory formation and opening new venues for improving mnemonic processes in both clinical and non-clinical populations.

Non-invasive brain stimulation (NIBS) is an emerging treatment for mental disorders that is painlessness and easy to administer. However, its effectiveness for treating fear extinction requires further elucidation. We searched eight bibliographical databases and identified randomized controlled trials of NIBS interventions for fear extinction in healthy populations. Outcomes were evaluated based on skin conductance response (SCR) under three experimental conditions: threat condition stimulation (CS+), safe condition stimulation (CS−), and their discrimination (CS+ minus CS−). We applied a random-effects model to determine effect sizes (Hedge’s g) post-intervention and assessed article quality using Physiotherapy evidence database (PEDro) scale. Twenty-one studies meeting systematic review criteria were included in this analysis, incorporating 40 independent effect sizes and data from 11 studies (n = 632) in the meta-analysis. Compared with the control group, the intervention group exhibited significant reductions SCRs: CS+ (g = −0.32, 95% confidence interval (CI) [−0.56, −0.07]) and discrimination (g = −0.35; 95% CI [−0.55, −0.15]). Fear extinction was more effective in the 24-hour test than immediately after NIBS. In conclusion, NIBS enhanced fear extinction, and the time interval between stimulus and testing may serve as a moderating variable.

not-yet-known not-yet-known not-yet-known unknown Emotional experiences involve dynamic multi-sensory perception, yet most EEG research uses unimodal stimuli such as photographs. However, a recent study found that realistic emotional videos reliably reduce the amplitude of a steady state visual evoked potential (ssVEP) elicited by a flickering border. It is unknown how the video-ssVEP measure compares to the well-established Late Positive Potential (LPP) that is reliably larger for emotional scenes. To address this question, 45 participants viewed 90 matched pairs of realistic videos and scenes. Replicating the previous study, emotional videos reduced ssVEP amplitude more than neutral videos. At the group level, the video-ssVEP and scene-LPP measures produced similarly large differences per category (pleasant, neutral, unpleasant), and both measures strongly correlated with arousal ratings. However, trial-based Bayesian multilevel models suggest that the group-level results mask important differences. Consistent with previous research, the scene-LPP was sensitive to specific emotional contents (erotica and gore) more than would be predicted by arousal ratings. In contrast, the video-ssVEP did not show this specific sensitivity, and was better explained by individual arousal ratings collected for each stimulus trial. These results suggest that the 2 measures index partially distinct aspects of emotional perception, with the LPP reflecting the discrimination of emotional features, while the ssVEP indexes emotional engagement. Taken together, the results suggest that a video-ssVEP paradigm has comparable single-trial reliability and may better reflect a more diverse range of experienced emotional states relative to scene-LPP paradigms.

Previous studies have indicated that people tend to believe that a name belongs to a person if that person's face shape matches the lip shape formed while pronouncing their name. However, the mechanism underlying this mapping effect remains unclear. In this study, participants were asked to wear different lip models and judge whether the name belonged to the corresponding face shape. The results showed that participants tended to associate ambiguous names with round faces in the round-lip-experience condition and with pointed faces in the flat-lip-experience condition. The event-related potentials showed that a more negative N400 component was induced under incongruent conditions than under congruent conditions, in which the experienced lip shape was consistent with the face shape. This suggests that the lip-shape experience enabled the participants to abstract shape concepts, thereby modulating the matching of names and faces. This not only supports the viewpoint of shared conceptual properties, but also posits embodied cognition as a potential mechanism underlying name--face mapping.