Cognitive Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience最新文献

Why does decision-making sometimes feel demanding while other times feel effortless? The dominant view of cognitive effort suggests that, all else being equal, individuals prefer to avoid mentally effortful courses of action-an empirical phenomenon that has been well-studied in cognitive control paradigms. However, less work has investigated cognitive demand avoidance in value-based decisions. Here we investigate subjective (self-reported) demand, preferences for demand, and psychophysiological measures of effort outlay in the context of risky decision-making. Across three experiments (N = 199), we observe that individuals evaluate choice pairs-consisting of two options with described risk levels and reward magnitudes-with less discriminable expected value differences as subjectively more demanding. More interestingly, participants exhibit a robust preference for low-demand risky choice pairs in a novel Decision Demand Task, which we modeled after a well-characterized demand selection paradigm used in the cognitive control domain. Finally, using pupillometry, we find that participants, contrary to our expectations, exhibit larger task-evoked pupillary responses (TEPRs)-a well-characterized measure of momentary effort exertion-when choosing between low-demand versus high-demand risky choice pairs, and that these TEPR magnitudes predicted subsequent demand-avoidant preferences. Together, these results demonstrate that cognitive demand avoidance generalizes beyond cognitive control tasks to risky value-based choice.

The ability of machines to recognize emotions automatically is becoming increasingly significant across many domains where emotional understanding is essential. Such technology is applied in customer interaction, marketing, healthcare, education, the automotive industry, entertainment, and security. Providing real-time insights into human affective states improves user engagement and enables systems to respond more intelligently. Nevertheless, progress in this field is hindered by the inherent complexity of emotions, cultural differences in expression, and technical limitations that make accurate detection challenging. This paper delivers a broad review of contemporary approaches to emotion recognition. It highlights techniques based on facial expression analysis (FER), oculometrics (OM), microexpressions identification (MER), and speech analysis (SER). Further attention is given to methods involving body posture, gesture, and gait, as well as tactile interaction, text-based emotion recognition, and methods based on self-reporting. In addition, physiological signal-driven methods are discussed in depth, including respiration signals (RS), galvanic skin response (GSR), electroencephalography (EEG), electromyography (EMG), skin temperature (SKT), cardiac signals (ECG, PPG, HRV), and touch dynamics (TD) analysis. This comprehensive overview lays the foundation for advancing research on machine-based emotion recognition.

Postpartum depression (PPD) impacts the health of both mothers and their offspring, underscoring the importance of early identification of risk factors for PPD. While both low-trait mindfulness and blunted neural processing to emotional stimuli (indexed by the late positive potential; LPP) have been separately associated with depression, previous work has highlighted an inverse relationship between trait mindfulness and neural emotional processing. Thus, it remains unclear how facets of trait mindfulness and neural emotional processing interact as risk factors for PPD. During the second trimester, pregnant women (n = 117) completed the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire, the Inventory of Depression and Anxiety Symptoms (IDAS), and an infant face matching task while continuous electroencephalography was recorded. At 9 weeks postpartum, participants' PPD symptoms were reassessed with the IDAS. A series of hierarchical linear regression models revealed that acting with awareness, a trait mindfulness facet, and LPP to happy infant faces interacted to predict PPD symptoms (β = .217, p = .014, 95% CI [.045, .390]) after adjusting for depression levels in mid-pregnancy, such that low acting with awareness was associated with greater PPD symptoms when LPP to happy infant faces was 1 standard deviation below (β = -.548, SE = .150 , p < .001) and at the mean (β = -.309, SE = .106, p = .004). Findings suggest that an enhanced LPP to positively valenced stimuli may be protective against postpartum depression for those with low-trait mindfulness.

Finding a way to relax is increasingly difficult in our overstimulating, modern society. Chronic stress can have severe psychological and physiological consequences. Music is a promising tool to promote relaxation by lowering heart rate, modulating mood and thoughts, and providing a sense of safety. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate how music influences brain activity during relaxation with a particular focus on the participants' experience of different types of music. In a 2 × 2 design, 57 participants were scanned while rating how relaxed they felt after listening to 28-s excerpts of either familiar or unfamiliar relaxation music with calm or energetic features. Behaviourally, calm music was the strongest predictor of relaxation, followed by familiar music. Functional magnetic resonance imaging results revealed activations of auditory, motor, emotion, and memory areas for listening to familiar compared with unfamiliar music. This suggests increased audiomotor synchronization and participant engagement of known music. Listening to unfamiliar music was correlated with attention-related brain activity, suggesting increased attentional load for this music. Behaviourally, we identified four clusters of participants based on their relaxation response to the different types of music. These groups also displayed distinct auditory and motor activity patterns, suggesting that the behavioural responses are linked to changes in music processing. Interestingly, some individuals found energetic music to be relaxing if it is familiar, whereas others only found calm music to be relaxing. Such individual behavioural and neurological differences in relaxation responses to music emphasise the importance of developing personalised music-based interventions.

Social influence, including obedience, compliance, and conformity, strongly shapes human behavior, particularly in moral contexts. While the neurocognitive mechanisms of obedience and compliance have been extensively studied, those underlying moral conformity remain underexplored. We conducted an experiment in which two agents sequentially decided whether to administer painful shocks to a victim in exchange for a shared monetary reward. We examined how the first agent's choice influenced the second agent's behavior and the neurocognitive processes involved. Key variables included personal and shared responsibility ratings, sense of agency, and three electroencephalography components: frontal-midline theta power (FMθ) during the partner's decision-a maker of auditory attention; FMθ during one's own decision-a marker of cognitive conflict; and centroparietal P3-LPP amplitude during shock observation-an index of empathic neural response. Results showed that the second agent's decisions were significantly influenced by first agent's choices, especially toward the antisocial direction. Greater FMθ during the auditory processing of the partner's choice was associated with higher overall conformity. FMθ during decision-making was lower when conforming prosocially compared with antisocially, while larger P3-LPP amplitudes to observed pain were associated with reduced antisocial conformity. Prosocial conformity was associated with greater feelings of personal and shared responsibility, higher subjective empathy, increased sense of agency, and reduced conflict during decision making. These findings show that people exhibit a clear tendency to align with others' moral decisions, and the effects of social influence are shaped by the moral valence of observed behavior. This suggests a distinction between processes of diffusion of responsibility in immoral contexts and shared responsibility in prosocial ones.

Value-based decision-making provides a theoretical framework to investigate apathy and impulsivity-two notable disturbances in Huntington's disease (HD). Whilst existing work has examined decisions requiring comparison between two options, many everyday choices involve a different class of decision: whether to continue to pursue a current course of action or switch to an alternative. We investigated whether reward and cost sensitivity in a 'stay or leave' foraging task would be associated with HD apathy and/or impulsivity. People with HD (n = 37) and controls (n = 40) performed a foraging task where the costs of leaving were effort (low and high) and time (short and long). Apathy and impulsivity were measured using questionnaires, and their associations with patch-leaving times were examined using linear mixed models. People with HD and controls stayed longer as costs to leave increased, in line with theoretical predictions. There was also a significant positive association between individual sensitivity to effort and delay costs. Apathy in HD was not associated with altered effort or delay cost sensitivity. Impulsivity in HD was associated with increased sensitivity to delay-but not effort-costs. Sensitivity to changing effort and time costs in a foraging context differs as a function of apathy and impulsivity in HD. The effects of these costs on foraging decisions also differ from previous work assessing cost sensitivity in HD using binary choice tasks, underlying the importance of decision context in interpreting associations with clinical syndromes in a value-based decision-making framework.

Background: The prevalence of depressive and anxiety disorders dramatically increases as children enter adolescence. It is critical to identify etiological factors that can assist in the identification of children most at risk. Event-related potentials are one measure that has demonstrated promise and feasible application in children and adolescents. In particular, the P300 has been extensively employed to examine cognitive system deviations associated with depressive and anxiety disorders. However, this work has primarily focused on adults, and there have been limited prospective investigations, making it unclear whether the P300 can prospectively predict the development of later depressive and anxiety disorders during critical developmental periods, such as adolescence.

Methods: The present sample included 272 9-year-old children with no history of psychopathology who completed the doors task while continuous electroencephalography was recorded to measure the choice- and feedback-locked P300s. Participants completed follow-up diagnostic interviews through age 15 to determine onset of later depressive and anxiety disorders.

Results: A smaller choice-locked, but not feedback-locked, P300 in childhood predicted an increased likelihood of developing first-onset depression by mid-adolescence. Neither P300 predicted the development of anxiety disorders.

Conclusions: The present study indicates a blunted choice-locked P300 indexes risk for depressive disorders in adolescence. The choice-locked P300 might be a valuable neural measure for further understanding pathways unique to increasing depression in adolescence.

Cognitive control of emotion is important for social-emotional functioning. Yet, we know little about the development of implicit cognitive control of emotion (iCCOE) or its neural underpinnings during the start of adolescence. This study aimed to characterize the neural underpinnings of iCCOE in early adolescence and examine how iCCOE behavior and neural activation are related to sex and pubertal development. We used baseline data from the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development^SM study (N = 7,897; age 8.9-11.0 years). Participants completed an emotional n-back task during functional MRI. We defined iCCOE as the interaction between cognitive load (2-back versus 0-back) and stimulus type (emotional faces vs. neutral faces or places). Pubertal development was measured by parent-report and hormone levels. Neural activation strongly increased in cognitive control regions during 2-back trials and to places; it decreased in the lateral parietal cortex during emotional versus neutral faces at 2-back. Test-retest reliability was low for iCCOE behavior and neural activation. There were no sex differences in iCCOE behavior or neural activation, and limited effects of pubertal development. Thus, the priority should be to develop a task that reliably captures interindividual differences in iCCOE. This would lead to better understanding of the development of iCCOE during adolescence in health and disease.

Rumination involves repetitive dwelling on negative thoughts, emotions, and memories and is a risk factor for depression. Cognitive theories suggest that rumination stems from heightened automatic, emotional stimuli-driven (i.e., "bottom-up") and/or deficits in effortful, goal-directed (i.e., "top-down") processes. It remains unclear whether rumination arises from bottom-up processes impacting top-down inhibitory control or from impaired inhibition alone. We used both experimental and computational approaches to address this. Participants (N = 151) first completed self-report measures of trait rumination, followed by the standard and emotional Stroop tasks, before and after a rumination induction. Brooding, a maladaptive component of rumination, was associated with slower reaction times for both tasks. A rumination induction, expected to heighten bottom-up emotional salience, increased the congruency effect in proportion to brooding severity. To study underlying computational mechanisms, we adapted an existing parallel distributed processing model of the Stroop task to include mechanisms for emotional cue processing and subsequently numerically fit the model parameters to individual participant Stroop data. Brooding was positively associated with bottom-up weights and steeper neural activation curves in the task control layer, representing a greater sensitivity to emotional cues and changes in task demands. Higher brooding also predicted faster temporal integration (i.e., activity decay) of top-down control signals and slower temporal integration (i.e., activity persistence) of emotional cues. We therefore propose that a greater sensitivity to changes in task demands and bottom-up emotional cues, along with a diminished capacity to sustain goal-relevant control signals, underlie inhibitory control deficits in trait rumination.

Although defined as a movement disorder, Parkinson's disease is characterised by a diverse range of motor and nonmotor symptoms, including cognitive impairment. Use of motor subtypes to characterise symptom heterogeneity is common, but it remains unclear whether these subtypes capture meaningful differences in nonmotor symptoms. Our systematic review and meta-analysis sought to investigate differences in cognitive function between motor subtypes of Parkinson's disease. A total of 123 eligible studies were identified from database searches (PubMed, PsycINFO, CINAHL, Scopus, Web of Science; last searched 23/01/2024) and forward and backward snowballing. All included studies used at least one objective or clinician-rated motor measure to classify patients into motor subtypes and administered one or more objective or clinician-rated cognitive assessments. Data were analysed using a combination of multilevel meta-analysis, traditional meta-analysis, and narrative synthesis. Several study characteristics, including subtyping method, cognitive domain, and disease duration, were evaluated as possible moderators, and risk of bias was assessed using an adapted version of the Quality in Prognosis Studies tool. We found robust evidence for better preserved cognition in tremor-dominant motor subtypes and for poorer cognition in freezing of gait, postural instability gait disorder, and akinetic-rigid subtypes. Our moderator analyses indicated that motor subtype provides important information about cognitive profile that cannot be inferred from other patient characteristics. Unfortunately, reporting of motor subtyping procedures often lacked clarity, compromising subtype reproducibility. Our findings demonstrate the utility of motor subtyping for identifying patients most at risk of cognitive decline and dementia, and highlight opportunities for future motor subtyping research.