Individual differences in the evaluation of ambiguous visual and auditory threat-related expressions.

This study investigated the neural correlates of the judgement of auditory and visual ambiguous threat-related information, and the influence of state anxiety on this process. Healthy subjects were scanned using a fast, high-resolution functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) multiband sequence while they performed a two-alternative forced-choice emotion judgement task on faces and vocal utterances conveying explicit anger or fear, as well as ambiguous ones. Critically, the latter was specific to each subject, obtained through a morphing procedure and selected prior to scanning following a perceptual decision-making task.

Social Prescription Interventions Addressing Social Isolation and Loneliness in Older Adults: Meta-Review Integrating On-the-Ground Resources.

Background: Social prescription programs represent a viable solution to linking primary care patients to nonmedical community resources for improving patient well-being. However, their success depends on the integration of patient needs with local resources. This integration could be accelerated by digital tools that use expressive ontology to organize knowledge resources, thus enabling the seamless navigation of diverse community interventions and services tailored to the needs of individual users.

Emotion regulation in bipolar disorder type-I: multivariate analysis of fMRI data.

Background: Bipolar disorder type-I (BD-I) patients are known to show emotion regulation abnormalities. In a previous fMRI study using an explicit emotion regulation paradigm, we compared responses from 19 BD-I patients and 17 matched healthy controls (HC). A standard general linear model-based univariate analysis revealed that BD patients showed increased activations in inferior frontal gyrus when instructed to decrease their emotional response as elicited by neutral images.

Preliminary Real-World Evidence Supporting the Efficacy of a Remote Neurofeedback System in Improving Mental Health: Retrospective Single-Group Pretest-Posttest Study.

Background: Neurofeedback training (NFT) has been shown to be effective in treating several disorders (eg, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder [ADHD], anxiety, and depression); however, little is currently known regarding the effectiveness of remote NFT systems.

Objective: This retrospective study provides real-world data (N=593) to assess the efficacy of app-based remote NFT in improving brain health and cognitive performance.

Methods: Improvement was measured from pre- to postintervention of in-app assessments that included validated symptom questionnaires (the 12-item General Health Questionnaire, the ADHD Rating Scale IV, the Adult ADHD Self-Report Scale, the 7-item Generalized Anxiety Disorder scale, and the 9-item Patient Health Questionnaire), a cognitive test of attention and executive functioning (ie, continuous performance task), and resting electroencephalography (EEG) markers.

Intra-individual Reliability of Voice- and Music-elicited Responses and their Modulation by Expertise.

A growing number of functional neuroimaging studies have identified regions within the temporal lobe, particularly along the planum polare and planum temporale, that respond more strongly to music than other types of acoustic stimuli, including voice. This "music preferred" regions have been reported using a variety of stimulus sets, paradigms and analysis approaches and their consistency across studies confirmed through meta-analyses. However, the critical question of intra-subject reliability of these responses has received less attention.

Multivariate fMRI pattern analysis of fear perception across modalities.

The emotional expression of fear can be processed through a number of modalities, and of varying forms, however, much of the functional imaging literature has centered on investigating fear as expressed through faces. Findings point to an active involvement of the amygdala, and remain fairly consistent in other studies of unimodal fear perception; however, few studies have looked at within-subject cross-modal responses to fear. Thus, we approached this inquiry by testing 30 healthy young adults with fast, high-resolution fMRI, recording the neural responses of fear perception, as expressed through faces, bodies, prosody, and vocalizations.

Singing in the brain: Neural representation of music and voice as revealed by fMRI.

The ubiquity of music across cultures as a means of emotional expression, and its proposed evolutionary relation to speech, motivated researchers to attempt a characterization of its neural representation. Several neuroimaging studies have reported that specific regions in the anterior temporal lobe respond more strongly to music than to other auditory stimuli, including spoken voice. Nonetheless, because most studies have employed instrumental music, which has important acoustic distinctions from human voice, questions still exist as to the specificity of the observed "music-preferred" areas.

Portable eyetracking-based assessment of memory decline.

Introduction: Preferential viewing of novel stimuli in the Visual Paired Comparison task has provided a useful marker of memory and medial temporal lobe function. We created a portable version of the VPC (P-VPC) and contrasted P-VPC metrics against the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) in healthy adults, to assess the validity and reliability of the P-VPC as an indicator of memory function across age. A supplementary case series was conducted with individuals diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and other dementias, to provide a preliminary illustration of the P-VPC's use as a measure in clinical populations.

Focus group reflections on the current and future state of cognitive assessment tools in geriatric health care.

Objective: This study provides insight into the thoughts and opinions of geriatric health-care professionals toward cognitive assessments and the use of emerging technologies, such as eye-tracking, to supplement current tools.

Methods: Two focus group sessions were conducted with nurses and physicians who routinely administer neurocognitive assessments to geriatric populations. Video recordings of the focus group sessions were transcribed and a thematic analysis was performed.

A clinical frailty index in aging mice: comparisons with frailty index data in humans.

We previously quantified frailty in aged mice with frailty index (FI) that used specialized equipment to measure health parameters. Here we developed a simplified, noninvasive method to quantify frailty through clinical assessment of C57BL/6J mice (5-28 months) and compared the relationship between FI scores and age in mice and humans. FIs calculated with the original performance-based eight-item FI increased from 0.