Subjects: Psychology >> Developmental Psychology submitted time 2023-09-26
Abstract： Sleep-dependent memory consolidation is the process by which the brain reprocesses and reinforces newly learned information or skills during sleep, making memories more stable and lasting. Sleep is essential for transforming newly learned short-term memory into more stable and lasting long-term memory. The role of sleep in consolidating memory depends on the type of memory. Furthermore, different stages and characteristics of sleep have different effects on different types of memory consolidation. Changes in the EEG characteristics of sleep (such as spindle wave, slow wave amplitude, etc.) maybe related to the effect of memory consolidation in infants and toddlers. Based on adult studies, recent studies on infants and toddlers have found that sleep plays a vital role in consolidating memory even in the early stages of individual development. Infants and toddlers who sleep after learning show significantly better learning outcomes and can solve problems more effectively and quickly than those who do not sleep in the control group. Based on two different types of memory, declarative memory and procedural memory, this paper introduces the behavior of sleep-dependent memory consolidation in infants and the progress of brain research, so as to help grasp the effect of sleep on memory consolidation in infants and toddlers.
Subjects: Psychology >> Cognitive Psychology submitted time 2023-08-26
Abstract： In recent years, research on the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying interpersonal emotion regulation has gained momentum, providing some insights into the neural basis of this process. Specifically, interpersonal emotion regulation involves the participation of the mentalizing system (including the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the temporo-parietal junction, and the anterior insula), the emotional response system (including the amygdala and the insula), and the emotion regulation system (including the frontal and parietal lobes), with the mentalizing system being the core brain area. To advance the field, future research should focus on addressing current unanswered questions, involving diverse populations, and integrating brain observation and control techniques to comprehensively and deeply investigate the cognitive and neural mechanisms of interpersonal emotion regulation from both static (single-brain level) and dynamic (dual-brain level) perspectives, providing a scientific basis for training and intervention in interpersonal emotion regulation in applied domains.
Peer Review Status:
Awaiting Review
Subjects: Psychology >> Cognitive Psychology submitted time 2023-07-26
Abstract： Newborns utilize their auditory system to process and learn the various elements of language from birth. Examining the characteristics of language processing in newborns not only reveals the neurocognitive mechanisms of language function in the earliest stages of human development, but also provides valuable clues for an early warning and clinical diagnosis of neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism. This review article summarized the perception, discrimination, and learning of phonemes in newborns, as well as the potential role in predicting autism spectrum disorder. It was found that newborns have preferences for specific languages and possess unique phoneme discrimination abilities. Furthermore, brain functional and structural indices of language processing in infancy have predictive values for autism. Future research should focus on the following three issues: 1) Controlling the rhythm factors of materials, re-examining the characteristics of newborn language processing and brain lateralization issues; 2) Revealing the neurocognitive mechanisms of newborn language learning and the role of sleep in memory consolidation; 3) Tracking the language development of high-risk newborns with autism and establishing a disease risk assessment system so as to reveal the potential biomarkers for autism.
Peer Review Status:Awaiting Review
Subjects: Psychology >> Developmental Psychology submitted time 2023-03-28 Cooperative journals: 《心理科学进展》
Abstract： Speech processing is the core function of language cognition, and the brain mechanism of speech processing are an important topic in linguistics and cognitive psychology. However, it is unclear that how the newborn's brain perceives speech. The purpose of this review is to investigate the brain mechanism of speech perception in newborns. We found that human beings have a relatively well-developed speech processing mechanism during the neonatal period. While the left frontal lobe (especially the inferior frontal gyrus) plays an important role in detecting speech structure, the bilateral temporal lobes are responsible for detecting speech deviation. In addition, the left hemisphere has an advantage in mother tongue perception.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-27 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract： Cooperation is a prosocial behavior that develops along with human social development. Cooperation involves brain activation of the reward system and enables people to form cooperative relationships so to pursuit social rewards and self-affirmation. Previous studies have shown that depressed patients have severe social dysfunctions, e.g., they have reduced willingness to cooperate and exhibited increased negative emotions during cooperation. This study employed the prisoner's dilemma game (PDG) to investigate the effect of depression on social cooperation using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) hyperscanning technique. A total of 156 participants were screened using Beck Depression Inventory Second Edition and allocated into three paired groups, i.e., low - low depressive tendency pairs (n = 26), low - high depressive tendency pairs (n = 26), and high - high depressive tendency pairs (n = 26). The fNIRS optrodes were placed at frontal and right temporoparietal junction of two participants, with 29 channels in each participant. Behavioral and self-reported emotion ratings showed that compared to participants with low depressive tendency, the high depressive tendency group were less cooperative and less satisfied with their partner during the prisoner's dilemma task. The brain imaging results showed that, first, the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) was activated most significantly in the reciprocal cooperation condition, followed by the condition with self defection but opponent cooperation. Furthermore, the significantly increased neural activation in these two conditions could only be observed in the low depressive tendency group. This finding suggests that people with high depressive tendency have deficits in reward processing, especially for social reward processing. Second, the neural activation of bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) in participants with high depressive tendency was significantly weaker than that in participants with low depressive tendency. Depressive tendency had a significant modulation effect on inter-brain synchronization of the right dlPFC, i.e., the enhanced inter-brain synchronization induced by reciprocal cooperation could not be observed in participants with high depressive tendency. Third, the right temporoparietal junction (TPJ) inter-brain synchronization in the low-low depressive tendency group was higher than that in the high-high and high-low depressive tendency groups. Furthermore, this effect was significant only if both participants in the PDG made the same choice (both cooperation or both defection). The result of this study suggests that depressive population have dysfunctions in the brain regions involved in social reward processing (reflected by the OFC), conflict control (the dlPFC) and theory of mind (the right TPJ). Our findings provide experimental evidence to help understand the brain mechanism of decreased cooperation in depressed individuals, which further lays a foundation to improve social functions in depressed patients in clinical practice.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-27 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract： Emotional expressions of others embedded in speech prosodies are important for social interactions. Affective prosody refers to a way to express and convey emotions through the dynamic changes of various acoustic cues such as pitch, intensity, stress, and intonation in speech, without relying on vocabulary and grammatical structure. Previous studies have shown that STC, IFG, OFC, and other cerebral cortex and subcortical structures are involved in emotional prosody processing, and gradually formed a hierarchical model. However, existing studies on the neural mechanism of emotional prosody processing mostly focus on the difference between non-neutral emotional prosody and neutral prosody, while the comparison between various non-neutral emotional prosody is less investigated. Besides, the differences involved in brain regions of emotional prosody processing under explicit and implicit tasks are still not clear. Furthermore, it is necessary to further accumulate experimental evidence based on noise-free brain imaging technology, such as the noise-free features of fNIRS are especially suitable for speech processing research.This study used functional near-infrared spectroscopy to investigate how speech prosodies of different emotional categories are processed in the cortex under different task conditions. A group of 25 college students participated in this study with a 3 (emotion: anger vs. fearful vs. happy) by 2 (task focus: explicit vs. implicit) within-participant factorial design. We manipulated task focus by adopting two different tasks, with emotional discrimination task as explicit condition and sex discrimination task as implicit condition. Ten phonological materials for each of anger, fearful, and happy prosody were selected from the Chinese Speech Emotion Database and consisted of the corresponding emotional prosodies and neutral prosodies. The emotional explicit task was to count the emotional and neutral sentences contained in each 10-second speech, and the emotional implicit task was to count the sentences played by two women in each 10-second speech. A multi-channel fNIRS system was used to record brain activity in a continuous waveform. According to existing literature, the brain regions observed in this study are the bilateral frontal and temporal lobes. Therefore, we used 13 emitters and 15 detectors to form 37 effective observation channels.We first adopted NirSpark-2442 software to preprocess the data, and then conducted general linear model analyses to calculate the cortical activation related to the task. The results showed that the brain activation was significantly higher when anger was contrasted to fearful and happy prosody in left frontal pole / orbitofrontal cortex, and when happy was contrasted to fearful and anger prosody in left inferior frontal gyrus, and when fearful was contrasted to anger and happy prosody in right supramarginal gyrus. Importantly, there was an interaction between emotion and task. In the explicit task, cortex activity in the right supramarginal gyrus was more sensitive to fearful than to anger and happy prosodies. But no similar results were found under anger and happy prosody. In addition, the brain activation in temporopolar, superior temporal gyrus, and middle temporal gyrus with the explicit task was greater than that in the implicit task.The present study demonstrated the specific brain regions for processing angry, fearful and happy prosody were left frontal pole/orbitofrontal cortex, right supramarginal gyrus, and left inferior frontal gyrus respectively, and the important role of right superior temporal gyrus and right supramarginal gyrus in emotional explicit task. These findings partially support the hierarchical model of emotional prosody and question the third level of the model.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-27 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract： Increasing evidence shows that the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (rVLPFC) plays an important role in emotion regulation, especially for social-relevant negative emotions. Negative interpersonal experiences and social events contribute largely to the occurrence of depression. Meanwhile, patients diagnosed with major depressive disorder are characterized by impaired social functions. Previous studies have revealed that depressed patients frequently show impaired emotional regulation for social pain. Recently, the work of our lab found that using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to activate the rVLPFC significantly reduced the subjects’ negative emotional feelings and improved their emotional regulation ability for down-regulating social pain. In order to improve the emotional regulation ability in depressed patients when they are in front of negative social events, this study examined the changed emotional regulation ability in depression following the activation of the rVLPFC using the TMS.A total of 127 patients who were diagnosed with major depressive disorder were recruited in this study. Participants were randomly assigned to experimental (n= 64) or control group (n = 63) while their age, gender, depressive level, social anxious level, rejection sensitivity and empathy ability were counterbalanced between the two groups. During the experiment, the participants were required to view pictures containing social exclusion events or reinterpret the situation using reappraisal strategy, followed by rating their negative emotional feeling on a 9-point scale. The experiment had two conditions, i.e., a passive viewing block and a cognitive reappraisal block.The results showed that the main effect of the task was significant: the negative emotional intensity reported by participants was lower during cognitive reappraisal when compared to that during passive viewing, indicating a successful manipulation of explicit emotional regulation. Meanwhile, the main effect of the group was significant: the negative emotional intensity reported by the experimental group was significantly reduced compared to that reported by the control group, suggesting the critical role of rVLPFC in emotional regulation. More importantly, the interaction between task and group was significant: while the two groups reported comparable distressful feelings during the passive view block, the experimental group reported decreased negative feelings compared to the control group during the cognitive reappraisal block. This result indicated that enhanced activation of the rVLPFC could effectively improve the ability of explicit down-regulating social pain using the cognitive reappraisal strategy in depressed patients.The current findings provide strong evidence for the causal relationship between the VLPFC and explicit emotional regulation using the cognitive reappraisal strategy. Also this study provides a potential neural target for clinical treatments of emotional regulation impairment in patients with social dysfunctions including individuals diagnosed with major depressive disorder, social anxiety disorder, and autism spectrum disorder. Future studies are suggested to use other paradigms (e.g., Cyberball, Chat Rooms, Online Ostracism, and Island Getaway) to induce a “first-hand” social pain and exclude the potential influence of empathy. Furthermore, optimized multi-session TMS protocols are required to enhance and prolong the TMS effects observed in this study. Also, the TMS-based treatment effects in depression should be compared between the left and the right part of the ventrolateral prefrontal cortices, and across different emotional regulation strategies including cognitive reappraisal, distraction, distancing, etc.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-27 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract： Emotion regulation is crucial to mental health and social life. Traditional view conceived emotion regulation as a deliberative process. However, there is growing evidence that emotion regulation can implement at an implicit level without or with limited involvement of the lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) that is responsible for cognitive control. Unlike explicit emotion regulation, we have few knowledge on the neural mechanisms underlying implicit emotion regulation. Here, we investigated the effect of excitatory the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) using transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to provide causal evidence for the key role of the vmPFC in implicit emotion regulation. This study had a mixed design, with group (anodal vs. sham) as the between-subject factor and priming type (reappraisal vs. baseline) as the within-subject factor. A total of 80 participants were recruited and randomly assigned to the anodal group and the sham tDCS group. The task was divided into two blocks, i.e., the implicit reappraisal block and the baseline block. The order of the two blocks was counterbalanced within the participants in each group. At the beginning of each block, participants were required to complete a tDCS session (1.5 mA; 10 min for the active group and 1 min for the sham group). The anodal electrode was placed in the middle of Fz and Fpz and the ground electrode was placed under the chin). Then, participants completed six sessions of sentence unscramble task (10 trials per session) to prime the emotion regulation goal. Each session of the sentence unscramble task was followed by a picture viewing task (5 trials) to evoke negative emotions. The self-reported emotion rating and EEG signals were recorded during the picture viewing task. Half an hour after the end of the picture viewing task, participants were asked to rate the valence (1 = very unpleasant; 9 = very pleasant) of all viewed images in the picture viewing task. The results showed that the experimental group (n = 40) reported lower negative emotional experience and showed lower LPP amplitudes (measured as the average amplitude of Pz P3, P4, CP1, CP2) when the vmPFC was activated in the cognitive reappraisal block compared to the control group (n = 40), indicating that excitatory vmPFC could effectively facilitate the ability of implicit emotion regulation. Furthermore, we also found that excitatory vmPFC can reduce the P1 amplitude (measured as the average amplitude of O1, O2) under both baseline and reappraisal conditions. The above results indicated that activating the vmPFC could not only facilitate implicit emotion regulation but also reduce early attention distribution to negative stimuli. This study is the first attempt to use the tDCS technique to investigate priming-induced implicit emotion regulation. The results directly reveal the causal relationship between the vmPFC and implicit cognitive reappraisal, suggesting this brain region as a potential target of neural modulation to enhance the ability of implicit emotion regulation in clinical populations.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-27 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract： Under the influence of the novel coronavirus epidemic, some negative social events, such as separation of family or friends and home isolation have increased. These events can cause negative emotion experiences similar to physical pain, thus they are called social pain. Placebo effect refers to the positive response to the inert treatment with no specific therapeutic properties, which has been shown to be one of the effective ways to alleviate social pain. Studies have shown that the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) plays a key role in placebo effect. Therefore, this study aimed to explore whether activating DLPFC by using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) could improve the ability of placebo effects to regulate social pain. Besides, we also combined neuroimaging and neuromodulation techniques to provide bidirectional evidence for the role of the DLPFC on placebo effects. We recruited a total of 100 participants to finish the task of negative emotional rating of the social exclusion images. Among them, 50 participants were stimulated by TMS at the right DLPFC (rDLPFC), while the others were assigned to the sham group. This study contained two independent variables. The between- subject variable was TMS group (rDLPFC-activated group or sham group) and the within-subject variable was placebo type (no-placebo and placebo). All participants received nasal spray in two blocks. In the no-placebo condition, participants were instructed that they would receive a saline nasal spray which helped to improve physiological readings; in placebo block, participants were told to administrate an intranasal fluoxetine spray (saline nasal spray in fact) that could reduce unpleasantness within 10 minutes. To strengthen the expectation of intranasal fluoxetine, participants viewed a professional introduction to fluoxetine’s clinical and academic usage including downregulating negative emotion, such as fear, anxiety, and disgust. Participants who received the placebo block first would be reminded that fluoxetine’s effect was over before the next block to reduce the carry-over for the following block. Self-reported negative emotional and electroencephalogram data were recorded. There was a significant two-way interaction of TMS group and placebo type. Results showed that compared with the sham group, participants in the rDLPFC-activated group reported less negative emotional feeling and had a lower amplitude of the late positive potential (LPP) in placebo condition, a component that reflects the emotional intensity, suggesting that activating rDLPFC can improve the ability of placebo effect to regulate social pain. The above finding suggested that activating DLPFC can improve the placebo effect of regulating negative emotion. Moreover, this study is the first attempt to investigate the enhancement of placebo effects by using TMS on emotion regulation. The findings not only support the critical role of DLPFC on placebo effect using neuroimaging and neuromodulation techniques, but also provide a potential brain target for treating emotional regulation deficits in patients with psychiatric disorders.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-27 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract： Depression is a common mental disorder characterized by persistent low mood and anhedonia. While healthy people can voluntarily forget unpleasant events, depressed patients cannot or have difficulty in forgetting negative stimuli. Studies focused on healthy population have found that memory suppression is not only associated with decreased neural activation in the hippocampus, but also significantly activates a wide network in the prefrontal cortex, especially the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). Meanwhile, studies have demonstrated that depressed participants could not effectively recruit their frontal brain network responsible for inhibition control of negative materials. Thus, the key question of this study is to examine whether an enhancement of the neural activation in DLPFC using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) could improve the ability of voluntary forgetting of negative information in depressed patients. We recruited a total of 123 participants. Among them, 31 healthy participants were stimulated by TMS at the right DLPFC (right DLPFC-activated controls), 32 patients and 30 patients were stimulated by TMS at the left and right DLPFC respectively (left and right DLPFC-activated patients). The other 30 patients were assigned into a sham TMS group. This study contained three independent variables. The two within-subject variables were TMS (baseline or TMS condition) and directed forgetting instruction (remember or forget), and the between-subject variable was group (left or right DLPFC-activated patient, or right DLPFC-activated control). We focused on the memory suppression of social feedbacks in this study, since social feedback processing plays a vital role in everyday interpersonal activities. Previous studies have found that depressed patients cannot perceive and evaluate social feedbacks accurately and adaptively, which makes negative social experiences being an important inducing factor of depression. Meanwhile, evidence indicates that depressed patients have more deficits in processing social relative to nonsocial information. Results of the explicit memory test showed that the recall accuracy of social rejection was higher in patients than healthy controls in baseline condition, suggesting that patients had difficulty in voluntarily forgetting negative social feedback. After we used the TMS to activate the left or right DLPFC of participants, we found no significant difference in the recall accuracy of social rejection between the three groups. This result suggested that the ability of memory suppression for negative social feedback was improved by TMS in patients. Moreover, it was also found that patients rated the feedback senders as being more attractive after they had forgotten negative social feedback provided by these feedback senders. The main contribution of this study is that we first attempt to improve the ability of memory suppression of negative information in depressed patients using the TMS technique. Still now, there have been only two neuroscience studies focusing on the deficits of directed forgetting in depression ( Xie, Jiang, & Zhang, 2018; Yang et al., 2016). Beyond these two studies, we demonstrated a causal relationship between the DLPFC and memory suppression impairment in depressed patients by employing TMS to facilitate the function of DLPFC. Thus, we provide a potential neural target for the clinical treatment of depressed patients with voluntary forgetting deficits. In addition to depression, difficulties in voluntary forgetting is a common problem found in patients diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety disorder (including obsessive compulsive disorder), schizophrenia and many other mental disorders. Meanwhile, difficulties in forgetting the euphoria or enjoyment coming from drugs or high-calorie foods might be an important reason for the persistence and aggravation of drug addiction and bulimia. Our finding suggests that the right DLPFC may be a potential brain target for the treatment of memory suppression deficits in these disorders. Facilitating the cognitive control of this brain region using the TMS is expected to restore the inhibitory control function of patients and thus significantly improve their voluntary forgetting ability, helping them to relieve symptoms and recover from disorders.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-27 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract： People tend to give priority to negative information and allocate more cognitive resources such as perception, attention and memory to negative, compared to positive, information. This phenomenon is called “negativity bias”, which is well established across toddlers, children, adolescents and adults. However, this emotional bias remains controversial in infants, especially in young infants that are less than six months old. Furthermore, it is still unclear whether the emotional bias changes from no bias or positivity bias to negativity bias during infants’ development in the first year of life. In this study, we used near-infrared spectroscopy to examine the neural responses to angry and happy prosodies in 45 neonates (0 month old) and 45 infants (one year old). The experiment was conducted in the neonatal ward of Peking University First Hospital. NIRS data were recorded when the infants were at active sleeping or staying quietly. Using a passive listening task, we investigated the brain functional connectivity during automatic processing of emotional prosodies of anger and happiness. The experiment was divided into three emotional blocks (using angry, happy and neutral prosodies, respectively). The order of the three blocks was counterbalanced among the participants. Each block contained 10 sentences, which were repeated six times, that is, 60 sentences were presented during the experiment in a random order. The results showed that emotion category had a significant main effect on 60 pairs of functional connectivity, which revealed that angry and happy prosodies evoked stronger functional connectivity than neutral prosody, whereas there was no significant difference between the angry and happy conditions. The observed significant functional connectivity was mainly distributed within the right hemisphere or across bilateral hemispheres. More importantly, there was an interaction between emotion category and group in the functional connectivity of frontal, temporal and parietal lobe of the right hemisphere. In the neonate group, the functional connectivity in the happy prosody condition was stronger than that in the angry prosody condition. By contrast, the functional connectivity in the infant group showed stronger connectivity in the angry compared to the happy condition. By examining the neural response to emotional prosodies at two time points (0 and 1 year old), this study revealed for the first time the changes of emotional bias in a developmental perspective. We found that emotional processing has a positive bias at the beginning of postnatal period, revealed by the stronger functional connectivity for happy than for angry prosodies at the right hemisphere of the superior temporal gyrus, the inferior frontal gyrus, the supramarginal gyrus, and the angular gyrus. However, the emotional processing bias reverses in 1-year-old infants, that is, the brain functional connectivity within the above mentioned brain regions is stronger for angry than that for happy prosodies. Therefore, the reliable phenomenon of “negativity bias” is not innate, although it is always observed in adults and children. Instead, we propose that there is a developmental change from positivity bias to negativity bias in the first year of human life.
Subjects: Psychology >> Cognitive Psychology Subjects: Psychology >> Applied Psychology submitted time 2023-03-17
Abstract：
Accumulating evidence suggests that non-invasive brain stimulation (NIBS) techniques can effectively intervene in the emotion regulation processes and down-regulate negative emotions. Summarizing the effects and applicability of NIBS for emotion regulation interventions is of great significance for enriching existing emotion regulation theories and promoting translational research. Through literature review, we found that when NIBS is used for modulating emotion regulation, a top-down change of brain circuits occurs, thereby producing a positive effect on explicit and implicit emotion regulation. Also, NIBS may improve psychiatric disorder symptoms by improving the emotion regulation processes. The existing problems are as follows: First, findings are mixed due to the heterogeneity. Second, the neural circuit mechanisms underlying the NIBS effects remain unclear, and measurements of emotion regulation effects must be enriched. In addition, previous NIBS protocols have problems like poor localization accuracy, weak effects due to the single-session stimulation, unable to fulfill new needs, and inevitable side effects. Accordingly, future studies could provide comprehensive quantitative summaries for existing literature, optimize the cortical target with the help of neuronavigation techniques, investigate the changes in the brain neural circuit when applying NIBS in explicit and implicit emotion regulation, and measure the NIBS effect with the combination of subjective experience, physiological indexes, and neural characteristics. In the future, we believe that the multi-target NIBS protocols, a combination of hyperscanning and NIBS, and NIBS-neurofeedback techniques can effectively improve the validity of the study, providing insights for relevant translational research and clinical therapeutics.
Peer Review Status:Awaiting Review
Subjects: Psychology >> Cognitive Psychology submitted time 2023-02-14
Abstract：
Under the influence of the novel coronavirus epidemic, some negative social events, such as separation of family or friends and home isolation have increased. These events can cause negative emotion experiences similar to physical pain, thus they are called social pain. Placebo effect refers to the positive response to the inert treatment with no specific therapeutic properties, which has been shown to be one of the effective ways to alleviate social pain. Studies have shown that the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) plays a key role in placebo effect. Therefore, this study aimed to explore whether activating DLPFC by using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) could improve the ability of placebo effects to regulate social pain. Besides, we also combined neuroimaging and neuromodulation techniques to provide bidirectional evidence for the role of the DLPFC on placebo effects. We recruited a total of 100 participants to finish the task of negative emotional rating of the social exclusion images. Among them, 50 participants were stimulated by TMS at the right DLPFC (rDLPFC), while the others were assigned to the sham group. This study contained two independent variables. The between-subject variable was TMS group (rDLPFC-activated group or sham group) and the within-subject variable was placebo type (no-placebo and placebo). All participants received nasal spray in two blocks. In the no-placebo condition, participants were instructed that they would receive a saline nasal spray which helped to improve physiological readings; in placebo block, participants were told to administrate an intranasal fluoxetine spray (saline nasal spray in fact) that could reduce unpleasantness within 10 minutes. To strengthen the expectation of intranasal fluoxetine, participants viewed a professional introduction to fluoxetine’s clinical and academic usage including downregulating negative emotion, such as fear, anxiety, and disgust. Participants who received the placebo block first would be reminded that fluoxetine’s effect was over before the next block to reduce the carry-over for the following block. Self-reported negative emotional and electroencephalogram data were recorded. There was a significant two-way interaction of TMS group and placebo type. Results showed that compared with the sham group, participants in the rDLPFC-activated group reported less negative emotional feeling and had a lower amplitude of the late positive potential (LPP) in placebo condition, a component that reflects the emotional intensity, suggesting that activating rDLPFC can improve the ability of placebo effect to regulate social pain. The above finding suggested that activating DLPFC can improve the placebo effect of regulating negative emotion. Moreover, this study is the first attempt to investigate the enhancement of placebo effects by using TMS on emotion regulation. The findings not only support the critical role of DLPFC on placebo effect using neuroimaging and neuromodulation techniques, but also provide a potential brain target for treating emotional regulation deficits in patients with psychiatric disorders.
Peer Review Status:Awaiting Review
Subjects: Psychology >> Developmental Psychology submitted time 2022-12-26
Abstract：
People tend to give priority to negative information and allocate more cognitive resources such as perception, attention and memory to negative, compared to positive, information. This phenomenon is called "negativity bias", which is well established across toddlers, children, adolescents and adults. However, this emotional bias remains controversial in infants, especially in young infants that are less than six months old. Furthermore, it is still unclear whether the emotional bias changes from no bias or positivity bias to negativity bias during infants’ development in the first year of life. In this study, we used near-infrared spectroscopy to examine the neural responses to angry and happy prosodies in 45 neonates (0 month old) and 45 infants (one year old). The experiment was conducted in the neonatal ward of Peking University First Hospital. NIRS data were recorded when the infants were at active sleeping or staying quietly. Using a passive listening task, we investigated the brain functional connectivity during automatic processing of emotional prosodies of anger and happiness. The experiment was divided into three emotional blocks (using angry, happy and neutral prosodies, respectively). The order of the three blocks was counterbalanced among the participants. Each block contained 10 sentences, which were repeated six times, that is, 60 sentences were presented during the experiment in a random order. The results showed that emotion category had a significant main effect on 60 pairs of functional connectivity, which revealed that angry and happy prosodies evoked stronger functional connectivity than neutral prosody, whereas there was no significant difference between the angry and happy conditions. The observed significant functional connectivity was mainly distributed within the right hemisphere or across bilateral hemispheres. More importantly, there was an interaction between emotion category and group in the functional connectivity of frontal, temporal and parietal lobe of the right hemisphere. In the neonate group, the functional connectivity in the happy prosody condition was stronger than that in the angry prosody condition. By contrast, the functional connectivity in the infant group showed stronger connectivity in the angry compared to the happy condition. By examining the neural response to emotional prosodies at two time points (0 and 1 year old), this study revealed for the first time the changes of emotional bias in a developmental perspective. We found that emotional processing has a positive bias at the beginning of postnatal period, revealed by the stronger functional connectivity for happy than for angry prosodies at the right hemisphere of the superior temporal gyrus, the inferior frontal gyrus, the supramarginal gyrus, and the angular gyrus. However, the emotional processing bias reverses in 1-year-old infants, that is, the brain functional connectivity within the above mentioned brain regions is stronger for angry than that for happy prosodies. Therefore, the reliable phenomenon of "negativity bias" is not innate, although it is always observed in adults and children. Instead, we propose that there is a developmental change from positivity bias to negativity bias in the first year of human life.
Peer Review Status:Awaiting Review
Subjects: Psychology >> Cognitive Psychology submitted time 2022-08-02
Abstract： Emotion regulation is crucial to mental health and social life. Traditional view conceived emotion regulation as a deliberative process. However, there is growing evidence that emotion regulation can implement at an implicit level without or with limited involvement of the lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) that is responsible for cognitive control. Unlike explicit emotion regulation, we have few knowledge on the neural mechanisms underlying implicit emotion regulation. Here, we investigated the effect of excitatory the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) using transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to provide causal evidence for the key role of the vmPFC in implicit emotion regulation. This study had a mixed design, with group (anodal vs. sham) as the between-subject factor and priming type (reappraisal vs. baseline) as the within-subject factor. A total of 80 participants were recruited and randomly assigned to the anodal group and the sham tDCS group. The task was divided into two blocks, i.e., the implicit reappraisal block and the baseline block. The order of the two blocks was counterbalanced within the participants in each group. At the beginning of each block, participants were required to complete a tDCS session (1.5 mA; 10 min for the active group and 1 min for the sham group). The anodal electrode was placed in the middle of Fz and Fpz and the ground electrode was placed under the chin). Then, participants completed six sessions of sentence unscramble task (10 trials per session) to prime the emotion regulation goal. Each session of the sentence unscramble task was followed by a picture viewing task (5 trials) to evoke negative emotions. The self-reported emotion rating and EEG signals were recorded during the picture viewing task. Half an hour after the end of the picture viewing task, participants were asked to rate the valence (1 = very unpleasant; 9 = very pleasant) of all viewed images in the picture viewing task. The results showed that the experimental group (n = 40) reported lower negative emotional experience and showed lower LPP amplitudes (measured as the average amplitude of Pz P3, P4, CP1, CP2) when the vmPFC was activated in the cognitive reappraisal block compared to the control group (n = 40), indicating that excitatory vmPFC could effectively facilitate the ability of implicit emotion regulation. Furthermore, we also found that excitatory vmPFC can reduce the P1 amplitude (measured as the average amplitude of O1, O2) under both baseline and reappraisal conditions. The above results indicated that activating the vmPFC could not only facilitate implicit emotion regulation but also reduce early attention distribution to negative stimuli. This study is the first attempt to use the tDCS technique to investigate priming-induced implicit emotion regulation. The results directly reveal the causal relationship between the vmPFC and implicit cognitive reappraisal, suggesting this brain region as a potential target of neural modulation to enhance the ability of implicit emotion regulation in clinical populations.
Peer Review Status:Awaiting Review
Subjects: Psychology >> Cognitive Psychology submitted time 2021-07-23
Abstract： " "
Peer Review Status:Awaiting Review
Subjects: Psychology >> Cognitive Psychology submitted time 2021-01-12
Abstract： Increasing evidence shows that the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (rVLPFC) plays an important role in emotion regulation, especially for social-relevant negative emotions. Negative interpersonal experiences and social events contribute largely to the occurrence of depression. Meanwhile, patients diagnosed with major depressive disorder are characterized by impaired social functions. Previous studies have revealed that depressed patients frequently show impaired emotional regulation for social pain. Recently, the work of our lab found that using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to activate the rVLPFC significantly reduced the subjects’ negative emotional feelings and improved their emotional regulation ability for down-regulating social pain. In order to improve the emotional regulation ability in depressed patients when they are in front of negative social events, this study examined the changed emotional regulation ability in depression following the activation of the rVLPFC using the TMS. A total of 127 patients who were diagnosed with major depressive disorder were recruited in this study. Participants were randomly assigned to experimental (n = 64) or control group (n = 63) while their age, gender, depressive level, social anxious level, rejection sensitivity and empathy ability were counterbalanced between the two groups. During the experiment, the participants were required to view pictures containing social exclusion events or reinterpret the situation using reappraisal strategy, followed by rating their negative emotional feeling on a 9-point scale. The experiment had two conditions, i.e., a passive viewing block and a cognitive reappraisal block. The results showed that the main effect of the task was significant: the negative emotional intensity reported by participants was lower during cognitive reappraisal when compared to that during passive viewing, indicating a successful manipulation of explicit emotional regulation. Meanwhile, the main effect of the group was significant: the negative emotional intensity reported by the experimental group was significantly reduced compared to that reported by the control group, suggesting the critical role of rVLPFC in emotional regulation. More importantly, the interaction between task and group was significant: while the two groups reported comparable distressful feelings during the passive view block, the experimental group reported decreased negative feelings compared to the control group during the cognitive reappraisal block. This result indicated that enhanced activation of the rVLPFC could effectively improve the ability of explicit down-regulating social pain using the cognitive reappraisal strategy in depressed patients. The current findings provide strong evidence for the causal relationship between the VLPFC and explicit emotional regulation using the cognitive reappraisal strategy. Also this study provides a potential neural target for clinical treatments of emotional regulation impairment in patients with social dysfunctions including individuals diagnosed with major depressive disorder, social anxiety disorder, and autism spectrum disorder. Future studies are suggested to use other paradigms (e.g., Cyberball, Chat Rooms, Online Ostracism, and Island Getaway) to induce a “first-hand” social pain and exclude the potential influence of empathy. Furthermore, optimized multi-session TMS protocols are required to enhance and prolong the TMS effects observed in this study. Also, the TMS-based treatment effects in depression should be compared between the left and the right part of the ventrolateral prefrontal cortices, and across different emotional regulation strategies including cognitive reappraisal, distraction, distancing, etc. "
Peer Review Status:Awaiting Review
Subjects: Psychology >> Cognitive Psychology submitted time 2020-09-18
Abstract： "
Peer Review Status:Awaiting Review
Subjects: Psychology >> Cognitive Psychology submitted time 2018-11-19
Abstract： Our ability to process emotional prosody, that is the emotional tone of a speaker, is fundamental to human communication and adaptive behaviours. Very early in development, vocal emotional cues are more critical than facial expressions in guiding infants' behavior. However, the processing of emotional prosody in the very early days of life is still far from clearly understood. It is unclear whether the discrimination between prosodies with different emotional categories is present at birth. Furthermore, it is unknown whether there is a preferential orientation (negativity bias versus positivity preference) in neonates. Here, we used event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine the ability of neonates (from 1 to 6 days old) to discriminate different types of emotions conveyed by speech prosody. The experiment was conducted in the neonatal ward of Peking University First Hospital, Beijing, China. Electroencephalogram recording was carried out when the infants were in a state of active sleep. Using an oddball paradigm, the current study investigated the neural correlates underlying automatic processing of emotional voices of happiness, fear and anger in 18 (Experiment 1) and 29 (Experiment 2) sleeping neonates. In Experiment 1, each category of emotional prosody (20%) was separately mixed into emotionally neutral prosody (80%), forming three blocks with different emotions. In Experiment 2, we not only repeated the procedure of Experiment 1, but also reversed the standard and deviation stimuli in the odd-ball task. Event-related potential data showed that the frontal scalp distribution (F3 and F4) of the neonatal brain could discriminate happy voices from both angry and fearful voices; the mismatch response (MMR) was larger in response to the deviant stimuli of happiness, compared with the deviant stimuli of anger and fear. However, the latter two stimuli, i.e., angry and fearful voices could not be differentiated. The MMR amplitudes at the other four electrodes, i.e., C3, C4, P3, and P4 did not show significant differences across emotional conditions. Note: the MMR is a prototype of the mismatch negativity, i.e. a preattentive component of the auditory ERP that shows a positive (MMR) or negative (MMN) displacement in response to deviant sounds compared to standard sounds in the oddball paradigm. The neural responses recorded here indicate very early preference for positive over negative stimuli, which is contrary to the ‘negativity bias’ phenomenon established in the affective prosody literature of adult and infant studies. It is suggest that the range-frequency hypothesis could help to interpret the transformation from the ‘positivity preference’ during the first half year of life to the ‘negativity bias’ later in development. The present finding provides the first neuroelectrophysiological evidence for the hypothesis of positivity preference in neonatal participants. In addition, this special discrimination between positive and negative prosody in early life may provide a foundation for later emotion and social cognition development. "
Subjects: Psychology >> Other Disciplines of Psychology submitted time 2018-10-26 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract：已有的经颅直流电刺激(transcranial direct current stimulation, tDCS)研究证明, 右腹外侧前额叶(right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, RVLPFC)是社会情绪调节的重要脑区, 激活RVLPFC可显著降低人们对社会性负性情绪体验的强度。社会功能受损是抑郁症患者或抑郁倾向人群的重要特征之一。该群体对社会排斥的敏感性高, 且对负性社会情绪体验的情绪调节能力降低。在本研究中, 我们采用外显的情绪调节任务, 研究了高、低抑郁水平的两组成年人被试在RVLPFC接受阳性tDCS后其情绪调节能力的改变。结果表明, 虽然采用tDCS激活RVLPFC可帮助被试通过情绪调节(认知重评)减弱负性情绪体验, 但高抑郁水平被试的负性情绪强度下降程度明显小于低抑郁水平被试。另外本文还发现, 与源于个人的负性情绪相比, tDCS效应对源于社会的负性情绪(即社会排斥)更强。本研究是采用电或磁刺激提高抑郁人群社会情绪调节能力的首次尝试。实验结果表明, 高抑郁水平成年人的RVLPFC仅通过单次、短时间(34 min)的tDCS激活, 其情绪调节能力并未得到显著提升。这提示对抑郁倾向群体或抑郁症患者的干预或治疗需要多次施加tDCS。
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