Current research and emerging directions in emotion-cognition interactions

Effect of stress on spatial working memory and EEG signal dynamics in the follicular and luteal phases of the menstrual cycle in young single girls

AIM

Women undergo behavioral changes during the menstrual cycle. This study aimed to investigate the effect of estradiol (Es) on stress and effect of stress on spatial working memory (WM) and also to investigate electroencephalogram (EEG) signal's dynamics in the early and late follicular (EF and LF) and luteal (LU) phases of unmarried girls' menstrual cycle.

METHODS

Stress was induced by presentation of a short (3 min) movie clip. Simultaneous with a memory test and stress induction, EEG, serum Es levels, and galvanic skin response (GSR) were assessed.

RESULTS

Serum Es concentrations were decreased in LF, LU, and EF phases. The mean GSR score decreased after stress induction in all three phases, but it increased in the LF and LU phases versus the EF phase. Spatial WM diminished after stress induction in all three phases, but it increased in the LF phase versus the two phases before and after stress induction. Average power spectrum density in all frequency bands increased after stress induction in the frontal and prefrontal channels in the spatial WM test.

CONCLUSION

The results showed that stress led to spatial WM dysfunction; however, Es improved spatial WM performance in the LF phase versus the other two phases.

Harnessing cognitive strategy use for functional problems and proposed underlying mechanisms in childhood-onset dystonia

BACKGROUND

There is a significant gap in knowledge about rehabilitation techniques and strategies that can help children and young people with hyperkinetic movement disorders (HMD) including dystonia to successfully perform daily activities and improve overall participation. A promising approach to support skill acquisition is the Cognitive Orientation to daily Occupational Performance (CO-OP) intervention. CO-OP uses cognitive strategies to help patients generate their own solutions to overcome self-identified problems encountered in everyday living.

PURPOSE

1. To identify and categorize strategies used by children with HMD to support skill acquisition during CO-OP; 2. To review the possible underlying mechanisms that might contribute to the cognitive strategies, in order to facilitate further studies for developing focused rehabilitation approaches.

METHODS

A secondary analysis was performed on video-recorded data from a previous study exploring the efficacy of CO-OP for childhood onset HMD, in which CO-OP therapy sessions were delivered by a single occupational therapist. For the purpose of this study, we reviewed a total of 40 randomly selected hours of video footage of CO-OP sessions delivered to six participants (age 6-19 years) over ten intervention sessions. An observational recording sheet was applied to identify systematically the participants' or therapist's verbalizations of cognitive strategies during the therapy. The strategies were classified into six categories in line with published literature.

RESULTS

Strategies used by HMD participants included distraction, externally focussed attention, internally focussed attention, emotion self-regulation, motor imagery and mental self-guidance. We postulate different underlying working mechanisms for these strategies, which have implications for the therapeutic management of children and young people with HMD including dystonia.

CONCLUSIONS

Cognitive strategy training can fundamentally change and improve motor performance. On-going work will address both the underlying neural mechanisms of therapeutic change and the mediators and moderators that influence how change unfolds.

Interactive influences of emotion and extraversion on visual attention

INTRODUCTION

Emotion has been shown to influence selective visual attention. However, studies in this field have revealed contradictory findings regarding the nature of this influence. One possible explanation for the variation in findings is that affective inter-individual differences impact both attention and emotion and may therefore moderate any influence of emotion on attention. The current work is a novel investigation of the effects of induced emotional states and the traits of extraversion and neuroticism on visual attention. This allowed a direct investigation of any impact of extraversion and neuroticism on the way in which emotion influences attention.

METHODS

Participants were induced into positive, neutral, and negative emotional states before completing a change detection flicker task in which they were required to locate a change to a real-world scene as quickly and accurately as possible.

RESULTS

Participants scoring higher in extraversion were more accurate but slower at detecting changes. Importantly, this was particularly evident when induced into a negative emotional state compared to a neutral emotional state. Neuroticism had no impact on attention.

CONCLUSIONS

The current study provides evidence that extraversion can moderate the influence of negative emotion upon visual attention and may help to explain some of the contradictory findings in this research area. When considered independently, increased trait levels of extraversion were associated with improved change detection. Individuals higher in extraversion appear better equipped to regulate negative emotion compared to individuals lower in extraversion, supporting research linking extraversion to affective reactivity and models of psychopathology.

Effects of affective content and motivational context on neural gain functions during naturalistic scene perception

Visual scene processing is modulated by semantic, motivational, and emotional factors, in addition to physical scene statistics. An open question is to what extent those factors affect low-level visual processing. One index of low-level visual processing is the contrast response function (CRF), representing the change in neural or psychophysical gain with increasing stimulus contrast. Here we aimed to (a) establish the use of an electrophysiological technique for assessing CRFs with complex emotional scenes and (b) examine the effects of motivational context and emotional content on CRFs elicited by naturalistic stimuli, including faces and complex scenes (humans, animals). Motivational context varied by expectancy of threat (a noxious noise) versus safety. CRFs were measured in 18 participants by means of sweep steady-state visual evoked potentials. Results showed a facilitation in visuocortical sensitivity (contrast gain) under threat, compared with safe conditions, across all stimulus categories. Facial stimuli prompted heightened neural response gain, compared with scenes. Within the scenes, response gain was smaller for scenes high in emotional arousal, compared with low-arousing scenes, consistent with interference effects of emotional content. These findings support the notion that motivational context alters the contrast sensitivity of cortical tissue, differing from changes in response gain (activation) when visual cues themselves carry motivational/affective relevance.

Use of cognitive bias as a welfare tool in poultry

In human psychology, the link between cognition and emotions is broadly accepted. However, the idea of using the interaction between cognition and emotions as a tool for a better understanding of animal emotions or for welfare assessment is relatively new. The first avian species used in cognitive bias tests was the European starling followed by the domestic chicken and other species. The most frequently used paradigm is the affect-induced judgment bias. There are many variations of the judgment bias tests in birds. The test itself is preceded by discrimination training. Discrimination tasks vary from visual cue discrimination, discrimination of time intervals to spatial location discrimination. During the discrimination training, birds flip or do not flip the lids of the food dishes, and their latency to approach the cues in a straight alley maze, in a two-choice arena, or different locations in spatial judgment task arena are measured. Alternately, the birds fulfill operant tasks in a Skinner box. Before or after the discrimination training phase, birds are subjected to manipulations that are hypothesized to induce positive or negative emotional states. In the last stage, birds are subjected to judgment bias tests. The assumption is that animals in a negative affective state would more likely respond to ambiguous cues, as if they predict the negative event, than animals in a more positive state. However, the results of some avian studies are inconsistent, particularly those studying the effect of environmental enrichment. In starlings, each of the three studies has supplied conflicting results. In poultry, none of the four studies demonstrated a positive effect of environmental enrichment on emotional states. Only the study using unpredictable stressors in combination with environmental complexity showed that animals kept in a more complex environment are more optimistic. Manipulation of the social environment seems to be more effective in judgment bias induction. Conflicting results could be attributable to the design of the tests, the manner of affect induction, or the data analysis. Further optimization and validation of avian cognitive bias tests could help to avoid problems such as the loss of ambiguity. New methods of attention and memory bias testing are promising. However, regardless of the abovementioned complications, a cognitive bias paradigm is a valuable tool, which can help us better understand avian emotions and assess poultry welfare.

Altered Resting-State Functional Connectivity of Multiple Networks and Disrupted Correlation With Executive Function in Major Depressive Disorder

Background: Major depressive disorder (MDD) is one of the most common and costly psychiatric disorders. In addition to significant changes in mood, MDD patients face an increased risk of developing cognitive dysfunction. It is important to gain an improved understanding of cognitive impairments and find a biomarker for cognitive impairment diagnosis in MDD.

Methods: One hundred MDD patients and 100 normal controls (NCs) completed resting-state fMRI (rs-fMRI) scan, in which 34 MDD patients and 34 NCs had scores in multiple cognitive domains (executive function, verbal fluency, and processing speed). Twenty-seven regions of interest from the default mode network (DMN), central executive network (CEN), salience network (SN), and limbic system (LS) were selected as seeds for functional connectivity (FC) analyses with the voxels in the whole brain. Finally, partial correlations were conducted for cognitive domain scores and FCs with significant differences between the MDD and NC groups.

Results: Significant FC differences between groups were identified among the seeds and clusters in the DMN, CEN, LS, visual network, somatomotor network, ventral attention network, and dorsal attention network. In the MDD patients, the magnitude of the Stroop interference effect was positively correlated with the illness duration, and the illness duration was negatively correlated with the FC between the right ventral hippocampal gyrus and the left inferior frontal gyrus. However, the correlation between the Stroop interference effect and the FC of the right anterior prefrontal cortex with the left cerebellum_4_5 was disrupted in these patients.

Conclusions: The MDD patients have altered FCs among multiple brain networks and a disrupted correlation between the FC of prefrontal cortex and executive function. The disrupted correlation could present before the symptoms develop and may be the core process in the development of executive function impairment.

Personality, Stress, and Intuition: Emotion Regulation Abilities Moderate the Effect of Stress-Dependent Cortisol Increase on Coherence Judgments

Objective

Findings on the relationship between hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenocortical (HPA) activity and cognitive performance are inconsistent. We investigated whether personality in terms of emotion regulation abilities (ERA) moderates the relationship between stress-contingent HPA activity and accuracy of intuitive coherence judgments.

Method

ERA and cortisol responses to social-evaluative stress as induced by a variant of the Trier Social Stress Test were measured in N = 49 participants (32 female, aged 18 to 33 years, M = 22.48, SD = 3.33). Subsequently, in a Remote Associates Task they provided intuitive judgments on whether word triples, primed by either stress-reminding or neutral words, are coherent or not.

Results

Under relative cortisol increase participants low in ERA showed reduced performance whereas individuals high in ERA showed increased performance. By contrast, under conditions of low cortisol change, individuals low in ERA outperformed those high in ERA.

Conclusion

Personality can moderate the link between stress and cognition such as accurate intuition. This can happen to a degree that existing effects may not be become apparent in the main effect (i.e. without considering personality), which highlights the necessity to consider personality in stress research, ERA in particular. We discuss the findings with respect to individual differences in neurobehavioral mechanisms potentially underlying ERA and corresponding interactions with cognitive processing.

Integration of spatio-temporal dynamics in emotion-cognition interactions: A simultaneous fMRI-ERP investigation using the emotional oddball task

Although a large corpus of evidence has identified brain regions and networks involved in emotion-cognition interactions, it remains unclear how spatial and temporal dynamics of the mechanisms by which emotion interfaces with cognition are integrated. Capitalizing on multi-modal brain imaging approaches, we used simultaneous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and event-related potential (ERP) recordings, to investigate the link between spatial and temporal aspects of processing in an emotional oddball task, and in relation to personality measures reflecting basic affective responses and emotion control. First, fMRI captured expected dorso-ventral dissociations, with greater response to targets in regions of dorsal brain networks (e.g., dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) and to emotional distracters in regions of ventral networks (e.g., ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, vlPFC). Also, ERP responses to targets were associated with a prominent P300, and responses to distracters with the late positive potential (LPP). Second, providing evidence for spatio-temporal integration of brain signals, ERP-informed fMRI analyses showed a link between LPP amplitude at parietal electrodes and the fMRI signal in the vlPFC, to emotional distraction. Third, regarding the link to personality measures, increased emotional arousability and attentional impulsiveness was associated with greater LPP differences between negative distracters and targets and enhanced response to negative distracters in the amygdala, respectively. Furthermore, we identified opposing relations between responses to emotional distraction and individual scores for cognitive reappraisal and self-control impulsiveness in posterior vlPFC. This suggests a greater engagement of this region in participants with reduced tendencies to employ reappraisal as a coping strategy and those with reduced ability to control impulsive responses during emotional distraction. Together, supporting the feasibility of integrating multi-dimensional approaches to clarify neural mechanisms of emotion-cognition interactions, these results point to convergence and complementarity between measures that differentially capture spatio-temporal dynamics of brain activity, and their associations with measures of individual differences in affective responses and control.

A comparison of denoising pipelines in high temporal resolution task-based functional magnetic resonance imaging data

It has been known for decades that head motion/other artifacts affect the blood oxygen level-dependent signal. Recent recommendations predominantly focus on denoising resting state data, which may not apply to task data due to the different statistical relationships that exist between signal and noise sources. Several blind-source denoising strategies (FIX and AROMA) and more standard motion parameter (MP) regression (0, 12, or 24 parameters) analyses were therefore compared across four sets of event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (erfMRI) and block-design (bdfMRI) datasets collected with multiband 32- (repetition time [TR] = 460 ms) or older 12-channel (TR = 2,000 ms) head coils. The amount of motion varied across coil designs and task types. Quality control plots indicated small to moderate relationships between head motion estimates and percent signal change in both signal and noise regions. Blind-source denoising strategies eliminated signal as well as noise relative to MP24 regression; however, the undesired effects on signal depended both on algorithm (FIX > AROMA) and design (bdfMRI > erfMRI). Moreover, in contrast to previous results, there were minimal differences between MP12/24 and MP0 pipelines in both erfMRI and bdfMRI designs. MP12/24 pipelines were detrimental for a task with both longer block length (30 ± 5 s) and higher correlations between head MPs and design matrix. In summary, current results suggest that there does not appear to be a single denoising approach that is appropriate for all fMRI designs. However, even nonaggressive blind-source denoising approaches appear to remove signal as well as noise from task-related data at individual subject and group levels.

Functional connections between activated and deactivated brain regions mediate emotional interference during externally directed cognition

Recent evidence shows that task-deactivations are functionally relevant for cognitive performance. Indeed, higher cognitive engagement has been associated with higher suppression of activity in task-deactivated brain regions - usually ascribed to the Default Mode Network (DMN). Moreover, a negative correlation between these regions and areas actively engaged by the task is associated with better performance. DMN regions show positive modulation during autobiographical, social, and emotional tasks. However, it is not clear how processing of emotional stimuli affects the interplay between the DMN and executive brain regions. We studied this interplay in an fMRI experiment using emotional negative stimuli as distractors. Activity modulations induced by the emotional interference of negative stimuli were found in frontal, parietal, and visual areas, and were associated with modulations of functional connectivity between these task-activated areas and DMN regions. A worse performance was predicted both by lower activity in the superior parietal cortex and higher connectivity between visual areas and frontal DMN regions. Connectivity between right inferior frontal gyrus and several DMN regions in the left hemisphere was related to the behavioral performance. This relation was weaker in the negative than in the neutral condition, likely suggesting less functional inhibitions of DMN regions during emotional processing. These results show that both executive and DMN regions are crucial for the emotional interference process and suggest that DMN connections are related to the interplay between externally-directed and internally-focused processes. Among DMN regions, superior frontal gyrus may be a key node in regulating the interference triggered by emotional stimuli.

Guilt leads to enhanced facing-the-viewer bias

As an important moral emotion, guilt plays a critical role in social interaction. It has been found that people tended to exhibit prosocial behavior under circumstances of guilt. However, all extant studies have predominantly focused on the influence of guilt on macro-level behavior. So far, no study has investigated whether guilt affects people’s micro-level perception. The current study closes this gap by examining whether guilt affects one’s inclination to perceive approaching motion. We achieved this aim by probing a facing-the-viewer bias (FTV bias). Specifically, when an ambiguous walking biological motion display is presented to participants via the point-light display technique, participants tend to perceive a walking agent approaching them. We hypothesized that guilt modulated FTV bias. To test this hypothesis, we adopted a two-person situation induction task to induce guilt, whereby participants were induced to feel that because of their poor task performance, their partner did not receive a satisfactory payment. We found that when participants were told that the perceived biological motion was motion-captured from their partner, the FTV bias was significantly increased for guilty participants relative to neutral participants. However, when participants were informed that the perceived biological motion was from a third neutral agent, the FTV bias was not modulated by guilt. These results suggest that guilt influences one’s inclination to perceive approaching motion, but this effect is constrained to the person towards whom guilt is directed.

MicroRNA132 associated multimodal neuroimaging patterns in unmedicated major depressive disorder

There is compelling evidence that epigenetic factors contribute to the manifestation of depression, in which microRNA132 (miR-132) is suggested to play a pivotal role in the pathogenesis and neuronal mechanisms underlying the symptoms of depression. Additionally, several depression-associated genes [MECP2, ARHGAP32 (p250GAP), CREB, and period genes] were experimentally validated as miR-132 targets. However, most studies regarding miR-132 in major depressive disorder are based on post-mortem, animal models or genetic comparisons. This work will be the first attempt to investigate how miR-132 dysregulation may impact covariation of multimodal brain imaging data in 81 unmedicated major depressive patients and 123 demographically-matched healthy controls, as well as in a medication-naïve subset of major depressive patients. MiR-132 values in blood (patients > controls) was used as a prior reference to guide fusion of three MRI features: fractional amplitude of low frequency fluctuations, grey matter volume, and fractional anisotropy. The multimodal components correlated with miR-132 also show significant group difference in loadings. Results indicate that (i) higher miR-132 levels in major depressive disorder are associated with both lower fractional amplitude of low frequency fluctuations and lower grey matter volume in fronto-limbic network; and (ii) the identified brain regions linked with increased miR-132 levels were also associated with poorer cognitive performance in attention and executive function. Using a data-driven, supervised-learning method, we determined that miR-132 dysregulation in major depressive disorder is associated with multi-facets of brain function and structure in fronto-limbic network (the key network for emotional regulation and memory), which deepens our understanding of how miR-132 dysregulation in major depressive disorders contribute to the loss of specific brain areas and is linked to relevant cognitive impairments.

Emotional prosody effects on verbal memory in older and younger adults

Prosody, or the way things are said, can modify the meaning of utterances making qualitatively different affective prosodies useful for understanding how auditory affective information is processed and remembered. In this study, we collected behavioral data from 225 younger (M age = 20.8 years, SD = 2.5 years; 119 males) and 225 older adults (M age = 71.6 years, SD = 6.5 years; 119 males) in order to examine age differences in emotional prosody effects on verbal memory. Participants were randomly divided into three subgroups according to different prosody listening conditions (positive, negative, and neutral) and prosody effects on a yes-no recognition memory task were investigated. The results showed how older adults who listened to the story read with a neutral prosody remembered more words than those who listened to the same story with a positive or negative prosody. Younger adults showed no valence effects. Our findings highlighted an age and affective prosody interaction that affects remembering in older adults alone.

Neural correlates of distraction in borderline personality disorder before and after dialectical behavior therapy

Neural underpinnings of emotion dysregulation in borderline personality disorder (BPD) are characterized by limbic hyperactivity and disturbed prefrontal activity. It is unknown whether neural correlates of emotion regulation change after a psychotherapy which has the goal to improve emotion dysregulation in BPD, such as dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT). We investigated distraction as a main emotion regulation strategy before and after DBT in female patients with BPD. Thirty-one BPD patients were instructed to either passively view or memorize letters before being confronted with negative or neutral pictures in a distraction task during functional magnetic resonance imaging. This paradigm was applied before and after a 12-week residential DBT-based treatment program. We compared the DBT group to 15 BPD control patients, who continued their usual, non-DBT-based treatment or did not have any treatment, and 22 healthy participants. Behaviorally, BPD groups and healthy participants did not differ significantly with respect to alterations over time. On the neural level, BPD patients who received DBT-based treatment showed an activity decrease in the right inferior parietal lobe/supramarginal gyrus during distraction from negative rather than neutral stimuli when compared to both control groups. This decrease was correlated with improvement in self-reported borderline symptom severity. DBT responders exhibited decreased right perigenual anterior cingulate activity when viewing negative (rather than neutral) pictures. In conclusion, our findings reveal changes in neural activity associated with distraction during emotion processing after DBT in patients with BPD. These changes point to lower emotional susceptibility during distraction after BPD symptom improvement.

Arousal Rather than Basic Emotions Influence Long-Term Recognition Memory in Humans

Emotion can influence various cognitive processes, however its impact on memory has been traditionally studied over relatively short retention periods and in line with dimensional models of affect. The present study aimed to investigate emotional effects on long-term recognition memory according to a combined framework of affective dimensions and basic emotions. Images selected from the Nencki Affective Picture System were rated on the scale of affective dimensions and basic emotions. After 6 months, subjects took part in a surprise recognition test during an fMRI session. The more negative the pictures the better they were remembered, but also the more false recognitions they provoked. Similar effects were found for the arousal dimension. Recognition success was greater for pictures with lower intensity of happiness and with higher intensity of surprise, sadness, fear, and disgust. Consecutive fMRI analyses showed a significant activation for remembered (recognized) vs. forgotten (not recognized) images in anterior cingulate and bilateral anterior insula as well as in bilateral caudate nuclei and right thalamus. Further, arousal was found to be the only subjective rating significantly modulating brain activation. Higher subjective arousal evoked higher activation associated with memory recognition in the right caudate and the left cingulate gyrus. Notably, no significant modulation was observed for other subjective ratings, including basic emotion intensities. These results emphasize the crucial role of arousal for long-term recognition memory and support the hypothesis that the memorized material, over time, becomes stored in a distributed cortical network including the core salience network and basal ganglia.

The Effect of Task-Irrelevant Fearful-Face Distractor on Working Memory Processing in Mild Cognitive Impairment versus Healthy Controls: An Exploratory fMRI Study in Female Participants

In mild cognitive impairment (MCI), a risk state for Alzheimer's disease, patients have objective cognitive deficits with relatively preserved functioning. fMRI studies have identified anomalies during working memory (WM) processing in individuals with MCI. The effect of task-irrelevant emotional face distractor on WM processing in MCI remains unclear. We aim to explore the impact of fearful-face task-irrelevant distractor on WM processing in MCI using fMRI. Hypothesis. Compared to healthy controls (HC), MCI patients will show significantly higher BOLD signal in a priori identified regions of interest (ROIs) during a WM task with a task-irrelevant emotional face distractor. Methods. 9 right-handed female participants with MCI and 12 matched HC performed a WM task with standardized task-irrelevant fearful versus neutral face distractors randomized and counterbalanced across WM trials. MRI images were acquired during the WM task and BOLD signal was analyzed using statistical parametric mapping (SPM) to identify signal patterns during the task response phase. Results. Task-irrelevant fearful-face distractor resulted in higher activation in the amygdala, anterior cingulate, and frontal areas, in MCI participants compared to HC. Conclusions. This exploratory study suggests altered WM processing as a result of fearful-face distractor in MCI.

Attention to emotional stimuli in borderline personality disorder - a review of the influence of dissociation, self-reference, and psychotherapeutic interventions

Interactions between attention and processing of emotional stimuli shed light on both sensitivity to emotional stimuli as well as emotion dysregulation. Both of the latter processes have been proposed as central characteristics of altered emotion processing in those with borderline personality disorder (BPD). This review first summarizes the conflicting behavioural, psychophysiological and neuroimaging evidence for the hypothesis that emotional dysregulation should be reflected by higher distractibility through emotional stimuli in those with BPD. Dissociation, self-reference, as well as symptom severity modulated by psychotherapeutic interventions are proposed to help clarify divergent findings. Data suggest an association of dissociation with impaired task continuation during the presentation of interfering emotional and neutral stimuli, as well as high recruitment of neuronal attention networks together with a blunted emotional response. Considering self-reference, evidence suggests that negative rather than positive information may be more self-relevant to those with BPD. This may be due to a negative self-concept and self-evaluation. Social or trauma-relevant information attracts more attention from individuals with BPD and thus suggests higher self-relevance. After psychotherapeutic interventions, initial evidence may indicate normalization of the way attention and emotional stimuli interact in BPD. When studying attention-emotion interactions in BPD, methodological heterogeneities regarding sample, task, and stimulus characteristics need to be considered. When doing so, dissociation, self-reference, and psychotherapeutic interventions offer promising targets for future studies on attention-emotion interactions in those with BPD. This could promote a deeper insight into the affected individuals' struggle with emotions.

Measuring embeddedness: Hierarchical scale-dependent information exchange efficiency of the human brain connectome

This article presents a novel approach for understanding information exchange efficiency and its decay across hierarchies of modularity, from local to global, of the structural human brain connectome. Magnetic resonance imaging techniques have allowed us to study the human brain connectivity as a graph, which can then be analyzed using a graph-theoretical approach. Collectively termed brain connectomics, these sophisticated mathematical techniques have revealed that the brain connectome, like many networks, is highly modular and brain regions can thus be organized into communities or modules. Here, using tractography-informed structural connectomes from 46 normal healthy human subjects, we constructed the hierarchical modularity of the structural connectome using bifurcating dendrograms. Moving from fine to coarse (i.e., local to global) up the connectome's hierarchy, we computed the rate of decay of a new metric that hierarchically preferentially weighs the information exchange between two nodes in the same module. By computing "embeddedness"-the ratio between nodal efficiency and this decay rate, one could thus probe the relative scale-invariant information exchange efficiency of the human brain. Results suggest that regions that exhibit high embeddedness are those that comprise the limbic system, the default mode network, and the subcortical nuclei. This supports the presence of near-decomposability overall yet relative embeddedness in select areas of the brain. The areas we identified as highly embedded are varied in function but are arguably linked in the evolutionary role they play in memory, emotion and behavior.

From specificity to sensitivity: affective states modulate visual working memory for emotional expressive faces

Previous findings suggest that visual working memory (VWM) preferentially remembers angry looking faces. However, the meaning of facial actions is construed in relation to context. To date, there are no studies investigating the role of perceiver-based context when processing emotional cues in VWM. To explore the influence of affective context on VWM for faces, we conducted two experiments using both a VWM task for emotionally expressive faces and a mood induction procedure. Affective context was manipulated by unpleasant (Experiment 1) and pleasant (Experiment 2) IAPS pictures in order to induce an affect high in motivational intensity (defensive or appetitive, respectively) compared to a low arousal control condition. Results indicated specifically increased sensitivity of VWM for angry looking faces in the neutral condition. Enhanced VWM for angry faces was prevented by inducing affects of high motivational intensity. In both experiments, affective states led to a switch from specific enhancement of angry expressions in VWM to an equally sensitive representation of all emotional expressions. Our findings demonstrate that emotional expressions are of different behavioral relevance for the receiver depending on the affective context, supporting a functional organization of VWM along with flexible resource allocation. In VWM, stimulus processing adjusts to situational requirements and transitions from a specifically prioritizing default mode in predictable environments to a sensitive, hypervigilant mode in exposure to emotional events.