Limited time horizons lead to the positivity effect in attention, but not to more positive emotions: An investigation of the socioemotional selectivity theory.

A positivity effect in attention (i.e., an attentional bias in favor of positive over negative stimuli) has been frequently reported in older adults. Based on the postulates of socioemotional selectivity theory (SST), the present study tested whether this positivity effect: (a) depends on the subjective perception of a limited future time perspective (FTP) independently of chronological age, (b) involves controlled processes, and (c) contributes to optimizing positive emotions. Thirty-one older adults (aged 75-93) and 92 younger adults (aged 18-23) were recruited. Young adults were divided into a control group (N = 52) and a group with limited FTP (N = 40), where their subjective perception of the time left to live was experimentally reduced. All participants performed a dot-probe task involving positive, negative and neutral pictures displayed with different presentation durations (500 ms, 1,000 ms). Reaction time bias scores were calculated, and emotional state was measured several times during the task. Analyses revealed attentional biases toward positive (compared to negative) pictures in older adults and young adults with limited FTP, but not in young adults in the control group. These positivity effects appeared from 500 ms of stimulus presentation, did not increase over time, and did not correlate with participants' emotions. These findings support SST predictions that positivity effects occur when individuals perceive a limited FTP, regardless of their actual age. However, our data also suggest that the positivity effect may be a more automatic than controlled process that does not influence emotional state. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Complex visual discrimination is impaired after right, but not left, anterior temporal lobectomy.

The prevailing view in human cognitive neuroscience associates the medial temporal lobes (MTLs) with declarative memory. Compelling experimental evidence has, however, demonstrated that these regions are specialized according to the representations processed, irrespective of the cognitive domain assessed. This account was supported by the study of patients with bilateral medial temporal amnesia, who exhibit impairments in perceptual tasks involving complex visual stimuli. Yet, little is known regarding the impact of unilateral MTL damage on complex visual abilities. To address this issue, we administered a visual matching task to 20 patients who underwent left (N = 12) or right (N = 8) anterior temporal lobectomy for drug-resistant epilepsy and to 38 healthy controls. Presentation viewpoint was manipulated to increase feature ambiguity, as this is critical to reveal impairments in perceptual tasks. Similar to control participants, patients with left-sided damage succeeded in all task conditions. In contrast, patients with right-sided damage had decreased accuracy compared with that of the other two groups, as well as increased response time. Notably, the accuracy of those with right-sided damage did not exceed chance level when feature ambiguity was high (i.e., when stimuli were presented from different viewpoints) for the most complex classes of stimuli (i.e., scenes and buildings, compared with single objects). The pattern reported in bilateral patients in previous studies was therefore reproduced in patients with right, but not left, resection. These results suggest that the complex visual-representation functions supported by the MTL are right-lateralized, and raise the question as to how the representational account of these regions applies to representations supported by left MTL regions.

The burden of early life stress in chronic inflammatory bowel diseases.

The aim of this study was to evaluate the prevalence of early life stress (ELS) in a population with inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD) and to estimate its burden on mental, physical, and digestive health. Ninety-three participants with IBD were asked to anonymously complete questionnaires (Childhood Trauma Questionnaire-Short Form, Early Life Event Scale, Perceived Stress Scale, Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale, Ways of Coping Checklist, Gastro-Intestinal Quality of Life Index questionnaire, and ad hoc questions about symptoms). The prevalence of patients with IBD who were exposed to at least one childhood abuse was 53%. Mental health and quality of life were significantly poorer in patients with IBD who were exposed to early abuse than in those who were not. Patients exposed to ELS had also more digestive perturbations and fatigue. These results suggest that early abuse should be considered a component of IBD care.

Reducing decision-making deficits in patients with brain injury: effect of slow-paced breathing.

Impairments in decision-making have been reported in brain-damaged (stroke/traumatic brain injury) patients with a wide range of lesion sites. Here, we propose that the performances of patients in complex sequential decision-making (DM) tasks can be explained by their negative affectivity, leading to deliberative processing associated with poor DM performances. We assumed that a slow-paced breathing (SPB) training, by reducing negative affectivity would improve performances in a complex DM task. For 24 days, 34 brain-damaged patients (16 males and 18 females; 12 had a hemorrhagic stroke, 17 with an ischemic stroke and 5 with a TBI), practiced either daily SPB or sham trainings for five min, three times a day. Before and after training, we assessed their vagal tone (electrocardiogram-ECG), affectivity (Positive and Negative Affect Schedule-PANAS) and certainty level (Dimensional Ratings Questionnaire-DRQ) and their performance on the Iowa Gambling Task. All participants showed initial weak performance, which improved only for patients in the SPB training condition. These results suggest that DM disorders in brain-damaged patients can be the consequence of their poor information processing strategy rather than an impairment in their DM abilities. Second, we showed that SPB could be efficient to normalize DM processes in brain injury patients.

The natural history of terms describing functional (neurological) disorders in the medical literature of the last 60 years.

BACKGROUND: Functional neurological disorders (FND), a subtype of functional disorders (FD), are a frequent motive for neurology referrals. The various presentations and the unknown physiopathology of FD have led to the multiplication of terms describing these disorders over the years. METHODS: We examined the FD-related articles published from 1960 to 2020 in PubMed and PsycINFO databases. We searched for: psychogenic, somatization, somatoform, medically unexplained symptoms, hysteria, conversion disorder, dissociative, functional neurological disorder, and functional disorder. Use rates in the title, abstract, keyword, or MeSH fields were collected over successive 5-year periods. After correcting for off-topic results, we examined proportional distribution over time, term associations, and disciplinary fields (neurology and psychiatry). Term impact was estimated via H-index and number of citations. RESULTS: We found that none of the terms is prevailing in the recent medical literature. We observed three trends in the use rates: stability, increase, and decrease of use over time. While most of the terms were present in a stable proportion of the publications, hysteria and psychogenic lost popularity over time. We found a differential preference for terminology between disciplines. Functional neurological disorder showed the highest citation impact, yielding 10% of highly cited publications. CONCLUSION: We found a dynamic and evolving use of the different terms describing FD in the last 60 years. Despite the tendency to use the term functional in the recent highly cited publications, its low prevalence and coexistence with several other terms suggest that a precise, explanatory and non-offensive term remains yet to be found.

Gut-Brain Coupling and Multilevel Physiological Response to Biofeedback Relaxation After a Stressful Task Under Virtual Reality Immersion: A Pilot Study.

Human physiological reactions to the environment are coordinated by the interactions between brain and viscera. In particular, the brain, heart, and gastrointestinal tract coordinate with each other to provide physiological equilibrium by involving the central, autonomic, and enteric nervous systems. Recent studies have demonstrated an electrophysiological coupling between the gastrointestinal tract and the brain (gut-brain axis) under resting-state conditions. As the gut-brain axis plays a key role in individual stress regulation, we aimed to examine modulation of gut-brain coupling through the use of an overwhelming and a relaxing module as a first step toward modeling of the underlying mechanisms. This study was performed in 12 participants who, under a virtual reality environment, performed a 9-min cognitive stressful task followed by a 9-min period of relaxation. Brain activity was captured by electroencephalography, autonomic activities by photoplethysmography, and electrodermal and gastric activities by electrogastrography. Results showed that compared with the stressful task, relaxation induced a significant decrease in both tonic and phasic sympathetic activity, with an increase in brain alpha power and a decrease in delta power. The intensity of gut-brain coupling, as assessed by the modulation index of the phase-amplitude coupling between the normogastric slow waves and the brain alpha waves, decreased under the relaxation relative to the stress condition. These results highlight the modulatory effect of biofeedback relaxation on gut-brain coupling and suggest noninvasive multilevel electrophysiology as a promising way to investigate the mechanisms underlying gut-brain coupling in physiological and pathological situations.

Emotional scene remembering: A combination of disturbing and facilitating effects of emotion?

An emotion-induced memory trade-off effect is frequently reported when participants have to memorize complex items that include both neutral and emotional features. This bias corresponds to better remembering of central emotional information accompanied by poor performance related to neutral background information. Although the trade-off effect has been mainly associated with attentional bias toward emotional content, findings suggest that other non-attentional cognitive processes could also be involved. The aim of this work was to assess whether emotional effects would be reported apart from their influence on attentional processing in an immediate delay memory task. Three studies were conducted. In Study 1, manipulation of the diffusion quality of emotional content allowed us to select focal emotional pictures vs. diffuse emotional pictures, which prevented attentional focus. The two studies that followed consisted of a recognition task of low- and high-complexity pictures in which we used partial visual cues during the test that could display either the emotional elements (i.e., central patch cues, Study 2) or the peripheral elements (i.e., peripheral patch cues, Study 3) of the focal emotional pictures. Results from Studies 2 and 3 replicated traditional trade-off effects only for high-complexity pictures. In addition, diffuse emotional pictures were associated with lower memory performance than were neutral pictures, suggesting that emotion features could both disturb and enhance (via their attentional effect) encoding processes.

Hippocampal activity during memory and visual perception: The role of representational content.

The functional organisation of the medial temporal lobe (MTL) has long been described on the basis of cognitive processes such as recollection or familiarity. However, this view has recently been challenged, and researchers have proposed decomposing cognitive phenomena into representations and operations. According to the representational view, representations, such as scenes for the hippocampus and objects for the perirhinal cortex, are critical in understanding the role of MTL regions in cognition. In the present study, 51 healthy young participants underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while completing a visual-discrimination task. Subsequently, half of the participants performed a patch-cue recognition procedure in which "Rec" responses are believed to reflect the operation of pattern completion, whereas the other half performed a whole-item remember/know procedure. We replicated the previously-reported demonstration that hippocampal involvement in pattern completion is preferential for scenes as compared with objects. In contrast, the perirhinal cortex was more recruited for object processing than for scene processing. We further extended these results to the operations of strength-signal memory and visual discrimination. Finally, the modulation of hippocampal engagement in pattern completion by representational content was found to be specific to its anterior segment. This observation is consistent with the proposal that this segment would process broad/global representations, whereas the posterior hippocampus would perform sharp/local representations. Taken together, these results favour the representational view of MTL functional organisation, but support that this specialisation differs along the hippocampal long-axis.

Disentangling Aging and Mood Effects on Emotional Memory.

Older adults tend to be in a more positive mood than young adults, and tend to remember positive information more often than negative information, yet the link between their positive mood and their positive memory bias has not often been explored. In this study, we manipulated young and older adults' moods prior to their completing an emotional memory task. For mood manipulation, young (n = 147) and older (n = 111) adults viewed a positive, negative, or neutral video lasting 3 min. To validate the mood induction, we collected self-reported ratings of valence and arousal (affective slider; Betella and Verschure, 2016) at baseline, after the video, and after the memory task. The memory task consisted of incidental encoding of 30 intermixed pictures (10 positive, 10 negative, 10 neutral valence), followed by free recall. The mood manipulation changed people's self-reported valence, yet it did not influence self-reported arousal. The memory task revealed a consistent negativity bias in young adults. Older adults recalled negative and positive pictures equally well in all conditions. After viewing a negative video, they recalled positive pictures more often than neutral pictures, but did not show the same advantage for negative pictures over neutral pictures. This positive memory advantage was weaker in the positive mood condition. Therefore, mood manipulation influenced in part older adults' emotional memory bias, showing some signs of mood incongruence which we discuss in terms of emotion regulation. This shows the importance of accounting for mood differences in studies on aging and memory. The robust age group differences support the view that the positivity effect in aging is the result of a negativity bias that fades with age.

Psychophysiological dynamics of emotional reactivity: Interindividual reactivity characterization and prediction by a machine learning approach.

The fast reaction of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) to an emotional challenge (EC) is the result of a functional coupling between parasympathetic (PNS) and sympathetic (SNS) branches. This coupling can be characterized by measures of cross-correlations between electrodermal activity (EDA) (under the influence of the SNS) and the RR interval (the interval between R peaks) (under the influence of the PNS and the SNS). Significant interindividual variability has previously been reported in SNS-PNS coupling in emotional situations, and the present study aimed to identify interindividual cross-correlation variability in ANS reactivity. We therefore studied EDA and the RR interval in 62 healthy subjects, recorded during a 24-minute EC. A Gaussian Mixture Model was used to cluster tonic EDA-RR cross-correlations during the EC. This identified two clusters that were characterized by significant or non-significant cross-correlations (SCC and NCC clusters, respectively). The SCC cluster reported higher negative emotion after the EC, while the NCC cluster reported higher scores on the Center for Epidemiologic Studies-Depression scale. The latter finding suggests that NCC is a pathological mood pattern with altered negative perception. Furthermore, a machine learning model that included three parameters indexing the functionality of both branches of the ANS, measured at baseline, predicted cluster membership. Our results are a first step in detecting dysfunctional ANS reactivity in general population.

Distinguishing the Impact of Age on Semantic and Nonsemantic Associations in Episodic Memory.

OBJECTIVES: Refreshing, or the act of briefly foregrounding recently presented but now perceptually absent representations, has been identified as a possible source of age differences in working memory and episodic memory. We investigated whether the refreshing deficit contributes to the well-known age-related deficit for retrieving nonsemantic associations, but has no impact on existing semantic associations. METHOD: Younger and older adults judged the relatedness of stimulus word pairs (e.g., pink-blue or pink-cop) after repeating or refreshing one of the words. During a later source recognition memory test, participants determined whether each item recognized as old was presented on the left or right (nonsemantic source memory) and presented in a related or unrelated pair (semantic source memory). The data were analyzed using a hierarchical Bayesian implementation of a multinomial model of multidimensional source memory. RESULTS: Neither age group exhibited a refreshing benefit to nonsemantic or semantic source memory parameters. There was a large age difference in nonsemantic source memory, but no age difference in semantic source memory. DISCUSSION: The study suggests that the nature of the association is most important to episodic memory performance in older age, irrespective of refreshing, such that source memory is unimpaired for semantically meaningful information.

Impact of emotionally negative information on attentional processes in normal aging and Alzheimer's disease.

Impairments of emotional processing have been reported in Alzheimer's disease (AD), consistently with the existence of early amygdala atrophy in the pathology. In this study, we hypothesized that patients with AD might show a deficit of orientation toward emotional information under conditions of visual search. Eighteen patients with AD, 24 age-matched controls, and 35 young controls were eye-tracked while they performed a visual search task on a computer screen. The target was a vehicle with implicit (negative or neutral) emotional content, presented concurrently with one, three, or five non-vehicle neutral distractors. The task was to find the target and to report whether a break in the target frame was on the left or on the right side. Both control groups detected negative targets more efficiently than they detected neutral targets, showing facilitated engagement toward negative information. In contrast, patients with AD showed no influence of emotional information on engagement delays. However, all groups reported the frame break location more slowly for negative than for neutral targets (after accounting for the last fixation delay), showing a more difficult disengagement from negative information. These findings are the first to highlight a selective lack of emotional influence on engagement processes in patients with AD. The involvement of amygdala alterations in this behavioral impairment remains to be investigated.

Can the induction of incidental positive emotions lead to different performances in sequential decision-making?

A growing body of evidence suggests that emotional states under which individuals perform decision-making tasks modulate performance. Studies have mainly reported that negative emotions can differentially increase or decrease performance by modulating feedback processing. In contrast, differential influences of specific emotions inside positive valence have been poorly investigated. The objective of the present work was to assess specific effect of different types of positive emotions on decision-making and to investigate whether this effect also depends on feedback processing. In our study, after being induced to feel either hope or happiness, participants undertook a risky sequential decision-making task in which feedback was required to obtain a good performance. We found that the more positive was the feedback received, the more happiness led participants to make risky decisions. This tendency was not observed among participants in the hopeful or in the control condition. Our results contribute to the literature showing that the effects of emotions on sequential decision-making performance can be explained by feedback processing and are not solely due to the valence of the emotional state. They also suggest that further research is required to determine which potential specific dimension is involved in the effects of positive emotions on sequential decision-making.

Multimodal assessment of language and memory reorganization: a proof of concept in two patients with drug-resistant temporal lobe epilepsy.

We report two patients suffering from drug-resistant temporal lobe epilepsy to show how their neuroplasticity can be apprehended using a multimodal, integrative and clinically relevant approach. This is a proof of concept based on using multimodal data including: (1) white matter structural connectivity (DTI) of the main tracts involved in language and memory; (2) neurophysiological biomarkers (fMRI-BOLD signal and LI lateralization indices); and (3) cognitive scores as measured during the neuropsychological assessment. We characterized tri-modal data for each patient using a descriptive integrative approach, in terms of reorganization and by comparing with a group of healthy participants. This proof of concept suggests that the inclusion of multimodal data in clinical studies is currently a major challenge. Since the various datasets obtained from MRI neuroimaging and cognitive scores are probably interrelated, it is important to go beyond the mono-modal approach and move towards greater integration of several multimodal data. Multimodal integration of anatomical, functional, and cognitive data facilitates the identification of comprehensive neurocognitive patterns in epileptic patients, thus enabling clinicians to differentiate between reorganization profiles and help to predict post-surgical outcomes for curative neurosurgery.

Semantic relatedness and distinctive processing may inflate older adults' positive memory bias.

Emotional stimuli are often more semantically interrelated and relatively distinct than neutral stimuli. These factors can enhance memory for emotional stimuli in young adults, but their effects in older adults-and on the age-related positive memory bias-remain unknown. In the present article, we tested whether item relatedness and distinctiveness affect emotional memory in young adults (Exps. 1 and 2) and the positive memory bias in older adults (Exp. 2). In both experiments, participants studied positive, negative, and neutral pictures and performed free recall after 1 min and 45 min. To manipulate relatedness, the neutral pictures were either as highly interrelated as the emotional pictures ("related neutral") or lower in semantic relatedness ("unrelated neutral"). To manipulate distinctiveness, we had participants process the emotional pictures in either a relatively distinct manner (mixed condition), by studying emotional and neutral pictures at the same time, or in a nondistinctive manner (unmixed condition), by studying and recalling each picture category separately. Overall, higher semantic relatedness (i.e., related-neutral vs. unrelated-neutral pictures) increased memory in both age groups. Distinctiveness did not affect memory in young adults, but it did alter the positive memory bias in older adults. Older adults recalled more positive than negative pictures when the pictures were processed in mixed sets, but not when they were processed in unmixed sets. These findings were consistent across both test delays. This suggests that previous reports, which were often based on mixed designs in which item interrelatedness was not controlled, may have overestimated the size and/or robustness of the positivity bias in older adults.

Automatic and Controlled Emotion Regulation in Aging: The Case of Expressive Suppression.

Background/Study Context: To explain the high levels of well-being reported by older adults, socioemotional selectivity theory suggests that emotion regulation becomes more automated with age. Hence, the objective of the present study was to determine whether automatic emotion regulation becomes indeed more efficient with age, as controlled regulation becomes less efficient. We tested this hypothesis with regard to a specific emotion regulation strategy, expressive suppression, and a discrete emotion: disgust. METHODS: Disgusting videos were presented to 74 young adults (mean (SD) age: 20.1 (1.8)) and 52 older adults (mean (SD) age: 73.6 (9.3)), randomly assigned to one of three conditions: the control condition, the implicit condition (assessing automatic suppression), and the explicit condition (assessing controlled suppression). The disgust expressed and the disgust felt were analyzed separately with factorial analyses of variance that included age group and regulation condition as between-subject variables. RESULTS: Our results suggest that automatic and controlled expressive suppression may both be altered in healthy aging. Relative to young adults, older adults do not suppress their facial expressions as much but report feeling less disgust. CONCLUSION: Expressive suppression may not become more automated with age. However, the older adults' ability to suppress facial expressions did not appear to be directly associated with the intensity of their emotions.

Aging Influences the Efficiency of Attentional Maintenance in Verbal Working Memory.

OBJECTIVES: Numerous studies reported an age-related deficit in verbal working memory (WM). Beyond the well-established general factors of cognitive aging, the alteration of the specific WM maintenance mechanisms may account for this deficit. This paper aims to investigate the hypothesis that WM attentional maintenance is impaired with age. METHOD: In a WM task adapted to individual short-term memory and processing speed, younger and older participants maintained letters while verbally responding to a concurrent processing task, in order to constrain the use of rehearsal. Critically, the opportunity to use attentional maintenance was manipulated by varying the cognitive load (CL) of the concurrent processing via its nature and pace. RESULTS: Younger participants outperformed older participants and, in both groups, recall performance decreased as the CL increased. Importantly, in line with our predictions, the CL effect was modulated by age. Older adults benefited less from free pauses that allowed participants to engage in attentional maintenance of WM traces. DISCUSSION: Although still effective in normal aging, WM attentional maintenance seems to be altered. It could therefore be a good candidate to account for WM age-related deficits.

Early Emotional Attention is Impacted in Alzheimer's Disease: An Eye-Tracking Study.

Emotional deficits have been repetitively reported in Alzheimer's disease (AD) without clearly identifying how emotional processing is impaired in this pathology. This paper describes an investigation of early emotional processing, as measured by the effects of emotional visual stimuli on a saccadic task involving both pro (PS) and anti (AS) saccades. Sixteen patients with AD and 25 age-matched healthy controls were eye-tracked while they had to quickly move their gaze toward a positive, negative, or neutral image presented on a computer screen (in the PS condition) or away from the image (in the AS condition). The age-matched controls made more AS mistakes for negative stimuli than for other stimuli, and triggered PSs toward negative stimuli more quickly than toward other stimuli. In contrast, patients with AD showed no difference with regard to the emotional category in any of the tasks. The present study is the first to highlight a lack of early emotional attention in patients with AD. These results should be taken into account in the care provided to patients with AD, since this early impairment might seriously degrade their overall emotional functioning.

What makes working memory traces stable over time?

Understanding the factors that make working memory (WM) traces stable over time is important because WM is the keystone of general cognitive achievement. Two views of attentional WM maintenance have been suggested to account for the long-term retention of WM information. First, the distractors in a WM task are thought to foster the creation of episodic memory cues through covert retrieval. Second, the cognitive load (CL) of the distractors is thought to vary long-term memory instantiation. In this study, we propose an additional parsimonious perspective: the total time during which each trace is under the control of attention in WM is the key to long-term retention. Participants performed a complex span task in which the CL and number of distractors were orthogonally manipulated, and thereafter the participants performed a delayed recall test. Similar to previous findings, the results showed effects of the number of distractors and of CL on delayed recall. Our results went further, however, by showing a non-linear relationship between delayed recall performance and the free time accumulated between encoding and immediate recall. The role of time in episodic memory performance and the underlying WM maintenance mechanism are discussed.

Age-related differences in brain activity during implicit and explicit processing of fearful facial expressions.

Age-related differences in neural correlates underlying implicit and explicit emotion processing are unclear. Within the framework of the Frontoamygdalar Age-related Differences in Emotion model (St Jacques et al., 2009), our objectives were to examine the behavioral and neural modifications that occur with age for both processes. During explicit and implicit processing of fearful faces, we expected to observe less amygdala activity in older adults (OA) than in younger adults (YA), associated with poorer recognition performance in the explicit task, and more frontal activity during implicit processing, suggesting compensation. At a behavioral level, explicit recognition of fearful faces was impaired in OA compared with YA. We did not observe any cerebral differences between OA and YA during the implicit task, whereas in the explicit task, OA recruited more frontal, parietal, temporal, occipital, and cingulate areas. Our findings suggest that automatic processing of emotion may be preserved during aging, whereas deliberate processing is impaired. Additional neural recruitment in OA did not appear to compensate for their behavioral deficits.