Auditory attention enhances processing of positive and negative words in inferior and superior prefrontal cortex

Wegrzyn M, Herbert C, Ethofer T, Flaisch T, Kißler J. Auditory attention enhances processing of positive and negative words in inferior and superior prefrontal cortex. Cortex. 2017;96:31-45

Thirst and the state-dependent representation of incentive stimulus value in human motive circuitry

Abstract Depletion imposes both need and desire to drink, and potentiates the response to need-relevant cues in the environment. The present fMRI study aimed to determine which neural structures selectively increase the incentive value of needrelevant stimuli in a thirst state. Towards this end, participants were scanned twice-either in a thirst or no-thirst statewhile viewing pictures of beverages and chairs. As expected, thirst led to a selective increase in self-reported pleasantness and arousal by beverages. Increased responses to beverage when compared with chair stimuli were observed in the cingulate cortex, insular cortex and the amygdala in the thirst state, which were absent in the no-thirst condition. Enhancing the incentive value of need-relevant cues in a thirst state is a key mechanism for motivating drinking behavior. Overall, distributed regions of the motive circuitry, which are also implicated in salience processing, craving and interoception, provide a dynamic body-state dependent representation of stimulus value

Interpersonal Arrogance and the Incentive Salience of Power <i>Versus</i> Affiliation Cues

The arrogance dimension of the circumplex contrasts people who seemingly value power over affiliation (high arrogance) versus those who do not (low arrogance). Following this line of thinking, and building on an incentive salience model of approach motivation, three studies (total N = 284) examined the differential processing of power versus affiliation stimuli in categorization, perception and approach–avoidance paradigms. All studies found interactions of the same type. In study 2, for example, people high in arrogance perceived power stimuli to be larger than affiliation stimuli, but this differential pattern was not evident at low arrogance levels. People high, but not low, in arrogance also approached power stimuli faster than affiliation stimuli in a motor movement task (study 3). The results contribute to a process–based understanding of how interpersonal arrogance functions while linking such differences to the manner in which power versus affiliation cues are perceived and reacted to. Copyright © 2014 European Association of Personality Psychology </jats:p

First Impressions of HIV Risk: It Takes Only Milliseconds to Scan a Stranger

Research indicates that many people do not use condoms consistently but instead rely on intuition to identify sexual partners high at risk for HIV infection. The present studies examined neural correlates for first impressions of HIV risk and determined the association of perceived HIV risk with other trait characteristics. Participants were presented with 120 self-portraits retrieved from a popular online photo-sharing community (www.flickr.com). Factor analysis of various explicit ratings of trait characteristics yielded two orthogonal factors: (1) a ‘valence-approach’ factor encompassing perceived attractiveness, healthiness, valence, and approach tendencies, and (2) a ‘safeness’ factor, entailing judgments of HIV risk, trustworthiness, and responsibility. These findings suggest that HIV risk ratings systematically relate to cardinal features of a high-risk HIV stereotype. Furthermore, event-related brain potential recordings revealed neural correlates of first impressions about HIV risk. Target persons perceived as risky elicited a differential brain response in a time window from 220–340 ms and an increased late positive potential in a time window from 350–700 ms compared to those perceived as safe. These data suggest that impressions about HIV risk can be formed in a split second and despite a lack of information about the actual risk profile. Findings of neural correlates of risk impressions and their relationship to key features of the HIV risk stereotype are discussed in the context of the ‘risk as feelings’ theory

Are Females More Responsive to Emotional Stimuli? A Neurophysiological Study Across Arousal and Valence Dimensions

Men and women seem to process emotions and react to them differently. Yet, few neurophysiological studies have systematically investigated gender differences in emotional processing. Here, we studied gender differences using Event Related Potentials (ERPs) and Skin Conductance Responses (SCR) recorded from participants who passively viewed emotional pictures selected from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS). The arousal and valence dimension of the stimuli were manipulated orthogonally. The peak amplitude and peak latency of ERP components and SCR were analyzed separately, and the scalp topographies of significant ERP differences were documented. Females responded with enhanced negative components (N100 and N200), in comparison to males, especially to the unpleasant visual stimuli, whereas both genders responded faster to high arousing or unpleasant stimuli. Scalp topographies revealed more pronounced gender differences on central and left hemisphere areas. Our results suggest a difference in the way emotional stimuli are processed by genders: unpleasant and high arousing stimuli evoke greater ERP amplitudes in women relatively to men. It also seems that unpleasant or high arousing stimuli are temporally prioritized during visual processing by both genders

Tracing the time course of emotion perception : The impact of stimulus physics and semantics on gesture processing

Numerous event-related brain potential (ERP) studies reveal the differential processing of emotional and neutral stimuli. Yet, it is an ongoing debate to what extent the ERP components found in previous research are sensitive to physical stimulus characteristics or emotional meaning. This study manipulated emotional meaning and stimulus orientation to disentangle the impact of stimulus physics and semantics on emotional stimulus processing. Negative communicative hand gestures of Insult were contrasted with neutral control gestures of Allusion to manipulate emotional meaning. An elementary physical manipulation of visual processing was implemented by presenting these stimuli vertically and horizontally. The results showed dissociable effects of stimulus meaning and orientation on the sequence of ERP components. Effects of orientation were pronounced in the P1 and N170 time frames and attenuated during later stages. Emotional meaning affected the P1, evincing a distinct topography to orientation effects. Although the N170 was not modulated by emotional meaning, the early posterior negativity and late positive potential components replicated previous findings with larger potentials elicited by the Insult gestures. These data suggest that the brain processes different attributes of an emotional picture in parallel and that a coarse semantic appreciation may already occur during relatively early stages of emotion perception

Explicit semantic stimulus categorization interferes with implicit emotion processing

Previous functional magnetic resonance imaging and event-related brain potential studies revealed that performing a cognitive task may suppress the preferential processing of emotional stimuli. However, these studies utilized simple and artificial tasks (i.e. letter, shape or orientation discrimination tasks), unfamiliar to the participants. The present event-related potential study examined the emotion–attention interaction in the context of a comparably more natural scene categorization task. Deciding whether a natural scene contains an animal or not is a familiar and meaningful task to the participants and presumed to require little attentional resources. The task images were presented centrally and were overlaid upon emotional or neutral background pictures. Thus, implicit emotion and explicit semantic categorization may compete for processing resources in neural regions implicated in object recognition. Additionally, participants passively viewed the same stimulus materials without the demand to categorize task images. Significant interactions between task condition and emotional picture valence were observed for the occipital negativity and late positive potential. In the passive viewing condition, emotional background images elicited an increased occipital negativity followed by an increased late positive potential. In contrast, during the animal-/non-animal-categorization task, emotional modulation effects were replaced by strong target categorization effects. These results suggest that explicit semantic categorization interferes with implicit emotion processing when both processes compete for shared resources