Patrik Vuilleumier

• MD
• Head of Department at University of Geneva

The Emo-FilM dataset stands for Emotion research using Films and fMRI in healthy participants. This dataset includes emotion annotations by 44 raters for 14 short films with a combined duration of over 2½ hours and recordings of respiration, heart rate, and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) from a sample of 30 individuals watching the sa...

Human social interactions rely on the ability to reflect on one’s own and others’ internal states and traits—a psychological process known as mentalizing. Impaired or altered self- and other-related mentalizing is a hallmark of multiple psychiatric and neurodevelopmental conditions. Yet, replicable and easily testable brain markers of mentalizing h...

What makes people experience varying degrees of empathy? Common accounts focus on interpersonal attributes, including victims’ group membership or social proximity to the observer. Here we demonstrate the contribution of imagining the scenes surrounding victims in driving empathy. Although imagination has been shown to moderate empathy, the relativ...

Positive emotions determine individual well-being and sustainable social relationships. Here, we examined the neural processes mediating upregulation of positive social emotions using functional magnetic resonance imaging in healthy female volunteers. We identified brain regions engaged in upregulation of positive social emotions and applied a para...

Background: Subclinical depressive symptoms increase the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease (AD). The neurobiological mechanisms underlying this link may involve stress system dysfunction, notably related to the hippocampus which is particularly sensitive to AD. We aimed to investigate the links between blood stress markers and changes in brai...

Psychological characteristics are associated with varying dementia risk and protective factors. To determine whether these characteristics aggregate into psychological profiles and whether these profiles differentially relate to aging health, we conducted a cross-sectional investigation in two independent middle-aged (51.4 ± 7.0 years (mean ± s.d.)...

Introduction Early adolescence is a time of high psychosocial stress exposure and high stress reactivity, associated with the development of mental disorders. Understanding how the brain reacts to acute and social stressors during this period might help us detect and protect those at risk. Methods We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to i...

Background Increased stress is a proposed risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease (AD). We examined cross-sectional associations between circulating stress biomarkers and multimodal measures of brain health and cognition susceptible to AD in older adults and sex-specific subgroups. Methods Baseline data from 132 cognitively unimpaired participants wit...

Introduction Mental health conditions are associated with cognition and physical function in older adults. We examined whether worry and ruminative brooding, key symptoms of certain mental health conditions, are related to subjective and/or objective measures of cognitive and physical (cardiovascular) health. Methods We used baseline data from 282...

Currently, robust evidence is lacking to support one exercise type over another in the prevention of physical and cognitive decline and falls among older adults, primarily because of the lack of comparative trials of proven interventions. Therefore, a 12‐month randomized, single‐blind, comparative effectiveness trial is conducted, in which 142 olde...

Understanding the neural foundations of response inhibition is pivotal to unraveling parts of the mechanisms of cognitive control. Advanced human neuroimaging is able to converge the temporal precision of electroencephalography (EEG) with the spatial accuracy of simultaneous EEG-functional magnetic resonance imaging (EEG-fMRI) to illustrate the int...

This study discerns the relationship between discrete emotions and their underlying components from a detailed dataset of continuous annotations of more than 50 emotion variables during short films. Appraisal theories predict that discrete emotions arise from a combination of components. Specifically, the Component Process Model (CPM) highlights th...

The extensive Emo-FilM dataset stands for Emotion research using Films and fMRI in healthy participants. This dataset includes detailed emotion annotations by 44 raters for 14 short films with a combined duration of over 2 1/2 hours, as well as recordings of respiration, heart rate, and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) from a different...

Measuring implicit associations of self-concept with health or illness attributes may offer valuable insight into the mechanisms entailing the perception of one’s own health, as explicit measures of self-reported health are usually influenced by social desirability or response bias. In this study, healthy participants performed a modified version o...

Our emotions may influence how we interact with others. Previous studies have shown an important role of emotion induction in generating empathic reactions towards others’ affect. However, it remains unclear whether (and to which extent) our own emotions can influence the ability to infer people’s mental states, a process associated with Theory of...

Altitudinal neglect is an atypical form of spatial neglect where brain-damaged patients neglect the lower, or sometimes the upper, part of the space. Our understanding of this phenomena is limited, with unknown occurrence across different reference frames, such as distance (peripersonal vs. extrapersonal) and system of reference (egocentric vs. all...

Neuroticism is a personality trait with great clinical relevance, defined as a tendency to experience negative affect, sustained self-generated negative thoughts and impaired emotion regulation. Here, we investigated spontaneous brain dynamics in the aftermath of negative emotional events and their links with neuroticism in order to shed light on t...

The anterior insular cortex, a central node of the salience network, plays a critical role in cognitive control and attention. Here, we investigated the feasibility of enhancing attention using real-time fMRI neurofeedback training that targets the right anterior insular cortex (rAIC). 56 healthy adults underwent two neurofeedback training sessions...

Background Recent evidence in Alzheimer’s diseases suggests that early dysfunction of emotional processing may precede the onset of cognitive decline and dementia. Altered functional brain connectivity patterns also occur along with other brain changes many years before clinical AD symptoms. Method We combined baseline multimodal neuroimaging data...

Film fMRI has gained tremendous popularity in many areas of neuroscience. However, affective neuroscience remains somewhat behind in embracing this approach, even though films lend themselves to study how brain function gives rise to complex, dynamic, and multivariate emotions. Here, we discuss the unique capabilities of film fMRI for emotion resea...

What makes people experience varying degrees of empathy? Common accounts focus on interpersonal attributes, including victims’ group membership or social proximity to the observer. Here we demonstrate the contribution of imagining the scenes surrounding victims in driving empathy. Although imagination has been shown to moderate empathy, the relativ...

What makes people experience varying degrees of empathy? Common accounts focus on interpersonal attributes, including victims’ group membership or social proximity to the observer. Here we demonstrate the contribution of imagining the scenes surrounding victims in driving empathy. Although imagination has been shown to moderate empathy, the relativ...

Our daily lives unfold continuously, yet our memories are organised into distinct events, situated in a specific context of space and time, and chunked when this context changes (at event boundaries). Previous research showed that this process, termed event segmentation, enhances object-context binding but impairs temporal order memory. Physiologic...

Medical students and professional healthcare providers often underestimate patients' pain, together with decreased neural responses to pain information in the anterior insula (AI), a brain region implicated in self-pain processing and negative affect. However, the functional significance and specificity of these neural changes remains debated. Acro...

Humans can successfully correct deviations of movements without conscious detection of such deviations, suggesting limited awareness of movement details. We ask whether such limited awareness impairs confidence (metacognition). We recorded functional magnetic resonance imaging data while 31 human female and male participants detected cursor deviati...

Emotion elicitation using emotional film clips is one of the most common and ecologically valid methods in Affective Computing. However, selecting and validating appropriate materials that evoke a range of emotions is challenging. Here we present EmoStim: A Database of Emotional Film Clips as a film library with a rich and varied content. EmoStim i...

Background The European Working Group on Sarcopenia in Older People (EWGSOP2) recently revised its definition and diagnostic criteria for sarcopenia, placing muscle strength at the forefront. The pathogenesis of dynapenia (or low muscle strength) is still not fully understood, but there is emerging evidence that central neural factors constitute cr...

Despite a lack of scientific consensus on the definition of emotions, they are generally considered to involve several modifications in the mind, body, and behavior. Although psychology theories emphasized multi-componential characteristics of emotions, little is known about the nature and neural architecture of such components in the brain. We use...

Objective To examine whether putatively atypical neuronal activity during internal attention in ADHD yields insights into processes underlying emotion dysregulation. Methods We used a word processing paradigm to assess neural activations in adults with ADHD (N = 46) compared to controls (N = 43). We measured effects of valence, applied partial-lea...

Background: Neuroscience research has generally studied emotions each taken in isolation. However, mixed emotional states (e.g., the co-occurrence of amusement and disgust, or sadness and pleasure) are common in everyday life. Psychophysiological and behavioral evidence suggests that mixed emotions may have response profiles that are distinguishab...

Basic emotional functions seem well preserved in older adults. However, their reactivity to and recovery from socially negative events remain poorly characterized. To address this, we designed a ‘task–rest’ paradigm in which 182 participants from two independent experiments underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging while exposed to socio-emot...

Emotion elicitation using emotional film clips is one of the most common and ecologically valid methods in Affective Computing. However, selecting and validating appropriate materials that evoke a range of emotions is challenging. Here, we present EmoStim: A Database of Emotional Film Clips as a film library with rich and varied content. EmoStim is...

Selective attention mechanisms operate across large-scale cortical networks by amplifying behaviorally relevant sensory information while suppressing interference from distractors. Although it is known that fronto-parietal regions convey information about attentional priorities, it is unclear how such cortical communication is orchestrated. Based o...

Subclinical depressive symptoms are associated with increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), but the brain mechanisms underlying this relationship are still unclear. We aimed to provide a comprehensive overview of the brain substrates of subclinical depressive symptoms in cognitively unimpaired older adults using complementary multimodal neuroim...

Importance: No lifestyle-based randomized clinical trial directly targets psychoaffective risk factors of dementia. Meditation practices recently emerged as a promising mental training exercise to foster brain health and reduce dementia risk. Objective: To investigate the effects of meditation training on brain integrity in older adults. Design...

Determining the social significance of emotional face expression is of major importance for adaptive behavior, and gaze direction provides critical information in this process. The amygdala is implicated in both emotion and gaze processing, but how and when it integrates expression and gaze cues remains unresolved. We tackled this question using in...

Film fMRI has gained tremendous popularity in many areas of neuroscience. However, affective neuroscience is somewhat behind in embracing this new field, even though films especially lend themselves to the study of how brain function gives rise to complex, dynamic, and multivariate emotions. In this review, we discuss the unique capabilities of fil...

Background Older individuals with subjective cognitive decline (SCD) perceive that their cognition has declined but do not show objective impairment on neuropsychological tests. Individuals with SCD are at elevated risk of objective cognitive decline and incident dementia. Non-pharmacological interventions (including mindfulness-based and health se...

Behavioral research has extensively documented the impact of affective states on cognitive control. Despite increasing interest in investigating how affect and emotion influence cognition, the functional neural architecture mediating these effects remains unresolved. Here, we examined how changes in brain network dynamics elicited by negative emoti...

Current research indicates deficits in cognitive function together with widespread changes in brain activity following long-term cannabis use. In particular, cannabis use has been associated with excessive spectral power of the alpha rhythm (8–12 Hz), which is also known to be modulated during attentional states. Recent neuroimaging studies have li...

Previous behavioural and neuroimaging studies have consistently reported that memory is enhanced for associations congruent or incongruent with the structure of prior knowledge, termed as schemas. However, it remains unclear if similar effects arise with emotion-related associations, and whether they depend on the type of emotions. Here, we address...

Motivation is an important feature of emotion. By driving approach to positive events and promoting avoidance of negative stimuli, motivation drives adaptive actions and goal pursuit. The amygdala has been associated with a variety of affective processes, particularly the appraisal of stimulus valence that is assumed to play a crucial role in the g...

Previous behavioural and neuroimaging studies have consistently reported that our memory is enhanced for associations congruent or incongruent with the structure of our prior knowledge, termed as schemas. However, it remains unclear if similar effects exist if encoded associations are emotional. Do emotional schemas also facilitate learning and sub...

Alpha cortical oscillations have been proposed to suppress sensory processing in the visual, auditory, and tactile domains, influencing conscious stimulus perception. However, it is unknown whether oscillatory neural activity in the amygdala, a subcortical structure involved in salience detection, has a similar impact on stimulus awareness. Recordi...

The ventral striatum is implicated in the affective processing of reward, which can be divided into a motivational and a hedonic component. Here, we examined whether these two components rely on distinct neural substrates within the ventral striatum in humans (11 females and 13 males). We used a high-resolution fMRI protocol targeting the ventral s...

Stroke frequently produces attentional dysfunctions including symptoms of hemispatial neglect, which is characterized by a breakdown of awareness for the contralesional hemispace. Recent studies with functional MRI (fMRI) suggest that hemineglect patients display abnormal intra- and interhemispheric functional connectivity. However, since stroke is...

Objectives Deepening our understanding of the mechanisms by which meditation practices impact well-being and human flourishing is essential for advancing the science of meditation. A recent phenomenologically grounded classification system distinguishes attentional, constructive, and deconstructive forms of meditation based on the psychological mec...

The Component Process Model is a well-established framework describing an emotion as a dynamic process with five highly interrelated components: cognitive appraisal, expression, motivation, physiology and feeling. Yet, few empirical studies have systematically investigated discrete emotions through this full multi-componential view. We therefore el...

Current models of episodic memory posit that retrieval involves the reenactment of encoding processes. Recent evidence has shown that this reinstatement process – indexed by subsequent encoding-retrieval similarity of brain activity patterns - is related to the activity in the hippocampus during encoding. However, we tend to re-experience emotional...

The waking brain efficiently detects emotional signals to promote survival. However, emotion detection during sleep is poorly understood, and may be influenced by individual sleep characteristics or neural reactivity. Notably, dream recall frequency has been associated with stimulus reactivity during sleep, with enhanced stimulus-driven responses i...

Exploring psychophysiological changes during hypnosis can help to better understand the nature and extent of the hypnotic phenomenon by characterizing its influence on the autonomic nervous system (ANS), in addition to its central brain effects. Hypnosis is thought to induce a relaxation response, yet studies using objective psychophysiological mea...

The amygdala is a core structure in the anterior medial temporal lobe, with an important role in several brain functions involving memory, emotion, perception, social cognition, and even awareness. As a key brain structure for saliency detection, it triggers and controls widespread modulatory signals onto multiple areas of the brain, with a great i...

Introduction La plupart des interventions en cours de développement pour le traitement de la sarcopénie visent à améliorer la masse musculaire. Compte tenu des évidences croissantes en faveur d’un rôle clef du système nerveux central dans la sarcopénie, l’hypothèse peut être émise que certaines interventions spécifiques ciblant ce système pourraien...

Background Borderline personality disorder (BPD) patients present emotion dysregulation (ED) when faced with adversity. However, it is argued altered stress responding may be more influenced by ED than BPD-specific traits. Here, we investigated this issue with fMRI using another ED condition as clinical control group, i.e., bipolar disorder (BD), a...

Attentional selection and the decision of where to make an eye-movement are driven by various factors such as the representation of salience, task goal, and stimulus relevance, as well as expectations or predictions based on past experience. Brain systems implicated in these processes recruit cortico-subcortical areas including the Frontal Eye-Fiel...

Several cortical and sub-cortical regions in the right hemisphere, particularly in parietal and frontal lobe, but also in temporal lobe and thalamus, are part of neural networks critically implicated in spatial and attentional functions. Damage to different sites within these networks can cause hemispatial neglect. The aim of this study was to iden...

Numerous studies have shown that humans can successfully correct deviations to ongoing movements without being aware of them, suggesting limited conscious monitoring of visuomotor performance. Here, we ask whether such limited monitoring impairs the capacity to judiciously place confidence ratings to reflect decision accuracy (metacognitive sensiti...

Spatial neglect is a neuropsychological syndrome characterized by a failure to orient, perceive, and act toward the contralesional side of the space after brain injury. Neglect is one of the most frequent and disabling neuropsychological syndromes following right-hemisphere damage, often persisting in the chronic phase and responsible for a poor fu...

Spontaneous fluctuations in the blood oxygenation level dependent signal measured through resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging have been corroborated to aggregate into multiple functional networks. Abnormal resting brain activity is observed in mood disorder patients, however with inconsistent results. How do such alterations relate...

Patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) often show alexithymia, but the brain mechanisms underlying this emotional disorder remains unknown. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate alterations of emotion processing and emotion regulation in patients with MS, and their relationships with alexithymia. Nineteen MS patients wi...

Evidence from animal and human research shows that established memories can undergo changes after reactivation through a process called reconsolidation. Alterations of the level of the stress hormone cortisol may provide a way to manipulate reconsolidation in humans. Here, in a double-blind, within-subject design, we reactivated a 3-day-old memory...

Affective inertia represents the lasting impact of transient emotions at one time point on affective state at a subsequent time point. Here we describe the neural underpinnings of inertia following negative emotions elicited by sad events in movies. Using a co-activation pattern analysis of dynamic functional connectivity, we examined the temporal...

Medical students and professional healthcare providers often underestimate patients’ pain, together with decreased neural responses to pain information in the anterior insula (AI), a brain region implicated in self-pain processing and negative affect. However, the functional significance and specificity of these neural changes remains debated. Acro...

Research over the past decades has demonstrated the explanatory power of emotions, feelings, motivations, moods, and other affective processes when trying to understand and predict how we think and behave. In this consensus article, we ask: has the increasingly recognized impact of affective phenomena ushered in a new era, the era of affectivism?

Alterations in activity and connectivity of brain circuits implicated in emotion processing and emotion regulation have been observed during resting-state for different clinical phases of bipolar disorders (BD), but longitudinal investigations across different mood states in the same patients are still rare. Furthermore, measuring dynamics of funct...

This section overviews a large panel of studies investigating brain function at rest in bipolar disorder patients using various approaches. Literature findings highlight abnormal functional connectivity patterns within and between several brain networks including default mode, control, and saliency networks. Local and large-scale connectivity chang...

The ventral striatum is implicated in the affective processing of the reward, which can be divided into a motivational and a hedonic component. Here, we examined whether these two components rely on distinct neural substrates within the ventral striatum in humans. We used a high-resolution fMRI protocol targeting the ventral striatum combined with...

Emotions are rich and complex experiences involving various behavioral and physiological responses. While most empirical studies have mainly focused on discrete and dimensional representations of emotions, these representations do not yet fully reconcile with neuroscience studies that increasingly suggest a multi-process mechanism underlying emotio...

Alterations in activity and connectivity of brain circuits implicated in emotion processing and emotion regulation have been observed during resting-state for different clinical phases of bipolar disorders (BD), but longitudinal investigations across different mood states in the same patients are still rare. Furthermore, measuring dynamics of funct...

Affective inertia represents the lasting impact of transient emotions at one time point on affective state at a subsequent time point. Here we describe the neural underpinnings of inertia following negative emotions elicited by sad events in movies. Using a co-activation pattern analysis of dynamic functional connectivity, we examined the temporal...

Background Adaptive recovery from stress promotes healthy cognitive affective functioning, whereas maladaptive recovery is linked to poor psychological outcomes. Neural regions, like the anterior cingulate and hippocampus, play critical roles in psychosocial stress responding and serve as hubs in the corticolimbic neural system. To date, however, i...

Understanding the role of neuromodulators of socio-affective processing is important to ensure psychological wellbeing during older years. Here, we investigated the link between blood serotonin levels and brain and behavioral responses to emotional information in healthy elderly. A priori regions of interest (ROI) were selected due to their role in...

Congenital amusia in its most common form is a disorder characterized by a musical pitch processing deficit. Although pitch is involved in conveying emotion in music, the implications for pitch deficits on musical emotion judgements is still under debate. Relatedly, both limited and spared musical emotion recognition was reported in amusia in condi...

Unilateral spatial neglect is a neuropsychological syndrome commonly observed after stroke and defined by the inability to attend or respond to contralesional stimuli. Typically, symptoms are assessed using clinical tests that rely upon visual/perceptual abilities. However, neglect may affect high-level representations controlling attention in othe...

Neurofeedback (NFB) is a brain-based training method that enables users to control their own cortical oscillations using real-time feedback from the electroencephalogram (EEG). Importantly, no investigations to date have directly explored the potential impact of NFB on the brain’s key neuromodulatory systems. Our study’s objective was to assess the...

Evidence from animal and human research shows that established memories can undergo changes after reactivation through a process called reconsolidation. Alterations of the level of the stress hormone cortisol may be one way of manipulating reconsolidation. Here, in a double-blind, within-subject design, we reactivated a 3-day-old memory at 3:55 a.m...

These authors contributed equally to this work. All other authors are listed in reverse alphabetical order. Neurofeedback has begun to attract the attention and scrutiny of the scientific and medical mainstream. Here, neurofeedback researchers present a consensus-derived checklist that aims to improve the reporting and experimental design standards...

Carry-over effects on brain states have been reported following emotional and cogni-tive events, persisting even during subsequent rest. Here, we investigated such effects by identifying recurring co-activation patterns (CAPs) in neural networks at rest with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We compared carry-over effects on brain-wide...

Emotions are multifaceted phenomena affecting mind, body, and behavior. Previous studies sought to link particular emotion categories (e.g., fear) or dimensions (e.g., valence) to specific brain substrates but generally found distributed and overlapping activation patterns across various emotions. In contrast, distributed patterns accord with multi...

Socio-emotional functions seem well-preserved in the elderly. However, the long-lasting effects that the exposure to others’ distress may provoke in the brain remain unknown in this population. To evaluate how the aging brain reacts during and after emotionally challenging social events, we designed a new "task-rest" paradigm in which elderly parti...

Emotions are an inseparable part of human nature affecting our behavior in response to the outside world. Although most empirical studies have been dominated by two theoretical models including discrete categories of emotion and dichotomous dimensions, results from neuroscience approaches suggest a multi-processes mechanism underpinning emotional e...