Hadas Okon-Singer

• Ph.D.
• Professor (Associate) at University of Haifa

Objectives: Recent models on emotional processing consider a major role for the pulvinar in the coordination of emotion processing; however, these models do not specify the type of cognitive mechanisms that the pulvinar may be subserving during emotional processing. In this opinion paper, we focus on the role of the different pulvinar subdivisions...

Neuroscience has become prevalent in recent years; nevertheless, its value in the examination of psychological and philosophical phenomena is still a matter of debate. The examples reviewed here suggest that neuroscientific tools can be significant in the investigation of such complex phenomena. In this article, we argue that it is important to stu...

This study investigated the neural regions involved in blood pressure reactions to negative stimuli and their possible modulation by attention. Twenty-four healthy human subjects (11 females; age = 24.75 ± 2.49 years) participated in an affective perceptual load task that manipulated attention to negative/neutral distractor pictures. fMRI data were...

The question of how affective processing is organized in the brain is still a matter of controversial discussions. Based on previous initial evidence, several suggestions have been put forward regarding the involved brain areas: (a) right-lateralized dominance in emotional processing, (b) hemispheric dominance according to positive or negative vale...

Cognitive training is a promising intervention for psychological distress; however, its effectiveness has yielded inconsistent outcomes across studies. This research is a pre-registered individual-level meta-analysis to identify factors contributing to cognitive training efficacy for anxiety and depression symptoms. Machine learning methods, alongs...

The attentional control theory posits that anxiety may shift attention towards threatening stimuli and/or affect general attentional control mechanisms. The spatial theory suggests that mathematical anxiety (MA) originates from weakness in spatial processing mechanisms such as visuospatial working memory. Accordingly, MA may negatively influence (1...

Extracting regularities and probabilities from the environment is a fundamental and critical ability in an ever-changing surrounding. Previous findings showed that people are highly efficient in learning these regularities and that emotional stimuli are better learned than neutral ones. Yet, the generality and the underlying mechanism of this benef...

People naturally seek an interpersonal distance that feels comfortable, striking a balance between not being too close or too far from others until reaching a state of equilibrium. Previous studies on interpersonal distance preferences among autistic individuals have yielded inconsistent results. Some show a preference for greater distance, while o...

While executive functions (EFs) have traditionally been linked to the cerebral cortex, our understanding of EFs has evolved with increasing evidence pointing to the involvement of cortico-subcortical networks. Despite the importance of investigating EFs within this broader context, the functional contributions of subcortical regions to these proces...

An ongoing debate exists in the literature regarding the reliability of attention bias to threats. The current study directly examined how the interaction between available attention resources, personality traits, and stimuli visual characteristics moderates attention bias to task-irrelevant threatening stimuli. To this end, the current study condu...

The current registered report focused on the temporal dynamics of the relationship between expectancy and attention toward threat, to better understand the mechanisms underlying the prioritization of threat detection over expectancy. In the current event‐related potentials experiment, a‐priori expectancy was manipulated, and attention bias was meas...

Since COVID-19 is easily transmitted among people in close physical proximity, the focus of epidemiological policy during the COVID-19 crisis included major restrictions on interpersonal distance. However, the way in which distance restrictions affected spatial perception is unclear. In the current study, we examined interpersonal distance preferen...

A large body of ssVEP research has provided significant insights into the temporal dynamics of attentional processes. While these studies focused primarily on group level inspection, there is a need for further research employing methodological approaches that enable the examination of individual-level variability. This is particularly relevant in...

Introduction Attention bias plays an important role in specific fears and phobias. Previous studies revealed that a-priori expectancies affect attention toward neutral stimuli but not threatening stimuli. The aim of the current study was to test whether this selective influence of expectancies on attention is specific to phylogenetic threat (i.e.,...

Cognitive coping strategies to deal with anxiety-provoking events have an impact on mental and physical health. Dispositional vigilance is characterized by an increased analysis of the threatening environment, whereas cognitive avoidance comprises strategies to inhibit threat processing. To date, functional neuroimaging studies on the neural underp...

Working memory (WM) training has gained interest due to its potential to enhance cognitive functioning and reduce symptoms of mental disorders. Nevertheless, inconsistent results suggest that individual differences may have an impact on training efficacy. This study examined whether individual differences in training performance can predict therape...

According to a widely accepted definition, visual objects are composed of hierarchical structures classified as either global or local, depending on their location in the hierarchy. Previous research has demonstrated that fear and anxiety are associated with faster identification of local level stimuli, supporting the popular view that fear narrows...

We present here a unifying framework for affective phenomena: the Human Affectome. By synthesizing a large body of literature, we have converged on definitions that disambiguate the commonly used terms—affect, feeling, emotion, and mood. Based on this definitional foundation, and under the premise that affective states reflect allostatic concerns,...

Blood-injection-injury (BII) phobia is often considered a unique phobia as its emotional and physical manifestations differ from those of other specific phobias. Nevertheless, cognitive biases have been highly understudied in BII phobia. In the current study, expectancy of encountering BII-relevant stimuli was manipulated, and attention bias was me...

Background Extensive knowledge and research indicate that interpretation bias is very common among individuals with sub-clinical and clinical levels of depression. Nevertheless, little is known about the role of social experiences in enhancing interpretation bias. Given the major relevance of social experiences in the context of depression, the pre...

This research examines the impact of COVID-19 mobility restrictions and vaccinations on people’s behavioural intentions to travel and their actual travel patterns. The study was conducted in Israel using three-wave cross-sectional analysis: June 2020 (n=129), November 2020 (n=211) and April 2021 (n=208). The findings reveal that the main factor sup...

The psychiatric diagnostic procedure is currently based on self-reports that are subject to personal biases. Therefore, the diagnostic process would benefit greatly from data-driven tools that can enhance accuracy and specificity. In recent years, many studies have achieved promising results in detecting and diagnosing depression based on machine l...

Blood-injection-injury (BII) phobia can lead to avoidance of crucial medical procedures and to detrimental health consequences, even among health workers. Yet unlike other specific phobias, BII phobia has been understudied. Specifically, while cognitive biases have been extensively investigated in other anxiety disorders, little is known about the...

In light of the need for objective mechanism-based diagnostic tools, the current research describes a novel diagnostic support system aimed to differentiate between anxiety and depression disorders in a clinical sample. Eighty-six psychiatric patients with clinical anxiety and/or depression were recruited from a public hospital and assigned to one...

This study aimed to define the psychological markers for future development of depression symptoms following the lockdown caused by the COVID-19 outbreak. Based on previous studies, we focused on loneliness, intolerance of uncertainty and emotion estimation biases as potential predictors of elevated depression levels. During the general lockdown in...

Background: Essential hypertension is an important risk factor for cerebrovascular diseases and a major cause of premature death in industrialized societies. A predisposing factor for essential hypertension is prehypertension: blood pressure (BP) values at rest that are at the higher end of the normal range. Abnormally enhanced cardiovascular resp...

Individuals with social anxiety disorder (SAD) experience significant interpersonal impairment. However, little is known about the physiological processes that are associated with interpersonal dysfunction in the disorder. In the present study we examined heart-rate (HR) synchrony in SAD during “getting-acquainted” interactions between opposite-sex...

Accumulating evidence suggests that cognitive training may enhance well-being. Yet, mixed findings imply that individual differences and training characteristics may interact to moderate training efficacy. To investigate this possibility, the current paper describes a protocol for a data-driven individual-level meta-analysis study aimed at developi...

The role of attention bias in the etiology and maintenance of anxiety disorders has been studied extensively over decades. Attention bias reflects maladaptation in cognitive processing, as perceived threatening stimuli receive prioritized processing even when they are task-irrelevant or factually unthreatening. Recently, there has been some interes...

Abstract Anxiety and depression are distinct—albeit overlapping—psychiatric diseases, currently diagnosed by self-reported-symptoms. This research presents a new diagnostic methodology, which tests rigorously for differences in cognitive biases among subclinical anxious and depressed individuals. 125 participants were divided into four groups based...

The present series of studies examines the causal interaction between expectancy and attention biases in spider fear. Previous studies found that a-priori expectancy does not affect attention bias toward spiders, as measured by detection of spider targets in a subsequent visual search array compared to detection of bird targets (i.e. neutral target...

Objectives People regulate their interpersonal space appropriately to obtain a comfortable distance for interacting with others. Socially anxious individuals are especially prone to discomfort from and fear of physical closeness, leading them to prefer a greater interpersonal distance from others. Previous studies also indicate that fear can enhanc...

Emotion regulation plays a central role in empathy. Only by successfully regulating our own emotions can we reliably use them in order to interpret the content and valence of others' emotions correctly. In an fMRI-based experiment, we show that regulating one's emotion via reappraisal modulated biased emotional intensity ratings following an empath...

Excessive emotional arousal can impair individuals’ ability to function and achieve their goals. This is especially true when this heightened arousal emerges from an emotional stimulus that is irrelevant to current goals and hence should be ignored (Ochsner et al., 2012). One clinical population that has yet to be investigated in the context of emo...

Individuals with a tendency toward abnormally enhanced cardiovascular responses to stress are at greater risk of developing essential hypertension later in life. Accurate profiling of continuous blood pressure (BP) reactions in healthy populations is crucial for understanding normal and abnormal emotional reaction patterns. To this end, we examined...

Negative stimuli often receive excessive attention and abnormal behavioral reaction from human beings. Although threat-related attention bias is a normal phenomenon, it becomes pathological when it is systematically exhibited toward certain stimuli and when it impairs everyday functioning. Attention bias is characterized by faster engagement to and...

Previous studies have indicated that socially-anxious individuals prefer to maintain a greater interpersonal distance from others, specifically from strangers. Notwithstanding, it has yet to be examined whether this preference for distance is associated with estimating the physical interpersonal distance in a distorted manner. In the current study,...

Humans have long considered emotion and cognition as two separate mental capacities, depending on their subjective different emotional and cognitive experiences. However, evidence for the mutual modulatory relationships between emotional and cognitive functions, as well as for the neural circuits supporting these relationships, is growing substanti...

Due to their ability to capture attention, emotional stimuli tend to benefit from enhanced perceptual processing, which can be helpful when such stimuli are task-relevant but hindering when they are task-irrelevant. Altered emotion-attention interactions have been associated with symptoms of affective disturbances, and emerging research focuses on...

Over the last two decades, research has devoted increasing attention to the examination of empathy. Yet research examining empathic accuracy, defined as how well we judge the emotional intensity felt by another, has grown more modestly. This asymmetry may be due to the complexity of paradigms used to study empathic accuracy, as well as to the fact...

We present a publicly available dataset of 228 healthy participants comprising a young (N=154, 25.1±3.1 years, range 20–35 years, 45 female) and an elderly group (N=74, 67.6±4.7 years, range 59–77 years, 37 female) acquired cross-sectionally in Leipzig, Germany, between 2013 and 2015 to study mind-body-emotion interactions. During a two-day assessm...

We present a publicly available dataset of 227 healthy participants comprising a young (N=153, 25.1±3.1 years, range 20–35 years, 45 female) and an elderly group (N=74, 67.6±4.7 years, range 59–77 years, 37 female) acquired cross-sectionally in Leipzig, Germany, between 2013 and 2015 to study mind-body-emotion interactions. During a two-day assessm...

Attention traits are a cornerstone to the healthy development of children's performance in the classroom, their interactions with peers, and in predicting future success and problems. The cerebellum is increasingly appreciated as a region involved in complex cognition and behavior, and moreover makes important connections to key brain networks know...

Objective: To test whether elevated blood pressure (BP) relates to gray matter (GM) volume (GMV) changes in young adults who had not previously been diagnosed with hypertension (systolic BP [SBP]/diastolic BP [DBP] ≥140/90 mm Hg). Methods: We associated BP with GMV from structural 3T T1-weighted MRI of 423 healthy adults between 19 and 40 years...

Attention traits are a cornerstone to the healthy development of children's performance in the classroom, their interactions with peers, and in predicting future success and problems. The cerebellum is increasingly appreciated as a region involved in complex cognition and behavior, and moreover makes important connections to key brain networks know...

Based on findings showing that attention is captured by aversive stimuli, previous studies have hypothesized that inhibition of return (IOR) is reduced at spatial locations previously occupied by threat cues. Yet evidence for this view is limited: Only a few studies have demonstrated a reduced degree of IOR following threat cues, while most have no...

Recent behavioral observations suggest an influence of prior expectancies on attention to neutral targets, whereas the detection of threatening targets remains comparably immune to these expectancies. The origin of this asymmetry, however, remains unclear. Here, therefore, we investigated its neural basis by using fMRI. Specifically, we tested whet...

Individuals at risk of developing anxiety and those with (sub-) clinical anxiety have robust attention biases to irrelevant threats, among them facilitated engagement, difficulty in disengaging and later avoidance of threat. These attention biases are thought to be associated with abnormal activation and connectivity in prefrontal-limbic-sensory ne...

Empathy represents a fundamental ability that allows for the creation and cultivation of social bonds. As part of the empathic process, individuals use their own emotional state to interpret the content and intensity of other people’s emotions. Therefore, the current study was designed to test two hypotheses: (1) empathy for the pain of another wil...

Can prior expectancies shape attention to threat? To answer this question, we manipulated the expectancies of spider phobics and nonfearful controls regarding the appearance of spider and bird targets in a visual search task. We observed robust evidence for expectancy influences on attention to birds, reflected in error rates, reaction times, pupil...

Both anxiety and major depression disorder (MDD) were reported to involve a maladaptive selective attention mechanism, associated with bias toward negative stimuli. Previous studies investigated attentional bias using distractors that required processing as part of task settings, and therefore, in our view, these distractors should be regarded as t...

Communication between and within brain regions is essential for information processing within functional networks. The current methods to determine the influence of one region on another are either based on temporal resolution, or require a predefined model for the connectivity direction. However these requirements are not always achieved, especial...

Previous work on the neural underpinnings of emotional conflict processing has largely focused on designs that instruct participants to ignore a distracter which conflicts with a target. In contrast, this study investigated the noninstructed experience and evaluation of an emotional conflict, where positive or negative cues can be subjectively prio...

The ability to regulate emotions is essential for adaptive behavior. This ability is suggested to be mediated by the connectivity between prefrontal brain regions and the amygdala. Yet, it is still unknown whether the ability to regulate emotions can be trained by using a non-emotional procedure, such as the recruitment of executive control (EC). P...

There is a growing evidence showing that first-responders who are frequently exposed to traumatic events as part of their occupational routine may pay a hidden price. Although they display low to moderate levels of PTSD symptoms, similar to individuals with full- blown PTSD, they show impaired ability to process and react according to contextual de...

Sleep deprivation has been shown recently to alter emotional processing possibly associated with reduced frontal regulation. Such impairments can ultimately fail adaptive attempts to regulate emotional processing (also known as cognitive control of emotion), although this hypothesis has not been examined directly. Therefore, we explored the influen...

Healthy individuals often exhibit prioritized processing of aversive information, as manifested in enhanced orientation of attention to threatening stimuli compared with neutral items. In contrast to this adaptive behavior, anxious, fearful, and phobic individuals show exaggerated attention biases to threat. In addition, they overestimate the likel...

Evidence suggests that individual differences in emotion control are associated with frontoparietal-limbic networks and linked to emotional traits and executive functions. In a first attempt to directly target the link between emotional traits and executive functions using resting-state fMRI analysis, 43 healthy adults completed a test battery incl...

In this work we present a new open source software package offering a unified framework for the real-time adaptation of fMRI stimulation procedures. The software provides a straightforward setup and highly flexible approach to adapt fMRI paradigms while the experiment is running. The general framework comprises the inclusion of parameters from sub-...

Recent years have witnessed the emergence of powerful new tools for assaying the brain and a remarkable acceleration of research focused on the interplay of emotion and cognition. This work has begun to yield new insights into fundamental questions about the nature of the mind and important clues about the origins of mental illness. In particular,...

Our emotions tend to be directed towards someone or something. Such emotional intentionality calls for the integration between two streams of information; abstract hedonic value and its associated concrete content. In a previous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study we found that the combination of these two streams, as modeled by shor...

Phobic individuals display an attention bias to phobia-related information and biased expectancies regarding the likelihood of being faced with such stimuli. Notably, although attention and expectancy biases are core features in phobia and anxiety disorders, these biases have mostly been investigated separately and their causal impact has not been...

Women show increased predisposition for certain psychiatric disorders, such as depression, that are associated with disturbances in the integration of emotion and cognition. While this suggests that sex hormones need to be considered as modulating factors in the regulation of emotion, we still lack a sound understanding of how the menstrual cycle i...

Networks correlated with PA and NA at a statistical threshold of p<0.001. In order to further assess the likelihood of false negatives, we lowered our threshold further to p<0.001. Differences (new or newly overlapping voxels) to the threshold of p<0.0005 are circled in black. (TIF)

Axial slices of connections 6 to 10 correlated with NA. Details of the displayed connections can be found in Table 3. (TIF)

Networks correlated with PA and NA at a statistical threshold of p<0.0005. In order to assess the likelihood of false negatives, we lowered our threshold to p<0.0005. Differences (new or newly overlapping voxels) to the originally employed threshold of p<0.00025 are circled in black. (TIF)

Amygdala connectivity covaries with PA and NA. At a threshold of p<0.05, a negative correlation was observed between both (A) NA and (B) PA connectivity from the amygdala to differential regions in the brain. (TIF)

Details of additional connections at p<0.0005 for PA. (DOC)

Axial slices of connections 1 to 5 correlated with NA. Details of the displayed connections can be found in Table 3. (TIF)

Details of additional connections at p<0.0005 for NA. (DOC)

Details of additional connections at p<0.001 for NA. (DOC)

Details of additional connections at p<0.001 for PA. (DOC)

Axial slices of connections 1 to 5 correlated with PA. Details of the displayed connections can be found in Table 4. (TIF)

Axial slices of connections 6 to 9 correlated with PA. Details of the displayed connections can be found in Table 4. (TIF)

The unique role of the EEG alpha rhythm in different states of cortical activity is still debated. The main theories regarding alpha function posit either sensory processing or attention allocation as the main processes governing its modulation. Closing and opening eyes, a well-known manipulation of the alpha rhythm, could be regarded as attention...

In recent years, more and more emphasis has been placed on the investigation of sex differences in the human brain. Noninvasive neuroimaging techniques represent an essential tool in the effort to better understand the effects of sex on both brain structure and function. In this review, we provide a comprehensive summary of the findings that were c...