Emotional valence of words modulates the subliminal repetition priming effect in the left fusiform gyrus: an event-related fMRI study

Enhancing Enneagram Therapy with Contemporary Research on the Conscious and Unconscious Mind

The Enneagram is a personality framework with ancient philosophical underpinnings and cross cultural roots. It outlines nine different pathways of growth for nine different personalities. In recent years, it has started to gain traction in the peer reviewed level of research. Since the Enneagram has a conceptual versatility in addressing various levels and dimensions of the human psyche, it can both contribute and benefit from cross pollinating its insights with the latest scientific research on how the human mind works. One area of research that has the potential for this type of symbiotic partnership with the Enneagram is the study of the interaction between the conscious and unconscious mind. There is rich potential for the multi-leveled integration of contemporary findings on how the conscious and unconscious mind mutually interact with one another along with insights into personality structures from the Enneagram. These integrative insights have clinical implications and create possible directions for future research.

The Role of the Valence, Arousing Properties and Subjective Significance of Subliminally Presented Words in Affective Priming

In the verbal affective priming paradigm, the properties of a subliminally presented stimulus alter the interpretation of neutral target stimulus. In the experiment reported here, we tested the role of four factors (valence, origin, arousing properties and subjective significance) that determine the emotional reactions to words in affective priming. Subliminal masked presentation of words preceded the explicit task, which was assessment of neutral Quick Response code (QR code) stimuli. The QRs were codes for words representing personality traits. The results showed the effect of assimilation (negative words caused a negative interpretation, positive caused a positive interpretation) for words' emotional valence and no effects for origin. Concerning arousal, we found a weak negative trend. In the case of subjective significance, a moderate positive trend was found. These results suggest that affective priming effects are susceptible not only to the valence of priming stimuli but also to activation factors.

The Right Inferior Frontal Gyrus Plays an Important Role in Unconscious Information Processing: Activation Likelihood Estimation Analysis Based on Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Unconsciousness is a kind of brain activity that occurs below the level of consciousness, and the masked priming paradigm is a classic paradigm to study unconscious perceptual processing. With the deepening of unconscious perception research, different researchers mostly use different experimental materials and different masked priming paradigms in a single experiment but not for the comprehensive analysis of the unconscious information processing mechanism itself. Thus, the purpose of this study is to conduct a comprehensive analysis through a cross-experimental paradigm, cross-experimental materials, and cross-experimental purposes. We used activation likelihood estimation to test functional magnetic resonance imaging studies, involving 361 subjects, 124 foci in eight studies representing direct comparison of unconscious processing with baseline, and 115 foci in 10 studies representing direct comparison of unconscious priming effects. In the comparison of unconscious processing and baseline, clusters formed in the left superior parietal gyrus, the right insular gyrus, and the right inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) triangular part after correcting for familywise error (FWE). In the comparison of priming effects, clusters formed in only the right IFG triangular part after correcting for FWE. Here, we found that ventral and dorsal pathways jointly regulate unconscious perceptual processes, but only the ventral pathway is involved in the regulation of unconscious priming effects. The IFG triangular part is involved in the regulation of unconscious perceptual processing and unconscious priming effects and may be an important brain area in unconscious information processing. These preliminary data provide conditions for further study of the neural correlation of unconscious information processing.

Benefits of Implicit Regulation of Instructed Fear: Evidence From Neuroimaging and Functional Connectivity

Instructed fear, which denotes fearful emotions learned from others' verbal instructions, is an important form of fear acquisition in humans. Maladaptive instructed fear produces detrimental effects on health, but little is known about performing an efficient regulation of instructed fear and its underlying neural substrates. To address this question, 26 subjects performed an instructed fear task where emotional experiences and functional neuroimages were recorded during watching, explicit regulation (calmness imagination), and implicit regulation (calmness priming) conditions. Results indicated that implicit regulation decreased activity in the left amygdala and left insula for instructed fear; however, these effects were absent in explicit regulation. The implementation of implicit regulation did not increase activity in the frontoparietal control regions, while explicit regulation increased dorsolateral prefrontal cortex activity. Furthermore, implicit regulation increased functional connectivity between the right amygdala and right fusiform gyrus, and decreased functional connectivity between the right medial temporal gyrus and left inferior frontal gyrus, which are key nodes of memory retrieval and cognitive control networks, respectively. These findings suggest a favourable effect of implicit regulation on instructed fear, which is subserved by less involvement of control-related brain mechanisms.

Neural responses to maternal criticism in healthy youth

Parental criticism can have positive and negative effects on children's and adolescents' behavior; yet, it is unclear how youth react to, understand and process parental criticism. We proposed that youth would engage three sets of neural processes in response to parental criticism including the following: (i) activating emotional reactions, (ii) regulating those reactions and (iii) social cognitive processing (e.g. understanding the parent's mental state). To examine neural processes associated with both emotional and social processing of parental criticism in personally relevant and ecologically valid social contexts, typically developing youth were scanned while they listened to their mother providing critical, praising and neutral statements. In response to maternal criticism, youth showed increased brain activity in affective networks (e.g. subcortical-limbic regions including lentiform nucleus and posterior insula), but decreased activity in cognitive control networks (e.g. dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and caudal anterior cingulate cortex) and social cognitive networks (e.g. temporoparietal junction and posterior cingulate cortex/precuneus). These results suggest that youth may respond to maternal criticism with increased emotional reactivity but decreased cognitive control and social cognitive processing. A better understanding of children's responses to parental criticism may provide insights into the ways that parental feedback can be modified to be more helpful to behavior and development in youth.

Brain activation to briefly presented emotional words: effects of stimulus awareness

It is unknown to what extent briefly presented emotional words can be processed without awareness. By means of two independent functional magnetic resonance imaging studies, using either a block or an event-related design, we investigated brain activation to very briefly presented threat related and neutral words during two backward masking conditions (with and without gap between target and mask). In both experiments, emotional words were perceived during the supraliminal "with gap" condition, but they were not recognized during the subliminal "without gap" condition, as indicated by signal detection theory analysis. Imaging results of both experiments showed increased activation of the amygdala, the medial prefrontal cortex and language-processing cortical areas to negative versus neutral words during supraliminal but not subliminal conditions. These results suggest that even very briefly presented emotional words are capable of triggering increased cortical and subcortical processing; however, only when awareness of these stimuli is given.

Reduced repetition suppression in the occipital visual cortex during repeated negative Chinese personality-trait word processing

Reduced neural activation have been consistently observed during repeated items processing, a phenomenon termed repetition suppression. The present study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate whether and how stimuli of emotional valence affects repetition suppression by adopting Chinese personality-trait words as materials. Seventeen participants were required to read the negative and neutral Chinese personality-trait words silently. And then they were presented with repeated and novel items during scanning. Results showed significant repetition suppression in the inferior occipital gyrus only for neutral personality-trait words, whereas similar repetition suppression in the left inferior temporal gyrus and left middle temporal gyrus was revealed for both the word types. These results indicated common and distinct neural substrates during processing Chinese repeated negative and neutral personality-trait words.

An fMRI-study on semantic priming of panic-related information in depression without comorbid anxiety

Depression often involves anxiety symptoms and shows a strong comorbidity with panic disorder. However, the neural basis is unclear. The aim of the current study was to use semantic priming to investigate the neural correlates of panic and anxiety-related information processing in depression. In a lexical decision task, panic/agoraphobia-disorder-related and neutral word-pairs were presented during functional magnetic resonance imaging. Participants comprised 19 patients with major depression but without comorbid anxiety and 19 demographically matched controls. On a behavioral level, comparable significant priming effects were found for the neutral condition, while only patients showed a significant inhibition effect (slower reaction time for panic-related stimuli) for the panic condition. On a neural level, significant group differences emerged in left fronto-parietal (enhanced activation for patients) and left temporo-occipital regions (reduced activation for patients). The results showed that depressed patients recruit not only areas related to the interaction of emotion and semantic processing but also regions that are related to fear circuitry to process panic-related information. Hence, in the context of depression, there seems to be a pathological processing of panic-related information that could play an important role during the disorder and should be considered.

Emotion regulation, attention to emotion, and the ventral attentional network

Accounts of the effect of emotional information on behavioral response and current models of emotion regulation are based on two opposed but interacting processes: automatic bottom-up processes (triggered by emotionally arousing stimuli) and top-down control processes (mapped to prefrontal cortical areas). Data on the existence of a third attentional network operating without recourse to limited-capacity processes but influencing response raise the issue of how it is integrated in emotion regulation. We summarize here data from attention to emotion, voluntary emotion regulation, and on the origin of biases against negative content suggesting that the ventral network is modulated by exposure to emotional stimuli when the task does not constrain the handling of emotional content. In the parietal lobes, preferential activation of ventral areas associated with “bottom-up” attention by ventral network theorists is strongest in studies of cognitive reappraisal. In conditions when no explicit instruction is given to change one's response to emotional stimuli, control of emotionally arousing stimuli is observed without concomitant activation of the dorsal attentional network, replaced by a shift of activation toward ventral areas. In contrast, in studies where emotional stimuli are placed in the role of distracter, the observed deactivation of these ventral semantic association areas is consistent with the existence of proactive control on the role emotional representations are allowed to take in generating response. It is here argued that attentional orienting mechanisms located in the ventral network constitute an intermediate kind of process, with features only partially in common with effortful and automatic processes, which plays an important role in handling emotion by conveying the influence of semantic networks, with which the ventral network is co-localized. Current neuroimaging work in emotion regulation has neglected this system by focusing on a bottom-up/top-down dichotomy of attentional control.

Neural oscillatory evidence of the difference between emotional and conceptual processing in language comprehension

Despite ample study of conceptual and emotional information processing in language, it remains unclear whether these two types of processing rely on different neural mechanisms. In the present study, the processing of semantic and emotional information was directly compared in 24 participants undergoing electroencephalograms (EEGs). Participants read 120 scenarios ending in three ways (affectively and semantically congruent, affectively incongruent, and semantically incongruent) and were asked to judge the appropriateness of the last word within the context. The data were analyzed using both event-related potentials (ERPs) and event-related spectral perturbation (ERSP) analysis. In addition to the similar N400 effects evoked by both emotional and conceptual incongruity, conceptual incongruity elicited a larger theta power increase, while emotional incongruity induced a gamma band power increase, compared with the congruent condition. The different oscillatory patterns suggest that emotional and conceptual information in language processing may rely on different neural mechanisms, even though both types of processing produced a similar N400 effect.

Category-selective attention modulates unconscious processes in the middle occipital gyrus

Many studies have revealed the top-down modulation (spatial attention, attentional load, etc.) on unconscious processing. However, there is little research about how category-selective attention could modulate the unconscious processing. In the present study, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the results showed that category-selective attention modulated unconscious face/tool processing in the middle occipital gyrus (MOG). Interestingly, MOG effects were of opposed direction for face and tool processes. During unconscious face processing, activation in MOG decreased under the face-selective attention compared with tool-selective attention. This result was in line with the predictive coding theory. During unconscious tool processing, however, activation in MOG increased under the tool-selective attention compared with face-selective attention. The different effects might be ascribed to an interaction between top-down category-selective processes and bottom-up processes in the partial awareness level as proposed by Kouider, De Gardelle, Sackur, and Dupoux (2010). Specifically, we suppose an "excessive activation" hypothesis.

Exposure to subliminal arousing stimuli induces robust activation in the amygdala, hippocampus, anterior cingulate, insular cortex and primary visual cortex: a systematic meta-analysis of fMRI studies

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) demonstrates that the subliminal presentation of arousing stimuli can activate subcortical brain regions independently of consciousness-generating top-down cortical modulation loops. Delineating these processes may elucidate mechanisms for arousal, aberration in which may underlie some psychiatric conditions. Here we are the first to review and discuss four Activation Likelihood Estimation (ALE) meta-analyses of fMRI studies using subliminal paradigms. We find a maximum of 9 out of 12 studies using subliminal presentation of faces contributing to activation of the amygdala, and also a significantly high number of studies reporting activation in the bilateral anterior cingulate, bilateral insular cortex, hippocampus and primary visual cortex. Subliminal faces are the strongest modality, whereas lexical stimuli are the weakest. Meta-analyses independent of studies using Regions of Interest (ROI) revealed no biasing effect. Core neuronal arousal in the brain, which may be at first independent of conscious processing, potentially involves a network incorporating primary visual areas, somatosensory, implicit memory and conflict monitoring regions. These data could provide candidate brain regions for the study of psychiatric disorders associated with aberrant automatic emotional processing.

The influence of emotional associations on the neural correlates of semantic priming

Emotions influence our everyday life in several ways. With the present study, we wanted to examine the impact of emotional information on neural correlates of semantic priming, a well-established technique to investigate semantic processing. Stimuli were presented with a short SOA of 200 ms as subjects performed a lexical decision task during fMRI measurement. Seven experimental conditions were compared: positive/negative/neutral related, positive/negative/neutral unrelated, nonwords (all words were nouns). Behavioral data revealed a valence specific semantic priming effect (i.e., unrelated > related) only for neutral and positive related word pairs. On a neural level, the comparison of emotional over neutral relations showed activation in left anterior medial frontal cortex, superior frontal gyrus, and posterior cingulate. Interactions for the different relations were located in left anterior part of the medial frontal cortex, cingulate regions, and right hippocampus (positive > neutral + negative) and left posterior part of medial frontal cortex (negative > neutral + positive). The results showed that emotional information have an influence on semantic association processes. While positive and neutral information seem to share a semantic network, negative relations might induce compensatory mechanisms that inhibit the spread of activation between related concepts. The neural correlates highlighted a distributed neural network, primarily involving attention, memory and emotion related processing areas in medial fronto-parietal cortices. The differentiation between anterior (positive) and posterior part (negative) of the medial frontal cortex was linked to the type of affective manipulation with more cognitive demands being involved in the automatic processing of negative information.

Common and segregated neural substrates for automatic conceptual and affective priming as revealed by event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging

The brain activity associated with automatic semantic priming has been extensively studied. Thus far there has been no prior study that directly contrasts the neural mechanisms of semantic and affective priming. The present study employed event-related fMRI to examine the common and distinct neural bases underlying conceptual and affective priming with a lexical decision task. A special type of emotional word, a dual-meaning word containing both conceptual meaning and affective meaning, was adopted as target. Short stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) (50 ms) was used to emphasize automatic processing. Fifteen participants were scanned in the present study. We found that the left middle/superior temporal gyrus was the brain region involved in both automatic conceptual and affective priming effects, suggesting general lexical-semantic processing that share in the two types of priming. The left inferior frontal gyrus and right superior temporal gyrus were found to be the conceptual-specific areas in automatic priming effect, consistent with the role of these areas in more extensive within-category semantic processes. The results also revealed that the left fusiform gyrus and left insula were the affective-specific regions in automatic priming effect, demonstrating the involvement of the left fusiform gyrus in automatic affective priming effect, and clarifying the role of the insula in emotional processing rather than conceptual processing. Despite comparable behavioral effects of automatic conceptual priming and affective priming, the present study revealed a neural dissociation of the two types of priming, as well as the shared neural bases.

Common regions of dorsal anterior cingulate and prefrontal-parietal cortices provide attentional control of distracters varying in emotionality and visibility

Top-down attentional control is necessary to ensure successful task performance in the presence of distracters. Lateral prefrontal cortex, parietal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex have been previously implicated in top-down attentional control. However, it is unclear whether these regions are engaged independent of distracter type or whether, as has been suggested for anterior cingulate cortex, different regions provide attentional control over emotional versus other forms of salient distracter. In the current task, subjects viewed targets that were preceded by distracters that varied in both emotionality and visibility. We found that behaviorally, the presence of preceding distracters significantly interfered with target judgment. At the neural level, increases in the emotional and visual saliency of distracters were both associated with increased activity in proximal regions of prefrontal, parietal and cingulate cortex. Moreover, a conjunction analysis indicated considerable overlap in the regions of prefrontal, parietal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex responding to distracters of increased emotionality and visibility.

Effects of the emotional connotations in words on the frontal areas--a spatially filtered MEG study

The objective of this study was to elucidate how and where emotional connotations in words influenced linguistic processing in the language-related areas. We recorded neuromagnetic signals in nine right-handed and one left-handed healthy volunteers while they silently read emotional and emotionless words written in Japanese kanji characters, and investigated the distribution of the cerebral oscillatory changes using synthetic aperture magnetometry. Event-related desynchronizations (ERDs) in the beta-low gamma bands were observed in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) that were specific to the reading of emotional words in seven of nine right-handers. Beta-low gamma band ERDs were also detected in the left inferior or middle frontal gyrus (IFG or MFG) in nine right-handers regardless of the tasks. The magnitude of the ERDs in the IFG or MFG was significantly greater during emotional-word reading than during emotionless-word reading in nine right-handers. Left-dominant ERDs in the beta and gamma bands were observed in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) when negative emotional words were read (i.e. sadness), while right-dominant ERDs were observed for positive emotional words (i.e. happiness) in seven of nine right-handers (p=0.012, corrected). In one left-hander, the ERD in the ACC and the greater ERD that occurred in the IFG that was specific to emotional-word reading were also observed, but their lateralities in the IFG and PFC were reversed. These results suggest that emotional connotations in words facilitated the ERDs in the frontal language-related areas, and that these facilitations might be modulated by emotional processing in the ACC. Furthermore, negative and positive emotional words may be processed by different mechanisms.

Differential priming effects of color-opponent subliminal stimulation on visual magnetic responses

We investigated the effects of subliminal stimulation on visible stimulation to demonstrate the priority of facial discrimination processing, using a unique, indiscernible, color-opponent subliminal (COS) stimulation. We recorded event-related magnetic cortical fields (ERF) by magnetoencephalography (MEG) after the presentation of a face or flower stimulus with COS conditioning using a face, flower, random pattern, and blank. The COS stimulation enhanced the response to visible stimulation when the figure in the COS stimulation was identical to the target visible stimulus, but more so for the face than for the flower stimulus. The ERF component modulated by the COS stimulation was estimated to be located in the ventral temporal cortex. We speculated that the enhancement was caused by an interaction of the responses after subthreshold stimulation by the COS stimulation and the suprathreshold stimulation after target stimulation, such as in the processing for categorization or discrimination. We also speculated that the face was processed with priority at the level of the ventral temporal cortex during visual processing outside of consciousness.

Semantic Processing Precedes Affect Retrieval: The Neurological Case for Cognitive Primacy in Visual Processing

According to the affective primacy hypothesis, visual stimuli can be evaluated prior to and independent of object identification and semantic analysis (Zajonc, 1980, 2000 ). Our review concludes that the affective primacy hypothesis is, from the available evidence, not likely correct. Although people can react to objects that they cannot consciously identify, such affective reactions are dependent upon prior semantic analysis within the visual cortex. The authors propose that the features of objects must first be integrated, and then the objects themselves must be categorized and identified, all prior to affective analysis. Additionally, the authors offer a preliminary neurological analysis of the mere exposure and affective priming effects that is consistent with the claim that semantic analysis is needed to elicit these effects. In sum, the authors conclude that the brain must know what something is in order to know whether it is good or bad.

To what extent are emotional visual stimuli processed without attention and awareness?

In the past few years, important contributions have been made to the study of emotional visual perception. Researchers have reported responses to emotional stimuli in the human amygdala under some unattended conditions (i.e. conditions in which the focus of attention was diverted away from the stimuli due to task instructions), during visual masking and during binocular suppression. Taken together, these results reveal the relative degree of autonomy of emotional processing. At the same time, however, important limitations to the notion of complete automaticity have been revealed. Effects of task context and attention have been shown, as well as large inter-subject differences in sensitivity to the detection of masked fearful faces (whereby briefly presented, target fearful faces are immediately followed by a neutral face that 'masks' the initial face). A better understanding of the neural basis of emotional perception and how it relates to visual attention and awareness is likely to require further refinement of the concepts of automaticity and awareness.

Influence of bodily harm on neural correlates of semantic and moral decision-making

Moral decision-making is central to everyday social life because the evaluation of the actions of another agent or our own actions made with respect to the norms and values guides our behavior in a community. There is previous evidence that the presence of bodily harm--even if irrelevant for a decision--may affect the decision-making process. While recent neuroimaging studies found a common neural substrate of moral decision-making, the role of bodily harm has not been systematically studied so far. Here we used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate how behavioral and neural correlates of semantic and moral decision-making processes are modulated by the presence of direct bodily harm or violence in the stimuli. Twelve participants made moral and semantic decisions about sentences describing actions of agents that either contained bodily harm or not and that could easily be judged as being good or bad or correct/incorrect, respectively. During moral and semantic decision-making, the presence of bodily harm resulted in faster response times (RT) and weaker activity in the temporal poles relative to trials devoid of bodily harm/violence, indicating a processing advantage and reduced processing depth for violence-related linguistic stimuli. Notably, there was no increase in activity in the amygdala and the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) in response to trials containing bodily harm. These findings might be a correlate of limited generation of the semantic and emotional context in the anterior temporal poles during the evaluation of actions of another agent related to violence that is made with respect to the norms and values guiding our behavior in a community.