Neuroimaging and serum biomarkers of neurodegeneration and neuroplasticity in Parkinson's disease patients treated by intermittent theta-burst stimulation over the bilateral primary motor area: a randomized, double-blind, sham-controlled, crossover trial study.

Background And Objectives: Intermittent theta-burst stimulation (iTBS) is a patterned form of excitatory transcranial magnetic stimulation that has yielded encouraging results as an adjunctive therapeutic option to alleviate the emergence of clinical deficits in Parkinson's disease (PD) patients. Although it has been demonstrated that iTBS influences dopamine-dependent corticostriatal plasticity, little research has examined the neurobiological mechanisms underlying iTBS-induced clinical enhancement. Here, our primary goal is to verify whether iTBS bilaterally delivered over the primary motor cortex (M1) is effective as an add-on treatment at reducing scores for both motor functional impairment and nonmotor symptoms in PD.

Aversive memory formation in humans involves an amygdala-hippocampus phase code.

Memory for aversive events is central to survival but can become maladaptive in psychiatric disorders. Memory enhancement for emotional events is thought to depend on amygdala modulation of hippocampal activity. However, the neural dynamics of amygdala-hippocampal communication during emotional memory encoding remain unknown.

Menstrual cycle and exogenous attention toward emotional expressions.

Several studies suggest that the menstrual cycle affects emotional processing. However, these results may be biased by including women with premenstrual syndrome (PMS) in the samples. PMS is characterized by negative emotional symptomatology, such as depression and/or anxiety, during the luteal phase.

Exogenous Attention to Emotional Stimuli Presenting Realistic (3D) Looming Motion.

Previous research shows that dynamic stimuli, on the one hand, and emotional stimuli, on the other, capture exogenous attention due to their biological relevance. Through neural (ERPs) and behavioral measures (reaction times and errors), the present study explored the combined effect of looming motion and emotional content on attentional capture. To this end, 3D-recreated static and dynamic animals assessed as emotional (positive or negative) or neutral were presented as distractors while 71 volunteers performed a line orientation task.

Enhanced N170 to outgroup faces: Perceptual novelty or prejudice?

Habituation to ethnic ingroup members has been reported to be greater than to ethnic outgroup members. This pattern could be due to the lack of perceptive experience (familiarity) with outgroup facial morphs or, alternatively, to the prejudice held toward that outgroup. We explored this disjunctive in 71 participants, all Spanish, who were experimentally habituated to faces from their Ingroup and to faces from two unfamiliar outgroups, one for which there is low probability of prejudice in this population (Non-prejudiced Outgroup), and one for which the probability of prejudice is higher (Prejudiced Outgroup).

Realistic (3D) looming of emotional visual stimuli: Attentional effects at neural and behavioral levels.

Previous research shows that endogenous attention (the controlled selection of certain aspects of our environment) is enhanced toward emotional stimuli due to its biological relevance. Although looming affective stimuli such as threat seem even more critical for survival, little is known about their effect on endogenous attention. Here, we recorded neural (event-related potentials, ERPs) and behavioral responses (errors and reaction times) to explore the combined effect of emotion and looming motion.

Temporal dynamics of amygdala response to emotion- and action-relevance.

It has been proposed that the human amygdala may not only encode the emotional value of sensory events, but more generally mediate the appraisal of their relevance for the individual's goals, including relevance for action or task-based needs. However, emotional and non-emotional/action-relevance might drive amygdala activity through distinct neural signals, and the relative timing of both kinds of responses remains undetermined. Here, we recorded intracranial event-related potentials from nine amygdalae of patients undergoing epilepsy surgery, while they performed variants of a Go/NoGo task with faces and abstract shapes, where emotion- and action-relevance were orthogonally manipulated.

Prejudice drives exogenous attention to outgroups.

Exogenous attention allows the automatic detection of relevant stimuli and the reorientation of our current focus of attention towards them. Faces from an ethnic outgroup tend to capture exogenous attention to a greater extent than faces from an ethnic ingroup. We explored whether prejudice toward the outgroup, rather than lack of familiarity, is driving this effect.

Retinotopy of emotion: Perception of negatively valenced stimuli presented at different spatial locations as revealed by event-related potentials.

Scarce previous data on how the location where an emotional stimulus appears in the visual scene modulates its perception suggest that, for functional reasons, a perceptual advantage may exist, vertically, for stimuli presented at the lower visual field (LoVF) and, horizontally, for stimuli presented at the left visual field (LeVF). However, this issue has been explored through a limited number of spatial locations, usually in a single spatial dimension (e.g.

Human amygdala response to unisensory and multisensory emotion input: No evidence for superadditivity from intracranial recordings.

The amygdala is crucially implicated in processing emotional information from various sensory modalities. However, there is dearth of knowledge concerning the integration and relative time-course of its responses across different channels, i.e.

Neurophysiological evidence for early modulation of amygdala activity by emotional reappraisal.

How emotions unfold through time in the brain, and how fast they can be regulated by voluntary control, remain unresolved. Psychological accounts of emotion regulation posit cognitive reappraisal mechanisms may alter early emotion generative processes directly, whereas suppression impacts only later processing stages, after emotion has arisen. However, to date, there is no neurophysiological data concerning the precise latency of emotion regulation effects on the amygdala, a major emotion processing relay in the brain.

Ultrafast Cortical Gain Adaptation in the Human Brain by Trial-To-Trial Changes of Associative Strength in Fear Learning.

In fear conditioning, more efficient sensory processing of a stimulus (the conditioned stimulus, CS) that has acquired motivational relevance by being paired with an aversive event (the unconditioned stimulus, US) has been associated with increased cortical gain in early sensory brain areas (Miskovic and Keil, 2012). Further, this sensory gain modulation related to short-term plasticity changes occurs independently of aware cognitive anticipation of the aversive US, pointing toward implicit learning mechanisms (Moratti and Keil, 2009). However, it is unknown how quickly the implicit learning of CS-US associations results in the adaptation of cortical gain.

Conditioned inhibitory and excitatory gain modulations of visual cortex in fear conditioning: Effects of analysis strategies of magnetocortical responses.

In unpredictable environments, stimuli that predict potential danger or its absence can change rapidly. Therefore, it is highly adaptive to prioritize incoming sensory information flexibly as a function of prior experience. Previously, these changes have only been conceptualized as excitatory gain increases in sensory cortices for acquired fear-relevant stimuli during associative learning.

A fast pathway for fear in human amygdala.

A fast, subcortical pathway to the amygdala is thought to have evolved to enable rapid detection of threat. This pathway's existence is fundamental for understanding nonconscious emotional responses, but has been challenged as a result of a lack of evidence for short-latency fear-related responses in primate amygdala, including humans. We recorded human intracranial electrophysiological data and found fast amygdala responses, beginning 74-ms post-stimulus onset, to fearful, but not neutral or happy, facial expressions.

Dynamic gamma frequency feedback coupling between higher and lower order visual cortices underlies perceptual completion in humans.

To perceive a coherent environment, incomplete or overlapping visual forms must be integrated into meaningful coherent percepts, a process referred to as "Gestalt" formation or perceptual completion. Increasing evidence suggests that this process engages oscillatory neuronal activity in a distributed neuronal assembly. A separate line of evidence suggests that Gestalt formation requires top-down feedback from higher order brain regions to early visual cortex.

Priming effects on the N400 in the affective priming paradigm with facial expressions of emotion.

We studied the effect of facial expression primes on the evaluation of target words through a variant of the affective priming paradigm. In order to make the affective valence of the faces irrelevant to the task, the participants were assigned a double prime-target task in which they were unpredictably asked either to identify the gender of the face or to evaluate whether the word was pleasant or unpleasant. Behavioral and electrophysiological (event-related potential, or ERP) indices of affective priming were analyzed.

High arousal words influence subsequent processing of neutral information: evidence from event-related potentials.

Recent data suggest that word valence modulates subsequent cognitive processing. However, the contribution of word arousal is less understood. In this study, behavioral and electrophysiological measures to neutral nouns and pseudowords that were preceded by either a high-arousal or a low-arousal word were recorded during a lexical decision task.

Early effects of emotion on word immediate repetition priming: electrophysiological and source localization evidence.

The processing of a stimulus benefits from the previous exposure of an identical stimulus, which is known as immediate repetition priming (IRP). Although several experimental manipulations modulate the size of this effect, the influence of affective information is still unclear. In order to explore the temporo-spatial characteristics of the interaction between emotion and IRP, event-related potentials (ERPs) to negative and neutral target words were measured during a lexical decision task in an IRP paradigm.

Word frequency modulates the processing of emotional words: convergent behavioral and electrophysiological data.

The processing of high frequency (HF) words is speeded as compared to the processing of low frequency (LF) words, which is known as the word frequency effect. This effect has been suggested to occur at either a lexical access or in a decision processing stage. Previous work has shown that word frequency influenced the processing of emotional content at both neural and behavioral levels.

Emotion modulates language production during covert picture naming.

Previous studies have shown that emotional content modulates the activity of several components of the event-related potentials during word comprehension. However, little is known about the impact of affective information on the different processing stages involved in word production. In the present study we aimed to investigate the influence of positive and negative emotions in phonological encoding, a process that have been shown to take place between 300 and 450 ms in previous studies.

Looking at emotional words is not the same as reading emotional words: Behavioral and neural correlates.

Recent research suggests that the allocation of attentional resources to emotional content during word processing might be sensitive to task requirements. This question was investigated in two tasks with similar instructions. The stimuli were positive, negative, and neutral nouns.

Electrophysiological differences in the processing of affective information in words and pictures.

It is generally assumed that affective picture viewing is related to higher levels of physiological arousal than is the reading of emotional words. However, this assertion is based mainly on studies in which the processing of either words or pictures has been investigated under heterogenic conditions. Positive, negative, relaxing, neutral, and background (stimulus fragments) words and pictures were presented to subjects in two experiments under equivalent experimental conditions.

Arousal contributions to affective priming: electrophysiological correlates.

Current models of affective processing postulate that not only valence but also the arousal dimension characterizes the emotional experience. However, up-to-date research on affective priming has mainly focused on the contributions of valence congruency to priming. In this study, the authors explored the possible influence of arousal in priming processes.