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Empathy-for-pain states are underpinned byinteroception, i.e the central representation of internal states. Cardiac signals occur in a phasic manner; baroreceptor discharges at systole communicate the heartbeats’ strength. These signals... more
Empathy-for-pain states are underpinned byinteroception, i.e the central representation of internal states. Cardiac signals occur in a phasic manner; baroreceptor discharges at systole communicate the heartbeats’ strength. These signals modulate pain and emotion processing. We tested whether these phasic interoceptive signals modulate empathy-for-pain. As oxytocin (OT) enhances empathy and modulates interoceptive signals’ precision, we also tested if OT administration impacts empathy-for-pain via interoceptive mechanisms.Male subjects (N=32) attended three sessions to perform psychometric tests and an fMRI empathy-for-pain task, after intranasal administration of OT or placebo (40IU). Pictures of hands in painful or non-painful context were presented at systole or diastole. Effects of drug, emotion and cardiac timing on behaviour and brain activity was tested using general and mixed-effects linear models.Across conditions, activation was observed within regions implicated in pain and empathy-for-pain, with insula activation greater in the right than left hemisphere. OT administration, compared to placebo, attenuated the reactivity of some regions, including anterior cingulate cortex, but presentation of stimuli at systole blocked the OT attenuating effect.Our data suggest that OT alters the processing of motivationally-salient social cues, interacting with interoceptive signals. Our findings may inform targeted use of OT in psychiatric conditions linked to aberrant interoceptive processing.
Research Interests: Neuroscience, Psychology, Biology, Interoception, Empathy, and 3 moreOxytocin, Insula, and Insular Cortex
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The corpus callosum (CC) is the major commissure interconnecting the two hemispheres and is particularly affected in multiple sclerosis (MS). In the present review, we aimed to investigate the role played by callosal damages in the... more
The corpus callosum (CC) is the major commissure interconnecting the two hemispheres and is particularly affected in multiple sclerosis (MS). In the present review, we aimed to investigate the role played by callosal damages in the pathogenesis of MS-related dysfunctions and examine whether a model of callosal disconnection syndrome is a valid model for MS. For this purpose, we will first review structural and functional evidence of callosal pathology in MS. Second, we will account for the potential role of CC abnormalities in MS-related dysfunctions. Finally, we will report data concurring with a “multiple disconnection hypothesis” that has been proposed to explain those dysfunctions, and we will examine evidence pointing toward MS as a “callosal disconnection syndrome.” We will end by discussing the contribution of this interpretation to the understanding of MS and MS-related deficits.
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Over the past few years, it has become standard to describe brain anatomical and functional organisation in terms of complex networks, wherein single brain regions or modules and their connections are respectively identified with network... more
Over the past few years, it has become standard to describe brain anatomical and functional organisation in terms of complex networks, wherein single brain regions or modules and their connections are respectively identified with network nodes and the links connecting them. Often, the goal of a given study is not that of modelling brain activity but, more basically, to discriminate between experimental conditions or populations, thus to find a way to compute differences between them. This in turn involves two important aspects: defining discriminative features and quantifying differences between them. Here we show that the ranked dynamical stability of network features, from links or nodes to higher-level network properties, discriminates well between healthy brain activity and various pathological conditions. These easily computable properties, which constitute local but topographically aspecific aspects of brain activity, greatly simplify inter-network comparisons and spare the ne...
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Impairment of facial expression recognition in dementia is one of the cognitive deficits that could affect the social life of dementia patients. The severity of the facial expression recognition in different types of dementia has not been... more
Impairment of facial expression recognition in dementia is one of the cognitive deficits that could affect the social life of dementia patients. The severity of the facial expression recognition in different types of dementia has not been fully addressed. Previous studies showed that EEG event‐related oscillation (ERO) studies could reveal the brain dynamics during successful facial expression recognition. Furthermore, the impairment of facial recognition in Alzheimer's disease patients were represented with abnormal EROs (Güntekin et al., 2019). The present study aims to compare the impaired facial expression recognition between different types of dementia by analysis of event‐related delta responses. The role of delta responses in facial expression and emotional paradigms was reported previously by several researchers (Güntekin and Başar, 2014).
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Anxiety and depression are both characterized by dysregulated autonomic reactivity to emotion. However, most experiments until now have focused on autonomic reactivity to stimuli presented in central vision (CV) even if affective saliency... more
Anxiety and depression are both characterized by dysregulated autonomic reactivity to emotion. However, most experiments until now have focused on autonomic reactivity to stimuli presented in central vision (CV) even if affective saliency is also observed in peripheral vision (PV). We compared autonomic reactivity to CV and PV emotional stimulation in 58 participants with high anxious (HA) or low anxious (LA) and high depressive (HD) or low depressive (LD) symptomatology, based on STAI‐B and BDI scores, respectively. Unpleasant (U), pleasant (P), and neutral (N) pictures from IAPS were presented at three eccentricities (0°: CV; −12 and 12°: PV). Skin conductance (SC), skin temperature, pupillary diameter, and heart rate (HR) were recorded. First, HA participants showed greater pupil dilation to emotional than to neutral stimuli in PV than in CV. Second, in contrast to HD, the valence effect indexed by SC and emotional arousal effect indexed by skin temperature were observed in LD. T...
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<p>Differences between each half-night and its corresponding half of the Ref night (means and SEM). A: first half of the night; B: second half. Abbreviations for nights and movie valences are the same as those of <a... more
<p>Differences between each half-night and its corresponding half of the Ref night (means and SEM). A: first half of the night; B: second half. Abbreviations for nights and movie valences are the same as those of <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0142721#pone.0142721.g002" target="_blank">Fig 2</a>.</p
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Research Interests: Psychology, Cognition, Medicine, Anorexia Nervosa, Autonomic Nervous System, and 12 moreEmotions, Humans, Galvanic Skin Response, Female, Depressive Disorder, Arousal, Psychosomatic, Elsevier, Psychiatric Status Rating Scales, Affective symptoms, Psychology and Cognitive Sciences, and Medical and Health Sciences
Research Interests: Psychology, Biological Psychology, Cognitive Science, Emotion, Electrophysiology, and 13 moreVisual perception, Electroencephalography, Intrinsic motivation, Emotions, Affect, Habituation, Evoked Potentials, Humans, Event Related Potentials, Arousal, Valence, Individual Difference, and Neurosciences
Este artículo enfatiza las etapas principales del descubrimiento de uno de los marcadores autonómos más destacados de las expresiones mentales, la actividad electrodérmica (EDA). La contribución de las escue-las de fisiología francesa y... more
Este artículo enfatiza las etapas principales del descubrimiento de uno de los marcadores autonómos más destacados de las expresiones mentales, la actividad electrodérmica (EDA). La contribución de las escue-las de fisiología francesa y alemana, orientada por las necesidades clínicas y el deseo de conocer más sobre los mecanismos fisiológicos, constituyen las primeras raíces de dicha actividad. En este marco, Féré y Tarchanoff, des-cubridores franceses y rusos respectivamente, establecieron el vínculo entre la actividad mental y la EDA, por un lado, y sentaron las bases metodoló-gicas de la utilización moderna de este neuromarcador, por el otro. Este le-gado, asociado con medidas neuronales centrales, promete un futuro en expansión en neuropsicología, psicopatología, neurología, criminología y en neurociencia cognitiva y afectiva. This paper emphazises main steps of the discovery of one of the most salient autonomic markers of mind expressions, the electrodermal ac-tivity(EDA). The ...
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In natural situations, unpredictable events processing often interacts with the ongoing cognitive activities. In a similar manner, the insertion of deviant unpredictable stimuli into a classical oddball task evokes both the P3a and P3b... more
In natural situations, unpredictable events processing often interacts with the ongoing cognitive activities. In a similar manner, the insertion of deviant unpredictable stimuli into a classical oddball task evokes both the P3a and P3b event-related potentials (ERPs) components that are, respectively, thought to index reallocation of attentional resources or inhibitory process and memory updating mechanism. This study aims at characterising the influence of the emotional arousal and valence of a deviant and unpredictable non-target stimulus on these components. ERPs were recorded from 28 sites during a visual three-stimulus oddball paradigm. Unpleasant, neutral and pleasant pictures served as non-target unpredictable items and subjects were asked to realize a perceptually difficult standard/target discrimination task. A temporal principal component analysis (PCA) allowed us to show that non-target pictures elicited both a P3a and a P3b. Moreover, the P3b component was modulated by t...
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Henrique Sequeira4, Theodora Duka2, and Hugo Critchley1,3 1 Brighton and Sussex Medical School, Clinical Imaging Science Centre, Brighton, BN1 9RR, England; 2 University of Sussex, Psychology Department, Brighton, BN1 9RR, England; 3... more
Henrique Sequeira4, Theodora Duka2, and Hugo Critchley1,3 1 Brighton and Sussex Medical School, Clinical Imaging Science Centre, Brighton, BN1 9RR, England; 2 University of Sussex, Psychology Department, Brighton, BN1 9RR, England; 3 Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science, University of Sussex, UK; 4 University of Lille, SCALab, CNRS UMR 9193, Lille, 59045, France. The insular glutamatergic system in Alexithymia: A combined fMRI and MRS study.
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We investigated explicit and implicit emotional processing in peripheral vision using saccadic choice tasks. Emotional-neutral pairs of scenes were presented peripherally either at 10, 30 or 60° away from fixation. The participants had to... more
We investigated explicit and implicit emotional processing in peripheral vision using saccadic choice tasks. Emotional-neutral pairs of scenes were presented peripherally either at 10, 30 or 60° away from fixation. The participants had to make a saccadic eye movement to the target scene: emotional vs neutral in the explicit task, and oval vs rectangular in the implicit task. In the explicit task, pleasant scenes were reliably categorized as emotional up to 60° while performance for unpleasant scenes decreased between 10° and 30° and did not differ from chance at 60°. Categorization of neutral scenes did not differ from chance. Performance in the implicit task was significantly better for emotional targets than for neutral targets at 10° and this beneficial effect of emotion persisted only for pleasant scenes at 30°. Thus, these findings show that explicit and implicit emotional processing in peripheral vision depends on eccentricity and valence of stimuli.
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Objective: Emotional states are expressed in body and mind through subjective experience of physiological changes. In previous work, subliminal priming of anger prior to lexical decisions increased systolic blood pressure (SBP). This... more
Objective: Emotional states are expressed in body and mind through subjective experience of physiological changes. In previous work, subliminal priming of anger prior to lexical decisions increased systolic blood pressure (SBP). This increase predicted the slowing of response times (RT), suggesting that baroreflex-related autonomic changes and their interoceptive (feedback) representations, influence cognition. Alexithymia is a subclinical affective dysfunction characterized by difficulty in identifying emotions. Atypical autonomic and interoceptive profiles are observed in alexithymia. Therefore, we sought to identify mechanisms through which SBP fluctuations during emotional processing might influence decision-making, including whether alexithymia contributes to this relationship. Methods Thirty-two male participants performed an affect priming paradigm and completed the Toronto Alexithymia Scale. Emotional faces were briefly presented (20ms) prior a short-term memory task. RT, ac...
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Alexithymia describes an abnormality of emotional experience that is commonly expressed among individuals with addiction and alcohol abuse disorders. Alexithymic individuals are characterized by difficulties in identifying and describing... more
Alexithymia describes an abnormality of emotional experience that is commonly expressed among individuals with addiction and alcohol abuse disorders. Alexithymic individuals are characterized by difficulties in identifying and describing their emotions. This impairment is linked to the development and maintenance of addiction. Moreover, an emergent theory suggests alexithymia is itself secondary to a failure of interoception (sensitivity to internal bodily signals, including physiological arousal states). The present study tested for hypothesized contributory roles of alexithymia and dysfunctional interoception in the expression of binge drinking. Alexithymia, subjective sensitivity to bodily sensations, and alcohol consumption scores were quantified using the Toronto Alexithymia Scale, the Body Perception Questionnaire and the Alcohol Use Questionnaire respectively, in a normative sample (N=600). Regression and bootstrapping mediation analyses were used to test the hypothesis that ...