Emotional congruency between faces and words benefits emotional judgments in women: An event-related potential study.

The present study aimed to investigate the effects of emotional congruency between faces and words on word evaluation through event-related brain potentials (ERPs). To this end, 20 women performed a face-word congruency task in which an emotional face was presented simultaneously with an affective word in a non-superimposed format. Participants had to evaluate the emotional valence of the word in three different conditions: congruent, incongruent, and control. The emotionally congruent words were categorized faster and more accurately than the incongruent ones. In addition, the emotionally congruent words elicited higher P3/LPP amplitudes than the incongruent ones. These results indicate a beneficial effect of emotional face-word congruency on emotional judgments of words.

Musical tempo affects EEG spectral dynamics during subsequent time estimation.

The perception of time depends on the rhythmicity of internal and external synchronizers. One external synchronizer that affects time estimation is music. This study aimed to analyze the effects of musical tempi on EEG spectral dynamics during subsequent time estimation. Participants performed a time production task after (i) silence and (ii) listening to music at different tempi -90, 120, and 150 bpm- while EEG activity was recorded. While listening, there was an increase in alpha power at all tempi compared to the resting state and an increase of beta at the fastest tempo. The beta increase persisted during the subsequent time estimations, with higher beta power during the task after listening to music at the fastest tempo than task performance without music. Spectral dynamics in frontal regions showed lower alpha activity in the final stages of time estimations after listening to music at 90- and 120-bpm than in the silence condition and higher beta in the early stages at 150 bpm. Behaviorally, the 120 bpm musical tempo produced slight improvements. Listening to music modified tonic EEG activity that subsequently affected EEG dynamics during time production. Music at a more optimal rate could have benefited temporal expectation and anticipation. The fastest musical tempo may have generated an over-activated state that affected subsequent time estimations. These results emphasize the importance of music as an external stimulus that can affect brain functional organization during time perception even after listening.

Emotional faces interfere with saccadic inhibition and attention re-orientation: An fMRI study.

Modulation of reflex responses is crucial to adapt our behavior and cognition, and this is especially difficult when biological relevant stimuli are present such as emotional faces. The aim of this study was to identify the effect of peripherally presented happy and angry facial expressions in reflexive saccades and saccadic inhibition/re-orientation of attention. Behavior through eye-tracking technique and fMRI event-related BOLD signals activations were evaluated in adult males during the performance of an antisaccade task. fMRI signals obtained during task performance were compared to a baseline. Results showed that antisaccades had a lower percentage of correct responses and higher latency onsets than prosaccades. At the activation brain level, differences between both emotions and the baseline were found during stimuli presentation. Prosaccades for happy and angry faces recruited larger clusters with higher Z values mainly in occipito-parietal and temporal regions related to visual basic and integration processing, as well as regions of the oculomotor network. Meanwhile, when compared to the baseline, antisaccades recruited similar areas but a lower number of clusters with lower Z values as expected for peripheral processing of faces. At antisaccades, happy faces recruited parieto-occipital, temporal and cerebellar regions, while the angry faces added activation of orbital and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex related to emotional regulation. These results suggest that emotional facial expressions are being processed outside of the focus of attention. Particularly, angry expressions recruit a wider brain network in order to inhibit automatic behavior and re-orientate voluntary attention efficiently that may be due to its biological relevance.

Sex differences in cognitive processing: An integrative review of electrophysiological findings.

Sex differences in cognition and their underlying brain mechanisms have attracted increasing attention. Brain electrical activity (EEG) represents a reliable, high-temporal resolution approach to assessing the neural correlates of ongoing cognitive activity. The aim of the present work was to provide a comprehensive review of the literature regarding sex differences in brain electrical activity during cognitive processing, and their potential relation to behavioral performance. The cognitive domains addressed are perception, attention, language, visuospatial reasoning, and the executive functions. Overall, the literature reviewed shows sex differences in brain electrical activity during cognitive processing. Differences were observed in such EEG characteristics as hemispheric specialization, scalp topography, amplitudes of event-related potential components, temporal dynamics, and connectivity patterns. While these between-sex differences varied across the cognitive domains analyzed, there were consistent results for visuospatial reasoning and language. Regarding the relationships between behavioral manifestations of cognitive functions and underlying brain dynamics, further research is required to draw reasonable conclusions, since many of the EEG studies reviewed did not assess behavioral differences. Future research must contemplate several confounding factors, such as the precise characteristics of the experimental tasks employed, the phases of the menstrual cycle, individual traits, subjective stimuli saliency, and the interaction of brain development with educational and sociocultural factors. Despite these concerns, the present review contributes to supporting a broad debate that aims to optimize cognitive and behavioral abilities in order to improve teaching strategies and learning skills and thus expand the potentialities of each sex.

EEG functional brain connectivity strengthens with age during attentional processing to faces in children.

Studying functional connectivity may generate clues to the maturational changes that occur in children, expressed by the dynamical organization of the functional network assessed by electroencephalographic recordings (EEG). In the present study, we compared the EEG functional connectivity pattern estimated by linear cross-correlations of the electrical brain activity of three groups of children (6, 8, and 10 years of age) while performing odd-ball tasks containing facial stimuli that are chosen considering their importance in socioemotional contexts in everyday life. On the first task, the children were asked to identify the sex of faces, on the second, the instruction was to identify the happy expressions of the faces. We estimated the stable correlation pattern (SCP) by the average cross-correlation matrix obtained separately for the resting state and the task conditions and quantified the similarity of these average matrices comparing the different conditions. The accuracy improved with higher age. Although the topology of the SCPs showed high similarity across all ages, the two older groups showed a higher correlation between regions associated with the attentional and face processing networks compared to the youngest group. Only in the youngest group, the similarity metric decreased during the sex condition. In general, correlation values strengthened with age and during task performance compared to rest. Our findings indicate that there is a spatially extended stable brain network organization in children like that reported in adults. Lower similarity scores between several regions in the youngest children might indicate a lesser ability to cope with tasks. The brain regions associated with the attention and face networks presented higher synchronization across regions with increasing age, modulated by task demands.

Inhibitory control under emotional contexts in women with borderline personality disorder: An electrophysiological study.

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is characterized by emotional dysregulation and difficulties in cognitive control. Inhibitory control, meanwhile, is modulated by the presence of emotional stimuli. The objective of the present study was to examine the effects of implicit emotional contexts on response inhibition in BPD patients. Participants performed a response inhibition task (Go-NoGo) under 3 background context conditions: neutral, pleasant and unpleasant. Behavioral performance did not differed between groups. Significantly higher P3NoGo amplitudes, shorter N2 latencies and lower global connectivity were observed in the patients regardless of the emotional valence of the background images compared to controls. In addition, higher P3NoGo amplitudes were correlated with more pronounced psychopathological symptoms. Emotional contexts enhanced N2 amplitudes compared to neutral ones in both groups. Results indicate that BPD required greater neural effort to successfully perform the inhibitory task. Finally, BPD showed lower synchronization between cortical regions, which may indicate a disruption in the effective temporal coupling of distributed areas associated with emotional stimuli-processing during both response and response inhibition.

Emotional faces modulate eye movement control on an antisaccade task.

The ability to modulate automatic responses, in order to favor voluntary actions is crucial for cognition and behavior, and this is particularly difficult when dealing with highly salient stimuli as emotional faces. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effects of angry faces on cortical activity during preparation of saccadic inhibition and voluntary reorientation of attention. Behavioral performance, eye movements and presaccadic event-related potentials were evaluated as 30 participants performed an antisaccadic task with neutral and angry faces presented in the peripheral visual field. Two components of the presaccadic activity were measured: positive presaccadic slope and spike potential. Results showed lower accuracy in the presence of angry faces than neutral ones. Saccade onset latency was longer for angry faces than for neutral ones on the prosaccadic trials, but the opposite result occurred on the antisaccadic trials. Finally, higher spike potential amplitudes were observed for the angry faces than the neutral ones. These results suggest that potentially threatening stimuli like angry facial expressions require greater effort to achieve inhibitory control and voluntary reorientation of attention.

The Influence of EEG References on the Analysis of Spatio-Temporal Interrelation Patterns.

The characterization of the functional network of the brain dynamics has become a prominent tool to illuminate novel aspects of brain functioning. Due to its excellent time resolution, such research is oftentimes based on electroencephalographic recordings (EEG). However, a particular EEG-reference might cause crucial distortions of the spatiotemporal interrelation pattern and may induce spurious correlations as well as diminish genuine interrelations originally present in the dataset. Here we investigate in which manner correlation patterns are affected by a chosen EEG reference. To this end we evaluate the influence of 7 popular reference schemes on artificial recordings derived from well controlled numerical test frameworks. In this respect we are not only interested in the deformation of spatial interrelations, but we test additionally in which way the time evolution of the functional network, estimated via some bi-variate interrelation measures, gets distorted. It turns out that the median reference as well as the global average show the best performance in most situations considered in the present study. However, if a collective brain dynamics is present, where most of the signals get correlated, these schemes may also cause crucial deformations of the functional network, such that the parallel use of different reference schemes seems advisable.

Characteristic Fluctuations Around Stable Attractor Dynamics Extracted from Highly Nonstationary Electroencephalographic Recordings.

Since the discovery of electrical activity of the brain, electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings constitute one of the most popular techniques of brain research. However, EEG signals are highly nonstationary and one should expect that averages of the cross-correlation coefficient, which may take positive and negative values with equal probability, (almost) vanish when estimated over long data segments. Instead, we found that the average zero-lag cross-correlation matrix estimated with a running window over the whole night of sleep EEGs, or of resting state during eyes-open and eyes-closed conditions of healthy subjects shows a characteristic correlation pattern containing pronounced nonzero values. A similar correlation structure has already been encountered in scalp EEG signals containing focal onset seizures. Therefore, we conclude that this structure is independent of the physiological state. Because of its pronounced similarity across subjects, we believe that it depicts a generic feature of the brain dynamics. Namely, we interpret this pattern as a manifestation of a dynamical ground state of the brain activity, necessary to preserve an efficient operational mode, or, expressed in terms of dynamical system theory, we interpret it as a "shadow" of the evolution on (or close to) an attractor in phase space. Nonstationary dynamical aspects of higher cerebral processes should manifest in deviations from this stable pattern. We confirm this hypothesis through a correlation analysis of EEG recordings of 10 healthy subjects during night sleep, 20 recordings of 9 epilepsy patients, and 42 recordings of 21 healthy subjects in resting state during eyes-open and eyes-closed conditions. In particular, we show that the estimation of deviations from the stationary correlation structures provides a more significant differentiation of physiological states and more homogeneous results across subjects.

Is sex an influential factor in type-1 diabetes neurofunctional development? A preliminary study.

The aim of the study was to evaluate the neurofunctional effect of gender in Type-1 Diabetes Mellitus (T1DM) patients during a Visual Spatial Working Memory (VSWM) task. The study included 28 participants with ages ranging from 17-28 years. Fourteen well-controlled T1DM patients (7 female) and 14 controls matched by age, sex, and education level were scanned performing a block-design VSWM paradigm. Behavioral descriptive analyses and mean comparisons were done, and between-group and condition functional activation patterns were also compared. Whole-brain cumulative BOLD signal (CumBS), voxel-wise BOLD level frequency, Euclidean distance, and divergence indices were also calculated. There were no significant differences between or within-group sex differences for correct responses and reaction times. Functional activation analyses showed that females had activation in more brain regions, and with larger clusters of cortical activations than males. Furthermore, BOLD activation was higher in males. Despite the preliminary nature of the present study given the relatively small sample size, current results acknowledge for the first time that sex might contribute to differences in functional activation in T1DM patients. Findings suggest that sex differences should be considered when studying T1DM-disease development.

Emotional Contexts Exert a Distracting Effect on Attention and Inhibitory Control in Female and Male Adolescents.

Adolescents exhibit difficulties in behavioral regulation that become more evident when emotional contexts are involved, since these may hinder the development of socially-adaptive behaviors. The objectives of the present study were: to examine the influence of emotional contexts on adolescents' ability to inhibit a prepotent response, evaluated by ERPs, and to determine whether sex differences in response inhibition are observed in adolescents in those contexts. Participants performed a prepotent response inhibition task (Go-NoGo) under 3 background context conditions: neutral, pleasant, and unpleasant. While no differences in accuracy were observed, the presence of emotional contexts did prolong reaction times compared to the neutral context. Also, the unpleasant context caused an enhancement of N2 amplitudes compared to the neutral and pleasant contexts. Also, N2 and P3 latencies were longer in emotional contexts than in the neutral condition during both correct responses and correct inhibitions. No sex differences were found in amplitude, but females showed longer N2 and P3 latencies than males. These results confirm the idea that, in adolescents, unpleasant pictures receive preferential attention over neutral images and so generate greater difficulty in response inhibition. Finally, results demonstrate that sex differences in inhibition control in adolescence were observed only in relation to time-processing.

Autonomic Reactivity to Arousing Stimuli with Social and Non-social Relevance in Alexithymia.

Emotional difficulties in alexithymia and their social consequences have been linked to alterations in autonomic nervous system. However, most of previous studies did not take into account the distinction between the affective and the cognitive dimensions of the alexithymia, leading to inconsistent results. Aim: In this study, we compared the effects of both dimensions of alexithymia on the autonomic arousal to emotional and social visual stimulations. Methods: Skin conductance responses (SCRs) to items of the International Affective Pictures System characterized by emotional (unpleasant, neutral, and pleasant), social (with humans) or non-social (without humans) content were recorded in non-alexithymic (NA), affective (AA) and cognitive alexithymic (CA) participants, selected on the basis of the Toronto Alexithymia Scale and the Bermond-Vorst Alexithymia Questionnaire. All participants responded to questionnaires of empathy, social phobia, depression, and anxiety before the experiment and evaluated the arousal of the pictures after it. Results: Cognitive alexithymic group showed lower amplitudes of SCRs to pictures with social than without social relevance whereas the opposite pattern was observed for the NA group. Arousal emotional effects of the pictures on SCRs did not differ among groups. In addition, CA participants showed lower scores than NA in the Personal Taking sub-scale of the empathy questionnaire, while AA showed lower scores than NA in the fantasy sub-scale. The CA group showed higher social phobia, depression and anxiety scores, than the other two groups. Conclusion: This work has two original outcomes: first, affective alexithymics expressed lower empathic affective scores than other groups; second, alexithymia modulated the impact of the social relevance of the stimuli on the autonomic reactivity, this impact vanishing in affective alexithymics and reversing in cognitive alexithymics. Thus, though the groups could not be distinguished on the basis of emotional effect on SCRs, they clearly differed when the empathic characteristics and the autonomic impact of social relevance were considered. Finally, the described autonomic signature to social relevant information could contribute to elucidate the difficulty of alexithymics to deal with emotions during social transactions.

Sex differences in emotional contexts modulation on response inhibition.

The aim of the present study was to explore sex differences in the effects that emotional contexts exert on the temporal course of response inhibition using event-related potentials (ERP). Participants performed a Go-NoGo response inhibition task under 3 context conditions: with 1) neutral background stimuli, and 2) pleasant, and 3) unpleasant emotional contexts. No sex differences were found in relation to accuracy. Women showed higher N2NoGo amplitudes than men in both emotional contexts; whereas during inhibition men tended to show higher P3NoGo amplitudes than women in the unpleasant context. Both groups experienced a relevant effect of the presence of the unpleasant context during inhibition processing, as shown by the enhancement of the N2NoGo amplitudes in frontal regions compared to results from the neutral and pleasant conditions. In addition, women showed differences between the pleasant and unpleasant contexts, with the latter inducing higher amplitude values. Only in men did inhibition accuracy correlate with higher N2NoGo and lower P3NoGo amplitudes in the emotional context conditions. These findings suggest that when an inhibition task is performed in an emotionally-neutral background context no sex differences are observed in either accuracy or ERP components. However, when the emotional context was introduced -especially the unpleasant one- some gender differences did become evident. The higher N2NoGo amplitude at the presence of the unpleasant context may reflect an effect on attention and conflict monitoring. In addition, results suggest that during earlier processing stages, women invested more resources to process inhibition than men. Furthermore, men who invested more neural resources during earlier stages showed better response inhibition than those who did it during later processing stages, more closely-related to cognitive and motor inhibition processes.

Emotional content of stimuli improves visuospatial working memory.

Processing and storage in visuospatial working memory (VSWM) seem to depend on attention-based mechanisms. In order to explore the effect of attention-attractive stimuli, such as emotional faces on VSWM performance, ERPs were obtained from 20 young adults while reproducing spatial sequences of six facial (happy and neutral) and non-facial control stimuli in inverse order. Behavioral performances revealed that trials with happy facial expressions resulted in a significantly higher amount of correct responses. For positive emotional facial stimuli, N170 amplitude was higher over right temporo-parietal regions, while P2 amplitude was higher over frontal and lower over parietal regions. In addition, LPP amplitude was also significantly higher for this type of stimuli. Both behavioral and electrophysiological results support the notion of the domain-general attention-based mechanism of VSWM maintenance, in which spatial to-be-remembered locations might be influenced by the emotional content of the stimuli.

Feedback-related negativity is enhanced in adolescence during a gambling task with and without probabilistic reinforcement learning.

Feedback-related negativity (FRN) is a negative deflection that appears around 250 ms after the gain or loss of feedback to chosen alternatives in a gambling task in frontocentral regions following outcomes. Few studies have reported FRN enhancement in adolescents compared with adults in a gambling task without probabilistic reinforcement learning, despite the fact that learning from positive or negative consequences is crucial for decision-making during adolescence. Therefore, the aim of the present research was to identify differences in FRN amplitude and latency between adolescents and adults on a gambling task with favorable and unfavorable probabilistic reinforcement learning conditions, in addition to a nonlearning condition with monetary gains and losses. Higher rate scores of high-magnitude choices during the final 30 trials compared with the first 30 trials were observed during the favorable condition, whereas lower rates were observed during the unfavorable condition in both groups. Higher FRN amplitude in all conditions and longer latency in the nonlearning condition were observed in adolescents compared with adults and in relation to losses. Results indicate that both the adolescents and the adults improved their performance in relation to positive and negative feedback. However, the FRN findings suggest an increased sensitivity to external feedback to losses in adolescents compared with adults, irrespective of the presence or absence of probabilistic reinforcement learning. These results reflect processing differences on the neural monitoring system and provide new perspectives on the dynamic development of an adolescent's brain.

Sex differences in lipid peroxidation and fatty acid levels in recent onset schizophrenia.

Sex differences in the symptomatology and course of illness have been reported among schizophrenic patients. Hence, the principal objective of the present study was to investigate sex differences in the concentrations of the lipid peroxidation metabolites MDA and 4-HNE, and in the membrane phospholipid levels of ARA, EPA and DHA in patients with schizophrenia. A total of 46 paranoid schizophrenics (25 women) with short-term evolution who were in an acute psychotic stage and 40 healthy controls (23 women) participated in the study. Psychopathology was evaluated by BPRS and PANSS. Lipid peroxidation sub-products (MDA, 4-HNE) and fatty acid levels (ARA, EPA, DHA) were determined in erythrocyte membranes. The men in both groups showed higher lipid peroxidation levels and those values were higher in schizophrenic patients than controls, with only EPA fatty acid concentrations found to be lower in the former than the latter. These results suggest that men may suffer greater oxidative neuronal damage than women, and that this could worsen the course of illness and result in greater disease severity.

Sex differences in facial, prosodic, and social context emotional recognition in early-onset schizophrenia.

The purpose of the present study was to determine sex differences in facial, prosodic, and social context emotional recognition in schizophrenia (SCH). Thirty-eight patients (SCH, 20 females) and 38 healthy controls (CON, 20 females) participated in the study. Clinical scales (BPRS and PANSS) and an Affective States Scale were applied, as well as tasks to evaluate facial, prosodic, and within a social context emotional recognition. SCH showed lower accuracy and longer response times than CON, but no significant sex differences were observed in either facial or prosody recognition. In social context emotions, however, females showed higher empathy than males with respect to happiness in both groups. SCH reported being more identified with sad films than CON and females more with fear than males. The results of this study confirm the deficits of emotional recognition in male and female patients with schizophrenia compared to healthy subjects. Sex differences were detected in relation to social context emotions and facial and prosodic recognition depending on age.

Event-related potentials and event-related oscillations during identity and facial emotional processing in schizophrenia.

Impairments in emotional recognition have been consistently reported in schizophrenic patients. The main aim of the present study was to evaluate time-sequenced responses in ERPs and event-related oscillations during emotional recognition of happiness and fear compared to facial identity recognition in schizophrenic patients (SCH) versus healthy controls (CON). Ten paranoid SCH and ten CON subjects performed three oddball paradigm tasks, evaluating face identity recognition and facial emotional recognition of happiness and fear. Event-related potentials and event-related theta and alpha oscillations were obtained for each task. N170 and P2 components appeared with higher amplitude in SCH than in CON at the occipital locations. An early prefrontally distributed P3a component was observed while doing the identity task with lower amplitude in SCH than in CON. Comparatively, P3b amplitude was lower in SCH than in CON over parietal leads in the identity and happiness tasks. Additionally, theta oscillations showed significantly lower RMS values in SCH between 250 and 500 ms post-stimuli in frontal and central regions. On the other hand, the grand-averaged alpha oscillations demonstrated higher RMS values in the occipital leads in SCH compared to CON and the opposite over the frontal regions. Results are interpreted in the framework of a functional disruption in the distributed neuronal networks involved both in facial identity and emotional recognition in schizophrenics as indexed by the brain oscillatory activity and related ERP components.

Visual processing in a facial emotional context: an ERP study.

Facial emotional processing can be bypassed when faces are task-irrelevant and attention is diverted, although this effect has not been examined when cognitive task occurs within a facial background. Event-related potential (ERP) measures were obtained to evaluate the influence of different irrelevant facial emotional contexts on a simultaneous "ear-size" detection task performance in five processing contexts: (1) neutral face, (2) happy face, (3) fearful face, (4) facial contour, and (5) non-facial context. Reaction times were longer when visual processing occurred in a facial context, regardless of its emotional content. The context of neutral faces also demonstrated a lower number of correct responses, with fewer incorrect responses found during the presentation of fearful faces compared to the neutral facial context. ERP morphology was similar across all conditions, but ERP amplitude from components for the non-facial context was larger than that of the alternative conditions from 100 to 300 ms, with a similar N170-like potential also observed. The findings suggest that simultaneous irrelevant emotional facial stimuli may affect cognitive processing by altering two temporarily overlapped neural mechanisms: one responsible for earlier face detection, and the other involved in emotional recognition. The first might delay simultaneous cognitive actions by diverting attention, whereas while the latter may enhance the availability of processing resources through the participation of a subcortical pathway.

Patterns of covariant power and coherent EEG activity during rest in young adults.

Functional cortical organization is not dependent on cognition only, but also reflects basic intrinsic individual characteristics stable over time and across physiological conditions that suggest the existence of self-organization patterns operating even during rest. The aim of the present study was to investigate the pattern of functional organization of EEG broad bands and coherent activity during rest by means of Principal Component Analysis (PCA) with closed and open eyes of 28 men and women. PCA revealed patterns of covariant oscillatory activity and functionally related regions with covariant coherent activity present during resting conditions, different for open and closed eyes. Different patterns of covariant oscillations within alpha frequencies were identified consistent with current notions on overlapping frequencies with different origin and behavioral context. Covariant coherent cortical networks were revealed congruent with functional systems described during cognitive processes; one, linking regions involved in visuo-motor coordination, another in language, and a third one in visuo-spatial processes suggesting that strong functional links are present during rest.