1,268 research outputs found

    NEURAL PROCESSING OF EMOTIONAL MUSIC AND SOUNDS IN DEPRESSION

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    The present study uses functional MRI and an emotional sound and music paradigm to examine how neural processing of emotionally provocative auditory stimuli is altered in depression. Functional MRI was used to localize the neural response to auditory emotional stimulation, hypothesized to differ between depressed and never-depressed control participants in brain regions known to be involved in reward processing and rumination. Twenty individuals with depression (MDD) and 18 controls (ND) listened to positive and negative emotional musical and nonmusical stimuli during fMRI scanning, and gave subjective ratings of valence and arousal following scanning. ND participants exhibited greater activation to positive versus negative stimuli in the ventral anterior cingulate cortex (vACC), dorsal amygdala, and hippocampus, regions known to be affected in depression. They also showed two distinct processing networks for music versus sounds, with music activating the default mode network (DMN) and sounds activating object identification regions to a greater extent. When compared with control participants, depressed participants showed a different pattern of activation to these emotional stimuli in the ACC. In the rostral part of the ACC, ND participants showed greater activation for positive information, while MDD participants showed greater activation to negative information. In the dorsal and perigenual ACC, the pattern of activation distinguished between the types of sounds, with ND showing greater activation to music compared to sounds, while MDD showed greater activation to sounds, with the greatest response to negative sounds. The anterior cingulate is critical for emotion processing and functions as a relay for diverting cognitive control to demanding tasks. These results suggest that the type of auditory stimulation, as well as the emotional content may be processed differently by people with depression

    Understanding vulnerability for depression from a cognitive neuroscience perspective: a reappraisal of attentional factors and a new conceptual framework

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    We propose a framework to understand increases in vulnerability for depression after recurrent episodes that links attention processes and schema activation to negative mood states, by integrating cognitive and neurobiological findings. Depression is characterized by a mood-congruent attentional bias at later stages of information processing. The basic idea of our framework is that decreased activity in prefrontal areas, mediated by the serotonin metabolism which the HPA axis controls, is associated with an impaired attenuation of subcortical regions, resulting in prolonged activation of the amygdala in response to stressors in the environment. Reduced prefrontal control in interaction with depressogenic schemas leads to impaired ability to exert attentional inhibitory control over negative elaborative processes such as rumination, leading in turn to sustained negative affect. These elaborative processes are triggered by the activation of negative schemas after confrontation with stressors. In our framework, attentional impairments are postulated as a crucial process in explaining the increasing vulnerability after depressive episodes, linking cognitive and biological vulnerability factors. We review the empirical data on the biological factors associated with the attentional impairments and detail how they are associated with rumination and mood regulation. The aim of our framework is to stimulate translational research

    Survive or Thrive: Focusing on the Forest (Global) or the Trees (Local) Impacts Meaning Making

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    Focusing on the forest versus the trees illustrates a fundamental difference in how people see the world and make meaning, termed global and local attention. How we shift between them may impact whether we experience happiness or anxiety. We explored how different emotions serve as triggers for shifting between global and local attention using film clips and measuring responses to computerized attention tasks. We found that negative film clips localized attention, while positive films globalized attention, concluding that emotions can impact whether we attend to the forest or the trees. However, different induction strategies and various studies have led to discrepant findings in supporting whether affect alone impacts the activation of global and local systems of attention. A potential alternative explanation comes from a more recent theory, GLOMOsys, which asserts that perceived novelty and familiarity of a stimulus are essential for signaling global vs. local precedence over emotional state (Forster & Dannenberg, 2010). The current study provided support for an integrated model, considering both variables of novelty and affect on global versus local processing that we termed The Survive or Thrive Hypothesis. As predicted we found that novel and threatening film clips led to a global level of processing; however, after one repetition (familiarity) there was a shift toward a local level of processing. Thereby, upon repetition and familiarity with the threatening stimulus, there was a shift to a more detail-oriented processing approach (F [3, 37] = 3.35, p \u3c .05, η2 = .21). This trend demonstrated an interaction between cognitive appraisals of novelty, and specific affect states, in influencing global versus local systems of attention. Physiological measures of heart rate (HR) and skin conductance level (SCL) provided objective measures of emotional experiencing. Trends indicated that threatening film clips were associated with increased HR and SCL when compared to neutral and positive films clips. Further, HR and SCL were most elevated upon initial viewings (novelty) of the film clips. Physiological responding was impacted by both the emotional state as well as cognitive appraisals about the emotional stimulus. Our Survive or Thrive Hypothesis is based upon the integration of multiple theories, and would benefit from continued empirical replication. Future studies should explore different ways to induce novelty and familiarity, and possibly induce a broader spectrum of emotional valence categories. Continued exploration of the cognitive constructs of global versus local information processing can have implications for understanding how cognitive rigidity could be implicated in a range of mental disorders. Understanding the triggers and bounds for these different levels of information processing could be manipulated for clinical treatment purposes of a range of mental disorders

    The pill and the will : pharmacological and psychological modulation of cognitive and affective processes

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    Background: Impairments in cognition are components of practically all psychiatric disorders and in that sense transdiagnostic factors. In both clinical and non-clinical populations, ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ cognitive control, i.e., in emotional context and non-emotional context, is strongly associated with daily functioning and physical and mental well-being. The paradigm shift that the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Research Domain Criteria initiative (RDoC) has introduced, signifies that targeting the underlying biological and behavioural endophenotypes that determine mental health and illness might be more fruitful than simply focusing on symptom based diagnostic categories. Yet, little is known on how pharmacological interventions such as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI) and psychostimulants (CS), that are routinely used in everyday clinical praxis, affect cognitive and emotional processes beyond the symptoms they are supposed to treat. Aim: The aim of this thesis was to compare induction and regulation of fear and disgust in healthy subjects, and to investigate how SSRI affect these processes. This basic design was expanded to also include the effect of stimulant medication on the induction and regulation of negative emotions in healthy controls and patients with ADHD. A parallel aim was to compare pharmacological emotion regulation (SSRI and CS) with psychological emotion regulation (reappraisal) and emotion regulation with skills training/ exposure (task repetition). Methods: A multimodal approach was used to explore (i) subjective rating of emotion intensity and objective measures of performance at the behavioural level, (ii) neural underpinnings in the CNS with functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and voxel-based morphometry (VBM) and (iii) physiological components of the sympathetic nervous system (electrodermal activity), which were all evaluated in the absence and presence of pharmacological and psychological interventions, during emotion induction, emotion regulation, cognitive Stroop and emotional Stroop paradigms. Results: Study I and IV demonstrated that emotion regulation with reappraisal is an effective strategy with robust effects on subjective emotional experience and electrodermal activity. Study II and III showed that task repetition improved performance during both cognitive and emotional Stroop tasks, and reduced electrodermal activity during cognitive Stroop, without significantly modifying emotion induction or emotion regulation. Study II and III showed significant effects of single dose escitalopram in reducing subjective emotional experience, improving task performance during affective interference of an ongoing cognitive process, altering prefrontal activity in a task-specific manner, and blurring the differences in the electrodermal activity between fear and disgust seen at baseline. Study IV showed that single dose CS reduced emotion induction, and that emotion regulation with reappraisal was significantly more effective in reducing subjective emotional experience compared to pharmacological emotion regulation with CS. Lastly, Study IV revealed aberrant emotion processing in patients with ADHD both at the behavioural and CNS levels, with patients reporting lower emotion induction and regulation scores, accompanied by less activation of dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, less deactivation of the default mode network and instead greater deactivation of the dorsal attention network, during emotion regulation compared to healthy controls. Structurally (VBM), less gray matter volume was found in limbic and paralimbic areas in patients with ADHD compared to healthy controls. Conclusions and implications: Dimensional approach using behavioural endophenotypes is a fruitful framework for studying normal physiology and diagnostic and treatment aspects of psychiatric disorders. In this thesis, it is demonstrated that emotional and non-emotional cognitive processes, although part of a continuum, likely respond differentially to psychological and pharmacological interventions and skills training with task repetition. Ultimately, improved knowledge in this field will help formulate hypothesisdriven and science-informed frameworks that will guide diagnosis and treatment plans, and usher a shift in psychiatric praxis

    Altered Intrinsic Functional Brain Architecture in Children at Familial Risk of Major Depression

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    Background Neuroimaging studies of patients with major depression have revealed abnormal intrinsic functional connectivity measured during the resting state in multiple distributed networks. However, it is unclear whether these findings reflect the state of major depression or reflect trait neurobiological underpinnings of risk for major depression. Methods We compared resting-state functional connectivity, measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging, between unaffected children of parents who had documented histories of major depression (at-risk, n = 27; 8–14 years of age) and age-matched children of parents with no lifetime history of depression (control subjects, n = 16). Results At-risk children exhibited hyperconnectivity between the default mode network and subgenual anterior cingulate cortex/orbital frontal cortex, and the magnitude of connectivity positively correlated with individual symptom scores. At-risk children also exhibited 1) hypoconnectivity within the cognitive control network, which also lacked the typical anticorrelation with the default mode network; 2) hypoconnectivity between left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and subgenual anterior cingulate cortex; and 3) hyperconnectivity between the right amygdala and right inferior frontal gyrus, a key region for top-down modulation of emotion. Classification between at-risk children and control subjects based on resting-state connectivity yielded high accuracy with high sensitivity and specificity that was superior to clinical rating scales. Conclusions Children at familial risk for depression exhibited atypical functional connectivity in the default mode, cognitive control, and affective networks. Such task-independent functional brain measures of risk for depression in children could be used to promote early intervention to reduce the likelihood of developing depression

    THE MODULATION OF COVERT ATTENTION BY EMOTION: AUTOMATIC PROCESSING OF EMOTIONAL VERSUS NEUTRAL VALENCED CUES IN A COVERT ATTENTION PARADIGM

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    Selective attention has been studied extensively and it is shown, for example, that individuals with conditions such as anxiety show attention bias to threat-related stimuli. It has been proposed that humans are predisposed or that it is naturally adaptive to selectively attend to emotional stimuli (Lang, 2000). Similarly, LeDoux (1996) and others have proposed limbic brain networks allowing for quick and automatic, but sometimes inaccurate, processing of emotion which bypasses primary cortical areas. Along these lines, automatic attention bias to subliminal image cues in an adapted Posner Covert Attention Task was examined in the current study. A sample of 64 participants was used in each of three separate experiments to examine how individuals were cued subliminally by negative or positive emotional vs. neutral images and the modulation of covert attention by emotion. Due to automatic or motivated attention to emotionally salient stimuli, participants were expected to be facilitated in task performance by negative and positive emotional image cues, relative to neutral cues. Further, state anxiety and depression were expected to impact performance on emotional cueing as well. As expected in Experiment 1, subliminal images produced significant covert attentional cueing and only negative image cues compared to neutral ones produced response time (RT) reduction by valid cueing across both cue-target delay conditions. Further, cueing differences between neutral and negative images were seen only at short delays, supporting differential subliminal processing of emotional cues in attentional paradigms and supporting previous evidence of unconscious fear processing and specialized automatic fear networks. Moreover, in Experiment 2, when delays following subliminal cues were extended further, emotional cues did not differentially modulate covert attention, suggesting that subliminal emotional cueing seems to occur more immediately. Positive subliminal imagery in Experiment 3 was largely unsuccessful in differentially modulating covert attention compared to neutral cues, suggesting that positive information is either not effective in modulating covert attention or occurs over similar immediate time durations as negative cues in Experiment 1. Finally, the presence of self-reported state anxiety and depression affected task performance, especially in Experiment 1 negative for subliminal discrimination of negative vs. neutral image cues. Overall, the current study adds to the research literature which demonstrates that emotional information, especially negative imagery processed at short intervals, can be processed below awareness to modulate attention in a different manner than less salient neutral stimuli and this modulation is further influenced by state anxiety or depressive symptomatology. Implications of these findings and future directions for research are discussed

    The role of anterior cingulate cortex in the affective evaluation of conflict

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    An influential theory of anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) function argues that this brain region plays a crucial role in the affective evaluation of performance monitoring and control demands. Specifically, control-demanding processes such as response conflict are thought to be registered as aversive signals by ACC, which in turn triggers processing adjustments to support avoidance learning. In support of conflict being treated as an aversive event, recent behavioral studies demonstrated that incongruent (i.e., conflict inducing), relative to congruent, stimuli can speed up subsequent negative, relative to positive, affective picture processing. Here, we used fMRI to investigate directly whether ACC activity in response to negative versus positive pictures is modulated by preceding control demands, consisting of conflict and task-switching conditions. The results show that negative, relative to positive, pictures elicited higher ACC activation after congruent, relative to incongruent, trials, suggesting that ACC's response to negative (positive) pictures was indeed affectively primed by incongruent (congruent) trials. Interestingly, this pattern of results was observed on task repetitions but disappeared on task alternations. This study supports the proposal that conflict induces negative affect and is the first to show that this affective signal is reflected in ACC activation

    Flexibly adapting to emotional cues: Examining the functional and structural correlates of emotional reactivity and emotion control in healthy and depressed individuals

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    The ability of emotionally significant stimuli to bias our behaviour is an evolutionarily adaptive phenomenon. However, sometimes emotions become excessive, inappropriate, and even pathological, like in major depressive disorder (MDD). Emotional flexibility includes both the neural processes involved in reacting to, or representing, emotional significance, and those involved in controlling emotional reactivity. MDD represents a potentially distinct form of emotion (in)flexibility, and therefore offers a unique perspective for understanding both the integration of conflicting emotional cues and the neural regions involved in actively controlling emotional systems. The present investigation of emotional flexibility began by considering the functional neural correlates of competing socio-emotional cues and effortful emotion regulation in MDD using both negative and positive emotions. Study 1 revealed greater amygdala activity in MDD relative to control participants when negative cues were centrally presented and task-relevant. No significant between-group differences were observed in the amygdala for peripheral task-irrelevant negative distracters. However, controls demonstrated greater recruitment of the ventrolateral (vlPFC) and dorsomedial prefrontal cortices (dmPFC) implicated in emotion control. Conversely, attenuated amygdala activity for task-relevant and irrelevant positive cues was observed in depressed participants. In Study 2, effortful emotion regulation using strategies adapted from cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) revealed greater activity in regions of the dorsal and lateral prefrontal cortices in both MDD and control participants when attempting to either down-regulate negative or up-regulate positive emotions. During the down-regulation of negative cues, only controls displayed a significant reduction of amygdala activity. In Study 3, an individual differences approach using multiple regression revealed that while greater amygdala-vmPFC structural connectivity was associated with low trait-anxiety, greater connectivity between amygdala and regions of occipitotemporal and parietal cortices was associated with high trait-anxiety. These findings are discussed with respect to current models of emotional reactivity and emotion control derived from studies of both healthy individuals and those with emotional disorders, particularly depression. The focus is on amygdala variability in differing contexts, the role of the vmPFC in the modulation of amygdala activity via learning processes, and the modulation of emotion by attention or cognitive control mechanisms initiated by regions of frontoparietal cortices
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