Affective Neuroscience - Science topic

Hi, any comment..Prof. Franz Schelling ?

Could depression and anxiety be early signs of MS?

Jerry waese

Thank you very much I have my own views & in this line I have expressed my publication which have been appreciated by well many for which I have no comment .

For your contribution I respect you .

Thanks

Dear Ercument Gorgul

The iMotions VR Eye Tracking Module allows for eye tracking data collection, visualization, and analysis in virtual environments using the HTC Vive Pro Eye and Varjo VR-2 eye tracking headsets.

Kind Regards

I agree with all answers

Perception emotions

The "paradox" above appears because astrocytes control brain homeostasis according to the valence of the stimulus. Therefore, excitation can be turned into inhibition, or vice-versa, according to the adaptive process in which the brain responds to stimulation, moves away from homeostatic equilibrium, and then reaches a stable region far from equilibrium, or recovers equilibrium after crossing a unstable phase. I mentioned this type of process in my 2010 paper with Furlan:

Bob Prichard https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-019-0556-z

not exactly but close enough!

Human non-olfactory cognition phase-locked with inhalation

If your Alkene is specific then adding OsO4 will oxidise d ENE bond to fool and hopefully give you a denser stain

thanks to everyone for their enriching suggestions.

Please take a look at the following PDF attachments.

Please take a look at the following PDF attachment.

Actually there are studies regarding the effect of conditioning place preference (CPP) via disparate environmental ques such as texture of a room, a redolent odor (natural pheromones for instance for certain animals or artificial fragrances such as a preferred food) or temperature, etc.

The underlying neurobiological and cognitive mechanisms of place conditioning or fear conditioning are plexiform and complicated. The perception of ques (visual or olfactory stimuli for example) becomes associated with the memory of an event (fear, reward,...) and becomes consolidated if repeated or if the intensity of the stimuli is significant. The model animals or rodents for example remembers (retrieval of the episodic or associative memory mostly in the hippocampal CA1 and DG) the good (rewarding) or bad (punishing) memory, and this would affect the decision-making via the strong connection and projection between hippocampus and cortical regions (e.g. PFC).

We have done a research in which we performed CPP by reward from drug-seeking and dependency:

Study on odor-conditioned rodent models:

I just finished spectating a course on neuroendocrinology (I am a law student, and thus this is not my main field), and even though there is research supporting that people convicted of murder and rape have more testosterone1. A problem that all studies on neuroendocrinology face, is that a part of the explanation on how testosterone, oxytocin and vasopressin works, is largely dependant on context. For example testosterone has been linked to social status-seeking behaviour, but what is seen as status-seeking behaviour can vary largely based on both immediate context and cultural context. This means that using brain chemistry to predict behaviour is extremely difficult, which makes your idea of isolating people based on brain chemistry a terrible idea. A lot of people who have high testosterone levels are not criminals. Maybe a better idea would be to improve on the context - teach people better methods of status-seeking than committing crime. The idea of using high testosterone as a mitigating circumstance is interesting, but again, high testosterone and low oxytocin doesn't necessarily mean that you become a criminal, it just means that you are more likely to seek status, and less likely to care about what other people think. If you need me to link some more research, feel free to ask. Also, where does this come from " Physicians and scientists agree that having the right research equipment and knowledge about the functioning of the brain they can determine the ability of a person to bear full responsibility for their actions. "? I haven't heard about any studies that support this, and it sounds interesting. 1https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/019188699400177T

of course it differ between countries and ethnic groups and you have to build your own by sampling many normal healthy people and study their NCS and decide the normal references for your citizens

Blind people have no visual imagery in their dreams, if born blind. Dreams do process past memories; in a dream, different temporal memory layers can be mixed over into 'one film'. We do not dream with our eyes, it is a brain function in sleep as the brain is a non-stop organ (you could put a light bulb on it).The existence of pre-cognitive dreams, which is portrayed in prophetic literature, e.g. Joseph in Egypt, cannot be ruled out. A healthy sleep cycle (chronobiology) and dreamimg are closely connected, in medical terms, to 'free' the memory from non-necessary psycho-logical ballast of life experiences.

What do you mean, to model dreams?

I hope that several articles from my electronic library will help you understand the complex problem.

Thanks alot for agreat paper Shafagat

Dear Benedek, bullshit is a philosophical term. I take myself the freedom to use it whenever I find it appobiate. When it comes to religion I have heard more offensive arguments during the last few years.

This is an open discussion and you should learn to accept other arguments and believes. We are discussing here hopefully in a quite open way. So this is not your personal partyroom nor is it your personal website where you can invite people or ask them to leave in case you do not like a certain point of view. Even not if you feel 'offended' or somehow negativly affected (which I can understand in a way). Let me be clear here, Benedek: You have by all means no right to ask me to leave the discussion. I communicate my questions here as I think it is linked to the topic. If you do not want to answer then just do not answer. By all means: Please do not feel forced to comment. I am not forcing you.

I am not talking here about the validity of verbalization. I guess we both know that especially when it comes to certain mediated processes sometimes there is no other way then to rely on self-report. As I said to you I do not think that there is necessarily a connection between the two. Beside that I clearly explained you why. Go back and read carefully what I wrote.

Subliminal messages are in some parts of psychology (especially advertising psychology) well researched. You can find tons of material when it comes to this topic. If my question was too much pioneer thinking for you... and by that you feel 'offended'... then feel offended. I really do not feel much responsible for your feelings. Indeed I give not so much when it comes to your feelings :[[[[[ Yes, I know... I might just be a mean person. But do not forget that people always felt insulted by new ideas :[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[

To John Kennedy,

Yes the internal is the real key to work on for psychological wellness. It will bring a solid external view.  This is one of the challenges of life.  Several or many methods are available.

Hi and thank you so much for the reply. The rejection condition will be compared against the inclusion condition (between participants) as a control.

The standard approach is to present stimuli that are either perceived (conscious) or not (unconscious). Binocular rivalry has been used a lot. You may find an authoritative review by two big guys in the field in Scholarpedia (1st link). An alternative is a masking paradigm. We have used it to investigate interactions of spatial and valence processing (2nd link).  Be aware, that many tasks require action and that you are not investigating pure perception. A very good current review is Koch et al., 2016 (3rd link). Let this suffice for a start :)

My 2ct, Peter

Implicit and explicit measures tend to be positively correlated, but not strongly. That's true of attitudes, motives, and personality characteristics, all of which have affective qualities. For example, he mean correlation between implicit and explicit attitudes is .24. This means that most of the variance is independent, so yes, you will certainly have many cases in which the two "layers" of affective experience go in opposite directions.

The challenge before you is to develop an appropriate implicit (or performance-based) measure of empathy. This could take very different forms. You might opt for a reaction-time based measure a la the Implicit Association Test. Or you might try to develop a picture-story exercise like the TAT measures of motivation. You would then seek to (a) validate it against actual behavior and (b) study its relationship with self-reported (explicit) empathy. If you proceed with this, drop me a note some time to let me know how it's going!.

Not that I'm aware of. As Dr. Schulreich above suggested, SPM also does this. If you are comparing maps from different subjects, you first need to warp them into a common space, which SPM also does really nicely. I've just found it hard to use SPM for EEG data, compared to EEGLAB and LORETA, but if you are not happy about a standard template, SPM might be the best way to go.  

maybe take a look at this?

Thank you for sharing this with me!

Hi Raura, recommend you read the paper by Gareth Leng and Nancy Sabatier 2016 J Neuroendocrinology. its not quite as straightforward as isolation and then analysis with antibodies - not saying you can not do it, but be aware there are several controls required and careful selection of which antibody to use. not sure commercial assays are a good way to start. Professor Hal Gainer has fantastic antibodies for oxtocin and vasopressin. you might try contacting him. or contact Rainer Landgraf whose lab runs a very safe dependable assay. hope this of help

We use the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire by Gross & John (2003). I've added the link below. There is a version of this scale for adolescents and children also.

If you want to use custom anatomical ROIs (e.g. in patients), you may want to acquire proton density (PD)-weighted images. They have very good grey/white matter contrast in subcortical structures, and you can simply segment the ventral striatum manually. You can't see the VTA directly, but you can readily recognize the substantia nigra (SN), and the VTA is located just anterior-medially to the SN. And be aware that the SN/VTA distinction is not that clear-cut in humans, and particularly the medial SN also activates in tasks that would typically engage the mesolimbic rather than the nigro-striatal dopamine system (see, e.g., the review by Düzel et al., TINS, 2009)

Worry and rumination are repetitive cognitive processes central to the understanding of anxiety and affective disorders; they are everyday phenomena as well as clinical symptoms pervasive throughout psychopathology Present conceptualizations, however, suggest that worry is specifically linked to anxiety and its disorders, especially generalized anxiety disorder  Worry and rumination have beenassessed using questionares like the Penn State Worry Questionnaire or Ruminative Response Styles Questionnaire-Short Form respectively.

This article might be helpful

1. Is worry different from rumination? Yes, it is more predictive of ... - NCBI

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov › NCBI › Literature › PubMed Central (PMC)

2.Rumination and worry as mediators of the ... - Self-Compassion

by F Raes - ‎2010

3.Are Rumination and Worry Two Sides of the Same Coin? A Structural ...

Great question and I have no answer to offer, but my understanding is that skin conductivity, for example, is always a pretty reliable indicator of arousal, and one that is difficult to actively control for a participant.

This is an approach to Self Reporting that is regularly used in Qualitative Research. Some researchers may have a beeper attached to respondents (with their permission of course) to prompt them when to make another report..

Thus, the negative and positive information. What is more important to select an adequate solution? It is necessary to consider several factors to answer the question. Firstly, the modality, the intensity and duration of action of a certain factor. Second, the functional state and the individual characteristics of the object (a person, for example), which is exposed to the factor. Finally, we must take into account the peculiarities of the current change factor characteristics in a particular time and space.

Please evaluare some papers in the attachment.

Hi Zeinab, both Nils and Julio offer some good standard measures. They are well used and valid. If you are not using them in English, you do need to be careful about possible linguistic or cultural factors that might affect results. Checking them through exploratory factor analysis, Cronbach's alphas, etc. can ensure the scales and all items functioned adequately.

Béatrice tack så mycket!  i see 

advertising style for Russian-speaking medical tourists :)

information about the clinician's expertise and experience for complex cases, it is unfortunately no

THANK YOU!

I wrote a blog post on the results (link below) and uploaded videos of the participants coupled with the gameplay. Although, it looks promising, I need another experimental design to elicit fear down-regulation explicitly in subjects to come to a extensive conclusion.

Hi Sam,

While sending the synchronization triggers to Biopac can be done by most stimulus presentation software, you might be also interested in controlling your stimuli by some characteristics of a real-time GSR signal. In this case you can look at our software, EventIDE (www.okazolab.com), which would allow you to build various neuro-feedback paradigms with Biopac, e.g. present a stimulus upon detection of a specific signal pattern online. You can see one of our demos  here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IobJs0ZTaQ

For the GSR, Shimmer seems the best. A cheaper solution would be Arduino with a groove gsr sensor (but I don't think it's suitable for a high precision work) or arduino with the gsr of cooking hacks.

A pdf of shimmer indicating also a software: http://www.shimmersensing.com/assets/images/content/case-study-files/Emotional_Response_27July2015.pdf

Dear Rebecca,

Very interesting question for us. We are working in normalization of the affective words originally translated by Hinojosa. Our normalization is being held in México with the affective words in spanish, we are measuring emotion-attention interference.

I am now attaching the affective-word database that we are using, the words are both, spanish and english. We built up out attention-emotion model using SuperLab, based on the Stroop effect.

Hope this can be useful.

Best regards.

You may want to examine studies that focus on insulin as an early warning sign. Studies in Scandinavia and in the US show that psychosocial factors predict elevated insulin before glucose becomes disregulated.We have published a number of papers that show that persons under chronic stress (caregivers for a spouse with AD) have higher levels of insulin, but not glucose in those who do NOT have diabetes. Caregiving is a prototypic chronic stressor. Importantly, it is not the exposure to chronic stress, but individual differences (responses to stress) that are factors in elevated insulin. These include anger and hostility.

Here are some papers about the suggested Stendhal syndrome:

Usually a relationship is deemed "significant" when the observed correlation is stronger than you would expect to find if there was no relationship between the two variables.

The "degree of expectation" is quantified as a probability, the p-value. So: given there is no relationship you would not expect to observe a strong correlation. Seeing a strong correlation is thus unexpected under the hypothesis (that there is no relationship), and hence the p-value will be small. A very small p-value indicates that the observation (the observed correlation) is surprising (=pretty much unexpected) if there was no relationship. Now either you believe that your data is somehow strange (to give this unexpexted result) or you believe that the hypothesized abscence of the relationship was a bad blunder.

Thus, "really unexpected observations (where the expectation is relative to a hypothesized model, like the abscence of any relationship = the tested hypothesis)" are used to discredit the tested hypothesis. If this discredit is convincing enough, one sais that one considers the result as "significant". People don't like to think much about all this and they are happy to get "read-to-use" and "generally applicable instruction" they can blindly follow. This lead to the quasi-standard in many research communities to consider observations with p<0.05 as "significant". This does not make much sense, but that's unfortunately quite common practice.

This means:

If an observation shows a correlation of a size that would be expected with a chance of less than 5% given the hypothesized absence of a relationship, then we take this as "sufficient evidence to disbelieve the hypothesis", and, consequently, have to believe that there must have been some kind of relationship.

If an observation is expected to happen more likely (in the absence of a relation), then the data we have at hand is simply not able to discredit the hypothesis. This may be due to the fact that the data is in principle unsuited to "detect" a relationship, that the model we used for the analysis is not suited, or it can be due to the fact that there simply is no relationship. We can not decide between these possibilities. Just claiming that there is no relationship is not ok. This would be like asking a witness if he has seen the suspected murderer. If he just sais "no, I havent seen him" then this is not at all any reason to acquit the suspect. This statement (without any additional information) is simply not useful. Only if we had the information that the witness was at the right time at the right place and that he is not blind, that he had a free view, that he was awake and observant, etc., only then we could use this testimony to exonerate and possibly to acquit the suspect. The equivalent for testing is the "planned experiment" with stated alpha and beta levels and the correct sample size.

So to your question: "why?":

If the experiment was "unplanned" (sample size is not defined according to alpha and beta, what I strongly believe is the case), then the answer is: "one cannot say". There can be many reasons why the available data is not convincing enough, and we have no clue which of the possible reasons is more or less likely. The p-value is a (continuous) measure of the "significance" of the data in light of the tested hypothesis. There is no god-given cut-off (like p<0.05 or so). The p-value needs actually be interpreted relative to the whole context of the experiment.

If the experiment was "planned" (chosing alpha and beta, determinning the sample size, performing the experiment accordingly), you take the decision to "accept the tested hypothesis with (1-beta)*100% confidence". That's it.This approach does not ask for whys. The structure of the experiment guarantuees you a confidence for your decisions. It is not about the problem whether a particular decision is right or wrong (you will never know, in principle!). But by wisely chosing alpha and beta you follow a decision strategy that optimizes your expected cost/benefit ratio (you see that this approach is hard to use in research). Here also the word "significant" is misplaced. It is not about significance - it is only about accepting one of two alternative hypotheses (based on alpha and beta, which are in turn based on many other considerations, and, well, on the whole context of the experiment).

Note that the tests of "unplanned experiments" (testing a single statistical hypothesis) leading to p-values as a measure of significance is called significance testing, and that the tests of "planned experiments" (leading to a decision between two alternative possibilities: the null-hypothesis and the [substantial!] alternative hypothesis) is called null-hypothesis testing. Unfortunately many textbook authors have not understood that these are two incompatible ways to go, and so they mixed and stirred them into a single non-sensical hybrid approach that is often called "null-hypothesis significance testing" (NHST). This is what you will likely have read/learned and this is at least one of the reasons causing your problems.

Lonny, I just finished reading a paper by Dr. Bokon that elucidates the unconscious decision making that precedes conscious awareness by 4 seconds originating in the default mode network (medial prefrontal and precuneus). He also characterizes what he calls epigenetic cellular memory which makes the issue of the "self" even more marvelously complex.

I agree with all of the comments posted here. I would add and emphasize that a priori long-term and enduring vulnerabilities (as touched on by Dinesh) may set boundaries for resilience across individuals and that although related to resilience, vulnerabilities are independent factors that begin before and after birth and continue to be influenced by early negative experiences/trauma. Even later in life, comorbidities (diseases, illnesses) and dispositional variables (hostility, etc.) make it more difficult to "bounce back" in the face of stressors. Resilience needs to be considered in the context of a person's vulnerability. If a person is born with physical, economic and social hardships, she/he will  find it more difficult to be resilient e.g., when one becomes a professor at a major university and has parents who never went to school, this is reflective of much greater resilience than someone who becomes a professor, but has parents who were doctors or engineers.

HI Ran.

so given that you have the same mice and treatment it should not happen however 10% of freezing variation is in the normal range because of error in the software scoring or intralab manual scoring differences (inactivity vs. freezing).

That being said what footshock level do you use? you are using adult mice and your labmate is using developing mice so there might be a difference because young mice has different pain perception (lower).

Last but not least, different cohort do you get the mice from your animal house or vendor? if they come from the vendor sometimes they have  different houring conditions.

So in order I would check:

1) Is scoring correct? Freezing vs. -immobility?

2) Footshock intentities use (above .4 mA induces generalisation)

3) Are they coming from the same vendor/ barrier?

Thanks.

Best Regards,

SG

A group in Helsinki has a follow up study on our ERP study:

Sokka et al., Int J of Psychophysiology, 94(3), 427-436, 2014.

They included 41 burnout patients and 29 controls. PLease have a look

 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167876014016420

latent growth curve modelling will pull out groups of students who show similar trajectories of anxiety, which you can then characterize using regression. You need MPlus or similar software that does longitudinal SEM-based analyses.

Agreed with Diverrez J-Marc. Interest isn't necessary an emotion, I would say it is more in line with a motivation to approach. One might try this "approach motivation" state measure that is popularly indexed by frontal asymmetry (I am doubtful it is a good predictor, but people suggest it could be a significant one - different things). That's usually done with EEG (or fNIRS).

If you want to do interest = not bored: lack of alpha activity. (EEG)

If you want to do interest = really excited! ECG (BPM).

If you want to do interest with this particular, super-well defined picture: P3 (EEG).

If you want to do interest = noticing the solid fun involved in such classics as "The E-Primer" (ahum), perhaps facial EMG, ZM measurements.

If you want to do interest = concentrating on the text while reading, perhaps facial EMG, CS measurements. Eye-tracking, in terms of detecting whether a person is actually reading, also sounds reasonable (more to the point, I'd say).

Do note that in all such cases, the fact that researchers found that "interest" (or motivation, or something else) reliably affects physiological correlate Y doesn't mean that the reverse is true. Since all known methods are extremely noisy and reliably confounded with other constructs, it is important to ask yourself what you exactly plan to gain. It is likely that just asking the student whether they're interested will be a much better predictor.

Best,

Michiel

Hi Jim, thanks for the tips. I agree, a good drug would impact food motivation only, rather than bringing about any counter-obesity effect through some other effect such as on affective state in general. I think the binge eating model is very interesting and useful in many ways, though I wonder how closely it reflects human binge eating, where I suspect periods between binges are driven partially by guilt in addition to satiety. 

I BELIEVE DR. ELKONON GOLDBERG, A WELL RENOWNED PERSON IN THE AREA OF THE HISTORY OF FRONTAL LOBE FUNCTIONING AND RESEARCH, HAS A USEFUL OPINION ON THIS; HE CAN BE REACHED AT EGNEUROCOG@AOL.COM, AND IF POSSIBLE, I WOULD LIKE TO INVITE HIM TO RESEARCH GATE. LK - CAPS FOR ME - NOT YOU!

Hi. I would be also interested. thanks

Cognitive science deals with cognition from two sides: psychological, i.e. the way our mental life is driven by abstract concepts (as opposed to operational conditioning), -- and computational, i.e. the way brains arrive and mental phenomena through plain algebraic / Bayesian computing.  Your computational model of emotion sits squarely in the second department, so you are good with a cognitive science journal.  I support Dr Parsapoor above: bottom-up influence of emotion on cognition is called decision making.

Dear Marcello, 

Please check this out: 

Chapter 1

Introduction: The psychology of music in multimedia

Annabel J. Cohen , Scott D. Lipscomb,

Siu-Lan Tan , and Roger A. Kendall

Jeffrey gave an interesting hint at how we can combine individual AU's intensities into a general intensity index. But as he noted, it has limitations. I would add that since FACS intensity levels are not on an interval scale (for example, the C level covers a wider range of movement than the B or the A levels), using a 1 to 5 linear scale to compute intensity values does not represent what was intended in FACS (let alone the fact that the adjectives "slight", "marked", or "severe" can be interpreted differently by different people). Based on the paper by Sayette et al. (2001) in JONB, we used three levels to code AU intensity then we compute an expressivity index for each AU based on intensity and duration of each AU. Once you do this for several AUs you can decide of a way to combine these values. As far as I know there is no gold standard 

As Salvatore notes, the meaning of the component will depend upon the task in which it is elicited. Given the distribution, the N400 is one candidate, if you have some level of semantic processing/incongruity in the task. In my work with the Stroop task and similar paradigms, we find a negative going central component between 300-500 ms after stimulus onset that is more negative for incongruent stimuli. This has been related to detecting conflict in the task and may be related to both resolving interference within a trial and proactive control over trials (West & Bailey, 2012 in Psychophysiology).

Because Rita asked for creative analysis method, I was going to suggest using techniques employed in timeseries analysis (i.e. brain activation over time).

If you can reveal what your hypotheses are, perhaps we can have a more informed discussion.

But without know that,  what I'm concerned with is that in this case, sampling was done once daily, and it was not random or time-locked, but instead it was linked to specific events that were different in nature for everybody, and presumably occurred at different times of the day.

So, the sampling rate and sampling trigger may be a problem, depending on your hypotheses, and whether these the hypotheses involve individual or intra-individual effects. 

Dear Riccardo

I think, it's better to check a paper about using IoT in Public Health. it maybe give you some good ideas.

Please, pay attention to the fact that in 2007 IADS-2 has been introduced. 

Bradley, M. M., & Lang, P. J. (2007a). International Affective Digitized Sounds (2nd Edition; IADS-2): Affective ratings of sounds and instruction manual (Technical Report No. B-3). Gainesville, FL: University of Florida, NIMH Center for the Study of Emotion and Attention.

best, 

Dear Daniela,

This maybe should be helpful.

Hello Joshua,

We've successfully used funny movies in our lab (http://miplab.epfl.ch/pub/eryilmaz1101.pdf  and http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24603023). In terms of pictures, there exists an updated version of the good old IAPS which has been validated in a number of ways. Recently they even added erotic stimuli (I saw a poster, not sure it's already out but you can email the people), if you wanted that type of positive emotion. It's called Necki Affective Picture Set http://naps.nencki.gov.pl/Site/Home.html

On top of that, there are the Geneva affective pictures which offerts various types of appetitive stimuli:

Music is also a good elicitor, you can ask Wiebke Trost for the stimuli (http://cercor.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2011/12/15/cercor.bhr353.full).

All depends on your design and what emotion exactly you want to elicit. I wouldn'd go for gifts unless you're studying the reward system or pleasure (giving people sweet food will surely activate the opioid receptors in the NAccumbens). Reward is one type of positive emotion.

Good luck!

Ewa

Thanks James, that is interesting. However I'm mainly interested in what synchrony in skin condutance between a couple relates to. Most of the studies concern only (pseudo)clients and listeners/therapists, and Gottman's work with skin conductance synchrony in couples is from the 80s.

I completely agree withBéatrice Marianne Ewalds-Kvist  that on ‘theory of mind’ tasks the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) plays a key role in the social understanding of others and with Kuan-Hua Chen that vmPFC patients only focus on the immediate-present goals (keeping money in the Trust Game) and ignore  the future negative consequences of  choosing again the same stimuli. I think, however, that it could be useful to take also into account some laterality effects that could play a role in these behavioural patterns.

According to some authors (e.g. Fuster J, The Prefrontal Cortex,Academic Press, London, 2008) there is some evidence of laterality in orbitomedial function with more right-sided than left-sided involvement in social/emotional functioning. For instance, Miller et al. (Dementia, 1993) contrasted the neuropsychological and behavioural characteristics of  patients with right and left fronto-temporal degeneration (FTD) and showed that in right-sided patients emotional and behavioural disinhibition were in the foreground, whereas no similar disorders were found in patients with left-sided FTD. More recently, Gomez-Beldarrain et al. (J Cogn Neurosci. 2004) have shown that patients with right frontal lesions are unable to assess and use advice to make predictive judgments. All these findings are consistent with the previously reported data, but stress the greater role played by the right orbital and medial PFC in emotional processing.

Hello,

Essi Viding and I have done something like that - available (for free) here https://sites.google.com/site/geoffbirdlab/papers

Benjamin:  We faced the same problem in a recent study focused on support/opposition to wolf recovery. Here (below) is a description of our methods, along with a citation to the article we published.

"Affect was operationalized by a standard elicitation measure developed by Slovic et al. (1991), wherein respondents are asked to list the first thought or image that comes to mind when they think about some object of interest. A lifetime of interacting on a daily basis provides people with images of the world, which according to Damasio (1994) can be broadly interpreted as sights, sounds, smells, visual representations of events, or words associated with objects or events. Attached to these images are positive or negative “somatic markers,” which can influence judgment and decision making (akin to trait-affect or integral affect). Here, respondents were asked for the first thought or image that comes to mind when they think about wolves. They were then asked to indicate how strong their negative or positive feelings are about wolves on a ten point scale ranging from “Very negative” (−5) to “Very positive” (5), with zero serving as “Neutral."

Slagle, K. M., Bruskotter, J. T., & Wilson, R. S. (2012). The Role of Affect in Public Support and Opposition to Wolf Management. Human Dimensions of Wildlife, 17(1), 44-57. 

I have used. There is also a conversion rartio in which 60,000 is the numerator and IBI is the denominator to convert it to heart rate beats per minute.  You download the emwave HRV data into excell and use specified time windows depending on how long the session was, theoretical variables of interest so a running average across a preset number of data points is used.  Google The Infuence of Communication on Physiology and Health.

This is an excellent question.  For me, the major ethical implication involves the concepts of moral responsibility and voluntary action.  As neurocriminology  becomes more sophisticated, neuroscientists will become more capable of identifying features of the brain, both organic, neuro-chemical, and genetic which are statistically associated with the commission of crime.  One implication of this development is bound to be strategies aimed at preventing crime before it is committed.

I can imagine strategies of this sort which would threaten the freedom and dignity of the individual.  The relationship between the brain and its functions and mind which is the realm of intention, consciousness and conscience is one of the most persistent philosophical problems.  One cannot be reduced to the other. Mind cannot be reduced to the psycho-physical, and the psycho-physical cannot be reduced to the mind and its features.

The relationship is, at the least, complex and sophisticated.  Any crime prevention strategies which seek to identify and/or engage those persons seen as potential offenders, before they offend, are a danger to the concept of the moral responsibility and the human capacity to choose our voluntary actions, as well as to the concept of free will, which is another important and persistent philosophical problem, which as such, is associated with what it means to be both human and a moral agent.  In short, I am concerned with the potential for developments in neurocriminology to arise with could threaten human freedom.

I believe that those values only provide information in terms of the intensity of arousal, from which you can't directly infer the valence. However, there is strong empirical support for the fact that negative emotions have stronger arousal responses than positive ones, since negative emotions (or affect) normally instructs the body to react, the so called "fight or flight" reaction. Good luck with your interesting research.

Dear Ahmet, We recently published a paper showing robust EDA (we called it skin conductance response [SCR]) differences between judging an ambiguous picture, sentence or sound as 'harmless' or 'threatening'. These SCR measures were collected during an fMRI experiment, so we also investigated the neural correlates of autonomic arousal; and related phasic SCR responses to personality traits. As is alluded to in one of the other answers, there is the complication of 'non-responders' - some of our subjects showed an almost completely flat trace throughout the experiment (though 'normal' BOLD responses). Hence you need a-priori exclusion criteria for these subjects. One answer to your question is therefore that EDA is a robust, reliable, not-subjective psychophysiological biomarker of psychological stress within subjects, but not always between. In a separate study we found that heart rate variability (HRV) was a better marker of cognitive load (i.e. effort) than SCR. Finally, don't forget that an SCR is relatively easy to fake (clench your buttocks, screw up your toes, dig your nails into your hand, imagine your children being tortured etc), so is not really suited to high stakes situations like the polygraph.

Dear Adam, there is no evidence for somatic states directly influencing appraisal. The influence should be by means of brain systems. The problem is that functional anatomical hypotheses as the involvement of ventromedial PFC in appraisal do not distinguish between a brain system that instantiates the somatic feeling and a brain system that makes the cognitive appraisal. This kind of distinction is made in the attached paper that proposes that the neuronal network makes the cognitive job and the astroglial network instantiates feelings.

This is a plausible starting point :

Validation of the Aphasic Depression Rating Scale Charles Benaim, MD, PhD; Bruno Cailly, MD; Dominic Perennou, MD, PhD; Jacques Pelissier, MD Background and Purpose—The Aphasic Depression Rating Scale (ADRS) was developed to detect and measure depression in aphasic patients during the subacute stage of stroke. Methods—Six experts selected an initial sampling of behavioral items from existing depression rating scales. Stroke patients (aphasic and nonaphasic) were assessed with these items by the rehabilitation staff, with the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HDRS) for nonaphasic patients only, by a psychiatrist, and by the rehabilitation staff with Visual Analog Scales (VAS). A second item selection was conducted after a regression algorithm was run including VAS as independent variables (criterion validity) and after their factorial structure was analyzed with a principal component analysis (factorial validity). The construct validity was evaluated with respect to the other depression assessments. A threshold for the diagnosis of depression was computed with respect to the psychiatrist’s diagnosis. Interrater and test-retest reliability were assessed in 2 additional groups of aphasic patients. Results—Eighty patients participated in the study (59 aphasic). Fifteen behavioral items from existing depression rating scales were selected, and 9 were retained after the validation process. ADRS correlated highly with VAS and HDRS (r􏰂0.60 to 0.78, P􏰂10􏰃4 to 10􏰃6). With respect to the psychiatrist’s diagnosis, the sensitivity and specificity of ADRS were 0.83 and 0.71, respectively, when the threshold was set at 9/32. Its factorial structure was comparable to HDRS structure. Interrater and test-retest reliability were high (average 􏰇 coefficient of the 9 items􏰂0.69). Conclusions—ADRS is a valid, reliable, sensitive, and specific tool for the evaluation of depression in aphasic patients during the stroke subacute phase. (Stroke. 2004;35:1692-1696.)

I also think that a good knowledge not only of brain pathology, but also of brain anatomy and, in general, of cognitive and affective neurosciences is necessary for a correct and in depth interpretation of neuropsychological data. A good knowledge of brain structure and functions is, indeed,  necessary to understand the patterns of cognitive impairment resulting from different kinds of brain lesions and to plan the corresponding rehabilitation

Music is present in all cultures since prehistoric times, but still it is not clear what the source of gratification that we feel listening. Two newly published studies now contribute to shed light on the brain mechanisms involved in the joy of music.

As you can read in "Science", Valorie N. Salimpoor and colleagues at the Montreal Neurological Institute of McGill University have analyzed the neural processes of volunteers who listened to the first few songs. To give way to the experimenters to assess the degree of pleasure evoked by the music, the subjects participated in a kind of auction in which they could make an offer to listen to a particular song.

"Viewing the activity of a particular brain area, the nucleus accumbens, which is involved in reward, it was possible to reliably predict whether subjects would have offered money to listen to a song," says Salimpoor. The involvement of the nucleus accumbens confirms recent indications of the fact that the emotional effect of music would activate mechanisms of expectation and anticipation of a stimulus desirable, mediated by the neurotransmitter dopamine when it comes to a song already familiar, the mechanism of leave would be evoked mental anticipation of the passages most enjoyable. In the search for Salimpoor colleagues, however, the music was not known, but functional magnetic resonance imaging showed that the activated areas and dopaminergic mediation were the same as those of well-known songs. The cause, according to the researchers, is an "implicit knowledge" of music, obtained over the years and internalize the structure of the music characteristic of a certain culture.

The activity of the nucleus accumbens, also, is not isolated, but also involves the auditory cortex, which stores information on the sounds and the music during the test, as the piece was rewarding, the more intense was the cross-communication between the different brain regions. This result supports the idea that the ability to appreciate music refers not only to the emotional aspects, but also on assessments of cognitive character.

Still on the subject of brain reactions to music, Vinod Menon and colleagues at Stanford University School of Medicine, authors of an article published in the "European Journal of Neuroscience," have shown that listening to classical music evokes a unique pattern of activation of areas of the brain in spite of the differences between people.

The team recorded the activation of different brain regions of volunteers who listened to the music of William Boyce, an English composer of the eighteenth century, or pieces of "pseudo-music", ie sequences of auditory stimuli obtained by altering the songs Boyce with appropriate algorithms by the computer. The reaserchers identified a distributed network of brain structures whose activity levels followed a similar pattern in all subjects while listening to music, but not in that of the pseudo-music.

"In our study we have shown for the first time that, despite individual differences, classical music evokes in subjects other than one very consistent pattern of activity in various structures of the frontoparietal cortex, including those involved in the planning of movement, memory and attention, "says Menon. These regions, in particular, participated each with its own activation rate to the development of what was being heard, helping to make sense, with its own specific contribution to the overall structure of the music.

Particularly curious is the preferential activation of the centers of motor planning in response to the music but not the pseudo-music: according to the authors, it is a "neural correlate" of the spontaneous tendency to accompany listening to music with body movements, as in the dance, or simply clapping his hands.

I red with particular interest these two papers which well summarize the mucic/brain interaction. And let me understand what is happening when I am listening to a favourite music. I do not know whether similar mechanisms are activated when I enjoy to  write, play and sing my songs. Many of you know that this is one of my hobbies.

Emotional processing is attenuated when task-demands are high (high cognitive load conditions) and during tasks that recruit executive control processes such as conflict resolution and inhibitory control.

See for example the opinion paper by Okon-Singer, Lichtenstein-Vidne, & Cohen, Biological Psychology, 2013

Hi Arpita. I use magnetic nanoparticles complexed with plasmid. These are incubated with cells for 24-48 h, in chemically-defined (serum-free) proliferation medium. Transgene expression is apparent at about 4-6 h, and peaks at ~48 h post-transfection, whether cells are kept in proliferation medium or switched to differentiation medium. I have reported greater efficiency when transfecting OPCs versus oligodendrocytes.