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.

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.

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.

STIMA: a short screening test for ideo-motor apraxia, selective for action meaning and bodily district.

We propose STIMA, a short test for ideo-motor apraxia, allowing us to quantify the apraxic deficit according to action meaning and affected body segment. STIMA is based on a neurocognitive model holding that there are two processes involved in action imitation (i.e., a semantic route for recognizing and imitating known gestures, and a direct route for reproducing new gestures). The test allows to identify which imitative process has been selectively impaired by brain damage (direct vs. semantic route) and possible deficits depending on the body segment involved (hand/limb vs. hand/fingers). N = 111 healthy participants were administered with an imitation task in two separated blocks of known and new gestures. In each block, half of the gestures were performed mainly with the proximal part of the upper limb and the remaining half with the distal one. It resulted in 18 known gestures (nine proximal and nine distal) and 18 new gestures (nine proximal and nine distal) for a total of 36. Each gesture was presented up to a maximum of two times. Detailed criteria are used to assign the final imitation score. Cut offs, equivalent scores and main percentile scores were computed for each subscale. Participants imitated better known than new gestures, and proximal better than distal gestures. Age influenced performance on all subscales, while education only affected one subscale. STIMA is easy and quick to administer, and compared to previous tests, it offers important information for planning adequate rehabilitation programs based on the functional locus of the deficit.

Facial and bodily emotion recognition in multiple sclerosis: the role of alexithymia and other characteristics of the disease.

Multiple sclerosis (MS) may be associated with impaired perception of facial emotions. However, emotion recognition mediated by bodily postures has never been examined in these patients. Moreover, several studies have suggested a relation between emotion recognition impairments and alexithymia. This is in line with the idea that the ability to recognize emotions requires the individuals to be able to understand their own emotions. Despite a deficit in emotion recognition has been observed in MS patients, the association between impaired emotion recognition and alexithymia has received little attention. The aim of this study was, first, to investigate MS patient's abilities to recognize emotions mediated by both facial and bodily expressions and, second, to examine whether any observed deficits in emotions recognition could be explained by the presence of alexithymia. Thirty patients with MS and 30 healthy matched controls performed experimental tasks assessing emotion discrimination and recognition of facial expressions and bodily postures. Moreover, they completed questionnaires evaluating alexithymia, depression, and fatigue. First, facial emotion recognition and, to a lesser extent, bodily emotion recognition can be impaired in MS patients. In particular, patients with higher disability showed an impairment in emotion recognition compared with patients with lower disability and controls. Second, their deficit in emotion recognition was not predicted by alexithymia. Instead, the disease's characteristics and the performance on some cognitive tasks significantly correlated with emotion recognition. Impaired facial emotion recognition is a cognitive signature of MS that is not dependent on alexithymia.

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.

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.

On-line changing of thinking about words: the effect of cognitive context on neural responses to verb reading.

Activity in frontocentral motor regions is routinely reported when individuals process action words and is often interpreted as the implicit simulation of the word content. We hypothesized that these neural responses are not invariant components of action word processing but are modulated by the context in which they are evoked. Using fMRI, we assessed the relative weight of stimulus features (i.e., the intrinsic semantics of words) and contextual factors, in eliciting word-related sensorimotor activity. Participants silently read action-related and state verbs after performing a mental rotation task engaging either a motor strategy (i.e., referring visual stimuli to their own bodily movements) or a visuospatial strategy. The mental rotation tasks were used to induce, respectively, a motor and a nonmotor "cognitive context" into the following silent reading. Irrespective of the verb category, reading in the motor context, compared with reading in the nonmotor context, increased the activity in the left primary motor cortex, the bilateral premotor cortex, and the right somatosensory cortex. Thus, the cognitive context induced by the preceding motor strategy-based mental rotation modulated word-related sensorimotor responses, possibly reflecting the strategy of referring a word meaning to one's own bodily activity. This pattern, common to action and state verbs, suggests that the context in which words are encountered prevails over the intrinsic semantics of the stimuli in mediating the recruitment of sensorimotor regions.

Equality versus self-interest in the brain: differential roles of anterior insula and medial prefrontal cortex.

Everything else being the same, an equal outcome is generally preferred; however, an equitable allocation sometimes is possible only by sacrificing the total amount of resources available to society. Moreover, direct interests may interact with the perception of equality. Here, we have investigated individual preferences, and their neural basis, by employing a task in which an allocation of a fixed amount between the subject and another person (MS condition) or two third parties (TP condition) is randomly determined. The subject can accept or reject the outcome, in the same fashion as the Ultimatum Game: thus an unequal offer may be rejected at the cost of a loss in total amount. Behavioral results show preference for equal outcomes in TP and for equal and advantageous outcomes in MS. An activation of medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), extending to the anterior middle cingulate cortex (aMCC), was found in MS unequal outcomes, particularly for disadvantageous outcomes and consequent rejections. The anterior insula (AI) was active for unequal outcomes, in both MS and TP. We propose that the equal treatment is a default social norm, and its violation is signaled by the AI, whereas aMCC/mPFC activation, negatively correlated to rejections, reflects the effort to overcome the default rule of equal treatment in favor of a self-advantageous efficiency.

Imitation components in the human brain: an fMRI study.

Human ability to imitate movements is instantiated in parietal, premotor and opercular structures, often referred to as the human homologue of the macaque mirror neuron system. As most studies employed imitation of specular models (participants imitated the seen movement as their mirror reflection), it is unclear whether the structures implicated code for the anatomical compatibility between the performer and the model or the spatial compatibility between the location at which both movements occur. We used fMRI to disentangle the neural mechanisms underlying anatomical and spatial components of imitation. Participants moved one finger which was either spatially or anatomically compatible with the finger moved in a video-display. In keeping with the existent behavioral literature, we found that during the spatial task, participants' responses were faster when the seen movement was also anatomically compatible, whereas in the anatomical task, responses were faster when the seen movement was also spatially compatible. Critically, the activity of the parietal opercula bilaterally was associated with the anatomical compatibility effect. Furthermore, increased activity of the left middle frontal gyrus and right superior temporal sulcus (extending to the temporo-parietal junction) was found in those trials in which the spatial mapping between the seen and executed movements was detrimental for the anatomical task. Our findings extend current understanding of the role played by spatial and anatomical components in imitation and provide new insights about the parietal opercula.

The cognitive rehabilitation of limb apraxia in patients with stroke.

Apraxia is a higher level motor deficit that occurs when processing a goal-directed action. The apraxic deficit can manifest itself in absence of sensory input deficits or motor output deficits, neglect, frontal inertia or dementia. According to a clinical classification still largely in use, there are two main forms of limb apraxia: ideomotor (IMA) and ideational (IA), observed when a patient is required to imitate a gesture or use an object, respectively. In the present review, we examined only the cognitive treatments of both types of limb apraxia of a vascular aetiology. Despite the high prevalence of limb apraxia caused by left brain damage, and the fact that apraxia has been known for over a century, the literature regarding its rehabilitation is still very limited. This is partly due to the nature of the recovery from the deficit, and in part to the automatic-voluntary dissociation. Here we review those treatments that have proved most successful in helping patients to recover from limb apraxia.

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.

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.

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.

Causal role of the sensorimotor cortex in action simulation: neuropsychological evidence.

Interest in sensorimotor cortex involvement in higher cognitive functions has recently been revived, although whether the cortex actually contributes to the simulation of body part movements has not yet been established. Neurosurgical patients with selective lesions to the hand sensorimotor representation offer a unique opportunity to demonstrate that the sensorimotor cortex plays a causal role in hand action simulations. Patients with damage to hand representation showed a selective deficit in simulating hand movements compared with object movements (Experiment 1). This deficit extended to objects when the patients imagined moving them with their own hands while maintaining the ability to visualize them rotating in space (Experiment 2). The data provide conclusive evidence for a causal role of the sensorimotor cortex in the continuous update of sensorimotor representations while individuals mentally simulate motor acts.

"She" is not like "I": the tie between language and action is in our imagination.

Embodied theories hold that understanding what another person is doing requires the observer to map that action directly onto his or her own motor representation and simulate it internally. The human motor system may, thus, be endowed with a "mirror matching" device through which the same motor representation is activated, when the subject is either the performer or the observer of another's action ("self-other shared representation"). It is suggested that understanding action verbs relies upon the same mechanism; this implies that motor responses to these words are automatic and independent of the subject of the verb. In the current study, participants were requested to read silently and decide on the syntactic subject of action and nonaction verbs, presented in first (1P) or third (3P) person, while TMS was applied to the left hand primary motor cortex (M1). TMS-induced motor-evoked potentials were recorded from hand muscles as a measure of cortico-spinal excitability. Motor-evoked potentials increased for 1P, but not for 3P, action verbs or 1P and 3P nonaction verbs. We provide novel demonstration that the motor simulation is triggered only when the conceptual representation of a word integrates the action with the self as the agent of that action. This questions the core principle of "mirror matching" and opens to alternative interpretations of the relationship between conceptual and sensorimotor processes.

The interrelations between verbal working memory and visual selection of emotional faces.

Working memory (WM) and visual selection processes interact in a reciprocal fashion based on overlapping representations abstracted from the physical characteristics of stimuli. Here, we assessed the neural basis of this interaction using facial expressions that conveyed emotion information. Participants memorized an emotional word for a later recognition test and then searched for a face of a particular gender presented in a display with two faces that differed in gender and expression. The relation between the emotional word and the expressions of the target and distractor faces was varied. RTs for the memory test were faster when the target face matched the emotional word held in WM (on valid trials) relative to when the emotional word matched the expression of the distractor (on invalid trials). There was also enhanced activation on valid compared with invalid trials in the lateral orbital gyrus, superior frontal polar (BA 10), lateral occipital sulcus, and pulvinar. Re-presentation of the WM stimulus in the search display led to an earlier onset of activity in the superior and inferior frontal gyri and the anterior hippocampus irrespective of the search validity of the re-presented stimulus. The data indicate that the middle temporal and prefrontal cortices are sensitive to the reappearance of stimuli that are held in WM, whereas a fronto-thalamic occipital network is sensitive to the behavioral significance of the match between WM and targets for selection. We conclude that these networks are modulated by high-level matches between the contents of WM, behavioral goals, and current sensory input.

Action performance and action-word understanding: evidence of double dissociations in left-damaged patients.

It has been proposed that language and action representational systems overlap when the tasks used to assess them involve the same stimuli and require abilities acquired at similarly early developmental stage. We matched variables at task and stimulus level to test this hypothesis in a group of 12 left-damaged patients (and 17 controls). At the patients' group level, we replicated previously reported correlations between linguistic and nonlinguistic tasks. When performances were analysed individually, however, double dissociations were observed between the ability to imitate pantomimes and the ability to produce and comprehend the corresponding action verbs, as well as between the ability to use tools and the ability to comprehend the corresponding tool nouns. These findings suggest that processing action words is independent of the ability to produce the associated object-directed actions. Double dissociations were also found between the ability to comprehend action verbs and the ability to comprehend tool nouns. Moreover, action and tool naming showed differential effects of age of acquisition, suggesting that the two word categories meet the lexical organization by word class (nouns and verbs), even when related to identical action concept. Dissociations at behavioural level are supported by anatomical dissociations shown in the analysis of patients' lesions.

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.