Higher availability of α4ß2 nicotinic receptors (nAChRs) in dorsal ACC is linked to more efficient interference control.

Nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs) are widely distributed in the human brain and play an important role in the neuromodulation of brain networks implicated in attentional processes. Previous work in humans showed that heteromeric α4ß2 nAChRs are abundant in the cingulo-insular network underlying attentional control. It has been proposed that cholinergic neuromodulation by α4ß2 nAChRs is involved in attentional control during demanding tasks, when additional resources are needed to minimize interference from task-irrelevant stimuli and focus on task-relevant stimuli. Here we investigate the link between the availability of α4ß2 nAChRs in the cingulo-insular network and behavioral measures of interference control using two versions of the Stroop paradigm, a task known to recruit cingulo-insular areas. We used a previously published PET dataset acquired in 24 non-smoking male subjects in the context of a larger study which investigated the brain distribution of nAChRs in two clinical groups using 2-[(18)F]F-A-85380 PET. We found that higher availability of α4ß2 nAChRs in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) predicted better interference control independently of group and age. In line with animal models, our results support the view that the availability of α4ß2 nAChRs in the dorsal ACC is linked with more efficient attentional control.

Far from the eyes, far from the heart: COVID-19 confinement dampened sensitivity to painful facial features.

In the last 2 years, governments of many countries imposed heavy social restrictions to contain the spread of the COVID-19 virus, with consequent increase of bad mood, distress, or depression for the people involved. Few studies investigated the impact of these restrictive measures on individual social proficiency, and specifically the processing of emotional facial information, leading to mixed results. The present research aimed at investigating systematically whether, and to which extent, social isolation influences the processing of facial expressions. To this end, we manipulated the social exclusion experimentally through the well-known Cyberball game (within-subject factor), and we exploited the occurrence of the lockdown for the Swiss COVID-19 first wave by recruiting participants before and after being restricted at home (grouping factor). We then tested whether either form of social segregation influenced the processing of pain, disgust, or neutral expressions, across multiple tasks probing access to different components of affective facial responses (state-specific, shared across states). We found that the lockdown (but not game-induced exclusion) affected negatively the processing of pain-specific information, without influencing other components of the affective facial response related to disgust or broad unpleasantness. In addition, participants recruited after the confinement reported lower scores in empathy questionnaires. These results suggest that social isolation affected negatively individual sensitivity to other people's affect and, with specific reference to the processing of facial expressions, the processing of pain-diagnostic information.

Emotion perception in habitual players of action video games.

Action video game players (AVGPs) display superior performance in various aspects of cognition, especially in perception and top-down attention. The existing literature has examined these performance almost exclusively with stimuli and tasks devoid of any emotional content. Thus, whether the superior performance documented in the cognitive domain extend to the emotional domain remains unknown. We present 2 cross-sectional studies contrasting AVGPs and nonvideo game players (NVGPs) in their ability to perceive facial emotions. Under an enhanced perception account, AVGPs should outperform NVGPs when processing facial emotion. Yet, alternative accounts exist. For instance, under some social accounts, exposure to action video games, which often contain violence, may lower sensitivity for empathy-related expressions such as sadness, happiness, and pain while increasing sensitivity to aggression signals. Finally, under the view that AVGPs excel at learning new tasks (in contrast to the view that they are immediately better at all new tasks), the use of stimuli that participants are already experts at predicts little to no group differences. Study 1 uses drift-diffusion modeling and establishes that AVGPs are comparable to NVGPs in every decision-making stage mediating the discrimination of facial emotions, despite showing group difference in aggressive behavior. Study 2 uses the reverse inference technique to assess the mental representation of facial emotion expressions, and again documents no group differences. These results indicate that the perceptual benefits associated with action video game play do not extend to overlearned stimuli such as facial emotion, and rather indicate equivalent facial emotion skills in AVGPs and NVGPs. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Does my pain affect your disgust? Cross-modal influence of first-hand aversive experiences in the appraisal of others' facial expressions.

BACKGROUND: Embodied models of social cognition argue that others' affective states are processed by re-enacting a sensory-specific representation of the same state in the observer. However, neuroimaging studies suggest that a reliable part of the representation shared between self and others is supramodal and relates to dimensions such as Unpleasantness or arousal, common to qualitatively different experiences. Here we investigated whether representations of first-hand pain and disgust influenced the subsequent evaluation of facial expressions in Modality-specific fashion, or in terms of Unpleasantness or arousal. METHODS: Thirty volunteers were subjected to thermal painful and olfactory disgusting events, and subsequently were asked to classify computer-generated faces expressing pain (characterized by high Unpleasantness and arousal), disgust (high Unpleasantness and low arousal), surprise (low Unpleasantness and high arousal) and hybrid combinations thereof. RESULTS: Thermal and olfactory events were associated with comparable Unpleasantness ratings and heart rate (but stronger galvanic response was found for painful temperatures). Furthermore, we found that the appraisal of facial expressions was biased by the prior stimulus, with more frequent pain classifications following thermal stimuli, and more frequent disgust classifications following olfactory stimuli. Critically, this modulation was cross-modal in nature, as each first-hand stimulation influenced in comparable fashion facial traits diagnostic of both pain and disgust, without instead generalizing to features of surprise. CONCLUSION: Overall, these data support the presence of shared coding between one's aversive experiences and the appraisal of others' facial responses, which is best describable as supramodal representation of the Unpleasantness of the experience. SIGNIFICANCE: These results extend previous findings about common representational coding between the experience of first-hand and others' pain. In particular, they highlight that reliable part of the information shared is supramodal in nature and relates to a broad dimension of Unpleasantness common also to painless aversive states such as disgust.

Beyond unpleasantness. Social exclusion affects the experience of pain, but not of equally-unpleasant disgust.

Seminal theories posit that social and physical suffering underlie partly-common representational code. It is unclear, however, if this shared information reflects a modality-specific component of pain, or alternatively a supramodal code for properties common to many aversive experiences (unpleasantness, salience, etc.). To address this issue, we engaged participants in a gaming experience in which they were excluded or included by virtual players. After each game session, participants were subjected to comparably-unpleasant painful or disgusting stimuli. Subjective reports and cardiac responses revealed a reduced sensitivity to pain following exclusion relative to inclusion, an effect which was more pronounced in those participants who declared to feel more affected by the gaming manipulation. Such modulation was not observed for disgust. These findings indicate that the relationship between social and physical suffering does not generalize to disgust, thus suggesting a shared representational code at the level of modality-specific components of pain.

Transient emotional events and individual affective traits affect emotion recognition in a perceptual decision-making task.

Both affective states and personality traits shape how we perceive the social world and interpret emotions. The literature on affective priming has mostly focused on brief influences of emotional stimuli and emotional states on perceptual and cognitive processes. Yet this approach does not fully capture more dynamic processes at the root of emotional states, with such states lingering beyond the duration of the inducing external stimuli. Our goal was to put in perspective three different types of affective states (induced affective states, more sustained mood states and affective traits such as depression and anxiety) and investigate how they may interact and influence emotion perception. Here, we hypothesized that absorption into positive and negative emotional episodes generate sustained affective states that outlast the episode period and bias the interpretation of facial expressions in a perceptual decision-making task. We also investigated how such effects are influenced by more sustained mood states and by individual affect traits (depression and anxiety) and whether they interact. Transient emotional states were induced using movie-clips, after which participants performed a forced-choice emotion classification task with morphed facial expressions ranging from fear to happiness. Using a psychometric approach, we show that negative (vs. neutral) clips increased participants' propensity to classify ambiguous faces as fearful during several minutes. In contrast, positive movies biased classification toward happiness only for those clips perceived as most absorbing. Negative mood, anxiety and depression had a stronger effect than transient states and increased the propensity to classify ambiguous faces as fearful. These results provide the first evidence that absorption and different temporal dimensions of emotions have a significant effect on how we perceive facial expressions.

Strange-face-in-the-mirror illusion and schizotypy during adolescence.

Patients with schizophrenia can sometimes report strange face illusions when staring at themselves in the mirror; such experiences have been conceptualized as anomalous self-experiences that can be experienced with a varying degree of depersonalization. During adolescence, anomalous self-experiences can also be indicative of increased risk to develop schizophrenia-spectrum disorders. To date however, the Mirror-Gazing test (MGT), an experimentally validated experiment to evaluate the propensity of strange face illusions in nonclinical and clinical adults, has yet to be investigated in an adolescent sample. The first goal of the present study was to examine experimentally induced self-face illusions in a nonclinical sample of adolescents, using the MGT. The second goal was to investigate whether dimensions of adolescent trait schizotypy were differentially related to phenomena arising during the MGT. One hundred and ten community adolescents (59 male) aged from 12 to 19 years (mean age = 16.31, SD age = 1.77) completed the MGT and Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire. The results yielded 4 types of strange face illusions; 2 types of illusions (slight change of light/color [20%] and own face deformation [45.5%]) lacked depersonalization-like phenomena (no identity change), while 2 other types (vision of other identity [27.3%], and vision of non-human identity [7.3%]) contained clear depersonalization-like phenomena. Furthermore, the disorganization dimension of schizotypy associated negatively with time of first illusion (first press), and positively with frequency of illusions during the MGT. Statistically significant differences on positive and disorganized schizotypy were found when comparing groups on the basis of degree of depersonalization-like phenomena (from slight color changes to non-human visions). Similarly to experimentally induced self-face illusions in patients with schizophrenia, such illusions in a group of nonclinical adolescents present significant associations to schizotypy dimensions.