Withholding response in the face of a smile: age-related differences in prefrontal sensitivity to Nogo cues following happy and angry faces

Early infant prefrontal gray matter volume is associated with concurrent and future infant emotionality

High levels of infant negative emotionality (NE) are associated with emotional and behavioral problems later in childhood. Identifying neural markers of high NE as well as low positive emotionality (PE) in infancy can provide neural markers to aid early identification of vulnerability, and inform interventions to help delay or even prevent psychiatric disorders before the manifestation of symptoms. Prefrontal cortical (PFC) subregions support the regulation of NE and PE, with each PFC subregion differentially specializing in distinct emotional regulation processes. Gray matter (GM) volume measures show good test-retest reliability, and thus have potential use as neural markers of NE and PE. Yet, while studies showed PFC GM structural abnormalities in adolescents and young adults with affective disorders, few studies examined how PFC subregional GM measures are associated with NE and PE in infancy. We aimed to identify relationships among GM in prefrontal cortical subregions at 3 months and caregiver report of infant NE and PE, covarying for infant age and gender and caregiver sociodemographic and clinical variables, in two independent samples at 3 months (Primary: n = 75; Replication sample: n = 40) and at 9 months (Primary: n = 44; Replication sample: n = 40). In the primary sample, greater 3-month medial superior frontal cortical volume was associated with higher infant 3-month NE (p < 0.05); greater 3-month ventrolateral prefrontal cortical volume predicted lower infant 9-month PE (p < 0.05), even after controlling for 3-month NE and PE. GM volume in other PFC subregions also predicted infant 3- and 9-month NE and PE, together with infant demographic factors, caregiver age, and/or caregiver affective instability and anxiety. These findings were replicated in the independent sample. To our knowledge, this is the first study to determine in primary and replication samples associations among infant PFC GM volumes and concurrent and prospective NE and PE, and identify promising, early markers of future psychopathology risk.

Influences of Emotional Information on Response Inhibition in Gaming Disorder: Behavioral and ERP Evidence from Go/Nogo Task

BACKGROUND

Gaming disorder (GD) may impair executive functions such as response inhibition. According to the tripartite neurocognitive model, the interoceptive system generates a state of craving that exacerbates the dysfunction of GD. We speculate that emotional information may play an important role in the mechanism, which leads to impaired response inhibition in people with GD.

METHODS

A three-factor mixed experimental design was adopted in this go/nogo task. The between-subject factor was group (GD or control group), and the within-subject factors were two types of emotional information, task relevance (related or unrelated) and emotional valence (negative or positive).

RESULTS

The GD group had lower nogo accuracies than the control group in the task-unrelated condition and also in the negative condition. Parallelly, the GD group showed faster reactions and lower accuracy in the go trials than the control group under task-unrelated negative conditions. At the neural level, the GD group had smaller amplitudes of nogo-N2 and larger amplitudes of nogo-P3 than the control group in the task-unrelated condition.

CONCLUSIONS

The findings prove the hypothesis of this study that emotional information could be a factor leading to impaired response inhibition in GD individuals. The response inhibition abilities of GD are weakened when processing task-unrelated or negative information, which may be caused by failure of behavioral inhibition and weakened conflict control, resulting in more cognitive resources to complete response suppression under specific conditions. This study provides evidence for weaker response inhibition in GD individuals from the perspective of cognitive-emotional interaction and provides more detailed information for interventions for GD.

Effects of facial expression and gaze interaction on brain dynamics during a working memory task in preschool children

Executive functioning in preschool children is important for building social relationships during the early stages of development. We investigated the brain dynamics of preschool children during an attention-shifting task involving congruent and incongruent gaze directions in emotional facial expressions (neutral, angry, and happy faces). Ignoring distracting stimuli (gaze direction and expression), participants (17 preschool children and 17 young adults) were required to detect and memorize the location (left or right) of a target symbol as a simple working memory task (i.e., no general priming paradigm in which a target appears after a cue stimulus). For the preschool children, the frontal late positive response and the central and parietal P3 responses increased for angry faces. In addition, a parietal midline α (Pmα) power to change attention levels decreased mainly during the encoding of a target for angry faces, possibly causing an association of no congruency effect on reaction times (i.e., no faster response in the congruent than incongruent gaze condition). For the adults, parietal P3 response and frontal midline θ (Fmθ) power increased mainly during the encoding period for incongruent gaze shifts in happy faces. The Pmα power for happy faces decreased for incongruent gaze during the encoding period and increased for congruent gaze during the first retention period. These results suggest that adults can quickly shift attention to a target in happy faces, sufficiently allocating attentional resources to ignore incongruent gazes and detect a target, which can attenuate a congruency effect on reaction times. By contrast, possibly because of underdeveloped brain activity, preschool children did not show the happy face superiority effect and they may be more responsive to angry faces. These observations imply a crucial key point to build better relationships between developing preschoolers and their parents and educators, incorporating nonverbal communication into social and emotional learning.

Ignore the faces: Neural characterisation of emotional inhibition from childhood to adulthood using MEG

The ability to effectively and automatically regulate one's response to emotional information is a basic, fundamental skill for social functioning. The neural mechanisms underlying emotion regulation processing have been assessed, however few investigations have leveraged neurophysiological techniques, particularly magnetoencephalography (MEG) to determine the development of this critical ability. The current MEG study is the first to examine developmental changes in the neural mechanisms supporting automatic emotion regulation. We used an emotional go/no-go task with happy and angry faces in a single-site cohort of 97 healthy participants, 4-40 years of age. We found age-related changes as a function of emotion and condition in brain regions key to emotion regulation, including the right inferior frontal gyrus, orbitofrontal cortices and primarily right-lateralized temporal areas. Interaction effects, including an age by emotion and condition, were also found in the left angular gyrus, an area critical in emotion regulation and attention. Findings demonstrate protracted and nonlinear development, due to the adolescent group, of emotion regulation processing from child to adulthood, and highlight that age-related differences in emotion regulation are modulated by emotional face type.

Segregating domain-general from emotional context-specific inhibitory control systems - ventral striatum and orbitofrontal cortex serve as emotion-cognition integration hubs

Inhibitory control hierarchically regulates cognitive and emotional systems in the service of adaptive goal-directed behavior across changing task demands and environments. While previous studies convergently determined the contribution of prefrontal-striatal systems to general inhibitory control, findings on the specific circuits that mediate emotional context-specific impact on inhibitory control remained inconclusive. Against this background we combined an evaluated emotional Go/No Go task with fMRI in a large cohort of subjects (N=250) to segregate brain systems and circuits that mediate domain-general from emotion-specific inhibitory control. Particularly during a positive emotional context, behavioral results showed a lower accuracy for No Go trials and a faster response time for Go trials. While the dorsal striatum and lateral frontal regions were involved in inhibitory control irrespective of emotional context, activity in the ventral striatum (VS) and medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC) varied as a function of emotional context. On the voxel-wise whole-brain network level, limbic and striatal systems generally exhibited highest changes in global brain connectivity during inhibitory control, while global brain connectivity of the left mOFC was less decreased during emotional contexts. Functional connectivity analyses moreover revealed that negative coupling between the VS with inferior frontal gyrus (IFG)/insula and mOFC varied as a function of emotional context. Together these findings indicate separable domain- general as well as emotional context-specific inhibitory brain systems which specifically encompass the VS and its connections with frontal regions.

Self-Positivity or Self-Negativity as a Function of the Medial Prefrontal Cortex

Self and emotions are key motivational factors of a person strivings for health and well-being. Understanding neural mechanisms supporting the relationship between these factors bear far-reaching implications for mental health disorders. Recent work indicates a substantial overlap between self-relevant and emotion information processing and has proposed the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) as one shared neural signature. However, the precise cognitive and neural mechanisms represented by the MPFC in investigations of self- and emotion-related processing are largely unknown. Here we examined whether the neural underpinnings of self-related processing in the MPFC link to positive or negative emotions. We collected fMRI data to test the distinct and shared neural circuits of self- and emotion-related processing while participants performed personal (self, friend, or stranger) and emotion (happy, sad, or neutral) associative matching tasks. By exploiting tight control over the factors that determine the effects of self-relevance and emotions (positive: Happy vs. neutral; negative: Sad vs. neutral), our univariate analysis revealed that the ventral part of the MPFC (vmPFC), which has established involvement in self-prioritisation effects, was not recruited in the negative emotion prioritisation effect. In contrast, there were no differences in brain activity between the effects of positive emotion- and self-prioritisation. These results were replicated by both region of interest (ROI)-based analysis in the vmPFC and the seed- to voxel functional connectivity analysis between the MPFC and the rest of the brain. The results suggest that the prioritisation effects for self and positive emotions are tightly linked together, and the MPFC plays a large role in discriminating between positive and negative emotions in relation to self-relevance.

Changing Faces: Dynamic Emotional Face Processing in Autism Spectrum Disorder Across Childhood and Adulthood

BACKGROUND

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is classically associated with poor emotional face processing. Few studies, however, have used more ecological dynamic stimuli. We contrasted functional magnetic resonance imaging measures of dynamic emotional face processing in ASD and typically developing (TD) cohorts across a wide age range to determine if the processing and age-related trajectories differed between participants with and without ASD.

METHODS

Functional magnetic resonance imaging data collected from 200 participants (5-42 years old; 107 in ASD cohort, 93 in TD cohort) during the presentation of dynamic emotional faces (neutral-to-happy, neutral-to-angry) and dynamic flowers (closed-to-open) were analyzed. Group differences and group-by-age interactions in the faces versus flowers and between emotion contrasts were investigated.

RESULTS

Differences in activation between dynamic faces and flowers in occipital regions, including the fusiform gyri, were reduced in the ASD group. Contrasting the two emotions, ASD compared with TD participants showed increased engagement of the precentral, postcentral, and superior temporal gyri to happy faces and increased activation to angry faces occipitally. Emotion processing regions, such as insula, temporal pole, and frontal regions, showed increased recruitment with age to happy faces compared with both angry faces and flowers in the TD group, but decreased recruitment with age in the ASD group.

CONCLUSIONS

Using dynamic stimuli, we demonstrated that participants with ASD processed faces similarly to nonface stimuli, and age-related atypicalities were more pronounced to happy faces in participants with ASD. We demonstrated emotion-specific atypicalities in a large group of participants with ASD that underscore persistent difficulties from childhood into mid-adulthood.

Perceptual inhibition of emotional interference in children

In daily life, when a bee approaches us while we are sitting in the garden, we must pay attention to that threatening stimulus and give an appropriate response. However, if this bee approaches us while riding a bike, we must inhibit that distractor to avoid an accident. In this case, avoiding the interference of an emotional stimuli and continuing with the task should be preferential. In general, perceptual inhibition is responsible for controlling and suppressing the environmental distractions that interrupt the course of the realization of a goal. In this study, 435 children performed a modified flanker task with entirely irrelevant emotional and neutral stimuli in order to assess perceptual inhibition in contexts with high and low emotional salience. The results showed that entirely irrelevant distractors affected performance, but that there were no significant differences according to whether these distractors were emotionally salient or neutral. These results constitute a first approach to the problem of emotional interference in children considering the multidimensional approach of inhibition.

Converging function, structure, and behavioural features of emotion regulation in very preterm children

Children born very preterm (VPT; <32 weeks' gestational age) are at high risk for emotional regulation and social communication impairments. However, the underlying neurobiological correlates of these difficulties remain poorly understood. Using a multimodal approach, including both magnetoencephalographic and structural magnetic resonance imaging, we investigated the functional, structural, and behavioural characteristics of socio-emotional processing in 19 school-age children born VPT and 21 age-matched term-born (TB) children (7-13 years). Structural MRI analyses were conducted on a subset of these groups (16 VPT and 21 age-matched TB). Results showed that the inhibition of aversive socio-emotional stimuli was associated with a sustained reduction of right frontoparietal functional brain activity in children born VPT children. Moreover, whole brain structural analyses showed that reductions of cortical thickness or volume in these regions were associated with poor socio-emotional performance in children born VPT. Hence, our results suggest that functional and structural alterations encompassing the frontoparietal areas might be a biological marker of less efficient emotion regulation processes/performance in school-age children born VPT. These findings open up novel avenues to investigate the potential impact of such atypicalities, and in particular, those related to the atypical maturation of the medial prefrontal regions, on the frequent development of psychiatric disorders in this vulnerable population.

Emotional Response Inhibition Is Greater in Older Than Younger Adults

Emotional information rapidly captures our attention and also often invokes automatic response tendencies, whereby positive information motivates approach, while negative information encourages avoidance. However, many circumstances require the need to override or inhibit these automatic responses. Control over responses to emotional information remains largely intact in late life, in spite of age-related declines in cognitive control and inhibition of responses to non-emotional information. The goal of this behavioral study was to understand how the aging process influences emotional response inhibition for positive and negative information in older adults. We examined emotional response inhibition in 36 healthy older adults (ages 60–89) and 44 younger adults (ages 18–22) using an emotional Go/No-Go task presenting happy (positive), fearful (negative), and neutral faces. In both younger and older adults, happy faces produced more approach-related behavior (i.e., fewer misses), while fearful faces produced more avoidance-related behavior, in keeping with theories of approach/avoidance-motivated responses. Calculation of speed/accuracy trade-offs between response times and false alarm rates revealed that younger and older adults both favored speed at the expense of accuracy, most robustly within blocks with fearful faces. However, there was no indication that the strength of the speed/accuracy trade-off differed between younger and older adults. The key finding was that although younger adults were faster to respond to all types of faces, older adults had greater emotional response inhibition (i.e., fewer false alarms). Moreover, younger adults were particularly prone to false alarms for happy faces. This is the first study to directly test effects of aging on emotional response inhibition. Complementing previous literature in the domains of attention and memory, these results provide new evidence that in the domain of response inhibition older adults may more effectively employ emotion regulatory ability, albeit on a slower time course, compared to younger adults. Older adults’ enhanced adaptive emotion regulation strategies may facilitate resistance to emotional distraction. The present study extends the literature of emotional response inhibition in younger adulthood into late life, and in doing so further elucidates how cognitive aging interacts with affective control processes.

Inhibition in the face of emotion: Characterization of the spatial-temporal dynamics that facilitate automatic emotion regulation

Emotion regulation mediates socio-cognitive functions and is essential for interactions with others. The capacity to automatically inhibit responses to emotional stimuli is an important aspect of emotion regulation; the underlying neural mechanisms of this ability have been rarely investigated. Forty adults completed a Go/No-go task during magnetoencephalographic (MEG) recordings, where they responded rapidly to either a blue or purple frame which contained angry or happy faces. Subjects responded to the target color in an inhibition (75% Go trials) and a vigilance condition (25% Go trials). As expected, inhibition processes showed early, sustained activation (200-450 ms) in the right inferior frontal gyrus (IFG). Emotion-related inhibition processes showed greater activity with angry faces bilaterally in the orbital-frontal gyri (OFG) starting at 225 ms and temporal poles from 250 ms, with right hemisphere dominance. The presence of happy faces elicited earlier activity in the right OFG. This study demonstrates that the timing of inhibition processes varies with the emotional context and that there is much greater activation in the presence of angry faces. It underscores the importance of the right IFG for inhibition processes, but the OFG in automatic emotion regulation.

SOAP Opera: Self as Object and Agent in Prioritizing Attention

A growing body of evidence has demonstrated that multiple sources of salience tune attentional sets toward aspects of the environment, including affectively and motivationally significant categories of stimuli such as angry faces and reward-associated target locations. Recent evidence further indicates that objects that have gained personal significance through ownership can elicit similar attentional prioritization. Here we discuss current research on sources of attentional prioritization that shape our awareness of the visual world from moment to moment and the underlying neural systems and contextualize what is known about attentional prioritization of our possessions within that research. We review behavioral and neuroimaging research on the influence of self-relevance and ownership on cognition and discuss challenges to this literature stemming from different modes of conceptualizing and operationalizing the self. We argue that ownership taps into both “self-as-object,” which characterizes the self as an object with a constellation of traits and attributes, and “self-as-subject,” which characterizes the self as an agentic perceiver and knower. Despite an abundance of research probing neural and behavioral indices of self-as-object and its effects on attention, there exists a paucity of research on the influence of self-relevance of attention when self is operationalized from the perspective of a first-person subject. To begin to address this gap, we propose the Self as Ownership in Attentional Prioritization (SOAP) framework to explain how ownership increases salience through attention to external representations of self-identity (i.e., self as object) and attention to contextually mediated permission to act (i.e., self as subject).

The temporal and spatial brain dynamics of automatic emotion regulation in children

Mechanisms for automatic emotion regulation (AER) are essential during childhood as they offset the impact of unwanted or negative emotional responses without drawing on limited attentional resources. Despite the importance of AER in improving the efficiency and flexibility of self-regulation, few research studies have investigated the underlying neurophysiological mechanisms. To fill this gap, we used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to investigate AER-related brain processes in 25 children (∼10 years old) who performed a go/no–go task that included an incidental exposure to faces containing socio-emotional cues. Whole brain results revealed that the inhibition of angry faces (compared with happy faces) was associated with a stronger recruitment of several brain regions from 100 to 425 ms. These activations involved the right angular and occipital gyri from 100 to175 ms, the right orbito-frontal gyrus (OFG) from 250 to 325 ms (p^corr < 0.05), and finally, the left anterior temporal lobe (ATL) from 325 to 425 ms. Our results suggest a specific involvement of these regions in the automatic regulation of negative emotional stimuli in children. In the future, this knowledge may help understand developmental conditions where inhibition impairments are exacerbated by an emotional context.

Tuning to the Positive: Age-Related Differences in Subjective Perception of Facial Emotion

Facial expressions aid social transactions and serve as socialization tools, with smiles signaling approval and reward, and angry faces signaling disapproval and punishment. The present study examined whether the subjective experience of positive vs. negative facial expressions differs between children and adults. Specifically, we examined age-related differences in biases toward happy and angry facial expressions. Young children (5–7 years) and young adults (18–29 years) rated the intensity of happy and angry expressions as well as levels of experienced arousal. Results showed that young children—but not young adults—rated happy facial expressions as both more intense and arousing than angry faces. This finding, which we replicated in two independent samples, was not due to differences in the ability to identify facial expressions, and suggests that children are more tuned to information in positive expressions. Together these studies provide evidence that children see unambiguous adult emotional expressions through rose-colored glasses, and suggest that what is emotionally relevant can shift with development.

Blunted brain activation in patients with schizophrenia in response to emotional cognitive inhibition: a functional near-infrared spectroscopy study

INTRODUCTION

Patients with schizophrenia (SZ) have deficits of facial emotion processing and cognitive inhibition, but the brain pathophysiology underlying these deficits and their interaction are not clearly understood. We tested brain activity during an emotional face go/no-go task that requires rapid executive control affected by emotional stimuli in patients with SZ using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS).

METHODS

Twenty-five patients with SZ and 28 healthy control subjects were studied. We evaluated behavioral performance and used fNIRS to measure oxygenated hemoglobin concentration changes in fronto-temporal areas during the emotional go/no-go task with emotional and non-emotional blocks.

RESULTS

Patients with SZ made more errors and had longer reaction times in both test blocks compared with healthy subjects. Significantly greater activation in the inferior, superior, middle, and orbital frontal regions were observed in healthy subjects during the emotional go/no-go block compared to the non-emotional go/no-go block, but this difference was not observed in patients with SZ. Relative to healthy subjects, patients with SZ showed less activation in the superior and orbital frontal and middle temporal regions during the emotional go/no-go block.

DISCUSSION

Our results suggest that fronto-temporal dysfunction in patients with SZ is due to an interaction between abnormal processing of emotional facial expressions with negative valence and cognitive inhibition, especially during the rapid selection of rule-based associations that override automatic emotional response tendencies. They indicate that fronto-temporal dysfunction is involved in the pathophysiology of emotional-cognitive deficits in patients with SZ.

Structure and function: how to connect?

INTRODUCTION

The majority, but not all, of very preterm-born infants have difficulties with a variety of cognitive functions as children. It is critical to be able to predict as early as possible those who will have difficulties, to be able to direct appropriate interventions.

METHODS

We are conducting multimodal structural and functional MRI studies in very preterm-born infants and following them with behavioural and neuroimaging assessments until 4 years of age. We are also completing structural and more complex functional imaging in school-aged very preterm-born children.

RESULTS

A number of MRI measures between preterm and term age correlate with outcome at 2 years of age. Functional and structural differences are also seen at school age; examples from these various studies are presented.

CONCLUSION

Structural and functional studies in preterm-born versus term-born infants and children, particularly if completed longitudinally, provide important information on the evolution of brain-behaviour correlates and can help predict outcome in this high-risk population.

Development of response inhibition in the context of relevant versus irrelevant emotions

The present study examined the influence of relevant and irrelevant emotions on response inhibition from childhood to early adulthood. Ninety-four participants between 6 and 25 years of age performed two go/nogo tasks with emotional faces (neutral, happy, and fearful) as stimuli. In one go/nogo task emotion formed a relevant dimension of the task and in the other go/nogo task emotion was irrelevant and participants had to respond to the color of the faces instead. A special feature of the latter task, in which emotion was irrelevant, was the inclusion of free choice trials, in which participants could freely decide between acting and inhibiting. Results showed a linear increase in response inhibition performance with increasing age both in relevant and irrelevant affective contexts. Relevant emotions had a pronounced influence on performance across age, whereas irrelevant emotions did not. Overall, participants made more false alarms on trials with fearful faces than happy faces, and happy faces were associated with better performance on go trials (higher percentage correct and faster RTs) than fearful faces. The latter effect was stronger for young children in terms of accuracy. Finally, during the free choice trials participants did not base their decisions on affective context, confirming that irrelevant emotions do not have a strong impact on inhibition. Together, these findings suggest that across development relevant affective context has a larger influence on response inhibition than irrelevant affective context. When emotions are relevant, a context of positive emotions is associated with better performance compared to a context with negative emotions, especially in young children.

Affect-biased attention as emotion regulation

The affective biasing of attention is not typically considered to be a form of emotion regulation. In this article, we argue that 'affect-biased attention' - the predisposition to attend to certain categories of affectively salient stimuli over others - provides an important component of emotion regulation. Affect-biased attention regulates subsequent emotional responses by tuning one's filters for initial attention and subsequent processing. By reviewing parallel research in the fields of emotion regulation and affect-biased attention, as well as clinical and developmental research on individual differences in attentional biases, we provide convergent evidence that habitual affective filtering processes, tuned and re-tuned over development and situation, modulate emotional responses to the world. Moreover, they do so in a manner that is proactive rather than reactive.