Arousal, interindividual differences and temporal binding a psychophysiological study.

The sense of agency varies as a function of arousal in negative emotional contexts. As yet, it is unknown whether the same is true for positive affect, and how inter-individual characteristics might predict these effects. Temporal binding, an implicit measure of the sense of agency, was measured in 59 participants before and after watching either an emotionally neutral film clip or a positive film clip with high or low arousal. Analyses included participants' individual differences in subjective affective ratings, physiological arousal (pupillometry, skin conductance, heart rate), striatal dopamine levels via eye blink rates, and psychopathy. Linear mixed models showed that sexual arousal decreased temporal binding whereas calm pleasure had no facilitation effect on binding. Striatal dopamine levels were positively linked whereas subjective and physiological arousal may be negatively associated with binding towards actions. Psychopathic traits reduced the effect of high arousal on binding towards actions. These results provide evidence that individual differences influence the extent to which the temporal binding is affected by high arousing states with positive valence.

The bidirectional relationship between head injuries and conduct problems: longitudinal modelling of a population-based birth cohort study.

Childhood head injuries and conduct problems increase the risk of aggression and criminality and are well-known correlates. However, the direction and timing of their association and the role of their demographic risk factors remain unclear. This study investigates the bidirectional links between both from 3 to 17 years while revealing common and unique demographic risks. A total of 8,603 participants (50.2% female; 83% White ethnicity) from the Millennium Cohort Study were analysed at 6 timepoints from age 3 to 17. Conduct problems were parent-reported for ages 3 to 17 using the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) and head injuries at ages 3 to 14. A cross-lagged path model estimated the longitudinal bidirectional effects between the two whilst salient demographic risks were modelled cumulatively at three ecological levels (child, mother, and household). Conduct problems at age 5 promoted head injuries between 5 and 7 (Z = 0.07; SE = 0.03; 95% CI, 0.02-0.13), and head injuries at ages 7 to 11 promoted conduct problems at age 14 (ß = .0.06; SE = .0.03; 95% CI, 0.01-0.12). Head injuries were associated with direct child-level risk at age 3, whereas conduct problems were associated with direct risks from all ecological levels until 17 years. The findings suggest a sensitive period at 5-11 years for the bidirectional relationship shared between head injuries and conduct problems. They suggest that demographic risks for increased head injuries play an earlier role than they do for conduct problems. Both findings have implications for intervention timing.

Emotional arousal pattern (EMAP): A new database for modeling momentary subjective and psychophysiological responding to affective stimuli.

This article describes a new database (named "EMAP") of 145 individuals' reactions to emotion-provoking film clips. It includes electroencephalographic and peripheral physiological data as well as moment-by-moment ratings for emotional arousal in addition to overall and categorical ratings. The resulting variation in continuous ratings reflects inter-individual variability in emotional responding. To make use of the moment-by-moment data for ratings as well as neurophysiological activity, we used a machine learning approach. The results show that algorithms that are based on temporal information improve predictions compared to algorithms without a temporal component, both within and across participant modeling. Although predicting moment-by-moment changes in emotional experiences by analyzing neurophysiological activity was more difficult than using aggregated experience ratings, selecting a subset of predictors improved the prediction. This also showed that not only single features, for example, skin conductance, but a range of neurophysiological parameters explain variation in subjective fluctuations of subjective experience.

A dorsomedial prefrontal cortex-based dynamic functional connectivity model of rumination.

Rumination is a cognitive style characterized by repetitive thoughts about one's negative internal states and is a common symptom of depression. Previous studies have linked trait rumination to alterations in the default mode network, but predictive brain markers of rumination are lacking. Here, we adopt a predictive modeling approach to develop a neuroimaging marker of rumination based on the variance of dynamic resting-state functional connectivity and test it across 5 diverse subclinical and clinical samples (total n = 288). A whole-brain marker based on dynamic connectivity with the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) emerges as generalizable across the subclinical datasets. A refined marker consisting of the most important features from a virtual lesion analysis further predicts depression scores of adults with major depressive disorder (n = 35). This study highlights the role of the dmPFC in trait rumination and provides a dynamic functional connectivity marker for rumination.

Designing a neuroclinical assessment of empathy deficits in psychopathy based on the Zipper Model of Empathy.

The heterogeneity of the literature on empathy highlights its multidimensional and dynamic nature and affects unclear descriptions of empathy in the context of psychopathology. The Zipper Model of Empathy integrates current theories of empathy and proposes that empathy maturity is dependent on whether contextual and personal factors push affective and cognitive processes together or apart. This concept paper therefore proposes a comprehensive battery of physiological and behavioral measures to empirically assess empathy processing according to this model with an application for psychopathic personality. We propose using the following measures to assess each component of this model: (1) facial electromyography; (2) the Emotion Recognition Task; (3) the Empathy Accuracy task and physiological measures (e.g., heart rate); (4) a selection of Theory of Mind tasks and an adapted Dot Perspective Task, and; (5) an adjusted Charity Task. Ultimately, we hope this paper serves as a starting point for discussion and debate on defining and assessing empathy processing, to encourage research to falsify and update this model to improve our understanding of empathy.

Prediction of moment-by-moment heart rate and skin conductance changes in the context of varying emotional arousal.

Autonomic nervous system (ANS) responses such as heart rate (HR) and galvanic skin responses (GSR) have been linked with cerebral activity in the context of emotion. Although much work has focused on the summative effect of emotions on ANS responses, their interaction in a continuously changing context is less clear. Here, we used a multimodal data set of human affective states, which includes electroencephalogram (EEG) and peripheral physiological signals of participants' moment-by-moment reactions to emotional provoking video clips and modeled HR and GSR changes using machine learning techniques, specifically, long short-term memory (LSTM), decision tree (DT), and linear regression (LR). We found that LSTM achieved a significantly lower error rate compared with DT and LR due to its inherent ability to handle sequential data. Importantly, the prediction error was significantly reduced for DT and LR when used together with particle swarm optimization to select relevant/important features for these algorithms. Unlike summative analysis, and contrary to expectations, we found a significantly lower error rate when the prediction was made across different participants than within a participant. Moreover, the predictive selected features suggest that the patterns predictive of HR and GSR were substantially different across electrode sites and frequency bands. Overall, these results indicate that specific patterns of cerebral activity track autonomic body responses. Although individual cerebral differences are important, they might not be the only factors influencing the moment-by-moment changes in ANS responses.

Recovering Individual Emotional States from Sparse Ratings Using Collaborative Filtering.

A fundamental challenge in emotion research is measuring feeling states with high granularity and temporal precision without disrupting the emotion generation process. Here we introduce and validate a new approach in which responses are sparsely sampled and the missing data are recovered using a computational technique known as collaborative filtering (CF). This approach leverages structured covariation across individual experiences and is available in Neighbors, an open-source Python toolbox. We validate our approach across three different experimental contexts by recovering dense individual ratings using only a small subset of the original data. In dataset 1, participants (n=316) separately rated 112 emotional images on 6 different discrete emotions. In dataset 2, participants (n=203) watched 8 short emotionally engaging autobiographical stories while simultaneously providing moment-by-moment ratings of the intensity of their affective experience. In dataset 3, participants (n=60) with distinct social preferences made 76 decisions about how much money to return in a hidden multiplier trust game. Across all experimental contexts, CF was able to accurately recover missing data and importantly outperformed mean and multivariate imputation, particularly in contexts with greater individual variability. This approach will enable new avenues for affective science research by allowing researchers to acquire high dimensional ratings from emotional experiences with minimal disruption to the emotion-generation process. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-022-00161-2.

An examination of autonomic and facial responses to prototypical facial emotion expressions in psychopathy.

Meta-analyses have found that people high in psychopathy categorize (or "recognize") others' prototypical facial emotion expressions with reduced accuracy. However, these have been contested with remaining questions regarding the strength, specificity, and mechanisms of this ability in psychopathy. In addition, few studies have tested holistically whether psychopathy is related to reduced facial mimicry or autonomic arousal in response to others' dynamic facial expressions. Therefore, the current study presented 6 s videos of a target person making prototypical emotion expressions (anger, fear, disgust, sadness, joy, and neutral) to N = 88 incarcerated adult males while recording facial electromyography, skin conductance response (SCR), and heart rate. Participants identified the emotion category and rated the valence and intensity of the target person's emotion. Psychopathy was assessed via the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R). We predicted that overall PCL-R scores and scores for the interpersonal/affective traits, in particular, would be related to reduced emotion categorization accuracy, valence ratings, intensity ratings, facial mimicry, SCR amplitude, and cardiac deceleration in response to the prototypical facial emotion expressions. In contrast to our hypotheses, PCL-R scores were unrelated to emotion categorization accuracy, valence ratings, and intensity ratings. Stimuli failed to elicit facial mimicry from the full sample, which does not allow drawing conclusions about the relationship between psychopathy and facial mimicry. However, participants displayed general autonomic arousal responses, but not to prototypical emotion expressions per se. PCL-R scores were also unrelated to SCR and cardiac deceleration. These findings failed to identify aberrant behavioral and physiological responses to prototypical facial emotion expressions in relation to psychopathy.

All Walks of Life: Editorial for the Special Issue on "The Impact of Psychopathy: Multidisciplinary and Applied Perspectives".

We are grateful for the opportunity to serve as Guest Editors of this Special Issue on "The impact of psychopathy: Multidisciplinary and applied perspectives." Psychopathy is a serious public health concern that has long attracted scholarly and clinical interest in both mental health and criminal justice fields. However, given its robust link with criminal behavior, research on psychopathy has largely developed with a primary emphasis on (male) adults within correctional settings. While the preponderance of work remains focused on these adult offenders, research on psychopathy has expanded in recent decades to include studies within a variety of more diverse populations and contexts. The goal of this Special Issue has been to highlight some of the most recent research in these areas, toward a more deliberate emphasis on the broad impacts that psychopathy can impart across all walks of life. To this end, while only two of the papers included in the Special Issue focused on forensic samples (and more specifically on treatment and recidivism), all 10 papers have nonetheless offered a clear focus on the detrimental impacts that individuals with psychopathic traits can impart within society. Indeed, included manuscripts focused on the impact of psychopathy within romantic relationships (in both middle and older adulthood), within parent-child dyads, within the workplace, and within society at large. Across these studies, the significant, detrimental impact that individuals with heightened psychopathic traits impart is highlighted, not only for their victims, but also for their family, friends, and colleagues. In this Editorial, we would like to emphasize some main themes that emerged from their contributions.

In Search of the Preference Reversal Zone.

A preference reversal is observed when a preference for a larger-later (LL) reward over a smaller-sooner (SS) reward reverses as both rewards come closer in time. Preference reversals are common in everyday life and in the laboratory and are often claimed to support hyperbolic delay-discounting models which, in their simplest form, can model reversals with only one free parameter. However, it is not clear if the temporal location of preference reversals can be predicted a priori. Studies testing model predictions have not found support for them, but they overlooked the well-documented effect of reinforcer magnitude on discounting rate. Therefore, we directly tested hyperbolic and exponential model predictions in a pre-registered study by assessing individual discount rates for two reinforcer magnitudes. We then made individualized predictions about pairs of choices between which preference reversals should occur. With 107 participants, we found (1) little evidence that hyperbolic and exponential models could predict the temporal location of preference reversals, (2) some evidence that hyperbolic models had better predictive performance than exponential models, and (3) in contrast to many previous studies, that exponential models generally produced superior fits to the observed data than hyperbolic models.

Selfish risk-seeking can provide an evolutionary advantage in a conditional public goods game.

While cooperation and risk aversion are considered to be evolutionarily advantageous in many circumstances, and selfish or risky behaviour can bring negative consequences for individuals and the community at large, selfish and risk-seeking behaviour is still often observed in human societies. In this paper we consider whether there are environmental and social conditions that favour selfish risk-seeking individuals within a community and whether tolerating such individuals may provide benefits to the community itself in some circumstances. We built an agent-based model including two types of agent-selfish risk-seeking and generous risk-averse-that harvest resources from the environment and share them (or not) with their community. We found that selfish risk-seekers can outperform generous risk-averse agents in conditions where their survival is moderately challenged, supporting the theory that selfish and risk-seeking traits combined are not dysfunctional but rather can be evolutionarily advantageous for agents. The benefit for communities is less clear, but when generous agents are unconditionally cooperative communities with a greater proportion of selfish risk-seeking agents grow to a larger population size suggesting some advantage to the community overall.

Dissociation of behavioral and neural responses to provocation during reactive aggression in healthy adults with high versus low externalization.

The externalizing spectrum describes a range of heterogeneous personality traits and behavioral patterns, primarily characterized by antisocial behavior, disinhibition, and substance (mis)use. In psychopathology, abnormalities in neural threat, reward responses and the impulse-control system may be responsible for these externalizing symptoms. Within the non-clinical range, mechanisms remain still unclear. In this fMRI-study, 61 healthy participants (31 men) from the higher versus lower range of the non-clinical variation in externalization (31 participants with high externalization) as assessed by the subscales disinhibition and meanness of the Triarchic-Psychopathy-Measure (TriPM) performed a monetary modified Taylor-Aggression-Paradigm (mTAP). This paradigm consisted of a mock competitive-reaction-time-task played against a fictional opponent with preprogrammed win- and lose-trials. In lose-trials, participants were provoked by subtraction of an amount of money between 0 and 90 cents. As a manipulation check, provocation induced a significant rise in behavioral aggression levels linked with an increased activation in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). High externalization predicted reduced ACC responses to provocation. However, high externalizing participants did not behave more aggressively than the low externalization group. Additionally, the high externalizing group showed a significantly lower positive affect while no group differences emerged for negative affect. In conclusion, high externalization in the non-clinical range was related to neural alterations in regions involved in affective decision-making as well as to changes in affect but did not lead to higher behavioral aggression levels in response to the mTAP. This is in line with previous findings suggesting that aberrations at multiple levels are essential for developing externalizing disorders.

The conceptual building blocks of everyday thought: Tracking the emergence and dynamics of ruminative and nonruminative thinking.

How do thoughts arise, unfold, and change over time? Are the contents and dynamics of everyday thought rooted in conceptual associations within one's semantic networks? To address these questions, we developed the Free Association Semantic task (FAST), whereby participants generate dynamic chains of conceptual associations in response to seed words that vary in valence. Ninety-four adults from a community sample completed the FAST task and additionally described and rated six of their most frequently occurring everyday thoughts. Text analysis and valence ratings revealed similarities in thematic and affective content between FAST concept chains and recurrent autobiographical thoughts. Dynamic analyses revealed that individuals higher in rumination were more strongly attracted to negative conceptual spaces and more likely to remain there longer. Overall, these findings provide quantitative evidence that conceptual associations may act as a semantic scaffold for more complex everyday thoughts, and that more negative and less dynamic conceptual associations in ruminative individuals mirror maladaptive repetitive thoughts in daily life. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Psychopathy in women: insights from neuroscience and ways forward for research.

Psychopathy is a severe form of personality disturbance, resulting in a detrimental impact on individuals, healthcare systems, and society as a whole. Until relatively recently, most research in psychopathy has focused on male samples, not least because of its link with criminal behavior and the large proportion of violent crime committed by men. However, psychopathy in women also leads to considerable problems at an individual and societal level, including substance misuse, poor treatment outcomes, and contribution to ever-increasing numbers of female prisoners. Despite this, due to relative neglect, most research into adult female psychopathy is underpowered and outdated. We argue that the field needs revitalizing, with a focus on the developmental nature of the condition and neurocognitive research. Recent work international consortia into conduct disorder in female youth-a precursor of psychopathy in female adults-gives cause for optimism. Here, we outline key strategies for enriching research in this important field with contemporary approaches to other psychiatric conditions.

Variation is the Norm: Brain State Dynamics Evoked By Emotional Video Clips.

For the last several decades, emotion research has attempted to identify a "biomarker" or consistent pattern of brain activity to characterize a single category of emotion (e.g., fear) that will remain consistent across all instances of that category, regardless of individual and context. In this study, we investigated variation rather than consistency during emotional experiences while people watched video clips chosen to evoke instances of specific emotion categories. Specifically, we developed a sequential probabilistic approach to model the temporal dynamics in a participant's brain activity during video viewing. We characterized brain states during these clips as distinct state occupancy periods between state transitions in blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) signal patterns. We found substantial variation in the state occupancy probability distributions across individuals watching the same video, supporting the hypothesis that when it comes to the brain correlates of emotional experience, variation may indeed be the norm.

Externalizing behavior in healthy young adults is associated with lower cortisol responses to acute stress and altered neural activation in the dorsal striatum.

The externalizing spectrum is characterized by disinhibition, impulsivity, antisocial-aggressive behavior as well as substance (mis)use. Studies in forensic samples and mentally impaired children suggested that higher rates of externalization are linked to lower cortisol stress responses and altered affect-related neural activation. In this fMRI-study, we investigated whether externalizing behavior in healthy participants is likewise associated with altered cortisol responses and neural activity to stress. Following a quasi-experimental approach, we tested healthy participants (N = 61, 31 males) from the higher versus lower range of the non-clinical variation in externalization (31 participants with high externalization) as assessed by the subscales disinhibition and meanness of the Triarchic-Psychopathy-Measure. All participants were exposed to ScanSTRESS, a standardized psychosocial stress paradigm for scanner environments. In both groups, ScanSTRESS induced a significant rise in cortisol levels with the high externalization group showing significantly lower cortisol responses to stress than the low externalization group. This was mainly driven by males. Further, individual increases in cortisol predicted neural response differences between externalization groups, indicating more activation in the dorsal striatum in low externalization. This was primarily driven by females. In contrast, post-hoc analysis showed that hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis hyporeactivity in males was associated with prefrontal and hippocampal activation. Our data substantiate that individuals from the general population high on externalization, show reduced cortisol stress responses. Furthermore, dorsal striatum activity as part of the mesolimbic system, known to be sensitive to environmental adversity, seems to play a role in externalization-specific cortisol stress responses. Beyond that, a modulating influence of gender was disclosed.

The Role of Psychopathic Traits in Explaining Associations Between Childhood Traumatic Experiences and Aggression.

The present study reports on a preregistered investigation of the potential mediating role of the triarchic psychopathy components Boldness, Meanness, and Disinhibition for associations between childhood traumatic experiences (CTE) and aggression. Three nonclinical samples (total N = 1,729; 1,176 women, 68.02%) completed self-report instruments of CTE, triarchic psychopathy traits, reactive and proactive aggression (Samples 1 and 2), and general aggression (Sample 3). Cross-sectional path analyses revealed that both Meanness and Disinhibition consistently mediated associations between CTE and aggression. These indirect effects were consistent across gender, even though the direct effect of Meanness on proactive aggression was stronger in men than in women (Samples 1 and 2). Finally, Boldness had weak negative associations with childhood traumatic experiences in all three samples, but no direct association with aggression. Taken together, these correlational findings suggest potential developmental mechanisms linking early traumatic experiences to adult aggression through elevated levels of psychopathic traits.

Author Correction: Neural and sociocultural mediators of ethnic differences in pain.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Neural and sociocultural mediators of ethnic differences in pain.

Understanding ethnic differences in pain is important for addressing disparities in pain care. A common belief is that African Americans are hyposensitive to pain compared to Whites, but African Americans show increased pain sensitivity in clinical and laboratory settings. The neurobiological mechanisms underlying these differences are unknown. We studied an ethnicity- and gender-balanced sample of African Americans, Hispanics and non-Hispanic Whites using functional magnetic resonance imaging during thermal pain. Higher pain report in African Americans was mediated by discrimination and increased frontostriatal circuit activations associated with pain rating, discrimination, experimenter trust and extranociceptive aspects of pain elsewhere. In contrast, the neurologic pain signature, a neuromarker sensitive and specific to nociceptive pain, mediated painful heat effects on pain report largely similarly in African American and other groups. Findings identify a brain basis for higher pain in African Americans related to interpersonal context and extranociceptive central pain mechanisms and suggest that nociceptive pain processing may be similar across ethnicities.

Assessment of Different Dimensions of Shame Proneness: Validation of the SHAME.

A large body of research revealed that shame is associated with adaptive and maladaptive correlates. The aim of this work was to validate a new dimensional instrument (SHAME), which was developed to disentangle adaptive and maladaptive dimensions of shame proneness. Confirmatory factor analyses supported the three-factorial structure (bodily, cognitive, and existential shame) in American (n = 502) and German (n = 496) community samples, using invariance testing. Bifactor model analyses exhibited distinct associations of adaptive (bodily and cognitive shame) and maladaptive (existential shame) dimensions of shame with psychopathology and social functioning. Network analyses highlighted the role of existential shame in psychopathology, especially for a clinical sample of patients with Borderline Personality Disorder (n = 92). By placing shame pronenesss into a network of similar and dissimilar constructs, the current findings serve as a foundation for drawing conclusions about the adaptive and maladaptive nature of shame.