Interoceptive sensibility predicts the ability to infer others’ emotional states

Emotional sensations and inferring another’s emotional states have been suggested to depend on predictive models of the causes of bodily sensations, so-called interoceptive inferences. In this framework, higher sensibility for interoceptive changes (IS) reflects higher precision of interoceptive signals. The present study examined the link between IS and emotion recognition, testing whether individuals with higher IS recognize others’ emotions more easily and are more sensitive to learn from biased probabilities of emotional expressions. We recorded skin conductance responses (SCRs) from forty-six healthy volunteers performing a speeded-response task, which required them to indicate whether a neutral facial expression dynamically turned into a happy or fearful expression. Moreover, varying probabilities of emotional expressions by their block-wise base rate aimed to generate a bias for the more frequently encountered emotion. As a result, we found that individuals with higher IS showed lower thresholds for emotion recognition, reflected in decreased reaction times for emotional expressions especially of high intensity. Moreover, individuals with increased IS benefited more from a biased probability of an emotion, reflected in decreased reaction times for expected emotions. Lastly, weak evidence supporting a differential modulation of SCR by IS as a function of varying probabilities was found. Our results indicate that higher interoceptive sensibility facilitates the recognition of emotional changes and is accompanied by a more precise adaptation to emotion probabilities.

Altered effective connectivity of the extended face processing system in depression and its association with treatment response: findings from the YoDA-C randomized controled trial

Background Depression is commonly associated with fronto-amygdala dysfunction during the processing of emotional face expressions. Interactions between these regions are hypothesized to contribute to negative emotional processing biases and as such have been highlighted as potential biomarkers of treatment response. This study aimed to investigate depression associated alterations to directional connectivity and assess the utility of these parameters as predictors of treatment response. Methods Ninety-two unmedicated adolescents and young adults (mean age 20.1; 56.5% female) with moderate-to-severe major depressive disorder and 88 healthy controls (mean age 19.8; 61.4% female) completed an implicit emotional face processing fMRI task. Patients were randomized to receive cognitive behavioral therapy for 12 weeks, plus either fluoxetine or placebo. Using dynamic causal modelling, we examined functional relationships between six brain regions implicated in emotional face processing, comparing both patients and controls and treatment responders and non-responders. Results Depressed patients demonstrated reduced inhibition from the dlPFC to vmPFC and reduced excitation from the dlPFC to amygdala during sad expression processing. During fearful expression processing patients showed reduced inhibition from the vmPFC to amygdala and reduced excitation from the amygdala to dlPFC. Response was associated with connectivity from the amygdala to dlPFC during sad expression processing and amygdala to vmPFC connectivity during fearful expression processing. Conclusions Our study clarifies the nature of face processing network alterations in adolescents and young adults with depression, highlighting key interactions between the amygdala and prefrontal cortex. Moreover, these findings highlight the potential utility of these interactions in predicting treatment response.

The Effects of Angry Expressions and Fearful Expressions on Duration Perception: An ERP Study

Little is known about the electrophysiological basis of the effect of threat-related emotional stimuli with different motivational direction on duration perception. Thus, event-related potentials were employed to examine the effects of angry expressions and fearful expressions on perception of different duration (490–910 ms). Behavioral results showed there was a greater underestimation of the duration of angry expressions (approach-motivated negative stimuli) than fearful expressions (withdrawal-motivated negative stimuli), compared with neutral expressions. Event-related potentials results showed that, the area of Contingent Negative Variation (CNV) evoked by angry expression, fearful expression and neutral expression gradually increased. These results indicated that specific electrophysiological mechanisms may underlie the attention effects of angry and fearful expressions on timing. Specifically, compared with neutral expressions, fearful expressions and angry expressions both are likely to distract more attentional resources from timer, in particular, angry expressions attract more attention resources than fearful expressions from timer. The major contribution of the current study is to provide electrophysiological evidences of fear vs. anger divergence in the aspect of time perception and to demonstrate beyond the behavioral level that the categorization of threat-related emotions should be refined so to highlight the adaptability of the human defense system.

The Effect of Emotion on Associative Memory: Anger Versus Fear

Studies show that emotion enhances memory for individual items but weakens memory for associations between items (Bisby & Burgess, 2014). One explanation for this associative memory impairment is that emotional stimuli capture attention, causing enhanced encoding of the emotional item but reduced encoding of the surrounding environment (Schupp, Junghöfer, Weike, & Hamm, 2003). This explanation generates the prediction that emotional information always impairs associative memory. Alternatively, it may be that emotion orients attention towards threats in the environment, suggesting that emotions’ effects on associative memory may differ depending on where they indicate a threat may be coming from (Öhman, Flykt, & Esteves, 2001). For example, seeing an angry face constitutes a direct threat. The angry face itself potentially captures attention and thereby reduces memory for its associated information. In contrast, seeing a fearful face indicates a threat elsewhere in the environment. Therefore, the fearful face may redirect attention towards the surroundings and thus enhance encoding of the associated information. To adjudicate between these hypotheses, subjects studied sets of three images, consisting of two objects and a face with either a neutral, angry, or fearful expression. Subjects were later tested on their memory for the associations between the three items. Supporting the first hypothesis, memory for both angry and fearful associations was worse than memory for neutral associations. Contrary to the second hypothesis, there were no differences in memory for angry versus fearful associations. Thus, emotional information itself seems to capture attention, weakening memory for related information.

The association of temperament and maternal empathy with individual differences in infants’ neural responses to emotional body expressions

We examined the role of infant temperament and maternal dispositional empathy in the neural processing of happy and fearful emotional body expressions in 8-month-old infants by measuring event-related brain potentials. Our results revealed that infants’ tendency to approach novel objects and people was positively correlated with the neural sensitivity (attention allocation) to fearful expressions, while infant fearfulness was negatively correlated to the neural sensitivity to fearful expressions. Maternal empathic concern was associated with infants’ neural discrimination between happy and fearful expression, with infants of more empathetically concerned mothers showing greater neural sensitivity (attention allocation) to fearful compared to happy expressions. It is critical that our results also revealed that individual differences in the sensitivity to emotional information are explained by an interaction between infant temperament and maternal empathic concern. Specifically, maternal empathy appears to impact infants’ neural responses to emotional body expressions, depending on infant fearfulness. These findings support the notion that the way in which infants respond to emotional signals in the environment is fundamentally linked to their temperament and maternal empathic traits. This adds an early developmental neuroscience dimension to existing accounts of social–emotional functioning, suggesting a complex and integrative picture of why and how infants’ emotional sensitivity varies.

Fear-specific modulation of tactile perception is disrupted after amygdala lesions

The perception of tactile stimuli on the face is modulated when subjects concurrently observe a face being touched; this effect is termed ‘Visual Remapping of Touch’, or the VRT effect, and might represent a visually evoked somatosensory activity. VRT effect is modulated by specific key information processed in face-to-face interactions: facial emotional expression. Indeed, tactile perception in healthy subjects is enhanced when viewing touch towards a fearful face compared to viewing touch towards neutral, happy or angry expressions. The fear-specific modulation of the VRT effect might be interpreted as an adaptive preferential enhancement of the somatosensory cortices in presence of fearful stimuli. The present experiment was designed to test whether the amygdala, a crucial neural site in fear perception, might contribute to this effect. Six epileptic patients (mean age: 20 years) with lesions to the amygdala due to temporal lobe resection received tactile stimuli near the perceptual threshold, either on their right, left or both cheeks. Concurrently, they watched several blocks of movies depicting a face with a neutral, happy or fearful expression that was touched or just approached by human fingers. Participants were asked to distinguish between felt unilateral and bilateral tactile stimulation. Tactile perception was enhanced when viewing touch only towards a neutral face, while no effect was found when patients viewed touch towards fearful or happy faces. Results of the present experiment suggest that the amygdala modulates the activity of the somatosensory cortices, playing a crucial role in mediating the fear-specific enhancement in the VRT effect.