Neuropsychobiological Fingerprints of Chronic Fatigue in Sarcoidosis.

Background: Chronic fatigue is a prominent symptom in many sarcoidosis patients, affecting quality of life and interfering with treatment. This study investigated neuropsychobiological mechanisms and markers of chronic fatigue in sarcoidosis.

Methods: Thirty patients with a histological diagnosis of sarcoidosis were included.

Neurobiobehavioral responses to virtual social rejection in females-exploring the influence of oxytocin.

In recent years, especially adolescents and young adults interact frequently via social media and digital communication. Mimicking an online communication platform where participants could initiate short conversations with two computerized interlocutors, the Verbal Interaction Social Threat Task (VISTTA) was used to induce feelings of social rejection. Motivational and physiological reactions were investigated in 43 healthy young women undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), of which 22 received 24 international units (IU) intranasal oxytocin and 21 received placebo.

The Association Between Vulnerable/Grandiose Narcissism and Emotion Regulation.

Narcissism has been widely discussed in the context of career success and leadership. Besides several adaptive traits, narcissism has been characterized by difficulties in emotion regulation. However, despite its essential role in mental health, there is little research on emotion regulation processes in narcissism.

A Short Empathy Paradigm to Assess Empathic Deficits in Schizophrenia.

Empathy is important for successful social interaction and maintaining relationships. Several studies detected impairments in empathic abilities in schizophrenia, with some even indicating a broader deficit in several components, including emotion recognition, perspective taking, and affective responsiveness. The aim of our study was to validate a short version of the previous empathy paradigm as a reliable and easily applicable method to assess empathic deficits in patients with schizophrenia potentially within clinical routine.

Serum Testosterone and Cortisol Concentrations After Single-Dose Administration of 100-Mg Transdermal Testosterone in Healthy Men.

The growing interest in testosterone's effects on men's social behaviors, in particular aggressive, risk-taking, or status maintenance behaviors, is accompanied by a paucity of dose-dependent pharmacokinetic data. Examining the neurophysiological effects of transdermal testosterone typically includes a 4h delay before further brain-behavior measurements. Nevertheless, high heterogeneity regarding the timing of follow-up measurements and dosage remains.

The Verbal Interaction Social Threat Task: A New Paradigm Investigating the Effects of Social Rejection in Men and Women.

In recent years, digital communication and social media have taken an indispensable role in human society. Social interactions are no longer bound to real-life encounters, but more often happen from behind a screen. Mimicking an online communication platform, we developed a new, fMRI compatible, social threat paradigm to investigate sex differences in reactions to social rejection.

Attention control and its emotion-specific association with cognitive emotion regulation in depression.

Individuals with major depression show impaired control of attention and emotions. Both processes are conceptually similar and might share common mechanisms. The current study aims to examine attention control and its association with cognitive emotion regulation in depression.

The regulation of positive and negative emotions through instructed causal attributions in lifetime depression - A functional magnetic resonance imaging study.

Adequate emotional control is essential for mental health. Deficiencies in emotion regulation are evident in many psychiatric disorders, including depression. Patients with depression show, for instance, disrupted neural emotion regulation in cognitive regulation regions such as lateral and medial prefrontal cortices.

Genetic and epigenetic regulatory mechanisms of the oxytocin receptor gene (OXTR) and the (clinical) implications for social behavior.

Oxytocin and the oxytocin receptor (OXTR) play an important role in a large variety of social behaviors. The oxytocinergic system interacts with environmental cues and is highly dependent on interindividual factors. Deficits in this system have been linked to mental disorders associated with social impairments, such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

Implicit and Explicit Motivational Tendencies to Faces Varying in Trustworthiness and Dominance in Men.

Motivational tendencies to happy and angry faces are well-established, e.g., in the form of aggression.

Electrophysiological correlates of oxytocin-induced enhancement of social performance monitoring.

Altered performance monitoring has been demonstrated after administration of different pharmacological compounds and in various clinical populations, such as excessive neurophysiological responses to mistakes in anxiety disorders. Here, a novel social pharmacological approach was applied to investigate whether oxytocin administration (24 IU) enhances performance monitoring for errors that have negative consequences for another individual, so-called social mistakes. Healthy male volunteers (N = 24) participated in a placebo-controlled crossover design.

Blunted insula activation reflects increased risk and reward seeking as an interaction of testosterone administration and the MAOA polymorphism.

Testosterone, a male sex hormone, has been suggested to partly explain mixed findings in males and females when investigating behavioral tendencies associated with the MAOA polymorphism. Prior studies indicated that the MAOA polymorphism represents a vulnerability factor for financial risk-taking and harm avoidance and that testosterone increases human risk-taking. We therefore assumed an interactive influence of the MAOA polymorphism and testosterone application on decision making and corresponding neural correlates in a risk and reward context.

Exogenous testosterone decreases men's personal distance in a social threat context.

Background: Testosterone can motivate human approach and avoidance behavior. Specifically, the conscious recognition of and implicit reaction to angry facial expressions is influenced by testosterone. The study tested whether exogenous testosterone modulates the personal distance (PD) humans prefer in a social threat context.

Imaging the up's and down's of emotion regulation in lifetime depression.

Reappraisal is a particularly effective strategy for influencing emotional experiences, specifically for reducing the impact of negative stimuli. Although depression has repeatedly been linked to dysfunctional behavioral and neural emotion regulation, prefrontal and amygdala engagement seems to vary with clinical characteristics and the specific regulation strategy used. Whereas previous neuroimaging research has focused on down-regulating reactions to emotionally evocative scenes, the current study compared up- and down-regulation in response to angry facial expressions in patients with depression and healthy individuals.

Intrinsic functional connectivity underlying successful emotion regulation of angry faces.

Most of our social interaction is naturally based on emotional information derived from the perception of faces of other people. Negative facial expressions of a counterpart might trigger negative emotions and initiate emotion regulatory efforts to reduce the impact of the received emotional message in a perceiver. Despite the high adaptive value of emotion regulation in social interaction, the neural underpinnings of it are largely unknown.

Corrigendum: The Influence of Menstrual Cycle and Androstadienone on Female Stress Reactions: An fMRI Study.

[This corrects the article on p. 44 in vol. 10, PMID: 26909031.

Affective responsiveness is influenced by intake of oral contraceptives.

Despite the widespread use of oral contraceptive pills (OCs), little is known about their impact on psychological processes and emotional competencies. Recent data indicate impaired emotion recognition in OC users compared to naturally cycling females. Building upon these findings, the current study investigated the influence of OC use on three components of empathy, i.

The Influence of Menstrual Cycle and Androstadienone on Female Stress Reactions: An fMRI Study.

Communicating threats and stress via biological signaling is common in animals. In humans, androstadienone (ANDR), a synthetic male steroid, is a socially relevant chemosignal exhibited to increase positive mood and cortisol levels specifically in (periovulatory) females in positively arousing contexts. In a negative context, we expected that such effects of ANDR could amplify social evaluative threat depending on the stress sensitivity, which differs between menstrual cycle phases.

When opportunity meets motivation: Neural engagement during social approach is linked to high approach motivation.

Social rewards are processed by the same dopaminergic-mediated brain networks as non-social rewards, suggesting a common representation of subjective value. Individual differences in personality and motivation influence the reinforcing value of social incentives, but it remains open whether the pursuit of social incentives is analogously supported by the neural reward system when positive social stimuli are connected to approach behavior. To test for a modulation of neural activation by approach motivation, individuals with high and low approach motivation (BAS) completed implicit and explicit social approach-avoidance paradigms during fMRI.

Testosterone biases the amygdala toward social threat approach.

Testosterone enhances amygdala reactions to social threat, but it remains unclear whether this neuroendocrine mechanism is relevant for understanding its dominance-enhancing properties; namely, whether testosterone biases the human amygdala toward threat approach. This pharmacological functional magnetic-resonance imaging study shows that testosterone administration increases amygdala responses in healthy women during threat approach and decreases it during threat avoidance. These findings support and extend motivational salience models by offering a neuroendocrine mechanism of motivation-specific amygdala tuning.

Does oxytocin affect mind-reading? A replication study.

One of the most well-known findings in human oxytocin research is its beneficial effect on "mind-reading", i.e., inferring others' mental states just from the eye region in the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET).

Emotional dysfunctions in neurodegenerative diseases.

Neurodegenerative diseases are characterized primarily by motor signs but are also accompanied by emotional disturbances. Because of the limited knowledge about these dysfunctions, this Review provides an overview of emotional competencies in Huntington's disease (HD), Parkinson's disease (PD), and multiple sclerosis (MS), with a focus on emotion recognition, emotion regulation, and depression. Most studies indicate facial emotion recognition deficits in HD and PD, whereas data for MS are inconsistent.

The impact of emotional faces on social motivation in schizophrenia.

Impairments in emotion recognition and psychosocial functioning are a robust phenomenon in schizophrenia and may affect motivational behavior, particularly during socio-emotional interactions. To characterize potential deficits and their interplay, we assessed social motivation covering various facets, such as implicit and explicit approach-avoidance tendencies to facial expressions, in 27 patients with schizophrenia (SZP) and 27 matched healthy controls (HC). Moreover, emotion recognition abilities as well as self-reported behavioral activation and inhibition were evaluated.

In action or inaction? Social approach-avoidance tendencies in major depression.

In depression, approach deficits often impair everyday social functioning, but empirical findings on performance-based measurements of approach-avoidance behavior remain conflicting. To investigate action tendencies in patients with depression, the current study used an explicit version of the Approach-Avoidance Task (AAT). In this task, participants responded to emotional faces by either pulling a joystick toward (approach) or pushing it away from themselves (avoid).