Electrophysiological Correlates of Amplified Emotion-Related Cognitive Processing Evoked by Self-Administered Disgust Images.

In the processing of emotions, the brain prepares and reacts in distinctive manners depending upon the negative or positive nuance of the emotion elicitors. Previous investigations showed that negative elicitors generally evoke more intense neural activities than positive and neutral ones, as reflected in the augmented amplitude of all sub-components of the event-related potentials (ERP) late posterior positivity (LPP) complex, while less is known about the emotion of disgust. The present study aimed to examine whether the LPP complex during the processing of disgust stimuli showed greater amplitude than other emotion elicitors with negative or positive valences, thus confirming it as a neural marker of disgust-related negativity bias at earlier or later stages.

The temporal coupling effect: Preparation and execution of bimanual reaching movements.

The study of bimanual movements has allowed to describe an interesting phenomenon known as the bimanual coupling effect: a lack of independence between the two hands that induces an interference process, which has been reported in both the spatial and temporal domain. Here, we studied for the first time the electro-cortical activity of the temporal bimanual coupling effect, specifically focused on the motor preparation of the two hands movements. Participants performed congruent movements, with both hands heading towards easy or difficult targets, and incongruent movements, with the two hands heading to separate targets (i.

Getting ready for an emotion: specific premotor brain activities for self-administered emotional pictures.

Emotional perception has been extensively studied, but only a few studies have investigated the brain activity preceding exposure to emotional stimuli, especially when they are triggered by the subject himself. Here, we sought to investigate the emotional expectancy by means of movement related cortical potentials (MRCPs) in a self-paced task, in which the subjects begin the affective experience by pressing a key. In this experiment, participants had to alternatively press two keys to concomitantly display positive, negative, neutral, and scrambled images extracted from the International Affective Pictures System (IAPS).

Modulation of spontaneous alpha brain rhythms using low-intensity transcranial direct-current stimulation.

Transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS) is a form of neurostimulation in which a constant, low current is delivered directly to the brain area of interest by small electrodes. The overall aim of this study was to examine and monitor the modulation of brain activity by electroencephalogram (EEG) in the frequency domain during tDCS in the resting state. To this end, we considered the modulation of spontaneous EEG to be a marker of the perturbation that was induced through the direct current (1.

Right but not left angular gyrus modulates the metric component of the mental body representation: a tDCS study.

The parietal lobes contribute to body-space representation. The present work aims at characterizing the functional role of the inferior parietal lobe in body-space representation and at studying the different roles of the angular gyrus in the right and left hemisphere. We conducted three separate transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) experiments using "tactile distance task" as an implicit measure of body representation.

Plasticity of body representations after surgical arm elongation in an achondroplasic patient.

Purpose: A realistic body representation needs to be constantly updated. In case of physiological modifications, body representations integrate information coming from different sensory sources, including the sense of touch. Previous studies described transient modifications of these representations following illusory distortions.