Andrei C. Miu

Andrei C. Miu
Babeş-Bolyai University | UBB · Department of Psychology

Ph.D.

About

96
Publications
67,472
Reads
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3,104
Citations
Introduction
Andrei Miu is Professor at the Department of Psychology, and the Founding Director of the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, Babeș-Bolyai University. His research investigates the psychological and biological mechanisms of emotion and emotion regulation, with the aim of uncovering individual differences that contribute to risk for psychopathology. E-mail: andreimiu@psychology.ro Laboratory website: http://cognitive-neuroscience.ro/
Additional affiliations
October 2003 - July 2016
Babeş-Bolyai University
Position
  • Professor
Education
October 2003 - May 2007
Babeş-Bolyai University
Field of study
  • Psychology
October 2003 - July 2005
Iuliu Haţieganu University of Medicine and Pharmacy
Field of study
  • Molecular Medicine and Neuroscience
October 1999 - July 2003
Babeş-Bolyai University
Field of study
  • Psychology

Publications

Publications (96)
Article
Full-text available
Early life adversity has been associated with a lifelong increased risk for psychopathology and chronic health problems. These long-term negative effects have been explained through stress sensitization, which may involve dysregulation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis through either increased or decreased reactivity. The present met...
Article
Background: Childhood adversity (CA) is associated with increased risk of psychopathology, and reward processing (RP) may be one of the underlying mechanisms. However, evidence on impaired RP in childhood adversity is theoretically and methodologically heterogeneous. Objective: To provide a quantitative overview of studies on the relation between...
Article
Childhood adversity is a major risk factor for multiple forms of psychopathology, and recent efforts have focused on understanding the underlying psychological mechanisms. One outstanding candidate is emotion regulation, which has been associated with both childhood adversity, and psychopathology. Based on the available evidence, the present meta-a...
Article
While childhood maltreatment has been consistently associated with a high risk for psychopathology, the mechanisms underlying this relation are still unclear. Dysfunctional emotion regulation has been singled out as a potential mechanism and recent perspectives emphasise the importance of measuring flexibility over habitual patterns of regulating s...
Article
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Purpose of review: Studies on the relations between shame and anxiety and obsessive-compulsive and related disorders (OCRDs) are reviewed, with a focus on recent work. Recent findings: Medium-sized positive correlations have been consistently found across anxiety disorders and OCRDs, suggesting that this relation is transdiagnostic. Most studies...
Article
We aimed to identify and report data from studies investigating associations between loneliness and maladaptive cognitions. Eighteen studies were included in the present systematic review. Findings generally supported positive associations between loneliness and maladaptive cognitions, and this pattern was consistent across different types of cogni...
Article
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Cognitive behavioral therapy is based on the view that maladaptive thinking is the causal mechanism of mental disorders. While this view is supported by extensive evidence, very limited work has addressed the factors that contribute to the development of maladaptive thinking. The present study aimed to uncover interactions between childhood maltrea...
Article
The involvement of serotonin in emotion and psychopathology has been extensively examined. Studies using acute tryptophan depletion (ATD) have found limited effects on mood and aggression, and one of the explanations suggests that serotonin may be involved in higher-order functions, such as emotion regulation. However, there is very limited evidenc...
Article
Full-text available
Our 10-day diary investigation anchored in dynamic personality theories, such as Whole Trait Theory examined (a) whether within-person variability in two broad personality traits Extraversion and Neuroticism is consistently predicted by daily events, (b) whether positive and negative affect, respectively partly mediate this relationship and (c) the...
Article
Full-text available
Childhood maltreatment is a major risk factor for psychopathology, and increasing evidence suggests that emotion regulation is one of the underlying mechanisms. However, most of this evidence comes from single assessments of habitual emotion regulation, which may not overlap with spontaneous emotion regulation in daily life and which fail to accoun...
Article
Introduction: Studies suggest that adverse childhood events (ACEs) may contribute to the onset and development of cluster C personality disorders. However, the association between ACEs and these disorders remains unclear in terms of consistency across studies and effect magnitude, as well as generalizability within cluster C. The current meta-anal...
Preprint
Full-text available
Childhood maltreatment is a major risk factor for psychopathology, and increasing evidence suggests that emotion regulation (ER) is one of the underlying mechanisms. However, most of this evidence comes from cross-sectional studies and single assessments of habitual ER strategies. In the present study, we investigated the relation between history o...
Article
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Poetry-elicited emotions have recently come into the focus of empirical aesthetics. However, little is known about the association between individual differences in reader characteristics and emotional responses to poetry, such as differences in reading experience and psychological differences. The latter can be conceptualized either as disposition...
Article
Full-text available
Outcomes of gratitude interventions are encouraging, but inconsistent across studies. In addition, both mechanisms of change and effect modifiers for these interventions are largely unknown. Recent data point toward potential candidates and suggest reward processing may be a promising mechanism underlying these interventions, while childhood advers...
Book
The study of emotions has rapidly expanded in recent decades, incorporating interdisciplinary research on the genetic underpinnings and neural mechanisms of emotion. This has involved a wide range of methods from as varied fields as behavioral genetics, molecular biology, and cognitive neuroscience, and has allowed researchers to start addressing c...
Chapter
Recent research has started to uncover genetic influences on emotion and intermediate neural phenotypes. This work has involved an extensive array of methods and developed at the intersection of psychology, genetics, and neuroscience. The aim of this volume is to offer a comprehensive account of current research on the genetics of emotion, includin...
Chapter
Research in the last decades has extensively supported the widespread involvement of emotion regulation (i.e., the processes by which one attempts to modulate the experience and expression of affect) in emotion-cognition interactions, social functioning and behavior, and health. In particular, recent work has argued that emotion regulation is a tra...
Article
Emotion regulation difficulties have been involved in multiple forms of psychopathology and may represent an important focus for current efforts to understand the biological mechanisms underlying transdiagnostic symptoms. The present study investigated a gene-environment interaction (G × E) in reappraisal, a form of emotion regulation that has been...
Article
Full-text available
Suboptimal birth characteristics have been associated with altered reactivity to stress in infants. However, previous studies have not controlled for mode of delivery, which may influence the neonatal onset of stress responses. The present study assessed stress-related behavior and salivary cortisol before and after an inoculation at two hours afte...
Article
Extensive evidence has indicated that early adversity is associated with a lifelong increased risk for psychopathology. One of the mechanisms underlying this effect may involve maladaptive personality traits. This study investigated whether childhood trauma is related to individual differences in sensitivity to reward and punishment, construed as t...
Article
Full-text available
Extensive evidence indicates that early adversity is associated with a lifelong increased risk for psychopathology. One of the mechanisms underlying this effect may involve maladaptive personality traits. This study investigated whether childhood trauma is related to individual differences in sensitivity to reward and punishment, construed as the p...
Article
Full-text available
Child maltreatment is associated with increased risk for virtually all common mental disorders, but it is not yet clear why. One possible mechanism is emotion regulation ability. The present study investigated for the first time the influence of a BDNF Val66Met genotype × child maltreatment interaction on emotion regulation, and compared differenti...
Article
The majority of lower socioeconomic status (SES) households in the U.S. and Europe do not have stock investments, which is detrimental to wealth accumulation. Here, we examine one explanation for this puzzling fact, namely, that economic adversity may influence how people learn from financial information. Using experimental and survey data from the...
Article
Rumination is a maladaptive form of repetitive thinking that enhances stress responses, and heightened disposition to engage in rumination may contribute to the onset and persistence of stress-related symptoms. However, the cognitive mechanisms through which ruminative disposition influences stress reactivity are not yet fully understood. This stud...
Article
Full-text available
Dispositional shame and guilt have been associated with psychopathology and an increasing number of studies have traced this relation back to adolescence. This developmental period is thought to be characterized by maturational changes in emotion regulation, which also play an important role in vulnerability to psychopathology, but little is known...
Chapter
Full-text available
Emotion plays an important role in human social and economic decision-making. Only in the last few decades has this view been accepted in mainstream research by economists and psychologists studying decisional processes. Many studies now provide compelling evidence that the experience of various different emotions influence changes in decisional ou...
Article
While existent data emphasizes the need to improve children's transition to adulthood, health professionals are confronted with lack of knowledge regarding mechanisms underpinning adolescent health-related quality of life (HRQOL). Recent research indicates that there is a link between individuals' dysfunctional beliefs and physical symptoms. The cu...
Article
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Population stratification of functional gene polymorphisms is a potential confounding factor in genetic association studies. The Val66Met (rs6265) single-nucleotide polymorphism in the brain-derived neurotrophic factor gene (BDNF) exhibits one of the highest variabilities in terms of allelic distribution between populations. The present study repor...
Article
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Recent research indicates that subclinical social anxiety is associated with dysfunctions at multiple psychological and biological levels, in a manner that seems reminiscent of social anxiety disorder (SAD). This study aimed to describe multidimensional responses to laboratory-induced social stress in an analog sample selected for social anxiety sy...
Article
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Emotional responses to art have long been subject of debate, but only recently have they started to be investigated in affective science. The aim of this study was to compare perceptions regarding frequency of aesthetic emotions, contributing factors, and motivation which characterize the experiences of looking at painting and listening to music. P...
Chapter
Full-text available
Process theories have identified empathy and contagion as mechanisms by which music may induce emotions and recent studies in psychology and cognitive neuroscience have started to examine these hypotheses. After showing how music listening may tap into social cognition, and distinguishing between empathy and emotional contagion at the psychological...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This study investigated the relation between reappraisal ability and stress responses before an academic examination in students. Main findings indicated that higher reappraisal ability is associated with reduced self-reported stress, but is not related to autonomic activity. Habitual reappraisal was not related to reappraisal ability, or any of th...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This study investigated the relation between childhood socioeconomic status (SES) and adult emotion regulation. Main findings indicated that early access to community resources predicted emotion regulation difficulties in adulthood, when controlling for the effects of age, sex and current SES. No such effects were found for other indicators of chil...
Article
Full-text available
Rooted in people’s preoccupation with how they are perceived and evaluated, shame and guilt are self-conscious emotions that play adaptive roles in social behavior, but can also contribute to psychopathology when dysregulated. Shame and guilt-proneness develop during childhood and adolescence, and are influenced by genetic and environmental factors...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This study investigated the relation between reappraisal ability, general cognitive ability and Big Five personality traits in a sample of healthy volunteers. Main findings indicated that higher reappraisal ability is associated with higher cognitive ability and agreeableness, but not with other personality traits like extraversion, conscientiousne...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This study investigated the influence of child abuse and its interactions with several motion-linked genetic polymorphisms on reappraisal ability. The results indicated that reappraisal ability decreased with increasing levels of child abuse only in carriers of the low-expressing allele of a polymorphism (Val66Met) in the brain-derived neurotrophic...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This study investigated genetic and environmental factors that may influence emotion and decisions in moral dilemmas. Main findings indicated that the intensity of early traumatic events was associated with abstract moral judgment only in carriers of the low-expressing Met allele of BDNF Val66Met. No such effects were found for personal moral choic...
Chapter
Full-text available
In the last decades, the involvement of emotions in moral decision making was investigated using moral dilemmas in healthy volunteers, neuropsychological and psychiatric patients. Recent research characterized emotional experience in moral dilemmas and its association with deontological decisions. Moreover, theories debated the roles of emotion and...
Article
While early psychological theories debated the relation between religiosity and moral decision making, more recent work approached this relation on empirical grounds using multidimensional measures of religiosity and moral dilemmas. The present study investigated the influence of individual differences in religious thoughts and feelings, social des...
Conference Paper
We investigate the role of socioeconomic status (SES) on people's ability to learn from information in financial markets. In an experimental setting we find that low SES participants, relative to medium or high SES ones, form more pessimistic beliefs about the distribution of outcomes of financial investments when, objectively, these investments ar...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Twin studies indicated that heart rate variability (HRV) and particularly its high frequency (HF) spectral component show significant heritability, and their genetic variance is amplified by mental stress. This genetic association study investigated the influence of the brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) Val66Met polymorphism and the triallel...
Article
Full-text available
Recent theories have argued that emotions play a central role in moral decision-making and suggested that emotion regulation may be crucial in reducing emotion-linked biases. The present studies focused on the influence of emotional experience and individual differences in emotion regulation on moral choice in dilemmas that pit harming another pers...
Article
Full-text available
Process theories have argued that empathy and visual imagery are important mechanisms underlying emotional reactivity to music. Transient affective states such as mood may also influence music-induced emotions. The present study describes the emotional experience of participants who attended a live opera performance of Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly”,...
Article
Full-text available
Social anxiety symptoms have been related to (a) polymorphisms in the serotonin-transporter gene-promoter region (also, serotonin-transporter-linked polymorphic region; 5-HTTLPR) and (b) reduced use of adaptive forms of emotion regulation such as reappraisal. It is not known, however, whether reappraisal functions as a mediator in the link between...
Chapter
Full-text available
Emotion and cognition are inextricably linked in human mental life and the study of their interaction represents a hallmark of contemporary research in cognitive sciences (Gray, 2004). The study of anxiety offers an ideal framework for this type of investigation, since one of its distinctive features is the preferential processing of threat-related...
Article
It has been recently reported in Psychophysiology that carriers of the short allele of an insertion/deletion (ins/del) functional polymorphism in the promoter region (5-HTTLPR) of the serotonin transporter gene may display decreased resting respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA). However, this region hosts another functionally connected single-nucleoti...
Article
Full-text available
Recent studies have investigated the association between serotonin transporter gene promoter (5-HTTLPR) functional polymorphisms and attentional biases to threat, a cognitive mechanism that probably contributes to the development and maintenance of anxiety. The present study genotyped a sample of N = 141 healthy volunteers for an insertion/deletion...
Article
The present study investigated emotional face processing in neurotypicals selected for autistic traits (AT). Participants (N=81), who obtained scores one standard deviation above or below average on the Autism Spectrum Quotient, were tested using observational fear conditioning (FC), a face version of the attention probe task, and "Reading the Mind...
Article
Full-text available
The present study investigated the affective space of the entire twelve movements of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, and compared music-induced affect between musicians and non-musicians. The participants listened to each of the movements of the concertos, in shuffled order, and rated the emotional arousal and valence of each movement immediately after lis...
Article
This study investigated whether somatic markers mediate the effect of serotonin transporter genotype on Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) performance. Participants (N = 135) were genotyped for the insertion/deletion and single-nucleotide (rs25531) polymorphisms in the promoter region of the serotonin transporter gene (5-HTTLPR). The results of mediation ana...
Article
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This study investigated the effects of voluntarily empathizing with a musical performer (i.e., cognitive empathy) on music-induced emotions and their underlying physiological activity. N = 56 participants watched video-clips of two operatic compositions performed in concerts, with low or high empathy instructions. Heart rate and heart rate variabil...
Article
Recent studies have suggested that emotions play an important role in the susceptibility to the framing effect (i.e., decisions change depending on the description of the same outcomes as gains or losses). These suggestions raise the question of whether emotion regulation would reduce the susceptibility to framing. We used a neuroeconomic gambling...
Article
Operatic music involves both singing and acting (as well as rich audiovisual background arising from the orchestra and elaborate scenery and costumes) that multiply the mechanisms by which emotions are induced in listeners. The present study investigated the effects of music, plot, and acting performance on emotions induced by opera. There were thr...
Article
Full-text available
Electroencephalography (EEG) has been extensively used in studies of the frontal asymmetry of emotion and motivation. This study investigated the midfrontal EEG activation, heart rate and skin conductance during an emotional face analog of the Stroop task, in anxious and non-anxious participants. In this task, the participants were asked to identif...
Article
Full-text available
It is well established that emotion plays a key role in human social and economic decision making. The recent literature on emotion regulation (ER), however, highlights that humans typically make efforts to control emotion experiences. This leaves open the possibility that decision effects previously attributed to acute emotion may be a consequence...
Article
Several studies have indicated that the exposure of rodents to music modulates brain development and neuroplasticity, by mechanisms that involve facilitated hippocampal neurogenesis, neurotrophin synthesis and glutamatergic signaling. This study focused on the potential protection that the perinatal exposure to music, between postnatal days 2 and 3...
Article
Full-text available
Serotonin (5-HT) modulates emotional and cognitive functions such as fear conditioning (FC) and decision making. This study investigated the effects of a functional polymorphism in the regulatory region (5-HTTLPR) of the human 5-HT transporter (5-HTT) gene on observational FC, risk taking and susceptibility to framing in decision making under uncer...
Article
Full-text available
This study investigated heart rate variability (HRV) in healthy volunteers that were selected for extreme scores of trait anxiety (TA), during two opposite psychophysiological conditions of mental stress, and relaxation induced by autogenic training. R-R intervals, HF and LF powers, and LF/HF ratios were derived from short-term electrocardiographic...
Article
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This study investigated developmental and sex-related differences in affective decision making, using a two-deck version of Children's Gambling Task administered to 3- and 4-year-old children. The main findings were that 4-year-old children displayed better decision-making performance than 3-year-olds. This effect was independent of developmental c...
Article
Using the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) and psychophysiological correlates of emotional responses (i.e., heart rate and skin conductance), we investigate the effects of trait anxiety (TA) on decision-making. We find that high TA is associated with both impaired decision-making and increased anticipatory physiological (somatic) responses prior to advanta...
Article
Full-text available
The methodological and empirical development of cognitive, affective and clinical neuroscience has brought these fields into the ideal position of being able to benefit from the increasing number of techniques and interdisciplinary applications developed since the completion of the sequencing of the human genome. An increasingly investigated topic...
Article
This chapter focuses on individual differences in anxiety, by reviewing its neurobiology, cognitive effects, with an emphasis on decision-making, and recent developments in neuroeconomics. A review and discussion of anxiety and decision-making research. This chapter argues that by making the step from emotional states to individual differences in e...
Article
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Despite the circumstantial and sometimes equivocal support, the hypothetic involvement of aluminum (Al) in the etiology and pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) has subsisted in neuroscience. There are very few other examples of scientific hypotheses on the pathogenesis of a disease that have been revisited so many times, once a new method that...
Article
A common assumption about the corpus callosum transection (CCX) is that it only affects behaviors heavily relying on interhemispheric communication. However, cerebral laterality is ubiquitous across motor and perceptual, cognitive and emotional domains, and the corpus callosum is important for its establishment. Several recent studies showed that t...
Article
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The article discusses research being done on the reduction of aluminum intake in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD). It references a study by Christopher Exley and colleagues published in this same issue. The authors report that drinking silicic acid-rich mineral water for five days significantly reduced the urinary excretion of aluminum, but n...
Article
Autism is a behaviorally defined disorder of unknown etiology that is thought to be influenced by genetic and environmental factors. High levels of homocysteine and oxidative stress are generally associated with neuropsychiatric disorders. The purpose of this study was to compare the level of homocysteine and other biomarkers in children with autis...
Article
Full-text available
Emotional arousal can both enhance and impair memory. Considering that both emotional memory and trait anxiety (TA) have been associated with adrenergic activity, the authors investigated whether there is an association between 2 opposite emotional memory biases and the TA. The authors used a procedure recently put forward by B. A. Strange, R. Hurl...
Article
The theory put forward by Vallortigara & Rogers (V&R) to explain the versatility of directional asymmetries at the population level argues that the strength of lateralization is controlled by social learning. This shaping of behavioral asymmetries by a non-Stationary pressure probably involves a marked degree of neuroplasticity. I discuss the limit...
Article
This study investigated the capacity of erythropoietin (EPO) to protect fear conditioning performances against functional inactivation of the amygdala. We infused an excitotoxic dose of glutamate in the lateral nucleus of the amygdala (LA) of adult rats in order to block the output projections to brainstem areas controlling the expression of condit...
Article
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The persistence of neuroscientists in exploring aluminium's (Al) possible contribution to the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease (A