Stéphanie Dubal

• PhD, HDR
• Researcher at Paris Brain Institute, French National Centre for Scientific Research

The subjective experience conferred by auditory perception has rarely been addressed outside of the studies of auditory hallucinations. The aim of this study is to describe the phenomenology of auditory experiences in individuals who endorse magical beliefs, but do not report hallucinations. We examined the relationship between subjective auditory...

The computation by which our brain elaborates fast responses to emotional expressions is currently an active field of brain studies. Previous studies have focused on stimuli taken from everyday life. Here, we investigated event-related potentials in response to happy vs neutral stimuli of human and non-humanoid robots. At the behavioural level, emo...

Anhedonia is a personality trait associated with a decrease in the ability to feel pleasure. We investigated the experience of pleasure in individuals with physical and social anhedonia for positive pictures with varying levels of luminance contrast. Photographs with either a sensory or a social content were modified with a contrast-gradation proce...

Identity construction during adolescence constitutes a primary psychosocial developmental task. A growing body of research has addressed the importance of school education in fostering adolescents’ identity formation and the skills they need to thrive. Although several studies aimed at defining the factors contributing to a coherent, stable, and in...

In social interactions, people have to pay attention both to the 'what' and 'who'. In particular, expressive changes heard on speech signals have to be integrated with speaker identity, differentiating e.g. self- and other-produced signals. While previous research has shown that self-related visual information processing is facilitated compared to...

In social interactions, people have to pay attention both to the what and who. In particular, expressive changes heard on speech signals have to be integrated with speaker identity, differentiating e.g. self- and other-produced signals. While previous research has shown that self-related visual information processing is facilitated compared to non-...

Other's eye gaze is a powerful attention orienting cue that can change our perception of objects in the environment. Here, we seek to characterize the influence of attention orienting by eye gaze on the neural processing of visual targets. We used a Posner-like cueing paradigm to investigate with magnetoencephalography the brain responses associate...

Affect, space, and multisensory integration are processes that are closely linked. However, it is unclear whether the spatial location of emotional stimuli interacts with multisensory presentation to influence the emotional experience they induce in the perceiver. In this study, we used the unique advantages of virtual reality techniques to present...

Clinical remission of depression may be associated with emotional residual symptoms. We studied the association of emotional blunting, rumination with neural networks dynamics in remitted depressed patients and cognitive performance during an N-Back task. Twenty-six outpatients in remission of depression (Hamilton Depressive rating scale score <7)...

We present an open-source software platform that transforms emotional cues expressed by speech signals using audio effects like pitch shifting, inflection, vibrato, and filtering. The emotional transformations can be applied to any audio file, but can also run in real time, using live input from a microphone, with less than 20-ms latency. We antici...

We present an open-source software platform that transforms the emotions expressed by speech signals using audio effects like pitch shifting, inflection, vibrato, and filtering. The emotional transformations can be applied to any audio file, but can also run in real-time (with less than 20-millisecond latency), using live input from a microphone. W...

Social cues can greatly impact our perception of surrounding objects. For instance, eye gaze signals others' current object of attention and potential preferences, and in doing so, it has the power to influence our attentional state and affective evaluation of seen objects. While social influences have been long ago acknowledged, their neural under...

Fear of crowds is a symptom found in agoraphobia (among others) and which has both visual and auditory relevant components. In order to examine the potential interest of auditory-visual virtual reality to treat fear of crowds, we investigated the efficiency of an auditory-visual virtual environment in evoking affective reaction. We conducted an eva...

The creation of an artwork requires motor activity. To what extent is art appreciation divorced from that activity and to what extent is it linked to it? That is the question which we set out to answer. We presented participants with pointillist-style paintings featuring discernible brushstrokes and asked them to rate their liking of each canvas wh...

Centuries ago, western philosophers of art proposed that an artifact may express emotion. The much older tradition of Chinese calligraphy and landscape painting sees in the brushstroke a central element of the emotional expressiveness of pictorial art. How emotion is detected and perceived from artwork is a current subject of exploration in psychol...

Amygdala is a key brain region for face perception. While the role of amygdala in the perception of facial emotion and gaze has been extensively highlighted with fMRI, the unfolding in time of amydgala responses to emotional versus neutral faces with different gaze directions is scarcely known. Here we addressed this question in healthy subjects us...

Threat estimation is crucial for the adaptation of behavior to a dangerous situation. In anxiety, a bias to threat has been described as a core feature. Therefore, the sensitivity for threatening information in anxious individuals may have consequences for danger estimation. In this study, we used the affective priming paradigm to test the assumpti...

Combining excellent temporal resolution with accurate source localization is a challenge for brain imaging studies in humans. In this domain, showing evidence for the contribution of deep brain structures to magneto-encephalographic (MEG) signal may represent an important step. The amygdala, is an example of such structure that is essential for soc...

Human faces are the main emotion displayers. Knowing that emotional compared to neutral stimuli elicit enlarged ERPs components at the perceptual level, one may wonder whether this has led to an emotional facilitation bias toward human faces. To contribute to this question, we measured the P1 and N170 components of the ERPs elicited by human facial...

Cognitive remediation is frequently based on computerized training methods that target different cognitive deficits. The aim of this article was to assess the efficacy of computer-assisted cognitive remediation (CACR) in schizophrenia and to determine whether CACR enables selective treatment of specific cognitive domains. A meta-analysis was perfor...

The uncovering of the time course of amygdala activation is a challenge for non invasive electromagnetic brain imaging methods. Here, we propose a new method to detect the activation of this deep brain structure with magnetoencephalography (MEG). The originality of our model is to use a realistic anatomical and electrophysiological model of the neo...

ObjectivesPrevious studies revealed that adolescence is a period of risk for doping and drug addiction and that young athletes who used doping agents reported low self-esteem. We conducted a preventive study with the aims to investigate whether young adolescents displayed an attentional bias to doping-related words and whether this attentional bias...

Hearing loss may lead to major changes in the social and emotional aspects of daily life. This follow-up study investigated the effect of hearing-aid use on emotional experience in adults with hearing impairment. Thirteen individuals with impaired hearing were tested before and after 6 months of hearing-aid use, and were compared with 19 individual...

Gaze aversion could be a central component of the physiopathology of social phobia. The emotions of the people interacting with a person with social phobia seem to model this gaze aversion. Our research consists of testing gaze aversion in subjects with social phobia compared to control subjects in different emotional faces of men and women using a...

We combined event-related potential (ERP) and magnetoencephalography (MEG) acquisition and analysis to investigate the electrophysiological markers of the inhibitory processes involved in the number/length interference in a Piaget-like numerical task. Eleven healthy subjects performed four gradually interfering conditions with the heuristic "length...

Social anhedonia is a more promising indicator of vulnerability to schizophrenia than physical anhedonia, both as assessed by Chapman scales. More broadly, the populations identified by these scales would have a propensity to different psychiatric disorders. This cross-sectional study examined the respective profiles of schizotypy, anxiety, and dep...

The present study examined the influence of trait anxiety on the early stages of emotional face processing. In order to test if such early effect of anxiety could appear in response to positive as well as to negative stimuli, we recorded event-related potentials in response to both happy and fearful faces – contrasted with neutral faces – during a...

We sought to determine whether the neural traces of a previous cognitive developmental stage could be evidenced in young adults. In order to do so, 12 young adults underwent two functional imaging acquisitions (EEG then fMRI). During each session, two experimental conditions were applied: a Piaget-like task with number/length interference (INT), an...

Using functional MRI, we investigated whether, like healthy subjects, patients with schizophrenia show a relative hemispheric specialization in ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) for spatial and shape working memory (WM). We hypothesized that reduced specialization in schizophrenia would reflect a failure to adopt optimal domain-specific strateg...

Ce texte est un rapport d'étape issu de l'ACI cognitique.

The capacity to sustain attention was explored in a sample of anhedonic subjects according to the Chapman physical anhedonia scale. Sustained attention was determined by studying task-induced changes over the duration of the Eriksen response competition task [Percept. Psychophys. 16 (1974) 143]. Anhedonic subjects had longer reaction times (RTs), b...

We investigated whether spatial working memory (WM) is associated with functional specialization of the right prefrontal cortex (PFC) relative to WM for shapes. We designed spatial and shape WM tasks that are relatively easy to perform and that minimize both task-switching and manipulation demands. The tasks use identical stimuli and require the sa...

Anhedonia is the loss the of the capacity to experience pleasure and is considered a risk factor for psychopathology. This chapter considers anhedonia to be a loss of emotional fluency and addresses its impact on cognitive development. It also explores the link between anhedonia and attention in young anhedonic adults in order to describe their par...

Individuals with non-clinical anhedonia use unusual strategies to achieve normal performances, as shown by the atypical physiological pattern observed since the earlier stages of information processing. In this study, we explored the relationships between emotional and perceptual processes. Few studies have explored perception mechanisms in anhedon...

Clinical hyperacusis consists of a marked intolerance to ordinary environmental sounds, while hearing thresholds are quite often normal. Hyperacusis appears to be a subjective phenomenon, which is not easily defined or quantified by objective measurements. In order to create a tool suitable to quantify and evaluate various hyperacusis symptoms, a q...

Attentional and information processing impairments have been evidenced in nonclinical anhedonic subjects. However, the extent of attentional deficit has not been determined. We studied focused attention, the ability to reject irrelevant or distracting messages, in anhedonic nonclinical subjects. The event-related potentials and behavioral performan...

1. In the line of Zuckerman's studies on sensation seeking and optimal level of arousal, the authors hypothesized that high sensation seeking might be used to compensate for anhedonia due to basal arousal deficit. A population of interest was found with parachutists practicing skydiving, generally described as very high sensation seekers. 2. After...

Clinical research may be seen in the context of the more general problem of an exchange of knowledge between psychopathology and neurosciences. While this interaction is not contested by the specialists in either field, we cannot, nonetheless, ignore the question of their various levels of congruence. More generally, we are increasingly aware of a...

The aim of the study is to explore the validity and the reliability of the French version of the SHAPS in two groups of subjects. 208 healthy students and 103 inpatients meeting the RDC criteria for schizophrenia or depression filled out the French versions of the SHAPS and the revised Physical Anhedonia Scale of Chapman and Chapman. The internal c...

The aim of the study is to explore the validity and the reliability of the French version of the SHAPS in two groups of subjects. 208 healthy students and 103 inpatients meeting the RDC criteria for schizophrenia or depression filled out the French versions of the SHAPS and the revised Physical Anhedonia Scale of Chapman and Chapman. The internal c...

Clinical research may be seen in the context of the more general problem of an exchange of knowledge between psychopathology and neurosciences. While this interaction is not contested by the specialists in either field, we cannot, nonetheless, ignore the question of their various levels of congruence. More generally, we are increasingly aware of a...