Background: Positive touch experiences have proved to be extremely important throughout our lifespan, with cascading effects on our social life. However, few questionnaires are available to measure attitudes and experiences of touch in the Portuguese population. This study aimed to translate and validate the European Portuguese version of the Touch Experiences and Attitudes Questionnaire (TEAQ), as a reliable and valid instrument to measure different aspects of affective touch experiences and attitudes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTranscranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over the primary motor cortex (M1) and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex seem to improve pain and other symptoms of fibromyalgia (FM), although the evidence on the effectiveness of tDCS and the optimal stimulation target is not robust enough. Our main objective was to establish the optimal area of stimulation, comparing the 2 classical targets and a novel pain-related area, the operculo-insular cortex, in a sham-controlled trial. Using a double-blind design, we randomly assigned 130 women with FM to 4 treatment groups (M1, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, operculo-insular cortex, and sham), each receiving fifteen 20-minute sessions of 2 mA anodal tDCS over the left hemisphere.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFibromyalgia (FM) is a chronic condition characterized by widespread pain of unknown etiology associated with alterations in the central nervous system. Although previous studies demonstrated altered patterns of brain activity during pain processing in patients with FM, alterations in spontaneous brain oscillations, in terms of functional connectivity or microstates, have been barely explored so far. Here we recorded the EEG from 43 patients with FM and 51 healthy controls during open-eyes resting-state.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: Fibromyalgia (FM) is a generalized chronic pain condition associated with multiple cognitive impairments, including altered inhibitory processes. Inhibition is a key component of human executive functions and shares neural substrate with pain processing, which may explain the inhibitory deficits in FM. Here, we investigated the integrity of brain inhibitory mechanisms in these patients.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Cognitive dysfunction in fibromyalgia (FM) encompasses objective cognitive difficulties, as measured in neuropsychological tests, and self-reported cognitive complaints. Although it has been suggested that FM patients display problems in working memory, the data are inconsistent, and the overall working memory status of the patients is unclear. It is also not clear whether the working memory problems are related to cognitive complaints or how the dyscognition is affected by the characteristic clinical symptoms of FM.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFibromyalgia (FM) is a chronic syndrome involving widespread pain of unclear pathophysiology. FM patients frequently complain about cognitive symptoms that interfere with their daily life activities. Several studies have reported attentional deficits and working memory impairment in FM patients.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Multisource Interference Task (MSIT) was developed to test cognitive control in normal and pathological conditions and has become a reliable tool for exploring the integrity of cingulo-frontal-parietal cognitive/attentional networks in fMRI studies. Analysis of EEG recordings made during performance of the MSIT may provide additional information about the temporal dynamics of cognitive control. However, this has not yet been investigated in depth.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEarly neuroimaging and electrophysiological studies suggested that motor imagery recruited a different network than motor execution. However, several studies have provided evidence for the involvement of the same circuits in motor imagery tasks, in the absence of overt responses. The present study aimed to test whether imagined performance of a stop-signal task produces a similar pattern of motor-related EEG activity than that observed during real performance.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIt has been suggested that mental rehearsal activates brain areas similar to those activated by real performance. Although inhibition is a key function of human behavior, there are no previous reports of brain activity during imagined response cancellation. We analyzed event-related potentials (ERPs) and time-frequency data associated with motor execution and inhibition during real and imagined performance of a stop-signal task.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: To assess the discriminative power of several symptoms and domains that may assist in the diagnosis of subjects with Fibromyalgia (FM).
Methods: 79 individuals with FM and 66 healthy controls participated in the study. The potential domains proposed by the American College of Rheumatology (ACR) criteria were considered (Wolfe et al.
Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci
September 2014
Although there is evidence for preferential perceptual processing of written emotional information, the effects of attentional manipulations and the time course of affective processing require further clarification. In this study, we attempted to investigate how the emotional content of words modulates cerebral functioning (event-related potentials, ERPs) and behavior (reaction times, RTs) when the content is task-irrelevant (emotional Stroop Task, EST) or task-relevant (emotional categorization task, ECT), in a sample of healthy middle-aged women. In the EST, the RTs were longer for emotional words than for neutral words, and in the ECT, they were longer for neutral and negative words than for positive words.
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