Hallucination Proneness Alters Sensory Feedback Processing in Self-voice Production.

BACKGROUND: Sensory suppression occurs when hearing one's self-generated voice, as opposed to passively listening to one's own voice. Quality changes in sensory feedback to the self-generated voice can increase attentional control. These changes affect the self-other voice distinction and might lead to hearing voices in the absence of an external source (ie, auditory verbal hallucinations). However, it is unclear how changes in sensory feedback processing and attention allocation interact and how this interaction might relate to hallucination proneness (HP). STUDY DESIGN: Participants varying in HP self-generated (via a button-press) and passively listened to their voice that varied in emotional quality and certainty of recognition-100% neutral, 60%-40% neutral-angry, 50%-50% neutral-angry, 40%-60% neutral-angry, 100% angry, during electroencephalography (EEG) recordings. STUDY RESULTS: The N1 auditory evoked potential was more suppressed for self-generated than externally generated voices. Increased HP was associated with (1) an increased N1 response to the self- compared with externally generated voices, (2) a reduced N1 response for angry compared with neutral voices, and (3) a reduced N2 response to unexpected voice quality in sensory feedback (60%-40% neutral-angry) compared with neutral voices. CONCLUSIONS: The current study highlights an association between increased HP and systematic changes in the emotional quality and certainty in sensory feedback processing (N1) and attentional control (N2) in self-voice production in a nonclinical population. Considering that voice hearers also display these changes, these findings support the continuum hypothesis.

EmoSex: Emotion prevails over sex in implicit judgments of faces and voices.

Appraisals can be influenced by cultural beliefs and stereotypes. In line with this, past research has shown that judgments about the emotional expression of a face are influenced by the face's sex, and vice versa that judgments about the sex of a person somewhat depend on the person's facial expression. For example, participants associate anger with male faces, and female faces with happiness or sadness. However, the strength and the bidirectionality of these effects remain debated. Moreover, the interplay of a stimulus' emotion and sex remains mostly unknown in the auditory domain. To investigate these questions, we created a novel stimulus set of 121 avatar faces and 121 human voices (available at https://bit.ly/2JkXrpy) with matched, fine-scale changes along the emotional (happy to angry) and sexual (male to female) dimensions. In a first experiment (N = 76), we found clear evidence for the mutual influence of facial emotion and sex cues on ratings, and moreover for larger implicit (task-irrelevant) effects of stimulus' emotion than of sex. These findings were replicated and extended in two preregistered studies-one laboratory categorization study using the same face stimuli (N = 108; https://osf.io/ve9an), and one online study with vocalizations (N = 72; https://osf.io/vhc9g). Overall, results show that the associations of maleness-anger and femaleness-happiness exist across sensory modalities, and suggest that emotions expressed in the face and voice cannot be entirely disregarded, even when attention is mainly focused on determining stimulus' sex. We discuss the relevance of these findings for cognitive and neural models of face and voice processing. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Emotional salience but not valence impacts anterior cingulate cortex conflict processing.

Stimuli that evoke emotions are salient, draw attentional resources, and facilitate situationally appropriate behavior in complex or conflicting environments. However, negative and positive emotions may motivate different response strategies. For example, a threatening stimulus might evoke avoidant behavior, whereas a positive stimulus may prompt approaching behavior. Therefore, emotional stimuli might either elicit differential behavioral responses when a conflict arises or simply mark salience. The present study used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate valence-specific emotion effects on attentional control in conflict processing by employing an adapted flanker task with neutral, negative, and positive stimuli. Slower responses were observed for incongruent than congruent trials. Neural activity in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex was associated with conflict processing regardless of emotional stimulus quality. These findings confirm that both negative and positive emotional stimuli mark salience in both low (congruent) and high (incongruent) conflict scenarios. Regardless of the conflict level, emotional stimuli deployed greater attentional resources in goal directed behavior.

Interaction of emotion and cognitive control along the psychosis continuum: A critical review.

To better understand how emotion impacts cognitive control is important as both influence adaptive behavior in complex real-life situations. Performance changes in emotion and cognitive control as well as in their interaction are often described in psychotic patients as well as in non-clinical participants who experience psychosis-like symptoms. These changes are linked to low motivation and limited social interaction. However, it is unclear whether these changes are driven by emotion, cognitive control, or an interaction of both. This review provides an overview of neuroimaging evidence on the potential interaction of emotion and cognitive control along the psychosis continuum. The literature confirms that over-sensitivity towards negative and lowered sensitivity towards positive emotional stimuli in tasks exploring emotion-cognitive control interaction are associated with the severity of positive and negative symptoms in psychosis. Changes in the dynamic interplay between emotion and context-sensitive cognitive control, mediated by arousal, motivation, and reward processing may underlie poor interpersonal communication and real-life skills in psychosis. In addition, structural and functional changes in subcortical and cortical associative brain regions (e.g., thalamus, basal ganglia, and angular gyrus) may contribute to alterations in emotion and cognitive control interaction along the psychosis continuum. There is limited evidence on how antipsychotic medication and age at illness-onset affect this interaction.

Stimulus-dependent modulation of working memory for identity monitoring: A functional MRI study.

While the neural correlates of identity monitoring working memory (WM) have been well characterised in literature, the WM subsystems for different types of stimuli have not been established. The aim of our study was to examine the neural network subtending WM for identity monitoring of both verbal and visual stimuli. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with words, objects, and faces as stimuli in an n-back WM task to delineate the similarities and differences in brain activation during presentation of verbal and visual stimuli. The results revealed a predominantly left lateralized core fronto-parieto-cerebellar identity WM network comprising bilateral insula, left inferior frontal gyrus, inferior parietal gyrus, and cerebellum that is common to all stimuli. In addition, our results showed stimulus-specific recruitment of brain regions, with exclusive activations in left inferior frontal gyrus and inferior temporal gyrus for identity WM for verbal stimuli, and left middle occipital gyrus and cerebellum for identity WM for visual stimuli. The present study reveals the existence of a central identity WM network for both verbal and visual information, along with activation of distinct verbal and visual representational regions that are sensitive to respective stimuli.