Perceptual decision making regarding the emotional nature of a complex scene influences how we interact with the environment. This study uncovers a strategy marked by salience-dependent sampling coupled with unbiased weighting. The findings highlight the uniqueness of emotion processing and shed light on emotion-related psychopathology.

We investigated, for the first time, if transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation (taVNS) modulates gastric interoceptive accuracy and prospective dispositions to eat in different states of stomach fullness. Although taVNS may not directly influence gastric interoceptive accuracy, we provide evidence that taVNS modulates how gastric sensations influence feeding-related cognitions. Together these findings demonstrate the potential of taVNS as a new tool for investigating gastric-brain communication and, eventually, the treatment of gastric-related disorders.

Whether and how various switching contexts dynamically modulate the domain-general cognitive control is still elusive. The present study using a cross-task paradigm explores how distinct switching contexts affect cognitive control. Results show that the forced language-switching context exhibits an adaptive advantage. The brain activity in the forced switching context predicts cognitive processing during the flanker task. Furthermore, it additionally elicits a significant brain-behavior relationship. Our findings support the dynamic adaptation of language control to cognitive control and highlight the importance of switching contexts.

We survey domain experts to provide a snapshot of the state of the field for analyzing resting EEG data in children. Although there was expert agreement in some areas, there was vast heterogeneity in data cleaning and analysis methods more broadly. We discuss the implications and provide recommendations with the hope of increasing reproducibility and replicability in developmental EEG.

How does our brain monitor joint improvisation? Altered auditory feedback during a piano duet revealed two stages of performance monitoring affected differently by improvisation. The early stage indexed by the feedback-related negativity existed for both improvisation and score-playing, but the latter was stronger. The late stage associated with the P3 complex was more comparable and enhanced instead when improvising or playing the score together.

Conventional accelerometer-based additional heart rate focuses solely on concurrent movement intensity to predict heart rate. This study introduces a novel method to correct heart rate not only for ongoing physical activity but also for postural changes, type of physical activity, and past physical activity. This approach enhances the ability to differentiate between the impact of physical and mental demands on heart rate in daily life.

Our findings add to the current literature on mindfulness meditation and body awareness by assessing somatosensory perception combined with an EEG prestimulus alpha investigation in meditators. We found higher interoceptive sensibility in the mediation group and supplement previous evidence by linking prestimulus alpha activity to behavioral performance and finding lower prestimulus alpha activity in meditators, which is potentially lowering the somatosensory decision criterion in the meditation group.

Employing the fast periodic visual stimulation (FPVS) EEG approach, we detected a reliable index of emotional expression change with enhanced processing for happy compared to angry faces in young children (4–6 years). Our findings highlight the potential of this method to detect the processing of expression change implicitly in a short amount of time.

We adopted an implicit approach and participants deduced the disparity by examining the performance data from both themselves and their counterparts. Participants rapidly deduced the task's dynamics from the feedback obtained. The most intense emotional engagement and cognitive control were observed when the competition was evenly matched. Conversely, when participants perceived themselves to be at a disadvantage, their emotional reactions to personal outcomes were attenuated. These findings extend our comprehension of how social comparisons shape behavior and neural processing in competitive contexts.

This study provides a non-invasive, multiparametric model integrating physiological measures of stress reactivity and recovery with cognitive performance and demographic factors, to objectively quantify Major Depressive Disorder severity. Achieving notable accuracy, this approach heralds a significant advancement in personalized diagnosis and follow-up, thereby addressing a critical gap in current mental health practices.

We demonstrated trial-by-trial correlations between tonic and phasic pupil size and its derivative with heart rates, galvanic skin responses, pulse wave amplitude, and respiration rate and amplitude during an emotional face–word Stroop task, highlighting pupil size as an effective “real-time” index for autonomic arousal during emotional conflict and valence processing, arguably mediated by the locus coeruleus–norepinephrine system.

The study shows that motivation affects the choice of emotion regulation strategy between distraction and reappraisal by influencing early attention and cognitive processing, as reflected in frontal P2 and early LPP. These findings provide new support for the motivational dimensional model of emotion-cognition from the perspective of emotion regulation.

A case-by-case approach has recently demonstrated that emotional modulation effects of the early posterior negativity and late positive potential components can be assessed at the level of the individual case. Here, we explored a protocol in which picture categories are represented by a singular image rather than multiple exemplars. Findings show that emotion effects can reliably be observed for singular stimuli and encourage the pursuit of an individualized approach to study the process of affective stimulus evaluation.

The ABM-positive-search training was employed to modify attentional bias in socially anxious individuals. The dot-probe task was used to measure the changes of attentional bias while recording electrical activity in the brain. We found, after training, individuals in the ABM-positive-search group had more obvious changes in attentional bias than those in the placebo control group.

This study extends the literature on smoking and patterns of cardiovascular reactivity and adaptation to recurrent stress. Here, we provide evidence for the negative impact of smoking on blood pressure habituation. Smokers exhibited less systolic blood pressure tolerance to stress. This poorer response profile may be a mechanism that leads to further cardiotoxic effects on health. The findings add to emerging literature by indicating that smoking is related to poorer adjustment across time.

The mechanisms of search preparation during high-load search at working memory capacity are not very well understood. We used electrophysiological markers of attentional selection to show that participants can prepare for three colors simultaneously if they must, for example, because target colors appear randomly. However, if target colors alternate predictably, participants make use of strategic opportunities to reduce working memory load and only activate the one color template that is directly relevant for the upcoming search episode.

This study investigates the neural mechanisms underlying imagery rescripting and demonstrates that it effectively decreases the late positive potential (LPP) amplitude after 2000 ms and reduces the LPP response upon re-exposure to rescripted pictures. Additionally, we highlight the moderating role of individual differences in imagery tendency on rescripting effects. These findings deepen our understanding of how imagery content can influence emotion.

This is the first attempt to investigate the age-associated pairwise topological differences in modular structures extracted from different time windows within one individual. Our research provides further evidence that dedifferentiation and compensation are the outcomes of functional brain interactions.

The multiple-choice format of the Concealed Information Test (CIT) poses serious restrictions on the information that can be detected. We introduce a new variant of the CIT with a continuously moving stimulus that can differentiate between groups of informed and uninformed individuals and help find a location. This CIT may contribute to improving information gathering by investigative authorities, including the location of explosives, a planned ambush, or where hostages are being held.

Small animal phobia (SAP) is under-researched, with previous studies using limited, unbalanced samples and univariate analyses. This study employs for the first time a machine learning method to classify 32 SAP individuals based on structural MRI versus 90 matched controls. Key brain structures included frontal and temporal regions, as well as the amygdala and thalamus. In further analyses we showed that The default mode and the affective networks were among the most predictive networks.

Our results indicate that initial saccadic timing is predicted by the P1 and N1 responses to the search display onset, reflecting the role that both the modulation and selection of visual input have in determining saccade execution. We believe that these findings have an important role in helping to shape the growing body of literature surrounding models of eye movement behavior by finding neurophysiological evidence that supports roles for both information accumulation and decision processes in determining the speed of the impending saccadic decision.

We utilized an hidden Markov model approach to estimate rather than assume the presence of intraindividual variability in distinct latent acute parasympathetic nervous system states in response to a race-related stress task, finding that the majority of responses were characterized as blunted. Frequency of prior exposure to racial discrimination did not impact these states. Blunted reactivity could be screened for in Black young adults as an important form of physiological dysregulation.

 The effects of transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation (taVNS) for 30 min were detected in rats with in vivo microPET. Acute taVNS reduces in vivo [¹¹C]UCB-J binding, a measure of presynaptic density. Acute taVNS does not modulate in vivo glucose metabolism measured by [¹⁸F]FDG uptake. Modulation of presynaptic density may promote the therapeutic effects of taVNS.

Our findings identified components, including the LRP, reafference potential (RAP), and motor post-imperative negative variation within the same study. Moreover, we revealed several RAPs occurring at critical response moments, highlighting the role of this sensory processing in response control.

Breathing-based regulation of physiological stress responses offers a potential for anxiety management. A key challenge is to help people learn to do this in the context of an actual stressor. We used a stressful virtual reality (VR) game as a setting in which participants were encouraged to use breath-based regulation of their responses. Participants successfully achieved this, suggesting promise for VR-based gameplay to learn and practice biofeedback-related anxiety management.

For the first time in a crossmodal sensory context, event-related potentials revealed a link between trait anxiety and task-dependent sensory selection. Trait anxiety was related to reduced neural correlates of visual but not tactile distractor gating, and not sensorimotor performance. These findings shed light on modality-specific sensory processing alterations resulting from individual differences in anxiety which did not manifest behaviorally.

The present study examined the effects of taVNS at individualized (set by participant) versus constant (set at 0.5 mA for all participants) current intensity on behavioral and self-report scores associated with vigilance loss and salivary markers of locus coeruleus-norepinephrine activity. Although no positive effects of taVNS in mitigating the vigilance decrement were observed, we highlight the need to further investigate the effects of taVNS at different stimulation parameters on arousal states.

This article presents crucial insights into deviations from rational decision-making paradigms by replicating and extending Hewig et al.'s (2011) seminal study. While reaffirming key findings, our work unveils novel psychophysiological nuances, advancing understanding of economic game decision-making, emphasizing its non-rational nature and the role of cognitive control.

The first ERP report on the neural mechanisms of how choice and deliberation promote memory. According to the LPC old/new effect, value encoding was a potential mechanism for chosen items in a certain decision. However, in terms of the FN400 old/new effect, the memory advantage of chosen items was weakened by deliberation in uncertain decisions. These results suggest that decision-making can promote item memory through two independent processes: value encoding and elaboration encoding.

Transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation (taVNS) modulates cortical excitability in the primary motor cortex (M1) contralateral to the stimulated ear in healthy middle-aged and older adults. The likely underlying mechanisms are an increase in GABA_Aergic inhibition and a decrease in glutamatergic activity that mediates I-wave generation. The duration of taVNS seems to be important, as effects were observed after 60 min of stimulation but not after 30 min.

This registered replication report supported the convergent validity of ERN recorded during flanker, Go/no-go, and Stroop tasks. Convergent validity of ΔERN across tasks was not replicated, and ERN did not show divergent validity from N2. ERN and ΔERN were unrelated to internalizing/externalizing symptoms. These findings underscore the importance of considering the psychometric validity of ERPs as it provides a foundation for interpreting and comparing ERPs across different tasks and studies.