Patrik Vuilleumier

University of Geneva | UNIGE · Department of Fundamental Neurosciences (NEUFO)

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...

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-l...

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...

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...

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 the parietal and frontal lobes, but also in the 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 wa...

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...

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...

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, an effect associated with decreased neural response of the anterior insula to pain information. However, the functional significance of these neural modulations is still debated. We recruited university medical students and emergency caregivers to test the ro...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Research suggests that transient emotional episodes produces sustained effects on psychological functions and brain activity during subsequent resting state. In this fMRI study we investigated whether transient emotions induced by smells could impact brain connectivity at rest in a valence-specific manner. The results suggest a sustained reconfigur...

Embodied models suggest that moral judgments are strongly intertwined with first-hand somatic experiences, with some pointing to disgust, and others arguing for a role of pain/harm. Both disgust and pain are unpleasant, arousing experiences, with strong relevance for survival, but with distinctive sensory qualities and neural channels. Hence, it is...

Spatial neglect has profound implications for quality of life after stroke, yet we lack consensus for screening/diagnosing this heterogeneous syndrome. Our first step in a multi-stage research programme aimed to determine which neglect tests are used (within four categories: cognitive, functional, neurological and neuroimaging/neuromodulation), by...

The pulvinar is the largest thalamic nucleus in the brain and considered as a key structure in sensory processing and attention. Although its anatomy is well known, in particular thanks to studies in non-human primates, its role in perception and cognition remains poorly understood. Here, we used resting-state functional connectivity from a large s...

It has been proposed that the human amygdala may not only encode the emotional value of sensory events, but more generally mediate the appraisal of their relevance for the individual’s goals, including relevance for action or task-based needs. However, emotional and non-emotional/action-relevance might drive amygdala activity through distinct neura...

This fMRI study examines the role of local and global motion information in facial movements during exposure to novel dynamic face stimuli. We found that synchronous expressions distinctively engaged medial prefrontal areas in the rostral and caudal sectors of anterior cingulate cortex (r/cACC) extending to inferior supplementary motor areas, as we...

Emotions have powerful effects on 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 used a multivariate data-driven approach to decompose a wide range of emotions into functional core proce...

Background Metacognition refers to the ability to discriminate between one’s own correct and incorrect decisions, thus representing a key function for goal-oriented behavior. The neurobiological underpinnings of metacognition have mainly been studied in perceptual decision-making and memory-related processes; therefore, mechanisms and neural correl...