Ewww–Investigating the neural basis of disgust in response to naturalistic and pictorial nauseating stimuli

Emotion induction in psychological and neuroscientific research has been mostly done by presenting participants with picture or film material. However, it is debatable whether this passive approach to emotion induction results in an affective state comparable to real-life emotions, and if the neural correlates of emotion processing are ecologically valid. To investigate the appropriateness of pictures for the induction of emotions, we presented 56 participants in a within-subjects design with naturalistic disgusting and neutral stimuli as well as with pictures of said stimulus material while recording continuous EEG data. We calculated asymmetry indices (AIs) for alpha power as an index of emotion processing and emotion regulation at the F3/4, F5/6, F7/8, and O1/2 electrode pairs. Participants reported higher disgust ratings for disgusting naturalistic compared to disgusting pictorial stimuli. Investigating changes in the EEG signal in participants with a pronounced disgust response (n = 38), we found smaller AIs for naturalistic stimuli compared to pictures. Moreover, in this disgusted sub-sample, there were smaller AIs in response to naturalistic disgusting stimuli compared to pictorial disgusting and neutral stimuli at the O1/2 electrode pair indicating stronger activation of the right relative to the left hemisphere by naturalistic stimuli. As the right hemisphere has been shown to display dominance in processing negative and withdrawal-associated emotions, this might indicate that naturalistic stimuli are more appropriate for the induction of emotions than picture stimuli. To improve the validity of results from emotion induction, future research should incorporate stimulus material that is as naturalistic as possible

Four meta-analyses across 164 studies on atypical footedness prevalence and its relation to handedness

Funding: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) through the Research Training Group “Situated Cognition” (GRK 2185/1) and Grant number OC 127/9-1. The UK Medical Research Council and Wellcome (Grant ref: 102215/2/13/2) and the University of Bristol provide core support for ALSPAC. This publication is the work of the authors and S.P. and J.S. will serve as guarantors for the analysis of the ALSPAC data presented in this paper. J.S. is funded by the DFG (Project number: 418445085). S.P. is funded by the Royal Society. D.P.C. is funded by the Leverhulme Trust. Open Access funding was provided by Projekt DEAL. We acknowledge the support by the DFG Open Access Publication Funds of the Ruhr-Universität Bochum.Human lateral preferences, such as handedness and footedness, have interested researchers for decades due to their pronounced asymmetries at the population level. While there are good estimates on the prevalence of handedness in the population, there is no large-scale estimation on the prevalence of footedness. Furthermore, the relationship between footedness and handedness still remains elusive. Here, we conducted meta-analyses with four different classification systems for footedness on 145,135 individuals across 164 studies including new data from the ALSPAC cohort. The study aimed to determine a reliable point estimate of footedness, to study the association between footedness and handedness, and to investigate moderating factors influencing footedness. We showed that the prevalence of atypical footedness ranges between 12.10% using the most conservative criterion of left-footedness to 23.7% including all left- and mixed-footers as a single non-right category. As many as 60.1% of left-handers were left-footed whereas only 3.2% of right-handers were left-footed. Males were 4.1% more often non-right-footed compared to females. Individuals with psychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders exhibited a higher prevalence of non-right-footedness. Furthermore, the presence of mixed-footedness was higher in children compared to adults and left-footedness was increased in athletes compared to the general population. Finally, we showed that footedness is only marginally influenced by cultural and social factors, which play a crucial role in the determination of handedness. Overall, this study provides new and useful reference data for laterality research. Furthermore, the data suggest that footedness is a valuable phenotype for the study of lateral motor biases, its underlying genetics and neurodevelopment.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Meta-analysis on human cradling

CMA files for an analysis of the bias in human cradling (total, handedness, sex

Altered hemispheric asymmetries as an endophenotype in psychological and developmental disorders: a theory on the influence of stress on brain lateralization

Hemispheric asymmetries are a basic organizational principle of the human brain and are ubiquitous in the healthy population. Several psychological and developmental disorders have been associated with atypical lateralization patterns, especially with a reduction of asymmetry. Among these disorders are major depressive disorder (MDD), schizophrenia, and autism spectrum disorders, which also show altered stress reactivity and elevated basal levels of the stress hormone cortisol. Recent research, however, has called the importance of altered asymmetries in these disorders into question. Especially for MDD, recent large-scale studies investigating altered asymmetries have not found any association. In this article, we propose that there is an association between altered asymmetry and depression but only for a subset of MDD patients. We present a theoretical framework in which we suggest that different symptom clusters expressed in mental and neurodevelopmental disorders could be associated with different neurostructural and –functional alterations, of which only few display altered asymmetry. Further, we propose that the development of a certain symptom cluster depends on the patient-specific etiology of the disorder and that a strong common factor in the development of the subtype with altered asymmetry across disorders is a chronically altered stress level as well as early life stress. To gather empirical evidence for this speculative theory, future research should focus on assessing and categorizing the etiology of disorders and different types of laterality changes on an individual patient level. Identifying different clinical subtypes and their different treatment prognosis would give rise to the possibility of sub-type-specific treatment plans and ultimately benefit patients

Neuronal mechanisms of working memory and extinction learning in the avian forebrain

Höhere kognitive Funktionen sind unabdingbar für den flexiblen Umgang mit Änderungen in der Umwelt. In dieser Dissertation habe ich die behavioralen und neuronalen Mechanismen zweier kritischer höherer kognitiver Funktionen am Modell der Taube untersucht, nämlich die des Arbeitsgedächtnisses (Studie 1) und die des Extinktionslernens (Studie 2 und Studie 3). Zu diesem Zweck wurde aus dem funktionalen Äquivalent des Vogels zum präfrontalen Cortex des Säugers abgeleitet, dem nidopallium caudolaterale (NCL). Es konnte gezeigt werden, dass die mentale Aufrechterhaltung von Reizen mit geringer Informationsdichte erschwert war im Vergleich zur Aufrechterhaltung von Reizen mit hoher Information. In der zweiten Studie habe ich gezeigt, dass Gedächtniskonsolidierung keine Notwendigkeit für den Prozess der Erneuerung darstellt. Die dritte Studie hat gezeigt, dass alle aufgabenrelevanten Parameter des Extinktionslernen in einem distribuierten und diversen neuronalen Code im NCL abgelegt sind