The ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) is a major hub of the reward system and has been shown to activate specifically in response to pleasant / rewarding stimuli. Previous studies demonstrate enhanced pleasant cue reactivity after single applications of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to the vmPFC. Here we present a pilot case study in which we assess the cumulative impact of multiple consecutive vmPFC-tDCS sessions on the processing of visual emotional stimuli in an event-related MEG recording design. The results point to stable modulation of increased positivity biases (pleasant > unpleasant stimulus signal strength) after excitatory vmPFC stimulation and a reversed pattern (pleasant < unpleasant) after inhibitory stimulation across five consecutive tDCS sessions. Moreover, cumulative effects of these emotional bias modulations were observable for several source-localized spatio-temporal clusters, suggesting an increase in modulatory efficiency by repeated tDCS sessions. This pilot study provides evidence for improvements in the effectiveness and utility of a novel tDCS paradigm in the context of emotional processing.
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| http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6974138 | PMC |
| http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0222057 | PLOS |
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