Neuropsychologia
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Meta Analysis
Neural correlates of successful emotional episodic encoding and retrieval: An SDM meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies.
Episodic memory for emotional events is typically enhanced and engages additional brain mechanisms relative to episodic memory for neutral events. Many functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have probed the neural basis of this emotional enhancement effect on encoding processes, while relatively fewer studies have examined retrieval. Neuroimaging meta-analysis methods can summarize the brain regions associated with emotional episodic memory that are consistently activated across multiple studies. ⋯ For successful emotional episodic memory retrieval, SDM activations were observed in the medial temporal lobe (bilateral amygdala, left hippocampus, and left entorhinal cortex and perirhinal cortex), visual processing regions (bilateral occipital cortex and right middle temporal gyrus), prefrontal cortex (bilateral orbitofrontal cortex, bilateral inferior frontal gyrus, bilateral precentral gyrus, left middle frontal gyrus, right frontal pole) and other regions in the left hemisphere including the temporal pole, insula, putamen, angular gyrus, and parietal opercular cortex. Considerable overlap was observed between the encoding and retrieval meta-analysis maps in the medial temporal lobe (bilateral amygdala, left hippocampus, entorhinal, and perirhinal cortex), visual processing regions (bilateral occipital cortex, right middle temporal gyrus), and other regions including the left orbitofrontal cortex, left insula, left putamen, left pallidum, and left temporal pole. The current findings add to current understanding of the role of the amygdala, hippocampus, and neocortical regions in the successful encoding and retrieval of emotional episodic memory, clarify and provide an important summary of the current literature in this area, and have implications for current theories of emotional episodic memory encoding and retrieval.
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A period of post-learning sleep benefits memory consolidation compared with an equal-length wake interval. However, whether this sleep-based memory consolidation changes as a function of age remains controversial. Here we report a meta-analysis that investigates the age differences in the sleep-based memory consolidation in two types of memory: declarative memory and procedural memory. ⋯ However, further analyses suggested that the age differences were mainly manifested in sleep-based declarative memory consolidation but not in procedural memory consolidation. We discussed the possible underlying mechanisms for the age-related degradation in sleep-based memory consolidation. Further research is needed to determine the crucial components for sleep-related memory consolidation in older adults such as age-related changes in neurobiological and cardiovascular functions, which may play an important role in this context and have the potential to delineate the interrelationships between age-related changes in sleep and memory.
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Review Meta Analysis
Non-informative vision enhances tactile acuity: A systematic review and meta-analysis.
Individual experimental data suggest that visual input during tactile stimulation enhances tactile appreciation - whether this finding is replicated across studies and across body sites is unknown. ⋯ This review provides confirmatory evidence for a visual enhancement effect for tactile acuity for body parts where vision has a plausible functional linkage - further studies are required to elaborate on the mechanisms for multi-modal processing of sensory stimuli.
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Review Meta Analysis
A meta-analytic review of theory of mind difficulties in behavioural-variant frontotemporal dementia.
Theory of mind (ToM) refers broadly to our understanding of others' complex emotions and mental states. Deficits in ToM are widely regarded as one of the key defining features of the behavioural variant of frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD), which is unsurprising given the key role that frontal and temporal neural systems are considered to play in mental state decoding. Here we report the first meta-analysis of this literature, providing a timely summary of the breadth, magnitude and specificity of ToM difficulties in this population. ⋯ BvFTD-related ToM difficulties were also significantly larger than the ToM difficulties seen in people with Alzheimer's disease. However, ToM difficulties in people with bvFTD were of a similar magnitude to the difficulties seen on measures of more basic social cue perception (emotion recognition). These data have important implications for understanding the types of ToM difficulties associated with bvFTD.
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Meta Analysis
Sex differences in brain activation to emotional stimuli: a meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies.
Substantial sex differences in emotional responses and perception have been reported in previous psychological and psychophysiological studies. For example, women have been found to respond more strongly to negative emotional stimuli, a sex difference that has been linked to an increased risk of depression and anxiety disorders. The extent to which such sex differences are reflected in corresponding differences in regional brain activation remains a largely unresolved issue, however, in part because relatively few neuroimaging studies have addressed this issue. ⋯ The finding of greater left amygdala activation for positive emotional stimuli in men suggests that greater amygdala responses reported previously for men for specific types of positive stimuli may also extend to positive stimuli more generally. In summary, this study extends efforts to characterize sex differences in brain activation during emotion processing by providing the largest and most comprehensive quantitative meta-analysis to date, and for the first time examining sex differences as a function of positive vs. negative emotional valence. The current findings highlight the importance of considering sex as a potential factor modulating emotional processing and its underlying neural mechanisms, and more broadly, the need to consider individual differences in understanding the neurobiology of emotion.