Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience
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Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci · May 2010
Increasing negative emotions by reappraisal enhances subsequent cognitive control: a combined behavioral and electrophysiological study.
To what degree do cognitively based strategies of emotion regulation impact subsequent cognitive control? Here, we investigated this question by interleaving a cognitive task with emotion regulation trials, where regulation occurred through cognitive reappraisal. In addition to obtaining self-reports of emotion regulation, we used the late positive potential (LPP) of the event-related brain potential as an objective index of emotion regulation. ⋯ Results revealed that (1) the magnitude of the LPP was decreased with reappraisal instructions to decrease negative emotion and were enhanced with reappraisal instructions to increase negative emotion; (2) after cognitive reappraisal was used to increase the intensity of negative emotion, RT interference in the subsequent Stroop trial was significantly reduced; and (3) increasing negative emotions by reappraisal also modulated the cognitive control-related sustained potential. These results suggest that increasing negative emotions by cognitive reappraisal heightens cognitive control, which may be sustained for a short time after the regulation event.
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Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci · Dec 2008
ReviewCells, circuits, and choices: social influences on perceptual decision making.
Making decisions is an integral part of everyday life. Social psychologists have demonstrated in many studies that humans' decisions are frequently and strongly influenced by the opinions of others--even in simple perceptual decisions, where, for example, participants have to judge what an image looks like. However, because the effect of other people's opinions on decision making has remained largely unaddressed by the neuroimaging and neurophysiology literature, we are only beginning to understand how social influence is integrated into the decision-making process. ⋯ Perceptual paradigms are already widely used to probe neuronal mechanisms of decision making in nonhuman primates. There is also increasing evidence about how nonhuman primates' behavior is influenced by observing conspecifics. The high spatial and temporal resolution of neurophysiological recordings in awake monkeys could provide insight into where and how social influence modulates decision making, and thus should enable us to develop detailed functional models of the neural mechanisms that support the integration of social influence into the decision-making process.
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Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci · Sep 2007
Autonomic and prefrontal cortex responses to autobiographical recall of emotions.
The present study combined measures of regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) using positron emission tomography (PET) with measures of the autonomic nervous system using skin conductance (SC), heart rate (HR), and the high frequency band of heart rate variability (HRV) in ten healthy participants who were exposed to autobiographical scripts of memories for three target emotions: anger, happiness, and sadness. According to the results, anger was the only emotion to show a significant increase in sympathetic activity, accompanied by a significant decrease in HRV when compared with a neutral script. ⋯ By contrast, the results for the happy and sad conditions showed no significant increase in sympathetic activity and no changes in rCBF in the prefrontal cortex in comparison with the neutral script. The findings suggest that a relative increase in sympathetic activity with a reciprocal decrease in parasympathetic activity may be necessary to generate frontal activity in autobiographical recall of emotions.
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Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci · Dec 2004
Neural mechanisms of spatial working memory: contributions of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the thalamic mediodorsal nucleus.
The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) has been known to play an important role in working memory. Neurophysiological studies have revealed that delay period activity observed in the DLPFC is a neural correlate of the temporary storage mechanism for information and that this activity represents either retrospective or prospective information, although the majority represents retrospective information. ⋯ Although similar task-related activities were observed in the MD, the directional bias of these activities and the proportion of presaccadic activity are different between the MD and the DLPFC. These results indicate that, although the MD participates in working memory, the way it participates in this process is different between these two areas, in that the MD participates more in motor control aspects than the DLPFC does.
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Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci · Sep 2003
Meta Analysis Comparative StudyFunctional neuroanatomy of emotions: a meta-analysis.
The application of functional neuroimaging to the study of human emotion has yielded valuable data; however, the conclusions that may be drawn from any one study are limited. We applied novel statistical techniques to the meta-analysis of 106 PET and fMRI studies of human emotion and tested predictions made by key neuroscientific models. The results demonstrated partial support for asymmetry accounts. ⋯ These emotions were most consistently associated in activity in regions associated with selective processing deficits when damaged: the amygdala, the insula and globus pallidus, and the lateral orbitofrontal cortex, respectively. In contrast, the distributions for happiness and sadness did not differ. These findings are considered in the context of conceptualizations of the neural correlates of human emotion.