Functional neurological symptoms modulate processing of emotionally salient stimuli.

Objective: Dysfunctional emotion processing has been discussed as a contributing factor to functional neurological symptoms (FNS) in the context of conversion disorder, and refers to blunted recognition and the expression of one's own feelings. However, the emotion processing components characteristic for FNS and/or relevant for conversion remain to be specified. With this goal, the present study targeted the initial, automatic discrimination of emotionally salient stimuli.

Emotion regulation and functional neurological symptoms: Does emotion processing convert into sensorimotor activity?

Objective: Functional neurological symptoms (FNS) are hypothetically explained as a shift of emotion processing to sensorimotor deficits, but psychophysiological evidence supporting this hypothesis is scarce. The present study measured neuromagnetic and somatic sensation during emotion regulation to examine frontocortical and sensorimotor activity as signals of altered emotion processing.

Methods: Magnetoencephalographic (MEG) activity was mapped during an emotion regulation task in 20 patients with FNS and 20 healthy comparison participants (HC).

"That pulled the rug out from under my feet!" - adverse experiences and altered emotion processing in patients with functional neurological symptoms compared to healthy comparison subjects.

Background: Medically unexplained movement or sensibility disorders, recently defined in DSM-5 as functional neurological symptoms (FNS), are still insufficiently understood. Stress and trauma have been addressed as relevant factors in FNS genesis. Altered emotion processing has been discussed.

Cross-frequency dynamics of neuromagnetic oscillatory activity: two mechanisms of emotion regulation.

Hemodynamic and electromagnetic neuroimaging suggests a sequence of intraregional and interregional activity during emotion processing. Oscillatory activity within trials may offer insight into neural mechanisms involved in this process. MEG was measured in 24 subjects during passive viewing of neutral and unpleasant pictures and emotion regulation by cognitive reappraisal.

Neuromagnetic indication of dysfunctional emotion regulation in affective disorders.

Dysfunctional emotion regulation is often reported in affective disorders, but it is unclear whether this dysfunction concerns initial processing of emotional input or regulation of resulting emotion. The present study addressed these aspects in 27 depressive and 15 borderline personality disorder patients and 28 healthy controls who were instructed to either passively view unpleasant and neutral pictures or downregulate emotional responses by reappraisal, while neuromagnetic brain activity was measured. All three groups showed more early response to unpleasant than to neutral pictures, whereas patients failed to show subsequent activity suppression under instructions to down-regulate.

Distinct cognitive mechanisms in a gambling task share neural mechanisms.

Distinct psychological processes have been proposed to unfold in decision-making. The time course of neural mechanisms supporting these processes has not been fully identified. The present MEG study examined spatio-temporal activity related to components of decision-making proposed to support reward valuation, reward prediction, and outcome evaluation.