Bodily maps of musical sensations across cultures.

Emotions, bodily sensations and movement are integral parts of musical experiences. Yet, it remains unknown i) whether emotional connotations and structural features of music elicit discrete bodily sensations and ii) whether these sensations are culturally consistent. We addressed these questions in a cross-cultural study with Western (European and North American, n = 903) and East Asian (Chinese, n = 1035). We precented participants with silhouettes of human bodies and asked them to indicate the bodily regions whose activity they felt changing while listening to Western and Asian musical pieces with varying emotional and acoustic qualities. The resulting bodily sensation maps (BSMs) varied as a function of the emotional qualities of the songs, particularly in the limb, chest, and head regions. Music-induced emotions and corresponding BSMs were replicable across Western and East Asian subjects. The BSMs clustered similarly across cultures, and cluster structures were similar for BSMs and self-reports of emotional experience. The acoustic and structural features of music were consistently associated with the emotion ratings and music-induced bodily sensations across cultures. These results highlight the importance of subjective bodily experience in music-induced emotions and demonstrate consistent associations between musical features, music-induced emotions, and bodily sensations across distant cultures.

Distinct neurofunctional alterations during motivational and hedonic processing of natural and monetary rewards in depression - a neuroimaging meta-analysis.

Reward processing dysfunctions are considered a candidate mechanism underlying anhedonia and apathy in depression. Neuroimaging studies have documented that neurofunctional alterations in mesocorticolimbic circuits may neurally mediate these dysfunctions. However, common and distinct neurofunctional alterations during motivational and hedonic evaluation of monetary and natural rewards in depression have not been systematically examined. Here, we capitalized on pre-registered neuroimaging meta-analyses to (1) establish general reward-related neural alterations in depression, (2) determine common and distinct alterations during the receipt and anticipation of monetary v. natural rewards, and, (3) characterize the differences on the behavioral, network, and molecular level. The pre-registered meta-analysis (https://osf.io/ay3r9) included 633 depressed patients and 644 healthy controls and revealed generally decreased subgenual anterior cingulate cortex and striatal reactivity toward rewards in depression. Subsequent comparative analyses indicated that monetary rewards led to decreased hedonic reactivity in the right ventral caudate while natural rewards led to decreased reactivity in the bilateral putamen in depressed individuals. These regions exhibited distinguishable profiles on the behavioral, network, and molecular level. Further analyses demonstrated that the right thalamus and left putamen showed decreased activation during the anticipation of monetary reward. The present results indicate that distinguishable neurofunctional alterations may neurally mediate reward-processing alterations in depression, in particular, with respect to monetary and natural rewards. Given that natural rewards prevail in everyday life, our findings suggest that reward-type specific interventions are warranted and challenge the generalizability of experimental tasks employing monetary incentives to capture reward dysregulations in everyday life.

The neurostructural consequences of glaucoma and their overlap with disorders exhibiting emotional dysregulations: A voxel-based meta-analysis and tripartite system model.

BACKGROUND: Glaucoma, a progressive neurodegenerative disorder leading to irreversible blindness, is associated with heightened rates of generalized anxiety and depression. This study aims to comprehensively investigate brain morphological changes in glaucoma patients, extending beyond visual processing areas, and explores overlaps with morphological alterations observed in anxiety and depression. METHODS: A comparative meta-analysis was conducted, using case-control studies of brain structural integrity in glaucoma patients. We aimed to identify regions with gray matter volume (GMV) changes, examine their role within distinct large-scale networks, and assess overlap with alterations in generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) and major depressive disorder (MDD). RESULTS: Glaucoma patients exhibited significant GMV reductions in visual processing regions (lingual gyrus, thalamus). Notably, volumetric reductions extended beyond visual systems, encompassing the left putamen and insula. Behavioral and functional network decoding revealed distinct large-scale networks, implicating visual, motivational, and affective domains. The insular region, linked to pain and affective processes, displayed reductions overlapping with alterations observed in GAD. LIMITATIONS: While the study identified significant morphological alterations, the number of studies from both the glaucoma and GAD cohorts remains limited due to the lack of independent studies meeting our inclusion criteria. CONCLUSION: The study proposes a tripartite brain model for glaucoma, with visual processing changes related to the lingual gyrus and additional alterations in the putamen and insular regions tied to emotional or motivational functions. These neuroanatomical changes extend beyond the visual system, implying broader implications for brain structure and potential pathological developments, providing insights into the overall neurological consequences of glaucoma.

A brief real-time fNIRS-informed neurofeedback training of the prefrontal cortex changes brain activity and connectivity during subsequent working memory challenge.

Working memory (WM) represents a building-block of higher cognitive functions and a wide range of mental disorders are associated with WM impairments. Initial studies have shown that several sessions of functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) informed real-time neurofeedback (NF) allow healthy individuals to volitionally increase activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), a region critically involved in WM. For the translation to therapeutic or neuroenhancement applications, however, it is critical to assess whether fNIRS-NF success transfers into neural and behavioral WM enhancement in the absence of feedback. We therefore combined single-session fNIRS-NF of the left DLPFC with a randomized sham-controlled design (N = 62 participants) and a subsequent WM challenge with concomitant functional MRI. Over four runs of fNIRS-NF, the left DLPFC NF training group demonstrated enhanced neural activity in this region, reflecting successful acquisition of neural self-regulation. During the subsequent WM challenge, we observed no evidence for performance differences between the training and the sham group. Importantly, however, examination of the fMRI data revealed that - compared to the sham group - the training group exhibited significantly increased regional activity in the bilateral DLPFC and decreased left DLPFC - left anterior insula functional connectivity during the WM challenge. Exploratory analyses revealed a negative association between DLPFC activity and WM reaction times in the NF group. Together, these findings indicate that healthy individuals can learn to volitionally increase left DLPFC activity in a single training session and that the training success translates into WM-related neural activation and connectivity changes in the absence of feedback. This renders fNIRS-NF as a promising and scalable WM intervention approach that could be applied to various mental disorders.

A neurofunctional signature of subjective disgust generalizes to oral distaste and socio-moral contexts.

While disgust originates in the hard-wired mammalian distaste response, the conscious experience of disgust in humans strongly depends on subjective appraisal and may even extend to socio-moral contexts. Here, in a series of studies, we combined functional magnetic resonance imaging with machine-learning-based predictive modelling to establish a comprehensive neurobiological model of subjective disgust. The developed neurofunctional signature accurately predicted momentary self-reported subjective disgust across discovery (n = 78) and pre-registered validation (n = 30) cohorts and generalized across core disgust (n = 34 and n = 26), gustatory distaste (n = 30) and socio-moral (unfair offers; n = 43) contexts. Disgust experience was encoded in distributed cortical and subcortical systems, and exhibited distinct and shared neural representations with subjective fear or negative affect in interoceptive-emotional awareness and conscious appraisal systems, while the signatures most accurately predicted the respective target experience. We provide an accurate functional magnetic resonance imaging signature for disgust with a high potential to resolve ongoing evolutionary debates.

Fear of missing out (FOMO) associates with reduced cortical thickness in core regions of the posterior default mode network and higher levels of problematic smartphone and social media use.

BACKGROUND AND AIMS: Fear of missing out (FOMO) promotes the desire or urge to stay continuously connected with a social reference group and updated on their activities, which may result in escalating and potentially addictive smartphone and social media use. The present study aimed to determine whether the neurobiological basis of FOMO encompasses core regions of the reward circuitry or social brain, and associations with levels of problematic smartphone or social media use. METHODS: We capitalized on a dimensional neuroimaging approach to examine cortical thickness and subcortical volume associations in a sample of healthy young individuals (n = 167). Meta-analytic network and behavioral decoding analyses were employed to further characterize the identified regions. RESULTS: Higher levels of FOMO associated with lower cortical thickness in the right precuneus. In contrast, no associations between FOMO and variations in striatal morphology were observed. Meta-analytic decoding revealed that the identified precuneus region exhibited a strong functional interaction with the default mode network (DMN) engaged in social cognitive and self-referential domains. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS: Together the present findings suggest that individual variations in FOMO are associated with the brain structural architecture of the right precuneus, a core hub within a large-scale functional network resembling the DMN and involved in social and self-referential processes. FOMO may promote escalating social media and smartphone use via social and self-referential processes rather than reward-related processes per se.

Common and distinct neurofunctional representations of core and social disgust in the brain: Coordinate-based and network meta-analyses.

Disgust represents a multifaceted defensive-avoidance response. On the behavioral level, the response includes withdrawal and a disgust-specific facial expression. While both serve the avoidance of pathogens, the latter additionally transmits social-communicative information. Given that common and distinct brain representation of the primary defensive-avoidance response (core disgust) and encoding of the social-communicative signal (social disgust) remain debated, we employed neuroimaging meta-analyses to (1) determine brain systems generally engaged in disgust processing, and (2) segregate common and distinct brain systems for core and social disgust. Disgust processing, in general, engaged a bilateral network encompassing the insula, amygdala, occipital and prefrontal regions. Core disgust evoked stronger reactivity in left-lateralized threat detection and defensive response network including amygdala, occipital and frontal regions, while social disgust engaged a right-lateralized superior temporal-frontal network involved in social cognition. Anterior insula, inferior frontal and fusiform regions were commonly engaged during core and social disgust, suggesting a shared neurofunctional basis. We demonstrate a common and distinct neural basis of primary disgust responses and encoding of associated social-communicative signals.

Associations between levels of Internet Gaming Disorder symptoms and striatal morphology-replication and associations with social anxiety.

Background: Brain structural alterations of the striatum have been frequently observed in internet gaming disorder (IGD); however, the replicability of the results and the associations with social-affective dysregulations such as social anxiety remain to be determined. Methods: The present study combined a dimensional neuroimaging approach with both voxel-wise and data-driven multivariate approaches to (i) replicate our previous results on a negative association between IGD symptom load (assessed by the Internet Gaming Disorder Scale-Short Form) and striatal volume, (ii) extend these findings to female individuals, and (iii) employ multivariate and mediation models to determine common brain structural representations of IGD and social anxiety (assessed by the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale). Results: In line with the original study, the voxel-wise analyses revealed a negative association between IGD and volumes of the bilateral caudate. Going beyond the earlier study investigating only male participants, the present study demonstrates that the association in the right caudate was comparable in both the male and the female subsamples. Further examination using the multivariate approach revealed regionally different associations between IGD and social anxiety with striatal density representations in the dorsal striatum (caudate) and ventral striatum (nucleus accumbens). Higher levels of IGD were associated with higher social anxiety and the association was critically mediated by the multivariate neurostructural density variations of the striatum. Conclusions: Altered striatal volumes may represent a replicable and generalizable marker of IGD symptoms. However, exploratory multivariate analyses revealed more complex and regional specific associations between striatal density and IGD as well as social anxiety symptoms. Variations in both tendencies may share common structural brain representations, which mediate the association between increased IGD and social anxiety.

Action Real-Time Strategy Gaming Experience Related to Increased Attentional Resources: An Attentional Blink Study.

Action real-time strategy gaming (ARSG) is a cognitively demanding task which requires attention, sensorimotor skills, team cooperation, and strategy-making abilities. A recent study found that ARSG experts had superior visual selective attention (VSA) for detecting the location of a moving object that could appear in one of 24 different peripheral locations (Qiu et al., 2018), suggesting that ARSG experience is related to improvements in the spatial component of VSA. However, the influence of ARSG experience on the temporal component of VSA-the detection of an item among a sequence of items presented consecutively and quickly at a single location-still remains understudied. Using behavioral and electrophysiological measures, this study examined whether ARSG experts had superior temporal VSA performance compared to non-experts in an attentional blink (AB) task, which is typically used to examine temporal VSA. The results showed that the experts outperformed the non-experts in their detection rates of targets. Furthermore, compared to the non-experts, the experts had faster information processing as indicated by earlier P3 peak latencies in an AB period, more attentional resources distributed to targets as indicated by stronger P3 amplitudes, and a more flexible deployment of attentional resources. These findings suggest that experts were less prone to the AB effect. Thus, long-term ARSG experience is related to improvements in temporal VSA. The current findings support the benefit of video gaming experience on the development of VSA.

A Reduction in Video Gaming Time Produced a Decrease in Brain Activity.

This study examines whether a decrease in brain development is observable after players have reduced their video gaming time over a period of 1 year. Both video gaming experts and non-experts were recruited, whose resting-state functional MRI (fMRI) data were collected at the beginning and the end of the study. Immediately after the first scan, the participants were instructed to spend no more than 3 h on video gaming weekly for 1 year. The results showed decreased self-reported video gaming skills and decreased amplitude of low-frequency fluctuation (ALFF) in the experts at the end of the study, demonstrating that a reduction in video gaming time over a period of 1 year produced a decrease in brain development. The non-experts served as a control group and had no significant changes. The findings support the adaptive effect of video gaming experience on brain and cognitive development.