Everyday sounds can elicit a range of emotional and physiological responses. For individuals with misophonia, some sounds can produce strong feelings of disgust, annoyance, and anger, often accompanied by increased perspiration and heart rate. Presently, methods of diagnosing misophonia rely on clinical interviews and self-assessment scales. Our study asks whether pupillometry can be an objective measure that correlates with self-reported misophonia severity. Previous studies show that both unpleasant and pleasant sounds increase pupil diameter (Partala and Surakka, 2003; Nakakoga et al., 2020); however, these have not compared pupil responses to disgust versus other emotions. Given prior indications that the response to visually disgusting stimuli is pupil constriction (Ayzenberg et al., 2018), we asked whether the pupil dilation to auditorily disgusting stimuli would be smaller than for other emotional sounds. In our listening task, we monitored pupil size changes while participants listened to positive and negative emotional sounds from the IADS database (Bradley and Lang, 2007) along with “triggers” known to be especially aversive to misophonics. Participants reported the intensity of their emotional reactions (disgust, anger, annoyance, happiness, sadness, fear) as well as valence and arousal. Misophonic listeners reported greater emotion intensity for emotions associated with triggers (disgust, anger, annoyance) as well as for fear. For all listeners, there was a positive association between changes in pupil diameter and emotion intensity. Overall, misophonics had greater pupil dilation than non-misophonics, but after equating for emotion category of the sounds, misophonic pupil dilation was only larger for trigger sounds (and marginally, disgusting sounds).

Pupil size is a well-established marker of the level of cognitive effort, with greater efforts leading to larger pupils. This is particularly true for pupil size during task performance itself, whereas findings on anticipatory effort triggered by a cue stimulus are less consistent. For example, a recent report by Frömer et al. (2021) found that in a cued Stroop task, behavioural performance and electrophysiological markers of preparatory effort allocation were modulated by cued reward and ‘efficacy’ (the degree to which rewards depended on good performance), but pupil size did not show a comparable pattern. Here, we conceptually replicated this study in a pupillometry study. In line with previous findings, we found no modulation of absolute pupil size in the cue-to-target interval. Instead, we observed a significant difference in the rate of pupil dilation in anticipation of the target: Pupils dilated more rapidly for high-reward trials in which rewards depended on good performance. This was followed by a significant difference in absolute pupil size within the first hundreds of milliseconds following Stroop stimulus onset, likely reflecting a lagging effect of anticipatory effort allocation. Finally, the slope of pupil dilation was significantly correlated with behavioural response times, and this association was strongest for the high-reward, high-efficacy trials, further supporting that the rate of anticipatory pupil dilation reflects anticipatory effort. We conclude that pupil size is modulated by anticipatory effort, but in a highly temporally-specific manner, which is best reflected by the rate of dilation in the moments just prior to stimulus onset.

Recently, we found that continuous transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation (taVNS) facilitates the encoding and later recollection of emotionally relevant information, as indicated by enhanced late positive potential (LPP), memory performance, and late ERP Old/New effect. Here, we aimed to conceptually replicate and extend these findings by investigating the effects of different time-dependent taVNS stimulation protocols. In Study 1, an identical paradigm to our previous study was employed with interval stimulation (30-sec on/off). Participants viewed unpleasant and neutral scenes on two consecutive days while receiving taVNS or sham stimulation and completed a recognition test one week later. In line with our previous results, unpleasant images encoded under taVNS, compared to sham stimulation, elicited larger LPP amplitudes and Old/New effects. However, no effects of taVNS on memory performance were found, suggesting that interval stimulation may lower the effects of taVNS on memory. In Study 2, we followed up on these findings by synchronizing the stimulation cycle with image presentation to determine the taVNS effects for images encoded during the on and off cycles. We could replicate the enhancing effects of taVNS on brain potentials (LPP and late Old/New effect) and found that taVNS improved recollection-based memory performance for both unpleasant and neutral images, independently of the stimulation cycle. Overall, our results suggest that taVNS increases electrophysiological correlates of emotional encoding and retrieval in a time-independent manner, substantiating the vagus nerve’s role in emotional processing and memory formation and opening new venues for improving mnemonic processes in both clinical and non-clinical populations.

Non-invasive brain stimulation (NIBS) is an emerging treatment for mental disorders that is painlessness and easy to administer. However, its effectiveness for treating fear extinction requires further elucidation. We searched eight bibliographical databases and identified randomized controlled trials of NIBS interventions for fear extinction in healthy populations. Outcomes were evaluated based on skin conductance response (SCR) under three experimental conditions: threat condition stimulation (CS+), safe condition stimulation (CS−), and their discrimination (CS+ minus CS−). We applied a random-effects model to determine effect sizes (Hedge’s g) post-intervention and assessed article quality using Physiotherapy evidence database (PEDro) scale. Twenty-one studies meeting systematic review criteria were included in this analysis, incorporating 40 independent effect sizes and data from 11 studies (n = 632) in the meta-analysis. Compared with the control group, the intervention group exhibited significant reductions SCRs: CS+ (g = −0.32, 95% confidence interval (CI) [−0.56, −0.07]) and discrimination (g = −0.35; 95% CI [−0.55, −0.15]). Fear extinction was more effective in the 24-hour test than immediately after NIBS. In conclusion, NIBS enhanced fear extinction, and the time interval between stimulus and testing may serve as a moderating variable.

not-yet-known not-yet-known not-yet-known unknown Emotional experiences involve dynamic multi-sensory perception, yet most EEG research uses unimodal stimuli such as photographs. However, a recent study found that realistic emotional videos reliably reduce the amplitude of a steady state visual evoked potential (ssVEP) elicited by a flickering border. It is unknown how the video-ssVEP measure compares to the well-established Late Positive Potential (LPP) that is reliably larger for emotional scenes. To address this question, 45 participants viewed 90 matched pairs of realistic videos and scenes. Replicating the previous study, emotional videos reduced ssVEP amplitude more than neutral videos. At the group level, the video-ssVEP and scene-LPP measures produced similarly large differences per category (pleasant, neutral, unpleasant), and both measures strongly correlated with arousal ratings. However, trial-based Bayesian multilevel models suggest that the group-level results mask important differences. Consistent with previous research, the scene-LPP was sensitive to specific emotional contents (erotica and gore) more than would be predicted by arousal ratings. In contrast, the video-ssVEP did not show this specific sensitivity, and was better explained by individual arousal ratings collected for each stimulus trial. These results suggest that the 2 measures index partially distinct aspects of emotional perception, with the LPP reflecting the discrimination of emotional features, while the ssVEP indexes emotional engagement. Taken together, the results suggest that a video-ssVEP paradigm has comparable single-trial reliability and may better reflect a more diverse range of experienced emotional states relative to scene-LPP paradigms.

In everyday conversation, bilingual individuals switch between languages not only in reaction to monolinguals with different language profiles but also voluntarily and naturally. However, whether and how various switching contexts dynamically modulate the domain-general control were still illusive. Using a cross-task paradigm which flanker task was interleaved with language switching task trial-by-trial, the present study manipulated forced, voluntary and natural switching contexts. A group of unbalanced Chinese-English bilinguals performed a flanker task in the three switching contexts. The results showed that the cross-domain interaction on the P3 effect revealed an atypical flanker effect in forced switching contexts only, and P3 amplitude of incongruent trials in forced switching contexts was smaller than both natural and voluntary switching contexts. Furthermore, the robust brain-brain and brain-behavior relationships between language control and domain-general control were significantly emerged in the forced switching context only. Altogether, our findings support the dynamic adaptation of language control to cognitive control and highlight the importance of switching contexts.

The aperiodic slope of the EEG power spectrum (characterized by a 1/fx distribution in which power decreases as frequency increases) is hypothesized to index the excitatory-inhibitory balance and has been associated with various neurodevelopmental outcomes in older children and adults. However, the dearth of research early in development led us to investigate associations among EEG aperiodic slope, temperament, and maternal internalizing (anxiety and depression) symptoms in a large cohort of typically developing infants. Steeper slope was associated with higher scores on the temperament domains of orienting/regulation and surgency but was not associated with negative affectivity. Maternal symptoms did not appear to be directly associated with slope, but slope moderated the association between maternal symptoms and temperament. Specifically, steeper slope was associated with a stronger negative association between maternal internalizing symptoms and infant orienting/regulation. These results demonstrate associations between slope and behavior as early as infancy, which may reflect early differences in the development of global inhibitory networks. Longitudinal research in early childhood is necessary to better understand the nature of these relations during development and their potential impact on later socioemotional outcomes.

It is commonly agreed that power modulations in alpha oscillatory activity serve as an inhibitory neural mechanism, selectively routing information within neural circuits. In visuo-spatial attention, alpha oscillations enhance the processing of relevant targets and suppress potential distractors. However, there are inconsistencies regarding alpha power modulations with increasing load in common working memory (WM) tasks. Particularly, high WM load is associated with either decreased or increased alpha power, depending on the type of WM task deployed (i.e., N-back vs. Sternberg task). Next to existing cognitive interpretations of this variation of alpha power with load, recent considerations suggest the involvement of oculomotor action as a complementary explanation. In the present report we attempt to test this complementary view. We will conduct a large-scale combined electroencephalography and eye tracking study with 120 participants to examine the relationship between alpha power modulation and oculomotor action in the context of an N-back task and a Sternberg task. We aim to explore whether different gaze patterns during these tasks offer explanatory value in addressing the variations in alpha power with WM load. To this end, statistical tests on scalp-level power for the alpha band (8-14 Hz) and gaze deviation metrics will be conducted.

We tested whether decreasing respiratory frequency would stabilise both behavioural attention and pupil diameter oscillatory activity, compared to a spontaneously breathing control group. Pupil diameter was used as a proxy measure for Locus Coeruleus (LC) activity in order to directly test a prediction from a dynamical systems model (Melnychuk et al 2018) that posits the LC as a mediating nexus between respiration and attention. A novel task was designed, Paced Auditory Cue Entrainment (PACE) task, in which participants responded rhythmically to auditory cues, providing a continuous measure of sustained attention, and additionally, a breath guide for the experimental group. In Experiment 1, the respiratory frequency was guided from 0.15 Hz → 0.1 Hz → 0.15 Hz. In Experiment 2, participants spent a longer duration in each frequency, guided at 0.15 Hz → 0.1 Hz only. The two experiments yielded highly consistent results. Despite no group differences in the variation of the timing of responses, the control group committed significantly more lapses of attention in contrast to the breathing group, which barely committed any of such errors. Additionally, the oscillatory activity of pupil diameter in the breathing group closely tracked the frequency of the instructed breathing, implicating the possibility of LC-noradrenaline activity being entrained by the breath intervention. From these findings we conclude that decreasing respiratory frequency did indeed stabilise attention, mitigating lapses, possibly through stabilising fluctuations in LC activity.

Visual search is guided by mental representations of target-defining features (attentional templates) that are activated in a preparatory fashion. It remains unknown how many templates can be maintained concurrently, and what kind of costs are associated with multiple-template versus single-template search. Here, we compared the operation of attentional templates during three-colour and single-colour search tasks. Preparatory template activation processes were tracked by measuring N2pc components to task-irrelevant singleton colour probes that appeared in rapid succession during the interval between search displays. These probes attract attention (as indexed by an N2pc) if the corresponding colour template is active at the time when the probe appears. In a three-colour search task where target identity was fully predictable (Experiment 1), only probes that matched the upcoming target colour triggered N2pcs, demonstrating that only a single target template was activated. When three possible colour targets appeared randomly and unpredictably (Experiment 2), probes that matched any of these colours triggered N2pcs, demonstrating that all three templates were activated concurrently. However, relative to a single-colour search task, clear costs emerged in this three-colour task for the attentional guidance towards search targets and for search performance. These costs appear to be linked to inhibitory interactions between simultaneously active search templates. These findings show that while at least three target templates can be maintained in parallel, multiple-template search is still subject to capacity limitations which affect both template-guided attentional guidance and the subsequent selective processing of search targets.

Research has shown that exposure to higher rates of neighborhood disadvantage and contextual threat increases risk for the development of psychopathology in youth, with some evidence that these effects may differ across racial/ethnic groups. Although studies have shown that direct exposure to stress impacts neural responses to threat-relevant stimuli, less is known about how neighborhood characteristics more generally (e.g., living in neighborhood characterized by high crime risk, whether or not the individual directly experiences any crime) may impact children’s neural responses to threat. To address this question, we examined links between census-derived indices of neighborhood crime and neural reactivity to emotional stimuli in a sample of 100 children (Mage = 9.64, 54% girls, 65% non-Hispanic White) and whether these relations differ for children from minority backgrounds compared to non-Hispanic White children. Focusing on the late positive potential (LPP) event-related potential (ERP) component, we examined neural reactivity to threat-relevant stimuli (fearful faces) as well as non-threat relevant negative (sad faces) and positive (happy faces) stimuli across low, medium, and high intensities (morph levels). We found that levels of neighborhood crime were associated with LPP response to high intensity fearful, but not happy or sad, faces, but only among children from racial/ethnic minority backgrounds. This suggests that levels of crime within one’s neighborhood may be a more salient stressor for children from minority racial-ethnic groups than for non-Hispanic White children.

This study examined neural signatures associated conflict-monitoring, recognition and feedback processing in a novel feedback Concealed Information Test (fCIT), and also examined whether all the ERPs can be used to detect concealed autobiographical information. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two groups (guilty or innocent) and then tested in the fCIT while undergoing electroencephalograms (EEGs). Results show that the probe (participants’ name) elicited more negative N200, more positive recognition P300 than irrelevants among guilty participants, and feedback following the probe elicited a larger feedback P300 than feedback following irrelevants. Further, we found that all indicators, including conflict-monitoring N200, recognition P300, and feedback P300, could significantly discriminate between guilty and innocent participants. Combining them is highly effective in discriminating between guilty and innocent participants (AUC = 0.96). These findings not only shed light on the neural processing of fCIT, but also suggest the potential of using fCIT to detect concealed autobiographical information.

Motivation is considered a crucial factor in determining emotion regulation choice (ER choice). Our previous study revealed that increased motivation led to a preference for distraction over reappraisal due to the narrowed attention, yet neural underpinnings supporting this phenomenon remain unclear. In this study, we used event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate whether motivation influences ER choice by early attention processing (P2) or late resource engagement (LPP). EEG activities were recorded for the pictorial contexts varying in motivational intensity and direction, while participants (N=68) were required to decide which strategy from the two options they would use to regulate their emotions. Consistent with previous studies, the results indicated that individuals chose more distraction over reappraisal in high-withdrawal motivated contexts while a reversed pattern was observed in low-withdrawal motivated contexts. Moreover, high-intensity motivated emotional contexts result in enhanced P2 and LPP. Further analysis indicates that only frontal P2 and the early LPP mediate the effect of motivational intensity on ER choice. These findings suggest that heightened motivation leads to a preference for distraction over reappraisal during emotion regulation due to the greater occupation of attentional resources.

Imaginal exposure is a standard procedure of cognitive behavioural therapy for the treatment of anxiety and panic disorders. It is often used when in vivo exposure is not possible, too stressful for patients, or would be too expensive. The Bio-Informational Theory implies that imaginal exposure is effective because of the perceptual proximity of mental imagery to real events, whereas empirical findings suggest that propositional thought of fear stimuli (i.e., thinking about the stimuli without seeing them in the mind’s eye) could be sufficient. To investigate whether mental imagery or propositional thought is crucial for the success of imaginal exposure, participants with the rare state of aphantasia (= absence of sensory mental imagery) and two control groups were subjected to a fear conditioning paradigm followed by imaginal exposure and a reinstatement procedure. During imaginal exposure, a control group (N = 30) stared at a bright screen to disrupt visual imagery by incoming luminance (= simulated aphantasia), while a second control group (N = 30) and participants with actual aphantasia (N = 30) kept their eyes closed. Results showed successful extinction in all groups, thus demonstrating that imaginal extinction is possible using propositional thought. Moreover, results indicate that people with aphantasia experience less emotional distress during the fear conditioning procedure, most likely due to similar mechanisms as in alexithymia, i.e., a decoupling between physiological arousal and emotional experience.

There is considerable evidence documenting associations between tobacco smoking, including initiation, maintenance, and relapse of addiction, with diminished cardiovascular responses to acute psychological stress. However, less is known about how smokers respond to repeated stress across time. The current study examined patterns of cardiovascular reactivity and adaptation to recurrent stress among abstinent smokers, smokers who continued to smoke at their normal rate, and non-smokers. Smokers were randomly assigned to one of two conditions; ad libitum (n = 42), or 24h abstinence (n = 61); and non-smokers (n = 43) provided comparative referencing. Across the two laboratory sessions, participants (n = 149) were asked to complete a modified version of the trier social stress test (TSST), while monitoring systolic and diastolic blood pressure, and heart rate activity. Results showed that while non-smokers had elevated cardiovascular reactivity to begin with, they showed a greater capacity to habituate to recurrent stress across sessions. The data also suggest that smokers displayed attenuated cardiovascular reactivity to acute psychological stress and showed little habituation to repeated stress. In adjusted models, smokers exhibited less systolic blood pressure tolerance to stress. This poorer response profile in smokers may be a potential mechanism that leads to further cardiotoxic effects on health. Key words: Smoking, cardiovascular reactivity, habituation, stress

For distinguished contributions to psychophysiology: Christopher J. Patrick

Speech production interferes with accurate measurement of cardiac vagal activity during acute stress, attenuating the expected drop in heart rate variability in the respiratory frequency band. Speech also induces sympathetic changes similar to those induced by psychological stress. In the laboratory, confounding of physiological stress reactivity by speech may be controlled experimentally. In ambulatory assessments, however, detection of speech episodes is necessary to separate the physiological effects of psychosocial stress from those of speech. Using supervised machine learning (https://osf.io/bk9nf), we trained and tested speech classification models on data obtained from 56 participants (ages 18-39). They were equipped with privacy-secure wearables measuring thoracoabdominal respiratory inductance plethysmography (RIP from a single and a dual-band set-up), thoracic impedance pneumography, and an upper-sternum positioned unit with triaxial accelerometers and gyroscopes. Following an 80/20 train-test set split, nested cross-validations were run with the machine learning algorithms XGBoost, Gradient Boosting, Random Forest, and Logistic Regression on the training set to get unbiased generalized performance estimates. Speech classification by the best model per method was then validated in the unseen test-set. Speech versus no-speech classification performance (AUC) for both nested cross-validation and test-set predictions was excellent for thorax-abdomen RIP (nested cross-validation: 96.6%, test-set prediction: 98.5%), thorax-only RIP (97.5%, 99.1%), impedance (97.0%, 97.8%) and accelerometry (99.3%, 99.6%). The sternal accelerometer outperformed the other methods. These novel open-access models that leverage privacy-secure biosignals will enable researchers to detect speech and control for its confounding effects in ambulatory recordings, thereby enhancing the trustworthiness of psychophysiological findings.

The neurovisceral integration model proposes that information flows bidirectionally between the brain and the heart via the vagus nerves and vagally-mediated heart rate variability (vmHRV) can be used to index heart-brain interaction. Recent research has shown that voluntary reduction of breathing rate (slow-paced breathing, SPB) can enhance cardiac vagal control. Additionally, prefrontal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) can modulate the excitability of the prefrontal region and influence the vagus nerve. However, fundamental research on the combination of SPB and prefrontal tDCS to increase vmHRV and other physiological indices of the autonomic nervous system is scarce. Therefore, 200 healthy participants were assigned to four experimental groups. Each group received either 20 min of active or sham tDCS combined with 5.5 breath per minute (BPM) or 15 BPM breathing. Regardless of the tDCS condition, the SPB group showed a significant increase in vmHRV over 20 minutes, suggesting an increase in parasympathetic activity. In addition, a significant decrease in HR at the first and second 5-minute epochs of the intervention. Regardless of breathing condition, the active tDCS group exhibited higher HR at the fourth 5-minute epoch of the intervention compared to the sham tDCS group, suggesting more sympathetic arousal. However, there was no combined effect on vmHRV, HR, skin conductance, or blood pressure. SPB is a robust technique for increasing vmHRV, whereas prefrontal tDCS may produce effects that counteract those of SPB. More research is necessary to test whether and how top-down and bottom-up approaches can be combined to improve vagal control.