Field of Study and Gender Moderation of the Association of Personality and Math Anxiety with Numeracy.

Math anxiety and personality influence numeracy, although the nature of their contribution has been overlooked. In the present study, we investigated whether their association with numeracy depended on field of study and gender in higher education. Participants were Italian undergraduates in either the humanities (N = 201) or Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM; N = 209) fields of study. These participants remotely completed standardized tests assessing numeracy, math anxiety, personality, intelligence, and basic numerical skills. We tested whether math anxiety and personality interacted with field of study and gender in predicting numeracy. Results showed that math anxiety was negatively associated with numeracy independently of field of study and gender, while the effect of personality, especially neuroticism, on numeracy interacted with field of study over and above intelligence and basic numerical skills. Specifically, humanities undergraduates with higher neuroticism levels scored lower in numeracy than STEM undergraduates. These findings underscore the importance of emotional experience for a good performance in mathematics, beyond math anxiety and the other personality traits, in the students that are less familiar with mathematics. Finally, no robust gender moderation emerged, suggesting that its role may be overridden by differences associated with career choice.

Agreeableness modulates mental state decoding: Electrophysiological evidence.

Agreeableness is one of the five personality traits which is associated with theory of mind (ToM) abilities. One of the critical processes involved in ToM is the decoding of emotional cues. In the present study, we investigated whether this process is modulated by agreeableness using electroencephalography (EEG) while taking into account task complexity and sex differences that are expected to moderate the relationship between emotional decoding and agreeableness. This approach allowed us to identify at which stage of the neural processing agreeableness kicks in, in order to distinguish the impact on early, perceptual processes from slower, inferential processing. Two tasks were employed and submitted to 62 participants during EEG recording: the reading the mind in the eyes (RME) task, requiring the decoding of complex mental states from eye expressions, and the biological (e)motion task, involving the perception of basic emotional actions through point-light body stimuli. Event-related potential (ERP) results showed a significant correlation between agreeableness and the contrast for emotional and non-emotional trials in a late time window only during the RME task. Specifically, higher levels of agreeableness were associated with a deeper neural processing of emotional versus non-emotional trials within the whole and male samples. In contrast, the modulation in females was negligible. The source analysis highlighted that this ERP-agreeableness association engages the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Our findings expand previous research on personality and social processing and confirm that sex modulates this relationship.

The Neural Signatures of Shame, Embarrassment, and Guilt: A Voxel-Based Meta-Analysis on Functional Neuroimaging Studies.

Self-conscious emotions, such as shame and guilt, play a fundamental role in regulating moral behaviour and in promoting the welfare of society. Despite their relevance, the neural bases of these emotions are uncertain. In the present meta-analysis, we performed a systematic literature review in order to single out functional neuroimaging studies on healthy individuals specifically investigating the neural substrates of shame, embarrassment, and guilt. Seventeen studies investigating the neural correlates of shame/embarrassment and seventeen studies investigating guilt brain representation met our inclusion criteria. The analyses revealed that both guilt and shame/embarrassment were associated with the activation of the left anterior insula, involved in emotional awareness processing and arousal. Guilt-specific areas were located within the left temporo-parietal junction, which is thought to be involved in social cognitive processes. Moreover, specific activations for shame/embarrassment involved areas related to social pain (dorsal anterior cingulate and thalamus) and behavioural inhibition (premotor cortex) networks. This pattern of results might reflect the distinct action tendencies associated with the two emotions.

The role of associative learning in healthy and sustainable food evaluations: An event-related potential study.

Individuals in industrialized societies frequently include processed foods in their diet. However, overconsumption of heavily processed foods leads to imbalanced calorie intakes as well as negative health consequences and environmental impacts. In the present study, normal-weight healthy individuals were recruited in order to test whether associative learning (Evaluative Conditioning, EC) could strengthen the association between food-types (minimally processed and heavily processed foods) and concepts (e.g., healthiness), and whether these changes would be reflected at the implicit associations, at the explicit ratings and in behavioral choices. A Semantic Congruency task (SC) during electroencephalography recordings was used to examine the neural signature of newly acquired associations between foods and concepts. The accuracy after EC towards minimally processed food (MP-food) in the SC task significantly increased, indicating strengthened associations between MP-food and the concept of healthiness through EC. At the neural level, a more negative amplitude of the N400 waveform, which reflects semantic incongruency, was shown in response to MP-foods paired with the concept of unhealthiness in proximity of the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). This implied the possible role of the left DLPFC in changing food representations by integrating stimuli's features with existing food-relevant information. Finally, the N400 effect was modulated by individuals' attentional impulsivity as well as restrained eating behavior.

sFEra APP: Description and Usability of a Novel Tablet Application for Executive Functions Training.

Executive functions include functions such as planning, working memory, inhibition, mental flexibility, and action monitoring and initiation, and are essential to carry out an independent everyday life. Individuals suffering from brain injury, such as a stroke, very commonly experience executive deficits that reduce the capacity to regain functional independence. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in developing tablet computer-based cognitive training programs for stroke patients and healthy aging adults since such programs can be included in non-supervised environments. In this respect, we described and evaluated the usability of a novel tablet application (app) for executive function training, developed in the context of the MEMORI-net project, a cross-border Italy-Slovenia program for the rehabilitation of stroke patients. We conducted a pilot study with a non-clinical sample of 16 participants to obtain information about the usability of the sFEra APP. Our descriptive analyses suggest that most users were satisfied with the overall experience and the app was highly usable, and instructions were clear, even with little previous experience with tablet applications. Acceptability and effectiveness will need to be evaluated in a clinical randomized controlled study.

Impaired processing of conspecifics in Parkinson's disease.

Experimental evidence indicates that the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) processes emotional/affective features crucial to elaborate knowledge about social groups and that knowledge of social concepts is stored in the anterior temporal lobe (ATL).We investigated whether knowledge about social groups is impaired in Parkinson's disease (PD), in which dysfunctional connectivity between IFG and ATL has been demonstrated.PD patients (N = 20) and healthy controls (HC, N = 16) were given a lexical decision task in a semantic priming paradigm: the prime-targets included 144 words and 144 pseudowords, each preceded by three types of prime ("animals," "things," "persons"). Out of these 288 prime-targets, forty-eight were congruent (same category) and 96 incongruent (different category). Out of 48 congruent prime-targets, 24 denoted social items and 24 nonsocial items. Thus, four types of trials were obtained: congruent social; congruent nonsocial; incongruent social; incongruent nonsocial.Congruent target-words were recognized better than incongruent target-words by all groups. The semantic priming effect was preserved in PD; however, accuracy was significantly lower in PD than in HC in social items. No difference emerged between the two groups in nonsocial items.Impaired processing of words denoting social groups in PD may be due to impairment in accessing the affective/emotional features that characterize conceptual knowledge of social groups, for the functional disconnection between the IFG and the ATL.

Protective factors for subjective cognitive decline individuals: trajectories and changes in a longitudinal study with Italian elderly.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: Many different factors have been hypothesized to modulate cognition in an aging population according to their functioning at baseline. METHODS: This retrospective study quantifies the relative contribution of age and sex as demographic factors, comorbidity, education and occupation (classified with the International Standard Classification of Occupation 2008) as cognitive reserve proxies in accounting for cognitive aging. All participants (3081) were evaluated at baseline with a complete neuropsychological test battery (T1) and those with unimpaired profiles were classified as subjective cognitive decline, those mildly impaired as mild neurocognitive decline and those severely impaired as major neurocognitive decline. From the first assessment 543 individuals were assessed a second time (T2), and 125 a third time (T3). Depending on whether they maintained or worsened their profile, based on their initial performance, participants were then classified as resistant or declining. RESULTS: At baseline, all individuals showed education and occupation as the best predictors of performance, in addition to age. Furthermore, across assessments, the resistant had higher levels of education and occupation than the declining. In particular, the education and occupation predicted cognitive performance in all groups considered, from the subjective cognitive decline to the one with the most severely impaired participants. CONCLUSIONS: This study highlights the role of working activity in protecting from cognitive decline across all fragile elderly groups and even more so the individuals who are at very high risk of decline.

The Role of Amygdala in Self-Conscious Emotions in a Patient With Acquired Bilateral Damage.

Shame plays a fundamental role in the regulation of our social behavior. One intriguing question is whether amygdala might play a role in processing this emotion. In the present single-case study, we tested a patient with acquired damage of bilateral amygdalae and surrounding areas as well as healthy controls on shame processing and other social cognitive tasks. Results revealed that the patient's subjective experience of shame, but not of guilt, was more reduced than in controls, only when social standards were violated, while it was not different than controls in case of moral violations. The impairment in discriminating between normal social situations and violations also emerged. Taken together, these findings suggest that the role of the amygdala in processing shame might reflect its relevance in resolving ambiguity and uncertainty, in order to correctly detect social violations and to generate shame feelings.

Establishing links between abnormal eating behaviours and semantic deficits in dementia.

The hypothesis that semantic deficits in dementia may contribute in producing changes in eating preferences has never been experimentally investigated despite this association has been clinically observed. We administered tasks assessing semantic memory and the Appetite and Eating Habits Questionnaire (APEHQ) to 23 patients with dementia (behavioural frontotemporal dementia, primary progressive aphasia, and Alzheimer's disease) and to 21 healthy controls. We used voxel-based morphometry and diffusion tensor imaging to identify regions and white matter tracts of significant atrophy associated with the performance at the semantic tasks and the pathological scores at the APEHQ. We observed that the lower the patients' scores at semantic tasks, the higher their changes in eating habits and preferences. Both semantic disorders and eating alterations correlated with atrophy in the temporal lobes and white matter tracts connecting the temporal lobe with frontal regions such as the arcuate fasciculus, the cingulum, and the inferior longitudinal fasciculus. These results confirm that semantic deficits underlie specific eating alterations in dementia patients.

Body odors (even when masked) make you more emotional: behavioral and neural insights.

Morality evolved within specific social contexts that are argued to shape moral choices. In turn, moral choices are hypothesized to be affected by body odors as they powerfully convey socially-relevant information. We thus investigated the neural underpinnings of the possible body odors effect on the participants' decisions. In an fMRI study we presented to healthy individuals 64 moral dilemmas divided in incongruent (real) and congruent (fake) moral dilemmas, using different types of harm (intentional: instrumental dilemmas, or inadvertent: accidental dilemmas). Participants were required to choose deontological or utilitarian actions under the exposure to a neutral fragrance (masker) or body odors concealed by the same masker (masked body odor). Smelling the masked body odor while processing incongruent (not congruent) dilemmas activates the supramarginal gyrus, consistent with an increase in prosocial attitude. When processing accidental (not instrumental) dilemmas, smelling the masked body odor activates the angular gyrus, an area associated with the processing of people's presence, supporting the hypothesis that body odors enhance the saliency of the social context in moral scenarios. These results suggest that masked body odors can influence moral choices by increasing the emotional experience during the decision process, and further explain how sensory unconscious biases affect human behavior.

Temporal and Effort cost Decision-making in Healthy Individuals with Subclinical Psychotic Symptoms.

The value people attribute to rewards is influenced both by the time and the effort required to obtain them. Impairments in these computations are described in patients with schizophrenia and appear associated with negative symptom severity. This study investigated whether deficits in temporal and effort cost computations can be observed in individuals with subclinical psychotic symptoms (PS) to determine if this dysfunction is already present in a potentially pre-psychotic period. Sixty participants, divided into three groups based on the severity of PS (high, medium and low), performed two temporal discounting tasks with food and money and a concurrent schedule task, in which the effort to obtain food increased over time. We observed that in high PS participants the discounting rate appeared linear and flatter than that exhibited by participants with medium and low PS, especially with food. In the concurrent task, compared to those with low PS, participants with high PS exerted tendentially less effort to obtain snacks only when the required effort was high. Participants exerting less effort in the higher effort condition were those with higher negative symptoms. These results suggest that aberrant temporal and effort cost computations might be present in individuals with subclinical PS and therefore could represent a vulnerability marker for psychosis.

Women smelling men's masked body odors show enhanced harm aversion in moral dilemmas.

Among the most unnoticeable stimuli providing social information, body odors are powerful social tools that can modulate behavioral and neural processing. It has recently been shown that body odors can affect moral decision-making, by increasing the activations in neural areas processing social and emotional information during the decision process. The aim of the present study was twofold: 1) to test whether body odors selectively affect decisions to real dilemmatic moral scenario (incongruent) vs. fake (congruent) dilemmas, and 2) to characterize whether the impact of masked body odors is modulated by four conceptual factors: personal force, intentionality, benefit recipient and evitability. Women chose between utilitarian (sacrificing a person's life in order to save other lives) or deontological actions (deciding against the harmful action) in 64 moral dilemmas under the exposure of a neutral fragrance (masker) or a masked male body odor. Our results showed that the masked male body odor did not specifically affect the answers to real and fake dilemmas but instead, its effect is modulating whether the agent harms the victim in a direct or indirect manner (personal force) to save herself or only other people (benefit recipient). In particular, when exposed to the masked body odor participants gave more deontological answers when the harm was indirect and only other people were saved. These data support the hypothesis that body odors induce participants to perceive the individuals described in moral dilemmas as more real, triggering harm avoidance.

Emotional reactions in moral decision-making are influenced by empathy and alexithymia.

The role of emotional processes in driving moral choices remains debated. In particular, diminished emotional processing and reduced empathy have been associated with unusual high rates of utilitarian responses in moral judgments while, to date, the effects of diminished emotional processing and empathy on moral decision-making have been only partially considered. In this study, we investigated the influence of empathy and alexithymia on behavior and emotional responses while participants performed a moral decision task. Self-report (valence and arousal ratings) and physiological (skin conductance and heart rate) measures were collected during the task. Results showed that empathy and alexithymia shaped emotional reactions to moral decisions but did not bias moral choices. The more empathic the participants, the more dilemmas were perceived as unpleasant and arousing, and the greater the increase in skin conductance. Conversely, alexithymia was characterized by a reduced physiological activation during moral decisions, but normal self-report ratings. Heart rate was not modulated by empathy or alexithymia. These results add new evidence to the field of moral decision showing that empathy and alexithymia modulate emotional reactions to moral decision.

Alexithymia and emotional reactions to odors.

Alexithymia is a psychological construct characterized by deficits in processing emotional stimuli. However, little is known about the processing of odours in alexithymia, even though there is extensive proof that emotion and olfaction are closely linked. The present study is aimed at investigating how alexithymic individuals process emotions conveyed by odors. Emotional responses to unpleasant, neutral odors and clean air were collected through self-report ratings and psychophysiological measures in a sample of 62 healthy participants with high (HA), medium (MA) and low (LA) levels of alexithymia. Moreover, participants performed tests on odors identification and threshold and completed questionnaires assessing olfactory imagery and awareness. Two main results have been found: first, HA and MA groups showed altered physiological responses to odors, compared to LA, while no differences among the groups were observed in odor ratings; and second, affective and cognitive alexithymia components were differently associated with the performance on olfactory tests, skin conductance response to odors, reaction times in the rating task, and scores on olfactory questionnaires. We conclude that alexithymia is characterized by altered physiological reactions to olfactory stimuli; moreover, we stress the importance of evaluating the different alexithymia components since they affect emotional stimuli processing in different ways.

A neural signature of food semantics is associated with body-mass index.

Visual recognition of objects may rely on different features depending on the category to which they belong. Recognizing natural objects, such as fruits and plants, weighs more on their perceptual attributes, whereas recognizing man-made objects, such as tools or vehicles, weighs more upon the functions and actions they enable. Edible objects are perceptually rich but also prepared for specific functions, therefore it is unclear how perceptual and functional attributes affect their recognition. Two event-related potentials experiments investigated: (i) whether food categorization in the brain is differentially modulated by sensory and functional attributes, depending on whether the food is natural or transformed; (ii) whether these processes are modulated by participants' body mass index. In experiment 1, healthy normal-weight participants were presented with a sentence (prime) and a photograph of a food. Primes described either a sensory feature ('It tastes sweet') or a functional feature ('It is suitable for a wedding party') of the food, while photographs depicted either a natural (e.g., cherry) or a transformed food (e.g., pizza). Prime-feature pairs were either congruent or incongruent. This design aimed at modulating N400-like components elicited by semantic processing. In experiment 1, N400-like amplitude was significantly larger for transformed food than for natural food with sensory primes, and vice versa with functional primes. In experiment 2, underweight and obese women performed the same semantic task. We found that, while the N400-like component in obese participants was modulated by sensory-functional primes only for transformed food, the same modulation was found in underweight participants only for natural food. These findings suggest that the level of food transformation interacts with participants' body mass index in modulating food perception and the underlying brain processing.

Face proprioception does not modulate access to visual awareness of emotional faces in a continuous flash suppression paradigm.

An important question in neuroscience is which multisensory information, presented outside of awareness, can influence the nature and speed of conscious access to our percepts. Recently, proprioceptive feedback of the hand was reported to lead to faster awareness of congruent hand images in a breaking continuous flash suppression (b-CFS) paradigm. Moreover, a vast literature suggests that spontaneous facial mimicry can improve emotion recognition, even without awareness of the stimulus face. However, integration of visual and proprioceptive information about the face to date has not been tested with CFS. The modulation of visual awareness of emotional faces by facial proprioception was investigated across three separate experiments. Face proprioception was induced with voluntary facial expressions or with spontaneous facial mimicry. Frequentist statistical analyses were complemented with Bayesian statistics. No evidence of multisensory integration was found, suggesting that proprioception does not modulate access to visual awareness of emotional faces in a CFS paradigm.

Relative Contribution of Odour Intensity and Valence to Moral Decisions.

Meta-analytic evidence showed that the chemical senses affect moral decisions. However, how odours impact on morality is currently unclear. Through a set of three studies, we assess whether and how odour intensity biases moral choices (Study 1a), its psychophysiological responses (Study 1b), as well as the behavioural and psychophysiological effects of odour valence on moral choices (Study 2). Study 1a suggests that the presence of an odour plays a role in shaping moral choice. Study 1b reveals that of two iso-pleasant versions of the same neutral odour, only the one presented sub-threshold (vs. supra-threshold) favours deontological moral choices, those based on the principle of not harming others even when such harm provides benefits. As expected, this odour intensity effect is tracked by skin conductance responses, whereas no difference in cardiac activity - proxy for the valence dimension - is revealed. Study 2 suggests that the same neutral odour presented sub-threshold increases deontological choices even when compared to iso-intense ambiguous odour, perceived as pleasant or unpleasant by half of the participants, respectively. Skin conductance responses, as expected, track odour pleasantness, but cardiac activity fails to do so. Results are discussed in the context of mechanisms alternative to disgust induction underlying moral choices.

Dual-route imitation in preschool children.

Imitation can be realized via two different routes: a direct route that translates visual input into motor output when gestures are meaningless or unknown, and a semantic route for known/meaningful gestures. Young infants show imitative behaviours compatible with the direct route, but little is known about the development of the semantic route, studied here for the first time. The present study examined preschool children (3-5years of age) imitating gestures that could be transitive or intransitive, and meaningful or meaningless. Both routes for imitation were already present by three years of age, and children were more accurate at imitating meaningful-intransitive gestures than meaningless-intransitive ones; the reverse pattern was found for transitive gestures. Children preferred to use their dominant hand even if they had to anatomically imitate the model to do this, showing that a preference for specular imitation is not exclusive at these ages.

Food color is in the eye of the beholder: the role of human trichromatic vision in food evaluation.

Non-human primates evaluate food quality based on brightness of red and green shades of color, with red signaling higher energy or greater protein content in fruits and leafs. Despite the strong association between food and other sensory modalities, humans, too, estimate critical food features, such as calorie content, from vision. Previous research primarily focused on the effects of color on taste/flavor identification and intensity judgments. However, whether evaluation of perceived calorie content and arousal in humans are biased by color has received comparatively less attention. In this study we showed that color content of food images predicts arousal and perceived calorie content reported when viewing food even when confounding variables were controlled for. Specifically, arousal positively co-varied with red-brightness, while green-brightness was negatively associated with arousal and perceived calorie content. This result holds for a large array of food comprising of natural food - where color likely predicts calorie content - and of transformed food where, instead, color is poorly diagnostic of energy content. Importantly, this pattern does not emerged with nonfood items. We conclude that in humans visual inspection of food is central to its evaluation and seems to partially engage the same basic system as non-human primates.

Anatomical and spatial matching in imitation: Evidence from left and right brain-damaged patients.

Imitation is a sensorimotor process whereby the visual information present in the model's movement has to be coupled with the activation of the motor system in the observer. This also implies that greater the similarity between the seen and the produced movement, the easier it will be to execute the movement, a process also known as ideomotor compatibility. Two components can influence the degree of similarity between two movements: the anatomical and the spatial component. The anatomical component is present when the model and imitator move the same body part (e.g., the right hand) while the spatial component is present when the movement of the model and that of the imitator occur at the same spatial position. Imitation can be achieved by relying on both components, but typically the model's and imitator's movements are matched either anatomically or spatially. The aim of this study was to ascertain the contribution of the left and right hemisphere to the imitation accomplished either with anatomical or spatial matching (or with both). Patients with unilateral left and right brain damage performed an ideomotor task and a gesture imitation task. Lesions in the left and right hemispheres gave rise to different performance deficits. Patients with lesions in the left hemisphere showed impaired imitation when anatomical matching was required, and patients with lesions in the right hemisphere showed impaired imitation when spatial matching was required. Lesion analysis further revealed a differential involvement of left and right hemispheric regions, such as the parietal opercula, in supporting imitation in the ideomotor task. Similarly, gesture imitation seemed to rely on different regions in the left and right hemisphere, such as parietal regions in the left hemisphere and premotor, somatosensory and subcortical regions in the right hemisphere.