Rats respond to aversive emotional arousal of human handlers with the activation of the basolateral and central amygdala.

Reading danger signals may save an animal's life, and learning about threats from others allows avoiding first-hand aversive and often fatal experiences. Fear expressed by other individuals, including those belonging to other species, may indicate the presence of a threat in the environment and is an important social cue. Humans and other animals respond to conspecifics' fear with increased activity of the amygdala, the brain structure crucial for detecting threats and mounting an appropriate response to them. It is unclear, however, whether the cross-species transmission of threat information involves similar mechanisms, e.g., whether animals respond to the aversively induced emotional arousal of humans with activation of fear-processing circuits in the brain. Here, we report that when rats interact with a human caregiver who had recently undergone fear conditioning, they show risk assessment behavior and enhanced amygdala activation. The amygdala response involves its two major parts, the basolateral and central, which detect a threat and orchestrate defensive responses. Further, we show that humans who learn about a threat by observing another aversively aroused human, similar to rats, activate the basolateral and centromedial parts of the amygdala. Our results demonstrate that rats detect the emotional arousal of recently aversively stimulated caregivers and suggest that cross-species social transmission of threat information may involve similar neural circuits in the amygdala as the within-species transmission.

Bodily confusion: Lower differentiation of emotional and physiological states in student alcohol users.

BACKGROUND: Alexithymia, difficulty in recognising and naming emotions, is common among people who use alcohol. There is also emerging evidence that people with alexithymia are unable to distinguish emotions from non-emotional physiological states. The project aimed to test if alcohol use is related to the way student drinkers experience emotions and physiological states in the body. METHODS: We employed a novel method to study bodily sensations related to emotions and physiological states in the context of alcohol use: the emBODY tool, which allowed participants to mark areas of the body in which they experience various emotions and physiological states. RESULTS: Students who showed a hazardous pattern of alcohol use (alcohol use disorders identification test [AUDIT] score ≥ 7, N = 91), overall, presented higher alexithymia levels and coloured larger areas for emotions and physiological states (showed less specificity) than those who show low-risk alcohol consumption (AUDIT ≤ 4, N = 90). Moreover, statistical classifiers distinguished feeling-specific maps less accurately for hazardous drinkers than low-risk drinkers [F(1,1998) = 441.16; p < 0.001], confirming that higher alcohol use is related to higher confusion of emotional and non-emotional bodily feelings. CONCLUSIONS: Plausibly, this increased bodily confusion drives alcohol consumption: alcohol may serve as a means of dealing with undifferentiated changes in psychophysiological arousal accompanying emotional states.

Development and validation of the Emotional Climate Change Stories (ECCS) stimuli set.

Climate change is widely recognised as an urgent issue, and the number of people concerned about it is increasing. While emotions are among the strongest predictors of behaviour change in the face of climate change, researchers have only recently begun to investigate this topic experimentally. This may be due to the lack of standardised, validated stimuli that would make studying such a topic in experimental settings possible. Here, we introduce a novel Emotional Climate Change Stories (ECCS) stimuli set. ECCS consists of 180 realistic short stories about climate change, designed to evoke five distinct emotions-anger, anxiety, compassion, guilt and hope-in addition to neutral stories. The stories were created based on qualitative data collected in two independent studies: one conducted among individuals highly concerned about climate change, and another one conducted in the general population. The stories were rated on the scales of valence, arousal, anger, anxiety, compassion, guilt and hope in the course of three independent studies. First, we explored the underlying structure of ratings (Study 1; n = 601). Then we investigated the replicability (Study 2; n = 307) and cross-cultural validity (Study 3; n = 346) of ECCS. The collected ratings were highly consistent across the studies. Furthermore, we found that the level of climate change concern explained the intensity of elicited emotions. The ECCS dataset is available in Polish, Norwegian and English and can be employed for experimental research on climate communication, environmental attitudes, climate action-taking, or mental health and wellbeing.

Learning about threat from friends and strangers is equally effective: An fMRI study on observational fear conditioning.

Humans often benefit from social cues when learning about the world. For instance, learning about threats from others can save the individual from dangerous first-hand experiences. Familiarity is believed to increase the effectiveness of social learning, but it is not clear whether it plays a role in learning about threats. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we undertook a naturalistic approach and investigated whether there was a difference between observational fear learning from friends and strangers. Participants (observers) witnessed either their friends or strangers (demonstrators) receiving aversive (shock) stimuli paired with colored squares (observational learning stage). Subsequently, participants watched the same squares, but without receiving any shocks (direct-expression stage). We observed a similar pattern of brain activity in both groups of observers. Regions related to threat responses (amygdala, anterior insula, anterior cingulate cortex) and social perception (fusiform gyrus, posterior superior temporal sulcus) were activated during the observational phase, possibly reflecting the emotional contagion process. The anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortex were also activated during the subsequent stage, indicating the expression of learned threat. Because there were no differences between participants observing friends and strangers, we argue that social threat learning is independent of the level of familiarity with the demonstrator.

Decreased preparatory activation and inattention to cues suggest lower activation of proactive cognitive control among high procrastinating students.

Procrastination is a voluntary delay in completing an important task while being aware that this behavior may lead to negative outcomes. It has been shown that an increased tendency to procrastinate is associated with deficits in some aspects of cognitive control. However, none of the previous studies investigated these dysfunctions through the lenses of the Dual Mechanisms Framework, which differentiates proactive and reactive modes of control. The present study was designed to fill this gap, using behavioral and neurophysiological assessment during the completion of the AX-Continuous Performance Task (AX-CPT) by high (HP) and low (LP) procrastinating students (N = 139). Behavioral results indicated that HP (vs. LP) were characterized by increased attentional fluctuations (higher reaction time variability) and reduction in some indices of proactive cognitive control (lower d'-context and A-cue bias, but similar PBIs). Furthermore, the neurophysiological data showed that HP, compared with LP, allocated less attentional resources (lower P3b) to cues that help to predict the correct responses to upcoming probes. They also responded with reduced preparatory activity (smaller CNV) after cues presentation. The two groups did not differ in neural responses linked to conflict detection and inhibition (similar N2 and P3a). Obtained findings indicate that HP might present deficits in some cognitive functions that are essential for effective proactive control engagement, along with preserved levels of reactive cognitive control. In the present paper, we discuss the potential neural and cognitive mechanisms responsible for the observed effects.

The mental health continuum-short form: The structure and application for cross-cultural studies-A 38 nation study.

OBJECTIVE: The Mental Health Continuum-Short Form (MHC-SF) is a brief scale measuring positive human functioning. The study aimed to examine the factor structure and to explore the cross-cultural utility of the MHC-SF using bifactor models and exploratory structural equation modelling. METHOD: Using multigroup confirmatory analysis (MGCFA) we examined the measurement invariance of the MHC-SF in 38 countries (university students, N = 8,066; 61.73% women, mean age 21.55 years). RESULTS: MGCFA supported the cross-cultural replicability of a bifactor structure and a metric level of invariance between student samples. The average proportion of variance explained by the general factor was high (ECV = .66), suggesting that the three aspects of mental health (emotional, social, and psychological well-being) can be treated as a single dimension of well-being. CONCLUSION: The metric level of invariance offers the possibility of comparing correlates and predictors of positive mental functioning across countries; however, the comparison of the levels of mental health across countries is not possible due to lack of scalar invariance. Our study has preliminary character and could serve as an initial assessment of the structure of the MHC-SF across different cultural settings. Further studies on general populations are required for extending our findings.

The Set of Fear Inducing Pictures (SFIP): Development and validation in fearful and nonfearful individuals.

Emotionally charged pictorial materials are frequently used in phobia research, but no existing standardized picture database is dedicated to the study of different phobias. The present work describes the results of two independent studies through which we sought to develop and validate this type of database-a Set of Fear Inducing Pictures (SFIP). In Study 1, 270 fear-relevant and 130 neutral stimuli were rated for fear, arousal, and valence by four groups of participants; small-animal (N = 34), blood/injection (N = 26), social-fearful (N = 35), and nonfearful participants (N = 22). The results from Study 1 were employed to develop the final version of the SFIP, which includes fear-relevant images of social exposure (N = 40), blood/injection (N = 80), spiders/bugs (N = 80), and angry faces (N = 30), as well as 726 neutral photographs. In Study 2, we aimed to validate the SFIP in a sample of spider, blood/injection, social-fearful, and control individuals (N = 66). The fear-relevant images were rated as being more unpleasant and led to greater fear and arousal in fearful than in nonfearful individuals. The fear images differentiated between the three fear groups in the expected directions. Overall, the present findings provide evidence for the high validity of the SFIP and confirm that the set may be successfully used in phobia research.

Disorders of the anterior attentional-intentional system in patients with end stage renal disease: Evidence from reaction time studies.

OBJECTIVE: Dialyzed patients with end-stage renal disease (ESRD) have been reported to have several neurobehavioral impairments that are often accompanied by structural and functional abnormalities of frontal-subcortical networks. Whereas the anterior attentional-intentional systems responsible for the allocation of attention and preparation for action (intention) are mediated by these frontal-subcortical networks, these functions have not been specifically investigated in this population. METHOD: Twenty-three non-demented dialyzed patients with ESRD were compared with 25 matched controls on the performance on four reaction time (RT) subtests from the ROtman-Baycrest Battery to Investigate Attention (ROBBIA). These included measures of Simple, Choice, and Prepare RTs as well as a Concentrate task. RESULTS: In the Prepare RT task with a warning signal presented 1s before the onset of imperative stimulus, the patients' performance was not different than the controls; however, dialyzed patients became significantly slower than controls in the Prepare 3s warning condition as well as on all other RT measures. Nonetheless, both groups exhibited a gradual decrease in RT with increasing interstimulus intervals, with no group difference in the number and type of errors. CONCLUSIONS: These results suggests, that while with external preparatory stimuli, the dialyzed ESRD patients may be able to acutely increase their arousal and enhance their allocation of selective attention or action-preparation, they appear not to be able to maintain this enhanced preparatory status. Whereas these results help to elucidate a potential source of disability in this patient population, future studies will need to examine if this deficit is primarily attentional, intentional or both (arousal), as well as explore possible treatments.

Characterization of the Nencki Affective Picture System by discrete emotional categories (NAPS BE).

The Nencki Affective Picture System (NAPS; Marchewka, Zurawski, Jednoróg, & Grabowska, Behavior Research Methods, 2014) is a standardized set of 1,356 realistic, high-quality photographs divided into five categories (people, faces, animals, objects, and landscapes). NAPS has been primarily standardized along the affective dimensions of valence, arousal, and approach-avoidance, yet the characteristics of discrete emotions expressed by the images have not been investigated thus far. The aim of the present study was to collect normative ratings according to categorical models of emotions. A subset of 510 images from the original NAPS set was selected in order to proportionally cover the whole dimensional affective space. Among these, using three available classification methods, we identified images eliciting distinguishable discrete emotions. We introduce the basic-emotion normative ratings for the Nencki Affective Picture System (NAPS BE), which will allow researchers to control and manipulate stimulus properties specifically for their experimental questions of interest. The NAPS BE system is freely accessible to the scientific community for noncommercial use as supplementary materials to this article.

Effectiveness of a Web-based and Mobile Therapy Chatbot on Anxiety and Depressive Symptoms in Subclinical Young Adults: Randomized Controlled Trial.

BACKGROUND: There has been an increased need to provide specialized help for people with depressive and anxiety symptoms, particularly teenagers and young adults. There is evidence from a 2-week intervention that chatbots (eg, Woebot) are effective in reducing depression and anxiety, an effect that was not detected in the control group that was provided self-help materials. Although chatbots are a promising solution, there is limited scientific evidence for the efficacy of agent-guided cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) outside the English language, especially for highly inflected languages. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to measure the efficacy of Fido, a therapy chatbot that uses the Polish language. It targets depressive and anxiety symptoms using CBT techniques. We hypothesized that participants using Fido would show a greater reduction in anxiety and depressive symptoms than the control group. METHODS: We conducted a 2-arm, open-label, randomized controlled trial with 81 participants with subclinical depression or anxiety who were recruited via social media. Participants were divided into experimental (interacted with a fully automated Fido chatbot) and control (received a self-help book) groups. Both intervention methods addressed topics such as general psychoeducation and cognitive distortion identification and modification via Socratic questioning. The chatbot also featured suicidal ideation identification and redirection to suicide hotlines. We used self-assessment scales to measure primary outcomes, including the levels of depression, anxiety, worry tendencies, satisfaction with life, and loneliness at baseline, after the 2-week intervention and at the 1-month follow-up. We also controlled for secondary outcomes, including engagement and frequency of use. RESULTS: There were no differences in anxiety and depressive symptoms between the groups at enrollment and baseline. After the intervention, depressive and anxiety symptoms were reduced in both groups (chatbot: n=36; control: n=38), which remained stable at the 1-month follow-up. Loneliness was not significantly different between the groups after the intervention, but an exploratory analysis showed a decline in loneliness among participants who used Fido more frequently. Both groups used their intervention technique with similar frequency; however, the control group spent more time (mean 117.57, SD 72.40 minutes) on the intervention than the Fido group (mean 79.44, SD 42.96 minutes). CONCLUSIONS: We did not replicate the findings from previous (eg, Woebot) studies, as both arms yielded therapeutic effects. However, such results are in line with other research of Internet interventions. Nevertheless, Fido provided sufficient help to reduce anxiety and depressive symptoms and decreased perceived loneliness among high-frequency users, which is one of the first pieces of evidence of chatbot efficacy with agents that use a highly inflected language. Further research is needed to determine the long-term, real-world effectiveness of Fido and its efficacy in a clinical sample. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT05762939; https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT05762939; Open Science Foundation Registry 2cqt3; https://osf.io/2cqt3.

Cortical and Subcortical Brain Alterations in Specific Phobia and Its Animal and Blood-Injection-Injury Subtypes: A Mega-Analysis From the ENIGMA Anxiety Working Group.

OBJECTIVE: Specific phobia is a common anxiety disorder, but the literature on associated brain structure alterations exhibits substantial gaps. The ENIGMA Anxiety Working Group examined brain structure differences between individuals with specific phobias and healthy control subjects as well as between the animal and blood-injection-injury (BII) subtypes of specific phobia. Additionally, the authors investigated associations of brain structure with symptom severity and age (youths vs. adults). METHODS: Data sets from 31 original studies were combined to create a final sample with 1,452 participants with phobia and 2,991 healthy participants (62.7% female; ages 5-90). Imaging processing and quality control were performed using established ENIGMA protocols. Subcortical volumes as well as cortical surface area and thickness were examined in a preregistered analysis. RESULTS: Compared with the healthy control group, the phobia group showed mostly smaller subcortical volumes, mixed surface differences, and larger cortical thickness across a substantial number of regions. The phobia subgroups also showed differences, including, as hypothesized, larger medial orbitofrontal cortex thickness in BII phobia (N=182) compared with animal phobia (N=739). All findings were driven by adult participants; no significant results were observed in children and adolescents. CONCLUSIONS: Brain alterations associated with specific phobia exceeded those of other anxiety disorders in comparable analyses in extent and effect size and were not limited to reductions in brain structure. Moreover, phenomenological differences between phobia subgroups were reflected in diverging neural underpinnings, including brain areas related to fear processing and higher cognitive processes. The findings implicate brain structure alterations in specific phobia, although subcortical alterations in particular may also relate to broader internalizing psychopathology.

[Polish adaptation and validation of the Agoraphobic Cognitions Questionnaire and the Body Sensations Questionnaire]. / Polska adaptacja i walidacja Kwestionariusza Mysli Towarzyszacych Agorafobii (KMTA) oraz Kwestionariusza Doznan Cielesnych (KDC).

AIM: The present study aimed at the adaptation and validation of two questionnaires assessing fear of bodily sensations (BSQ; suggested Polish name: Kwestionariusz Doznan Cielesnych [KDC]) and concerns specific to agoraphobics (ACQ; suggested Polish name: Kwestionariusz Mysli Towarzyszacych Agorafobii [KMTA]). METHOD: The study included a total of 82 patients diagnosed with agoraphobia or panic disorder with agoraphobia according to the diagnostic criteria of the DSM-IV as well as 100 control subjects who did not show the presence of mental disorders. RESULTS: The results showed that both adapted questionnaires meet basic psychometric criteria. The Polish-language versions of the ACQ and BSQ are characterized by a high content validity, internal consistency and showed to be stable over a period of 28 days. Moreover, the factor structure of the Polish version of the ACQ showed to be highly similar to the original version. CONCLUSIONS: Polish-language versions of the ACQ and BSQ have been found to be reliable and valid research and diagnostic instruments for the assessment of fear for bodily sensations and agoraphobic cognitions. Due to their high efficiency and adequate psychometric characteristics these measures might be very useful in research as well as in the diagnosis and evaluation of therapeutic effects.

Improved attention and performance monitoring in high procrastinating students after positive relative to negative norm-referenced feedback.

Procrastination is an irrational delay of task completion. Previous studies have demonstrated that individuals who often procrastinate present deficits in attentional control and performance monitoring and that these dysfunctions might be differentially manifested depending on the motivational context. Building upon these results, the present event-related potential (ERP) study aimed to investigate the impact of norm-referenced feedback on executive functions among students with high (HP; N = 75) or low (LP; N = 77) procrastination levels. Participants completed the parametric Go/No-Go task, while receiving either positive or negative false feedback indicating how well they performed in comparison to others. The results indicated that positive (as opposed to negative) feedback led to higher self-reported arousal and increased post-error slowing in HP (vs. LP) participants. Moreover, neurophysiological measures indicated lower neural activation linked to attentional control (P300) and performance monitoring (ERN, CRN and Pe) in HP than LP participants, while the groups did not differ in these indices during the positive feedback condition. Obtained findings indicate that HP might be more sensitive to the motivating effects of success and more vulnerable to the detrimental influence of failure.

Self-regulation and learning from failures: Probabilistic reversal learning task reveals lower flexibility persisting after punishment in procrastinators.

Procrastination is a self-regulation failure in which people irrationally delay intended actions which leads to lower performance, satisfaction from achievements, and quality of life. Trait procrastination is estimated to affect 15% to 20% of the total population, and previous studies have shown procrastination to be related to impulsivity, emotion dysregulation, and executive dysfunctions, making it a good nonclinical example of a self-regulation disorder. Our previous fMRI results revealed impaired error processing (lower error-related activity of the anterior cingulate cortex) and lack of ability to intensify executive-control during the punishment context (no increase in activity in prefrontal regions) in procrastinators. This led us to the question of whether procrastination is related to impaired learning on errors and punishments. Low (LP) and high (HP) procrastinating students took part in a modified monetary probabilistic reversal learning task with separated reward and punishment conditions. Half of the participants started with reward and half with the punishment condition. Several learning models and model-free measures were applied to the collected behavioral data. Results suggest lower flexibility in the learning task in HP subjects, which can further decrease during the punishment condition. Moreover, HP subjects who began with the punishment condition tended to be less flexible throughout the rest of the task. These results suggest that impaired learning from errors and punishments may prevent highly procrastinating subjects from correcting their behaviors and add to the persistence of procrastination. We also conclude that impaired learning on errors and punishments might be a more general mechanism underpinning other self-regulation disorders. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Kidney transplantation and action-intentional improvements: Evidence from an ERP study.

Reaction slowing observed in dialyzed patients results from deficits in initiating and sustaining motor response mobilization. The present study aimed at investigating whether these deficits are reversible following successful kidney transplantation. To achieve this goal, behavioral and electrophysiological (EEG) data were assessed from healthy control participants as well as kidney transplant and dialyzed patients performing a series of reaction time tasks. The results demonstrated that in patients who received kidney transplant a normalization of response latencies and brain preparatory activity was observed. At the same time, when compared to healthy individuals, increased attention engagement was observed in both clinical groups of patients. No behavioral and electrophysiological indices of impaired monitoring were observed in any of the clinical groups.

The influence of light exposure and chronotype on working memory in humans.

Here we examine how exposure to blue (peaking at λ=470 nm), green (peaking at λ=505 nm) and red (peaking at λ=630 nm) light affects subsequent working memory performance measured with visual N-back tasks and associated functional brain responses in participants with extreme morning and extreme evening chronotype. We used within-subjects experimental manipulation on carefully selected samples and state of the art equipment for light exposure. The results show no differences between extreme morning-type and evening-type individuals in N-back task performance. We also did not replicate the alerting effect of exposure to blue wavelength light, supposedly enhancing performance on cognitive tasks. However, we found higher brain activity in the morning hours for extreme morning in comparison to extreme evening chronotype in several frontal areas of the precentral gyrus, middle and superior frontal gyri and in the occipital gyrus. This may indicate increased strategic or attentional recruitment of prefrontal areas, implicated in compensating working memory load in the morning type.

Brain potentials reveal reduced attention and error-processing during a monetary Go/No-Go task in procrastination.

Procrastination is a self-regulatory problem of voluntarily and destructively delaying intended and necessary or personally important tasks. Previous studies showed that procrastination is associated with executive dysfunctions that seem to be particularly strong in punishing contexts. In the present event-related potential (ERP) study a monetary version of the parametric Go/No-Go task was performed by high and low academic procrastinators to verify the influence of motivational context (reward vs. punishment expectation) and task difficulty (easy vs. hard) on procrastination-related executive dysfunctions. The results revealed increased post-error slowing along with reduced P300 and error-related negativity (ERN) amplitudes in high (vs. low) procrastination participants-effects that indicate impaired attention and error-related processing in this group. This pattern of results did not differ as a function of task difficulty and motivation condition. However, when the task got more difficult executive attention deficits became even more apparent at the behavioral level in high procrastinators, as indexed by increased reaction time variability. The findings substantiate prior preliminary evidence that procrastinators show difficulties in certain aspects of executive functioning (in attention and error processing) during execution of task-relevant behavior, which may be more apparent in highly demanding situations.

Observational learning of fear in real time procedure.

Learning to avoid threats often occurs by observing others. Most previous research on observational fear learning (OFL) in humans has used pre-recorded standardized video of an actor and thus lacked ecological validity. Here, we aimed to enhance ecological validity of the OFL by engaging participants in a real-time observational procedure (35 pairs of healthy male friends, age 18-27). One of the participants watched the other undergo a differential fear conditioning task, in which a conditioned stimulus (CS+) was paired with an aversive electric shock and another stimulus (CS-) was always safe. Subsequently, the CS+ and CS- were presented to the observer to test the OFL. While the friend's reactions to the shock elicited strong skin conductance responses (SCR) in all observers, subsequent differential SCRs (CS+ > CS-) were found only when declarative knowledge of the CS+/US contingency (rated by the participants) was acquired. Contingency-aware observers also showed elevated fear potentiated startle responses during both CS+ and CS- compared to baseline. We conclude that our real-time procedure can be effectively used to study OFL. The procedure allowed for dissecting two components of the OFL: an automatic emotional reaction to the response of the demonstrator and learning about stimulus contingency.