Four-week intranasal oxytocin administration reduces attachment avoidance in older women.

The neuropeptide oxytocin (OT) serves as a critical modulator of social cognition and social behavior. Adult attachment is an affiliative process crucial for social interaction across adulthood. Insecure adult attachment comprises two broad dimensions, attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance. Both these dimensions of attachment are currently understudied regarding OT modulation, and especially in older adults. The present study determined the effects of chronic intranasal OT administration on adult attachment in generally healthy older women and men (aged 55-95 years). Embedded in a larger project, participants were randomly assigned to self-administer 24 international units of either OT or a placebo (P) intranasally twice daily for four weeks. The Experiences in Close Relationships Scale assessed adult attachment (anxiety and avoidance) pre- and post-treatment. There was no significant pre- to post-treatment change in attachment avoidance overall, but the treatment x timepoint x sex interaction was significant, in that women (but not men) in the OT (vs. P) group reported decreased attachment avoidance. No comparable effects were observed for attachment anxiety. Results suggest that older women may benefit from chronic intranasal OT treatment by experiencing less attachment avoidance in their adult relationships.

Intranasal oxytocin modulates the salience network in aging.

Growing evidence supports a role of the neuropeptide oxytocin in promoting social cognition and prosocial behavior, possibly via modulation of the salience of social information. The effect of intranasal oxytocin administration on the salience network, however, is not well understood, including in the aging brain. To address this research gap, 42 young (22.52 ± 3.02 years; 24 in the oxytocin group) and 43 older (71.12 ± 5.25 years; 21 in the oxytocin group) participants were randomized to either self-administer intranasal oxytocin or placebo prior to resting-state functional imaging. The salience network was identified using independent component analysis (ICA). Independent t-tests showed that individuals in the oxytocin compared to the placebo group had lower within-network resting-state functional connectivity, both for left amygdala (MNI coordinates: x = -18, y = 0, z = -15; corrected p < 0.05) within a more ventral salience network and for right insula (MNI coordinates: x = 39, y = 6, z = -6; corrected p < 0.05) within a more dorsal salience network. Age moderation analysis furthermore demonstrated that the oxytocin-reduced functional connectivity between the ventral salience network and the left amygdala was only present in older participants. These findings suggest a modulatory role of exogenous oxytocin on resting-state functional connectivity within the salience network and support age-differential effects of acute intranasal oxytocin administration on this network.

Value network engagement and effects of memory-related processing during encoding and retrieval of value.

Decision makers rely on episodic memory to calculate choice values in everyday life, yet it is unclear how neural mechanisms of valuation differ when value-related information is encoded versus retrieved from episodic memory. The current fMRI study compared neural correlates of value while information was encoded versus retrieved from memory. Scanned tasks were followed by a behavioral episodic memory test for item-attribute associations. Our analyses sought to (i) identify neural correlates of value that were distinct and common across encoding and retrieval, and (ii) determine whether neural mechanisms of valuation and episodic memory interact. The study yielded three primary findings. First, value-related activation in the fronto-striatal reward circuit and posterior parietal cortex was comparable across valuation phases. Second, value-related activation in select fronto-parietal and salience regions was significantly greater at value retrieval than encoding. Third, there was no interaction between neural correlates of valuation and episodic memory. Taken with prior research, the present study indicates that fronto-parietal and salience regions play a key role in retrieval-dependent valuation and context-specific effects likely determine whether neural correlates of value interact with episodic memory.

Age-related Differences in Expression Recognition of Faces with Direct and Averted Gaze Using Dynamic Stimuli.

Background: It is still an open to what extent the ecological validity of face stimuli modulates age-related differences in the recognition of facial expression; and to what extent eye gaze direction may play a role in this process. The present study tested whether age effects in facial expression recognition, also as a function of eye gaze direction, would be less pronounced in dynamic than static face displays.Method: Healthy younger and older adults were asked to recognize emotional expressions of faces with direct or averted eye gaze presented in static and dynamic format.Results: While there were no differences between the age groups in facial expression recognition ability across emotions, when considering individual expressions, age-related differences in the recognition of angry facial expressions were attenuated for dynamic compared to static stimuli.Conclusion: Our findings suggest a moderation effect of dynamic vs. static stimulus format on age-related deficits in the identification of angry facial expressions, suggesting that older adults may be less disadvantaged when recognizing angry facial expressions in more naturalistic displays. Eye gaze direction did not further modulate this effect. Findings from this study qualify and extend previous research and theory on age-related differences in facial expression recognition and have practical impact on study design by supporting the use of dynamic faces in aging research.

The Phishing Email Suspicion Test (PEST) a lab-based task for evaluating the cognitive mechanisms of phishing detection.

Phishing emails constitute a major problem, linked to fraud and exploitation as well as subsequent negative health outcomes including depression and suicide. Because of their sheer volume, and because phishing emails are designed to deceive, purely technological solutions can only go so far, leaving human judgment as the last line of defense. However, because it is difficult to phish people in the lab, little is known about the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying phishing susceptibility. There is therefore a critical need to develop an ecologically valid lab-based measure of phishing susceptibility that will allow evaluation of the cognitive mechanisms involved in phishing detection. Here we present such a measure based on a task, the Phishing Email Suspicion Test (PEST), and a cognitive model to quantify behavior. In PEST, participants rate a series of phishing and non-phishing emails according to their level of suspicion. By comparing suspicion scores for each email to its real-world efficacy, we find initial support for the ecological validity of PEST - phishing emails that were more effective in the real world were more effective at deceiving people in the lab. In the proposed computational model, we quantify behavior in terms of participants' overall level of suspicion of emails, their ability to distinguish phishing from non-phishing emails, and the extent to which emails from the recent past bias their current decision. Together, our task and model provide a framework for studying the cognitive neuroscience of phishing detection.

The effects of face attractiveness on face memory depend on both age of perceiver and age of face.

Face attractiveness can influence memory for previously seen faces. This effect has been shown to differ for young and older perceivers. Two parallel studies examined the moderation of both the age of the face and the age of the perceiver on the relationship between facial attractiveness and face memory. Study 1 comprised 29 young and 31 older participants; Study 2 comprised 25 young and 24 older participants. In both studies, participants completed an incidental face encoding and a surprise old/new recognition test with young and older faces that varied in face attractiveness. Face attractiveness affected memory for young but not older faces. In addition, young but not older perceivers showed a linear effect of facial attractiveness on memory for young faces, while both young and older perceivers showed a quadratic effect on memory for young faces. These findings extend previous work by demonstrating that the effect of facial attractiveness on face memory is a function of both the age of the perceiver and the age of the face. Factors that could account for such moderations of face and perceiver age on the associations between face attractiveness and face memory are discussed (e.g. age differences in social goals and face similarity/distinctiveness).

Associations between subclinical depressive symptoms and reduced brain volume in middle-aged to older adults.

OBJECTIVES: The associations between subclinical depressive symptoms, as well specific symptom subscales, on brain structure in aging are not completely elucidated. This study investigated the extent to which depressive symptoms were related to brain volumes in fronto-limbic structures in a sample of middle-aged to older adults. METHOD: Eighty participants underwent structural neuroimaging and completed the Beck Depression Inventory, 2nd Edition (BDI-II), which comprises separate affective, cognitive, and somatic subscales. Gray matter volumes were extracted from the caudal and rostral anterior cingulate, posterior cingulate, hippocampus, and amygdala. Hierarchical regression models examined the relationship between brain volumes and (i) total depressive symptoms and (ii) BDI-II subscales were conducted. RESULTS: After adjusting for total intracranial volume, race, and age, higher total depressive symptoms were associated with smaller hippocampal volume (p = 0.005). For the symptom subscales, after controlling for the abovementioned covariates and the influence of the other symptom subscales, more somatic symptoms were related to smaller posterior cingulate (p = 0.025) and hippocampal (p < 0.001) volumes. In contrast, the affective and cognitive subscales were not associated with brain volumes in any regions of interest. CONCLUSION: Our data showed that greater symptomatology was associated with smaller volume in limbic brain regions. These findings provide evidence for preclinical biological markers of major depression and specifically advance knowledge of the relationship between subclinical depressive symptoms and brain volume. Importantly, we observed variations by specific depressive symptom subscales, suggesting a symptom-differential relationship between subclinical depression and brain volume alterations in middle-aged and older individuals.

Emotion identification across adulthood using the Dynamic FACES database of emotional expressions in younger, middle aged, and older adults.

Facial stimuli are widely used in behavioural and brain science research to investigate emotional facial processing. However, some studies have demonstrated that dynamic expressions elicit stronger emotional responses compared to static images. To address the need for more ecologically valid and powerful facial emotional stimuli, we created Dynamic FACES, a database of morphed videos (n = 1026) from younger, middle-aged, and older adults displaying naturalistic emotional facial expressions (neutrality, sadness, disgust, fear, anger, happiness). To assess adult age differences in emotion identification of dynamic stimuli and to provide normative ratings for this modified set of stimuli, healthy adults (n = 1822, age range 18-86 years) categorised for each video the emotional expression displayed, rated the expression distinctiveness, estimated the age of the face model, and rated the naturalness of the expression. We found few age differences in emotion identification when using dynamic stimuli. Only for angry faces did older adults show lower levels of identification accuracy than younger adults. Further, older adults outperformed middle-aged adults' in identification of sadness. The use of dynamic facial emotional stimuli has previously been limited, but Dynamic FACES provides a large database of high-resolution naturalistic, dynamic expressions across adulthood. Information on using Dynamic FACES for research purposes can be found at http://faces.mpib-berlin.mpg.de .

Susceptibility to Spear-Phishing Emails: Effects of Internet User Demographics and Email Content.

Phishing is fundamental to cyber attacks. This research determined the effect of Internet user age and email content such as weapons of influence (persuasive techniques that attackers can use to lure individuals to fall for an attack) and life domains (a specific topic or aspect of an individual's life that attackers can focus an emails on) on spear-phishing (targeted phishing) susceptibility. One-hundred young and 58 older users received, without their knowledge, daily simulated phishing emails over 21 days. A browser plugin recorded their clicking on links in the emails as an indicator of their susceptibility. Forty-three percent of users fell for the simulated phishing emails, with older women showing the highest susceptibility. While susceptibility in young users declined across the study, susceptibility in older users remained stable. The relative effectiveness of the attacks differed by weapons of influence and life domains with age-group variability. In addition, older compared to young users reported lower susceptibility awareness. These findings support effects of Internet user demographics and email content on susceptibility to phishing and emphasize the need for personalization of the next generation of security solutions.

Functional brain networks involved in gaze and emotional processing.

Eye-gaze direction plays a fundamental role in the perception of facial features and particularly the processing of emotional facial expressions. Yet, the neural underpinnings of the integration of eye gaze and emotional facial cues are not well understood. The primary aim of this study was to delineate the functional networks that subserve the recognition of emotional expressions as a function of eye gaze. Participants were asked to identify happy, angry, or neutral faces, displayed with direct or averted gaze, while their neural responses were measured with fMRI. The results showed that recognition of happy expressions, irrespective of eye-gaze direction, engaged the critical nodes of the default mode network. Recognition of angry faces, on the other hand, was gaze-dependent, engaging the critical nodes of the salience network when presented with direct gaze, but fronto-parietal areas when presented with averted gaze. Functional connectivity analysis further showed gaze-dependent engagement of a large-scale network connected to bilateral amygdala during the recognition of angry expressions. This study provides important insights into the functional connectivity between the amygdala and other critical social-cognitive brain nodes, which are essential in processing of ambiguous, potentially threatening social signals. These findings have implications for psychiatric disorders, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, which are characterized by aberrant limbic connectivity.

False feedback and beliefs influence name recall in younger and older adults.

Feedback is an important self-regulatory process that affects task effort and subsequent performance. Benefits of positive feedback for list recall have been explored in research on goals and feedback, but the effect of negative feedback on memory has rarely been studied. The current research extends knowledge of memory and feedback effects by investigating face-name association memory and by examining the potential mediation of feedback effects, in younger and older adults, through self-evaluative beliefs. Beliefs were assessed before and after name recognition and name recall testing. Repeated presentation of false positive feedback was compared to false negative feedback and a no feedback condition. Results showed that memory self-efficacy declined over time for participants in the negative and no feedback conditions but was sustained for those receiving positive feedback. Furthermore, participants who received negative feedback felt older after testing than before testing. For name recall, the positive feedback group outperformed the negative feedback and no feedback groups combined, with no age interactions. The observed feedback-related effects on memory were fully mediated by changes in memory self-efficacy. These findings advance our understanding of how beliefs are related to feedback in memory and inform future studies examining the importance of self-regulation in memory.

Edgewise and subgraph-level tests for brain networks.

Resting-state functional magnetic resonance image is a useful technique for investigating brain functional connectivity at rest. In this work, we develop flexible regression models and methods for determining differences in resting-state functional connectivity as a function of age, gender, drug intervention, or neuropsychiatric disorders. We propose two complementary methods for identifying changes of edges and subgraphs. (i) For detecting changes of edges, we select the optimal model at each edge and then conduct contrast tests to identify the effects of the important variables while controlling the familywise error rate. (ii) We adopt the network-based statistics method to improve power by incorporating the graph topological structure. Both methods have wide applications for low signal-to-noise ratio data. We propose stability criteria for the choice of threshold in the network-based statistics procedure and utilize efficient massive parallel procedure to speed up the estimation and inference procedure. Results from our simulation studies show that the thresholds chosen by the proposed stability criteria outperform the Bonferroni threshold. To demonstrate applicability, we use both methods in the context of the Oxytocin and Aging Study to determine effects of age, gender, and drug treatment on resting-state functional connectivity, as well as in the context of the Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange Study to determine effects of autism spectrum disorder on functional connectivity at rest. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Face likeability mediates the memory-enhancing effect of face attractiveness in young but not older adults.

Evidence of effects of face attractiveness on memory is mixed and little is known about the underlying mechanisms of this relationship. Previous work suggests a possible mediating role of affective responding to faces (i.e., face likeability) on the relationship between face attractiveness and memory. Age-related change in social motivation may reduce the relevance of face attractiveness in older adults, with downstream effects on memory. In the present study, 50 young and 51 older participants were presented with face-trait pairs. Faces varied in attractiveness. Participants then completed a face-trait associative recognition memory task and provided likeability ratings for each face. There was a memory-enhancing effect of face attractiveness in young (but not older) participants, which was partially mediated by face likeability. In addition, more attractive and less attractive (compared to moderately attractive) faces were more likely remembered by both young and older participants. This quadratic effect of face attractiveness on memory was not mediated by face likeability. Findings are discussed in the context of motivational influences on memory that vary with age.

Getting LOST: A conceptual framework for supporting and enhancing spatial navigation in aging.

Spatial navigation is more difficult and effortful for older than younger individuals, a shift which occurs for a variety of neurological, physical, and cognitive reasons associated with aging. Despite a large body of evidence documenting age-related deficits in spatial navigation, comparatively less research addresses how to facilitate more effective navigation behavior for older adults. Since navigation challenges arise for a variety of reasons in old age, a one-size-fits-all solution is unlikely to work. Here, we introduce a framework for the variety of spatial navigation challenges faced in aging, which we call LOST-Location, Orientation, Spatial mapping, and Transit. The LOST framework builds on evidence from the cognitive neuroscience of spatial navigation, which reveals distinct components underpinning human wayfinding. We evaluate research on navigational aids-devices and depictions-which help people find their way around; and we reflect on how navigation aids solve (or fail to solve) specific wayfinding difficulties faced by older adults. In summary, we emphasize a bespoke approach to improving spatial navigation in aging, which focuses on tailoring navigation solutions to specific navigation challenges. Our hope is that by providing precise support to older navigators, navigation opportunities can facilitate independence and exploration, while minimizing the danger of becoming lost. We conclude by delineating critical knowledge gaps in how to improve older adults' spatial navigation capacities that the novel LOST framework could guide to address. This article is categorized under: Psychology > Development and Aging Neuroscience > Cognition Neuroscience > Behavior.

New directions for studying the aging social-cognitive brain.

The study of social cognition has extended across the lifespan with a recent special focus on the impacts of aging on the social-cognitive brain. This review summarizes current knowledge on social perception, theory of mind, empathy, and social behavior from a social-cognitive neuroscience of aging perspective and identifies new directions for studying the aging social-cognitive brain. These new directions highlight the need for (i) standardized operationalization and analysis of social-cognitive constructs; (ii) use of naturalistic paradigms to enhance ecological validity of social-cognitive measures; (iii) application of repeated assessments via single-N designs for robust delineation of social-cognitive processes in the aging brain; (iv) increased representation of vulnerable aging populations in social-cognitive brain research to enhance diversity, promote generalizability, and allow for cross-population comparisons.

Why the Single-N Design Should Be the Default in Affective Neuroscience.

Many studies in affective neuroscience rely on statistical procedures designed to estimate population averages and base their main conclusions on group averages. However, the obvious unit of analysis in affective neuroscience is the individual, not the group, because emotions are individual phenomena that typically vary across individuals. Conclusions based on group averages may therefore be misleading or wrong, if interpreted as statements about emotions of an individual, or meaningless, if interpreted as statements about the group, which has no emotions. We therefore advocate the Single-N design as the default strategy in research on emotions, testing one or several individuals extensively with the primary purpose of obtaining results at the individual level. In neuroscience, the equivalent to the Single-N design is deep imaging, the emerging trend of extensive measurements of activity in single brains. Apart from the fact that individuals react differently to emotional stimuli, they also vary in shape and size of their brains. Group-based analysis of brain imaging data therefore refers to an "average brain" that was activated in a way that may not be representative of the physiology of any of the tested individual brains, nor of how these brains responded to the experimental stimuli. Deep imaging avoids such group-averaging artifacts by simply focusing on the individual brain. This methodological shift toward individual analysis has already opened new research areas in fields like vision science. Inspired by this, we call for a corresponding shift in affective neuroscience, away from group averages, and toward experimental designs targeting the individual.

Allocation of Space-Based Attention is Guided by Efficient Comprehension of Spatial Direction.

Spatial navigation is supported by visual cues (e.g., scenes, schemas like arrows, and words) that must be comprehended quickly to facilitate effective transit. People comprehend spatial directions faster from schemas and words than scenes. We hypothesize that this occurs because schemas and words efficiently engage space-based attention, allowing for less costly computations. Here, participants completed a spatial cueing paradigm, and we calculated cue validity effects - how much faster participants responded to validly than invalidly cued locations - for each cue format. We pre-registered Experiment 1 and found significant cue validity effects with schemas and words, but not scenes, suggesting space-based attention was allocated more efficiently with schemas and words than scenes. In Experiment 2, we explicitly instructed participants to interpret the scenes from an egocentric perspective and found that this instruction manipulation still did not result in a significant cue validity effect with scenes. In Experiment 3, we investigated whether the differential effects between conditions were due to costly computations to extract spatial direction and found that increasing cue duration had no influence. In Experiment 4, significant cue validity effects were observed for orthogonal but not non-orthogonal spatial directions, suggesting space-based attention was allocated more efficiently when the spatial direction precisely matched the target location. These findings confirm our hypothesis that efficient allocation of space-based attention is guided by faster spatial direction comprehension. Altogether, this work suggests that schemas and words may be more effective supports than scenes for navigation performance in the real-world.

Effects of four-week intranasal oxytocin administration on large-scale brain networks in older adults.

Oxytocin (OT) is a crucial modulator of social cognition and behavior. Previous work primarily examined effects of acute intranasal oxytocin administration (IN-OT) in younger males on isolated brain regions. Not well understood are (i) chronic IN-OT effects, (ii) in older adults, (iii) on large-scale brain networks, representative of OT's wider-ranging brain mechanisms. To address these research gaps, 60 generally healthy older adults (mean age = 70.12 years, range = 55-83) were randomly assigned to self-administer either IN-OT or placebo twice daily via nasal spray over four weeks. Chronic IN-OT reduced resting-state functional connectivity (rs-FC) of both the right insula and the left middle cingulate cortex with the salience network but enhanced rs-FC of the left medial prefrontal cortex with the default mode network as well as the left thalamus with the basal ganglia-thalamus network. No significant chronic IN-OT effects were observed for between-network rs-FC. However, chronic IN-OT increased selective rs-FC of the basal ganglia-thalamus network with the salience network and the default mode network, indicative of more specialized, efficient communication between these networks. Directly comparing chronic vs. acute IN-OT, reduced rs-FC of the right insula with the salience network and between the default mode network and the basal ganglia-thalamus network, and greater selective rs-FC of the salience network with the default mode network and the basal ganglia-thalamus network, were more pronounced after chronic than acute IN-OT. Our results delineate the modulatory role of IN-OT on large-scale brain networks among older adults.

Oxytocin pathway gene variation and corticostriatal resting-state functional connectivity.

Genetic variations in single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) within oxytocin pathway genes have been linked to social behavior and neurodevelopmental conditions. However, the neurobiological mechanisms underlying these associations remain elusive. In this study, we investigated the relationship between variations of 10 SNPs in oxytocin pathway genes and resting-state functional connectivity among 55 independent components using a large sample from the UK Biobank (N ≈ 30,000). Our findings revealed that individuals with the GG genotype at rs4813627 within the oxytocin structural gene (OXT) exhibited weaker resting-state functional connectivity in the corticostriatal circuit compared to those with the GA/AA genotypes. Empirical evidence has linked the GG genotype at OXT rs4813627 with a behavioral tendency of insensitivity to others. These results inform the neural mechanisms by which oxytocin-related genetic factors can influence social behavior.

Effects of chronic intranasal oxytocin on visual attention to faces vs. natural scenes in older adults.

Aging is associated with changes in face processing, including desensitization to face cues like gaze direction and an attentional preference to faces with positive over negative emotional valence. A parallel line of research has shown that acute administration of oxytocin (OT) increases visual attention to social stimuli such as human faces. The current study examined effects of chronic OT administration among older adults on fixation duration to faces that varied in emotional expression, gaze direction, age, and sex. One hundred and twelve generally healthy older adults (aged 55-95 years) underwent a randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind, between-subject clinical trial in which they self-administered either OT or placebo (P) intranasally twice a day for 4 weeks. The behavioral task involved rating the trustworthiness of faces (i.e., social stimuli) and natural scenes (i.e., non-social control stimuli) during eye tracking and was conducted before and after the intervention. Fixation duration to both the faces and the natural scenes declined from pre- to post-intervention, however this decline was less pronounced among older adults in the OT compared to the P group for faces but not scenes. Further, face cues (emotional expression, gaze direction, age, sex) did not moderate the treatment effect. This study provides first evidence that chronic intranasal OT maintains salience of social cues over time in older adults, perhaps buffering effects of habituation. These findings enhance understanding of OT effects on social cognition among older adults, and would benefit from follow up with a young adult comparison group to directly speak to specificity of observed effects to older adults and reflection of the aging process.