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Introduction
Current institution
Publications
Publications (230)
Objective
Impaired habituation of bodily sensations has been suggested as a contributing factor to chronic pain. We examined in healthy volunteers the influence of fear learning towards a non-painful sensation in the esophagus on the perceptual habituation of this sensation.
Methods
In a homoreflexive fear learning paradigm, non-painful electrical...
Despite being widely assumed, the worsening impact of unpredictability on pain perception remains unclear because of conflicting empirical evidence, and a lack of systematic integration of past research findings. To fill this gap, we conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis focusing on the effect of unpredictability on pain perception. We al...
Introduction
Neural gating of respiratory sensations (NGRS) characterizes the brain's ability to filter out repetitive respiratory sensory stimuli. This mechanism plays a crucial role in the neural processing of respiratory stimuli. However, whether aging affects the NGRS in healthy adults is still unclear. Therefore, we aimed to measure the effect...
Breathlessness is an aversive bodily sensation impacting millions of people worldwide. It is often highly detrimental for patients and can lead to profound distress and suffering. Notably, unpredictable breathlessness episodes are often reported as being more severe and unpleasant than predictable episodes, but the underlying reasons have not yet b...
Background
Human respiratory sensory gating is a neural process associated with inhibiting the cortical processing of repetitive respiratory mechanical stimuli. While this gating is typically examined in the time domain, the neural oscillatory dynamics, which could offer supplementary insights into respiratory sensory gating, remain unknown. The pu...
Despite being widely assumed, the worsening impact of unpredictability on pain perception remains unclear due to conflicting empirical evidence, and a lack of systematic integration of past research findings. To fill this gap, we conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis focusing on the effect of unpredictability on pain perception. We also c...
Habituation to bodily sensations is highly relevant for the experience of chronic bodily symptoms, but the neural mechanisms behind diminished habituation are currently unclear. One potentially relevant mechanism is neural gating (NG), reflected as the short-term suppression of cortical responses to redundant stimuli. We investigated the effects of...
Previous studies on the potential effects of unpredictability on pain perception and its neural correlates yielded divergent results. This study examined whether this may be explained by differences in acquired expectations. We presented 41 healthy volunteers with laser heat stimuli of different intensities. The stimuli were preceded either by pred...
Transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation (taVNS) is a non-invasive neurostimulation technique that is thought to modulate noradrenergic activity. Previous studies have demonstrated inconsistent effects of taVNS on noradrenergic activity, which is possibly due to insufficient statistical power, suboptimal stimulation parameter settings, and...
Psychological distress is prevalent in people with COPD and relates to a worse course of disease. It often remains unrecognised and untreated, intensifying the burden on patients, carers and healthcare systems. Nonpharmacological management strategies have been suggested as important elements to manage psychological distress in COPD. Therefore, thi...
Background:
According to limited-capacity theories of attention, less attentional resources remain available when engaging in a high versus a low demanding cognitive task. This may reduce the perceived intensity and the evoked cortical responses of concomitant nociceptive stimuli. Whether and how the competition for limited attentional resources b...
Previous studies on potential effects of unpredictability on pain perception and its neural correlates yielded divergent results. This study examined whether this may be explained by expectations. We presented 41 healthy volunteers with laser heat stimuli of different intensities. The stimuli were preceded either by predictable low, medium or high...
Background Non-invasive transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation (taVNS) has received tremendous attention as a potential neuromodulator of cognitive and affective functions, which likely exerts its effects via activation of the locus coeruleus-noradrenaline (LC-NA) system. Reliable effects of taVNS on markers of LC-NA system activity, howe...
Breathlessness is a centrally processed symptom, as evidenced by activation of distinct brain regions such as the insular cortex and amygdala, during the anticipation and/or perception of breathlessness. Inhaled L-menthol or blowing cool air to the face/nose, both selective trigeminal nerve (TGN) stimulants, relieve breathlessness without concurren...
After multiple waves of the COVID-19 pandemic, it has become clear that the impact of SARS-CoV-2 will carry on for years to come. Acutely infected patients show a broad range of disease severity, depending on virus variant, vaccination status, age and the presence of underlying medical and physical conditions, including obesity. Additionally, a lar...
Transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation (taVNS) is a neurostimulatory technique hypothesised to enhance central noradrenaline. Currently, there is scarce evidence in support of a noradrenergic mechanism of taVNS and limited knowledge on its stimulation parameters (i.e., intensity and pulse width). Therefore, the present study aimed to test...
Psychological challenges have been found to impact respiratory symptom perception in healthy individuals as well as in patients with various neurological disorders. Human respiratory sensory gating is an objective measure to examine respiratory sensory information processing of repetitive respiratory mechanical stimuli in the central nervous system...
Background:
Non-invasive transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation (taVNS) has received tremendous attention as a potential neuromodulator of cognitive and affective functions, which likely exerts its effects via activation of the locus coeruleus-noradrenaline (LC-NA) system. Reliable effects of taVNS on markers of LC-NA system activity, ho...
Errors put organisms in danger. Upon error commission, error processing allows for the updating of behavior that proved ineffective in light of the current context and goals, and for the activation of behavioral defensive systems. Pain, on the other hand, signals actual or potential danger to one's physical integrity and, likewise, motivates protec...
Pain can be considered as a signal of "bodily error": errors put organisms at danger and activate behavioral defensive systems. If the error is of physical nature, pain is the warning signal that motivates protective action such as avoidance behavior to safeguard our body's integrity. Interestingly, an important component of neural error processing...
This study sought to investigate whether slow deep breathing (SDB) facilitates reversal learning. We also explored whether SDB modulates the renewal effect. After learning a series of cue-outcome associations (early acquisition phase) in a predictive learning task, 37 participants paced their breathing according to a normal (NPB group; 0.2 Hz) or a...
Although transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation (taVNS) is thought to increase central noradrenergic activity, findings supporting such mechanism are scarce and inconsistent. This study aimed to investigate whether taVNS modulates indirect markers of phasic and tonic noradrenergic activity. Sixty-six healthy participants performed a novel...
Respiration is gaining traction as an important and consciously accessible interoceptive domain with strong relationships to anxiety. In this issue of Neuron, Harrison et al. (2021) report a tour de force investigation into this relationship at multiple levels of interoception, featuring a novel respiratory learning task.
Background and aims:
Disease-related behaviours that may maintain or worsen symptom burden remain largely unexplored in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). In this study, we developed and validated an instrument assessing IBD-related, modifiable behaviours and explored which behaviours prospectively correlate with fatigue, a debilitating and common...
Background
The “can do, do do” concept aims at identifying subgroups among persons with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Following a two-dimensional categorization, individuals are binarily classified with respect to their levels of physical capacity (“can’t do” or “can do”) and physical activity (“don’t do” or “do do”), resulting in f...
We examined how predictable and unpredictable punishment intensity contingent on error commission modulated ERN amplitudes. We recorded the ERN in 35 healthy volunteers performing the Eriksen flanker task. Errors were punished with predictable nonpainful, painful or unpredictable electrical stimulation. Furthermore, we investigated trait anxiety. W...
This study investigated whether transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation (taVNS) enhances reversal learning and augments noradrenergic biomarkers (i.e., pupil size, cortisol, and salivary alpha‐amylase [sAA]). We also explored the effect of taVNS on respiratory rate and cardiac vagal activity (CVA). Seventy‐one participants received stimula...
Pain can be considered as a signal of "bodily error": Errors put organisms at danger and activate behavioral defensive systems. If the error is of physical nature, pain is the warning signal that motivates protective action such as avoidance behavior to safeguard our body's integrity. Interestingly, an important component of neural error processing...
The respiratory-related evoked potential (RREP) is an established technique to study the neural processing of respiratory sensations. We examined the test-retest reliability of the RREP during an unloaded baseline condition (no dyspnea) and an inspiratory resistive loaded breathing condition (dyspnea) over a one-week period. RREPs were evoked by sh...
Dyspnea or breathlessness is a symptom occurring in multiple acute and chronic illnesses, however, the understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying its subjective experience is limited. In this topical review, we propose neural oscillatory dynamics and cross-frequency coupling as viable candidates for a neural mechanism underlying respiratory...
Dyspnea is a debilitating and threatening symptom in various diseases. Affected patients often report the unpredictability of dyspnea episodes being particularly anxiety‐provoking and amplifying the perception of dyspnea. Experimental studies testing dyspnea unpredictability together with related neural processes, physiological fear responses, and...
Neural gating is a phenomenon whereby the response to a stimulus recorded in the electroencephalogram (EEG) is attenuated when preceded by an identical stimulus. Such attenuation of paired auditory clicks (P50 suppression) has repeatedly been shown to be affected in multiple mental disorders, most notably schizophrenia. Neural gating has also been...
Neural gating is a phenomenon whereby the response to a stimulus recorded in the electroencephalogram (EEG) is attenuated when preceded by an identical stimulus. Such attenuation of paired auditory clicks (P50 suppression) has repeatedly been shown to be affected in multiple mental disorders, most notably schizophrenia. Neural gating has also been...
Pain can be considered as a signal of "bodily error": Errors-discrepancies between the actual and optimal/targeted state-can put organisms at danger and activate behavioral defensive systems. If the error relates to the body, pain is the warning signal that motivates protective action such as avoidance behavior to safeguard our body's integrity. He...
Objectives: Worry is the most common psychological complaint among patients with Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD). This study aimed to translate and test the psychometric properties the Rating Form of IBD Patient Concerns (RFIPC) among Dutch-speaking patients with IBD in Belgium. It also aimed to describe worries and concerns, and to examine possib...
Neural gating is a phenomenon whereby the response to a stimulus in the electroencephalogram (EEG) is attenuated when preceded by an identical stimulus. Attenuation of paired auditory clicks has repeatedly been shown to be affected in mental disorders, e.g. schizophrenia. Neural gating has also been measured for respiratory and somatosensory sensat...
The error-related negativity (ERN) is an event-related potential occurring in the electroencephalogram (EEG) within 100ms after the commission of an error. The ERN is thought to partially reflect emotionally aversive aspects of error commission, however, it has thus far not been related to the neural processing of other aversive events, such as bri...
Recent findings showed that an unpredictable context increases the amplitude of the Error-Related Negativity (ERN), a cognitive Event-Related Potential (ERP) that appears after the commission of an error. Interestingly, this effect has only been studied using unpredictable, performance-unrelated stimuli. In many situations, however, it is the conse...
Background
Cumulative evidence has suggested that brain regions including the bilateral insula and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) play critical roles in the processing of interoceptive information. However, the brain functional connectivity patterns underlying interoceptive sensibility (IS) and their role in the relationship between IS and sel...
The error-related negativity (ERN) is an event-related potential occurring in the electroencephalogram (EEG) within 100 ms after the commission of an error. The ERN is thought to partially reflect emotionally aversive aspects of error commission, however, it has thus far not been related to the neural processing of other aversive events, such as br...
Whether, how, and which cognitive factors modulate the development of secondary hypersensitivity/hyperalgesia following central sensitization is not fully understood. Here we tested, in three subsequent experiments, whether being engaged in non-pain related cognitive demanding tasks: i) lessens the amount of hypersensitivity developed after an expe...
We compared the perception and neural processing of respiratory sensations between 20 COPD patients and 20 healthy controls by means of respiratory-related evoked potentials (RREP) in the electroencephalogram (EEG). RREPs were induced by short inspiratory occlusions while 129-channel EEG was measured. COPD patients rated the occlusions as more inte...
Dyspnea is a debilitating symptom in various prevalent diseases. Previous research demonstrated several cognitive impairments in dyspneic patients including an impairment in recognition memory. Even though some factors contributing to these impairments have already been identified (e.g., smoking, medication), the relevance of dyspnea as one of thos...
Respiratory sensations such as breathlessness are prevalent in many diseases and are amplified by increased levels of anxiety. Cortical activation in response to inspiratory occlusions in high- and low-anxious individuals was found different in previous studies using the respiratory-related evoked potential method. However, specific brain areas sho...
Disease-specific fears predict health status in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), but their role in pulmonary rehabilitation (PR) remains poorly understood and especially longer-term evaluations are lacking. We therefore investigated changes in disease-specific fears over the course of PR and six months after PR, and investigated associ...
Whether, how, and which cognitive factors modulate the development of secondary hypersensitivity/hyperalgesia following central sensitization is not fully understood. Here we tested, in 60 healthy volunteers, whether being engaged in non-pain related cognitive demanding tasks: i) lessens the amount of hypersensitivity developed after an experimenta...
In order to treat dyspnea (=breathlessness) successfully, response inhibition (RI) as a major form of self-regulation is a premise. This is supported by research showing that self-regulation is associated with beneficial behavioral changes supporting treatment success in patients. Recent research showed that dyspnea has an impairing effect on RI, b...
Dyspnea is a prevalent interoceptive sensation and the aversive cardinal symptom in many cardiorespiratory diseases as well as in mental disorders. Especially the unpredictability of the occurrence of dyspnea episodes has been suggested to be highly anxiety provoking for affected patients. Moreover, previous studies demonstrated that unpredictable...
An extrinsic resistive load (R) to breathing increases the work of breathing. The extrinsic airway resistive work (W) of breathing during inspiration is defined as: Waw = Paw * Vi.. The power (J) required to breathe with this load is defined as: Jaw = ∫ Waw*dt. With increasing R, the Waw and Jaw required to sustain minute ventilation (VE) increases...
Respiratory load is key in various respiratory diseases, accompanied by ventilatory compensation, cognitive awareness and affective perception. Loaded breathing can occur for a few breaths, minutes or days. Inspiratory loads elicit breathing sensations associated with behavioral modulation of breathing elicit breathing patterns to maintain alveolar...
Cite this article as: Herzog M, Sucec J, Vukovic M, et al. Experimental social rejection increases dyspnoea perception and neural processing of respiratory sensations in healthy subjects. Eur Respir J 2019; 53:1801409 [https://doi.org/10.1183/13993003.01409-2018].
A negative mood-congruent attention bias has been consistently observed, for example, in clinical studies on major depression. This bias is assumed to be dysfunctional in that it supports maintaining a sad mood, whereas a potentially adaptive role has largely been neglected. Previous experiments involving sad mood induction techniques found a negat...
Anxiety is a highly prevalent psychological comorbidity in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease
(COPD) and has detrimental effects on pulmonary rehabilitation (PR) outcomes. It has been suggested that
disease-specific fears could play an even more important role in COPD patients’ disease progression. However,
little is known about ho...
Dyspnea is a threatening symptom frequently experienced by patients within social contexts such as in the presence of family members, health professionals, or other patients. However, the effects of social presence on perceived dyspnea remain unknown. Therefore, this study examined the effects of social presence on dyspnea perception and cortical n...
Psychological factors such as negative affect have been demonstrated to impact course and treatment of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). However, little is known about the respective impact of social factors. In several other chronic diseases, loneliness has been shown to predict morbidity, but little is known about its impact on COPD....
Dyspnea (breathlessness) is a threatening and aversive bodily sensation and a major symptom of various diseases. It has been suggested to impair several aspects of functioning in affected patients, but experimental proof for this assumption is widely absent. Error processing is an important domain of functioning and has intensively been studied usi...
The error-related negativity (ERN) is an event-related potential in the electroencephalogram (EEG) observed within the first 100 ms after commission of an error. Increased ERN amplitudes have been observed in several psychological disorders characterized by high negative affect. While the ERN has extensively been studied in tasks using exteroceptiv...
Dyspnea (=breathlessness) is an aversive and threatening symptom in various prevalent diseases.
Established treatment procedures aim for behavioral changes in dyspneic patients in order to
treat dyspnea successfully. To achieve these behavioral changes, response inhibition as one key
executive function for goal-directed behavior is an important pre...
Interoception refers to the process by which the nervous system senses, interprets, and integrates signals originating from within the body, providing a moment-by-moment mapping of the body’s internal landscape across conscious and unconscious levels. Interoceptive signaling has been considered a component process of reflexes, urges, feelings, driv...
Not only the perception, but already the anxious anticipation of breathlessness can trigger a vicious circle of breathlessness in COPD via avoidance behavior, deconditioning and ever increasing breathlessness. The underlying brain processes are poorly understood. First available studies demonstrate that during the perception of breathlessness, COPD...
Breathlessness is an aversive symptom in many prevalent somatic and psychiatric diseases and is usually experienced as highly threatening. It is strongly associated with negative affect, but the underlying neural processes remain poorly understood. Therefore, using fMRI, the present study examined the effects of breathlessness on the neural process...
Increased respiratory load is a key feature in various respiratory diseases, accompanied by ventilatory compensation, cognitive awareness and affective perception. Loaded breathing can occur from minutes to days requiring the individual to modulate their breathing pattern to maintain alveolar ventilation, minimize work of breathing and minimize ave...
