Observer-generated maps of diagnostic facial features enable categorization and prediction of emotion expressions.

According to one prominent model, facial expressions of emotion can be categorized into depicting happiness, disgust, anger, sadness, fear and surprise. One open question is which facial features observers use to recognize the different expressions and whether the features indicated by observers can be used to predict which expression they saw. We created fine-grained maps of diagnostic facial features by asking participants to use mouse clicks to highlight those parts of a face that they deem useful for recognizing its expression.

Amygdala and cortical gamma-band responses to emotional faces are modulated by attention to valence.

The amygdala might support an attentional bias for emotional faces. However, whether and how selective attention toward a specific valence modulates this bias is not fully understood. Likewise, it is unclear whether amygdala and cortical signals respond to emotion and attention in a similar way.

MRI evidence for material-specific encoding deficits and mesial-temporal alterations in presurgical frontal lobe epilepsy patients.

Objective: Neuroimaging studies reveal frontal lobe (FL) contributions to memory encoding. Accordingly, memory impairments are documented in frontal lobe epilepsy (FLE). Still, little is known about the structural or functional correlates of such impairments.

The effect of neural pre-stimulus oscillations on post-stimulus somatosensory event-related potentials in disorders of consciousness.

Brain activity of people in a disorder of consciousness (DoC) is diffuse and different from healthy people. In order to get a better understanding of their cognitive processes and functions, electroencephalographic activity has often been examined in patients with DoC, including detection of event-related potentials (ERPs) and spectral power analysis. However, the relationship between pre-stimulus oscillations and post-stimulus ERPs has rarely been explored in DoC, although it is known from healthy participants that pre-stimulus oscillations predispose subsequent stimulus detection.

Hemodynamic correlates of emotion regulation in frontal lobe epilepsy patients and healthy participants.

The ability to regulate emotions is indispensable for maintaining psychological health. It heavily relies on frontal lobe functions which are disrupted in frontal lobe epilepsy. Accordingly, emotional dysregulation and use of maladaptive emotion regulation strategies have been reported in frontal lobe epilepsy patients.

Different ways to forget: Electrophysiological mechanisms underlying item-method directed forgetting of angry and neutral faces.

Emotional stimuli, including faces, receive preferential processing and are consequently better remembered than neutral stimuli. Therefore, they may also be more resistant to intentional forgetting. The present study investigates the behavioral and electrophysiological consequences of instructions to selectively remember or forget angry and neutral faces.

Emotion and attention in face processing: Complementary evidence from surface event-related potentials and intracranial amygdala recordings.

Face processing is biased by emotional and voluntarily directed attention, both of which modulate processing in distributed cortical areas. The amygdala is assumed to contribute to an attentional bias for emotional faces, although its interaction with directed attention awaits further clarification. Here, we studied the interaction of emotion and attention during face processing via scalp EEG potentials of healthy participants and intracranial EEG (iEEG) recordings of the right amygdala in one patient.

Effects of left and right medial temporal lobe resections on hemodynamic correlates of negative and neutral scene processing.

Enhanced visual cortex activation by negative compared to neutral stimuli is often attributed to modulating feedback from the amygdala, but evidence from lesion studies is scarce, particularly regarding differential effects of left and right amygdala lesions. Therefore, we compared visual cortex activation by negative and neutral complex scenes in an event-related fMRI study between 40 patients with unilateral temporal lobe resection (TLR; 19 left [lTLR], 21 right [rTLR]), including the amygdala, and 20 healthy controls. We found preserved hemodynamic emotion modulation of visual cortex in rTLR patients and only subtle reductions in lTLR patients.

Encoding in a social feedback context enhances and biases behavioral and electrophysiological correlates of long-term recognition memory.

Encoding often occurs in social contexts, yet research has hardly addressed their role in verbal memory. In three experiments, we investigated the behavioral and neural effects of encoding context on memory for positive, negative, and neutral adjectives, contrasting a social-feedback group (N = 24) with an explicit verbal-learning (N = 24) and a levels-of-processing group (N = 24). Participants in the social-feedback group were not aware of a recognition session one week later, but their memory was better than the explicit learning or the levels-of-processing groups'.

Different Patterns of Attention Modulation in Early N140 and Late P300 sERPs Following Ipsilateral vs. Contralateral Stimulation at the Fingers and Cheeks.

Intra-hemispheric interference has been often observed when body parts with neighboring representations within the same hemisphere are stimulated. However, patterns of interference in early and late somatosensory processing stages due to the stimulation of different body parts have not been explored. Here, we explore functional similarities and differences between attention modulation of the somatosensory N140 and P300 elicited at the fingers vs.

Right medial temporal lobe structures particularly impact early stages of affective picture processing.

Human vision prioritizes emotional stimuli. This is reflected in stronger electrocortical activation in response to emotional than neutral stimuli, measurable on the surface of the head. Feedback projections from brain structures deep within the medial temporal lobes (mTLs), in particular the amygdala, are thought to give rise to this phenomenon, although causal evidence is rare.

Whole-brain functional correlates of memory formation in mesial temporal lobe epilepsy.

The mesial temporal lobe is a key region for episodic memory. Accordingly, memory impairment is frequent in patients with mesial temporal lobe epilepsy. However, the functional relevance of potentially epilepsy-induced reorganisation for memory formation is still not entirely clear.

Mood Induction Differently Affects Early Neural Correlates of Evaluative Word Processing in L1 and L2.

We investigate how mood inductions impact the neural processing of emotional adjectives in one's first language (L1) and a formally acquired second language (L2). Twenty-three student participants took part in an EEG experiment with two separate sessions. Happy or sad mood inductions were followed by series of individually presented positive, negative, or neutral adjectives in L1 (German) or L2 (English) and evaluative decisions had to be performed.

Investigating the roles of age, sex, depression, and anxiety for valence and arousal ratings of words: a population-based study.

Background: The perception of the affective quality of stimuli with regard to valence and arousal has mostly been studied in laboratory experiments. Population-based research may complement such studies by accessing larger, older, better balanced, and more heterogeneous samples. Several characteristics, among them age, sex, depression, or anxiety, were found to be associated with affective quality perception.

Negative content enhances stimulus-specific cerebral activity during free viewing of pictures, faces, and words.

Negative visual stimuli have been found to elicit stronger brain activation than do neutral stimuli. Such emotion effects have been shown for pictures, faces, and words alike, but the literature suggests stimulus-specific differences regarding locus and lateralization of the activity. In the current functional magnetic resonance imaging study, we directly compared brain responses to passively viewed negative and neutral pictures of complex scenes, faces, and words (nouns) in 43 healthy participants (21 males) varying in age and demographic background.

Rhinal and hippocampal contributions to spontaneous inter-item binding and verbal memory recall: Evidence from temporal lobe epilepsy.

The medial temporal lobes (MTL) play a prominent role in associative memory processing. Still, it is unclear to what extent specific structures within the MTL sub-serve distinct aspects of associative memory. Here, the role of the MTL in forming spontaneous associations in a "naturalistic" setting is investigated applying a word-list memory test not presenting items in an associative fashion.

A tree of life? Multivariate logistic outcome-prediction in disorders of consciousness.

: Clinical outcome of patients with disorders of consciousness (DOC) is seen as generally very poor. Here, we specify individual outcome chances for patients with DOC on the basis of clinical and event-related-potentials (ERPs) data and identify subgroups, who vary substantially regarding their outcome chances.: We employed data from 102 patients and used standard clinical protocol data (age, etiology, diagnosis, gender), sensory (N100, Mismatch-Negativity) and cognitive (P300, N400) ERPs to predict patients' recovery rates.

Attending to Eliza: rapid brain responses reflect competence attribution in virtual social feedback processing.

In the age of virtual communication, the source of a message is often inferred rather than perceived, raising the question of how sender attributions affect content processing. We investigated this issue in an evaluative feedback scenario. Participants were told that an expert psychotherapist, a layperson or a randomly acting computer was going to give them online positive, neutral or negative personality feedback while high-density EEG was recorded.

Emotion in Context: How Sender Predictability and Identity Affect Processing of Words as Imminent Personality Feedback.

Recent findings suggest that communicative context affects the timing and magnitude of emotion effects in word processing. In particular, social attributions seem to be one important source of plasticity for the processing of affectively charged language. Here, we investigate the timing and magnitude of ERP responses toward positive, neutral, and negative trait adjectives during the anticipation of putative socio-evaluative feedback from different senders (human and computer) varying in predictability.

[… and Riding as Well? Case Report about the Treatment of an Infant with Unresponsive Wakefulness Syndrome].

Background: There is a growing number of children surviving birth complications with severe, multiple disabilities. Unfortunately, this is not paralleled by equal growth in knowledge about adequate therapeutic approaches. Some publications showed that Hippotherapy could, under certain circumstances, be a very useful complimentary therapy for a range of disabilities.

The causal role of prefrontal hemispheric asymmetry in valence processing of words - Insights from a combined cTBS-MEG study.

Hemispheric asymmetries play an important role in multiple cerebral functions. Asymmetries in prefrontal cortex (PFC) function have been suggested to regulate emotional processing in that right-hemispheric dominance biases towards negative affect, whereas left PFC dominance favors positive affect. This study used transcranial magnetic stimulation to test the causal role of prefrontal asymmetries in the processing of emotional stimuli.

A problem shared is a problem halved? Comparing burdens arising for family caregivers of patients with disorders of consciousness in institutionalized versus at home care.

Background: Disorders-of-consciousness (DOC) are rare conditions leading to very severe physical and mental disabilities. Providing care for DOC patients has been described as a stressful experience, eroding the physical and psychological health of the caregiver. Different forms of care may have different impacts on the caregivers and institutionalized care has been suggested to have an unburdening effect, but this possibility has never been empirically studied.

Frequency Band Variations Predict EEG Single-Trial Classification Performance in Disorder of Consciousness Patients.

Single-trial classification of EEG data from Disorder of Consciousness patients (DoC) has proved particularly challenging. We present an approach that establishes a measure to relate the performance of single-trial classification of DoC patient EEG data with relational frequency bands and thus with their mental state. We evaluate our approach on 31 patient data sets from two studies, showing that our measure indicates for different data sets a particular likelihood for misclassifying either target or non-target class samples.

Attributed social context and emotional content recruit frontal and limbic brain regions during virtual feedback processing.

In communication, who is communicating can be just as important as what is said. However, sender identity in virtual communication is often inferred rather than perceived. Therefore, the present research investigates the brain structures activated by sender identity attributions and evaluative feedback processing during virtual communication.