Rocco Mennella

University Paris Nanterre · Laboratoire des interaction cognition action émotion (LICAÉ)

Emotional coordination constitutes one of the crucial building blocks for social adaptation. Humans, like other primate species, are able to rapidly and accurately respond to others' non-verbal emotional signals by preparing and executing adaptive motor responses. In this chapter, we present a general overview of how emotional expressions emitted b...

Adaptation to our social environment requires learning how to avoid potentially harmful situations, such as encounters with aggressive individuals. Threatening facial expressions can evoke automatic stimulus-driven reactions, but whether their aversive motivational value suffices to drive instrumental active avoidance remains unclear. When asked to...

Objectif Malgré la connaissance d’un fonctionnement cognitif et socio-émotionnel altéré par une privation totale de sommeil (PTS), les mécanismes par lesquels la PTS altère les décisions dans des contextes sociaux sont peu rapportés. Nous voulons ici : – caractériser, pour des sujets en PTS, les décisions de contacts sociaux avec des individus mena...

Adaptation to our social environment requires learning how to avoid potentially harmful situations, such as encounters with aggressive individuals. Threatening facial expressions can evoke automatic stimulus-driven reactions, but whether their aversive motivational value suffices to drive instrumental active avoidance remains unclear. When asked to...

Merely perceiving objects usually grasped with a power or a precision grip (e.g., an apple vs. a cherry) potentiate power-grip and precision-grip responses, respectively. According to the size-coding account, this potentiation effect is due to the compatibility between size codes associated with both stimuli and responses, rather than to the simula...

Study Objectives Total sleep deprivation is known to have significant detrimental effects on cognitive and socio-emotional functioning. Nonetheless, the mechanisms by which total sleep loss disturbs decision-making in social contexts are poorly understood. Here, we investigated the impact of total sleep deprivation on approach/avoidance decisions w...

The search for neural correlates of emotional consciousness has gained momentum in the last decades. Nonetheless, disagreements concerning the mechanisms that determine the experiential qualities of emotional consciousness – the what is it like to feel an emotion - as well as on their neural correlates have far reaching consequence on how researche...

The ability to swiftly and accurately respond to others' non-verbal signals, such as their emotional expressions, constitutes one of the building blocks for social adaptation. It is debated whether rapid action tendencies to socio-emotional signals solely depend upon stimulus-evoked pre-decisional motor bias or can also engage goal-directed (decisi...

Socially-relevant signals benefit from prioritized processing, from initial orientation to behavioral choice elaboration. Yet it remains unclear whether such prioritized processing engages specific or similar neural computations as the processing of non-social cues during decision-making. To address this question, we developed a novel behavioral pa...

The capability model of alpha asymmetries posits that state emotional manipulations are a more powerful detector of depression-related motivational deficits than alpha activity at rest. The present study used a time-frequency approach to investigate the temporal dynamics of event-related changes in alpha power during passive viewing of emotional pi...

Research on Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) has focused on processing of socially-relevant stimuli, such as faces. Nonetheless, before being ‘social’, faces are visual stimuli. The present magnetoencephalography study investigated the time course of brain activity during an implicit emotional task in visual emotion-related regions in 19 adults with...

Prefrontal brain regions have been proposed to modulate vagally mediated heart rate variability (HRV) through their action on subcortical structures. This study aimed at investigating the beat-to-beat influence of the brain cortex over the heart through a high temporal resolution estimation of brain-heart coupling. Electrocardiogram (ECG) and elect...

Contrary to other phobias, individuals with blood phobia do not show a clear-cut withdrawal disposition from the feared stimulus. The study of response inhibition provides insights into reduced action disposition in blood phobia. Twenty individuals with and 20 without blood phobia completed an emotional go/no-go task including phobia-related pictur...

Several studies have examined the neural correlates of mood-related emotional processing in depression, showing a greater reduction of activity in the rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC) in response to pleasant relative to unpleasant stimuli in depressed individuals, and the opposite pattern in healthy controls. The present study aimed at exam...

Background Socio-emotional difficulties in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are thought to reflect impaired functional connectivity within the “social brain”. Nonetheless, a whole-brain characterization of the fast responses in functional connectivity during implicit processing of emotional faces in adults with ASD is lacking. Methods The present st...

Frontal alpha asymmetry has been proposed to underlie the balance between approach and withdrawal motivation associated to each individual's affective style. Neurofeedback of EEG frontal alpha asymmetry represents a promising tool to reduce negative affect, although its specific effects on left/right frontal activity and approach/withdrawal motivat...

Maladaptive memory biases toward trauma-related scenes, proposed to manifest as a facet of functional aberrations in temporal brain regions in PTSD patients. Magnetoencephalography was used to examine cognitive processing of war-related imagery in soldiers both with and without PTSD, and a civilian control group. Two tasks were completed; (1) Visua...

Several studies have examined the neural correlates of mood-dependent emotional processing in depression, showing a reduced activity in rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC) in response to pleasant vs. unpleasant stimuli in depressed individuals, but the opposite pattern in healthy controls. The present study aimed at examining whether frontal t...

Left and right cerebral hemispheres are differently involved in emotional processing. Asymmetry of the electroencephalographic alpha band (an inverse index of cortical activation) provides information on emotion-related cortical lateraliza-tion, as well as on mood changes and disturbances 1. Indeed, relatively less left-than right-sided cortical ac...

Studies on electroencephalographic (EEG) alpha band asymmetry at rest have reported that, compared to healthy controls, dysphoric and clinically depressed individuals often display relatively less left- than right-sided cortical activity at anterior scalp sites, and the opposite pattern at posterior scalp sites. It has also been shown that depressi...

Somatic, but not cognitive-affective, symptoms of depression have been associated with reduced heart rate variability (HRV), and with poor prognosis in cardiovascular patients. However, factors concomitant with cardiovascular diseases may confound the relationship between somatic symptoms of depression and reduced HRV. Therefore, this study examine...

Depression is conceptualized as a disorder of emotion. Accordingly, a growing number of studies have examined how depressed mood affects emotional responding, leading to the formulation of the negative potentiation, positive attenuation, and emotional context insensitiveness (ECI) hypotheses. At the physiological level, the support for each of thes...