Relationship closeness promotes desirable health outcomes. Most interventions to increase relationship closeness are verbal, which may not suit all couples. We consider whether Orgasmic Meditation ...(OM), a structured, partnered, largely non-verbal practice that includes genital touch, also increases relationship closeness. We hypothesized that OM would increase feelings of closeness for both romantic and non-romantic partners. This is important, because intimate touch with non-romantic partners is commonly considered deleterious by clinicians, which may inadvertently increase feelings of shame. Dyads (n = 125) reported their feelings of closeness before and after OM. Approximately half of the participants were romantic partners, while the other half only engaged in OM together (non-romantic). Closeness after OM increased on average across participants. Non-romantic dyads increased self-other overlap more than romantic dyads. These data support that a partnered, largely non-verbal practice is associated with increased feelings of closeness in the moment, including for individuals who are not in a romantic relationship.
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DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Depression is one of the most prevalent and debilitating of the psychiatric disorders. Studies have shown that cognitive therapy is as efficacious as antidepressant medication at treating depression, ...and it seems to reduce the risk of relapse even after its discontinuation. Cognitive therapy and antidepressant medication probably engage some similar neural mechanisms, as well as mechanisms that are distinctive to each. A precise specification of these mechanisms might one day be used to guide treatment selection and improve outcomes.
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DOBA, IJS, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Biased patterns of attention are implicated as key mechanisms across many forms of psychopathology and have given rise to automated mechanistic interventions designed to modify such attentional ...preferences. However, progress is substantially hindered by limitations in widely used methods to quantify attention, bias leading to imprecision of measurement.
In a sample of patients who were clinically anxious (n = 70), we applied a well-validated form of computational modeling (drift-diffusion model) to trial-level reaction time data from a two-choice “dot-probe task”—the dominant paradigm used in hundreds of attention bias studies to date—in order to model distinct components of task performance.
While drift-diffusion model–derived attention bias indices exhibited convergent validity with previous approaches (e.g., conventional bias scores, eye tracking), our novel analytic approach yielded substantially improved split-half reliability, modestly improved test-retest reliability, and revealed novel mechanistic insights regarding neural substrates of attention bias and the impact of an automated attention retraining procedure.
Computational modeling of attention bias task data may represent a new way forward to improve precision.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK
IMPORTANCE Suicide can be viewed as an escape from unendurable punishment at the cost of any future rewards. Could faulty estimation of these outcomes predispose to suicidal behavior? In behavioral ...studies, many of those who have attempted suicide misestimate expected rewards on gambling and probabilistic learning tasks. OBJECTIVES To describe the neural circuit abnormalities that underlie disadvantageous choices in people at risk for suicide and to relate these abnormalities to impulsivity, which is one of the components of vulnerability to suicide. DESIGN Case-control functional magnetic resonance imaging study of reward learning using a reinforcement learning model. SETTING University hospital and outpatient clinic. PATIENTS Fifty-three participants 60 years or older, including 15 depressed patients who had attempted suicide, 18 depressed patients who had never attempted suicide (depressed control subjects), and 20 psychiatrically healthy controls. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES Components of the cortical blood oxygenation level–dependent response tracking expected and unpredicted rewards. RESULTS Depressed elderly participants displayed 2 distinct disruptions of control over reward-guided behavior. First, impulsivity and a history of suicide attempts (particularly poorly planned ones) were associated with a weakened expected reward signal in the paralimbic cortex, which in turn predicted the behavioral insensitivity to contingency change. Second, depression was associated with disrupted corticostriatothalamic encoding of unpredicted rewards, which in turn predicted the behavioral oversensitivity to punishment. These results were robust to the effects of possible brain damage from suicide attempts, depressive severity, co-occurring substance use and anxiety disorders, antidepressant and anticholinergic exposure, lifetime exposure to electroconvulsive therapy, vascular illness, and incipient dementia. CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE Altered paralimbic reward signals and impulsivity and/or carelessness may facilitate unplanned suicidal acts. This pattern, also seen in gambling and cocaine use, may reflect a primary deficit in the paralimbic cortex or in its mesolimbic input. The overreactivity to punishment in depression may be caused in part by a disruption of appetitive learning in the corticostriatothalamic circuits.
Pupil dilation and blinks provide complementary, mutually exclusive indices of information processing. Though each index is associated with cognitive load, the occurrence of a blink precludes the ...measurement of pupil diameter. These indices have generally been assessed in independent literatures. We examine the extent to which these measures are related on two cognitive tasks using a novel method that quantifies the proportion of trials on which blinks occur at each sample acquired during the trial. This measure allows cross‐correlation of continuous pupil‐dilation and blink waveforms. Results indicate that blinks occur during early sensory processing and following sustained information processing. Pupil dilation better reflects sustained information processing. Together these indices provide a rich picture of the time course of information processing, from early reactivity through sustained cognition, and after stimulus‐related cognition ends.
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BFBNIB, DOBA, FSPLJ, FZAB, GIS, IJS, IZUM, KILJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBMB, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Purpose
In sports requiring multiple short bouts of high-intensity exertion, recovery while off the field is an important part of being an effective competitive athlete. This study investigated the ...potential of vibroacoustic stimulation to aid recovery from athletic stress.
Methods
University of Pittsburgh club and varsity athletes (
n
= 22) pedaled on a stationary bike strenuously, followed by a period of recovery accompanied by vibration using a wearable transducer. Subjective and physiological (skin conductance responses and cardiac measures) were used to determine the extent of recovery with frontal electroencephalographic (alpha/theta) measures indexing brain reactivity.
Results
Vibrations rated as the most calming by each participant were associated with increased high-frequency heart-rate variability, representing parasympathetic tone, particularly in athletes most affected by pedaling. Yet, EEG markers, while related to subjective recovery, were not associated with physiological change.
Conclusion
This work provides support for the idea that vibration, which is subjectively rated as calming, could affect physiological recovery from physical stressors, at least for those individuals whose physiology is affected by exertion. This is likely through direct effects on physiology rather than “top down” effects on the brain.
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EMUNI, FIS, FZAB, GEOZS, GIS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, MFDPS, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, SBMB, SBNM, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK, VKSCE, ZAGLJ
Background Major depressive disorder is characterized by increased and sustained emotional reactivity, which has been linked to sustained amygdala activity. It is also characterized by disruptions in ...executive control, linked to abnormal dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) function. These mechanisms have been hypothesized to interact in depression. This study explored relationships between amygdala and DLPFC activity during emotional and cognitive information processing in unipolar depression. Method Twenty-seven unmedicated patients with DSM-IV unipolar major depressive disorder and 25 never-depressed healthy control subjects completed tasks requiring executive control (digit sorting) and emotional information processing (personal relevance rating of words) during event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) assessment. Results Relative to control subjects, depressed subjects displayed sustained amygdala reactivity on the emotional tasks and decreased DLPFC activity on the digit-sorting task. Decreased relationships between the time-series of amygdala and DLPFC activity were observed within tasks in depression, but different depressed individuals showed each type of bias. Conclusions Depression is associated with increased limbic activity in response to emotional information processing and decreased DLPFC activity in response to cognitive tasks though these may reflect separate mechanisms. Depressed individuals also display decreased relationships between amygdala and DLPFC activity, potentially signifying decreased functional relationships among these structures.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK
Brain mechanisms underlying explicit evaluation of emotion have been explored using different tasks including 'stimulus-focused evaluation', 'evaluation of one's own emotion' and 'evaluation of ...others' emotions'. Yet the extent to which similar brain mechanisms underlie different evaluation tasks is unclear. A meta-analysis of published neuroimaging studies of explicit emotional evaluation was conducted to examine common and distinct regions underlying these different evaluation tasks. This study revealed regions common to all three tasks: The amygdala and LPFC as common regions may be involved in emotion-cognition interactions, and the DMPFC may possibly play integrative roles in explicit emotional evaluation. Distinct regions were also identified: (i) the sensory cortex and VLPFC were specifically associated with 'stimulus evaluation', possibly involved in perceptual and conceptual processing; (ii) the insula and rACC were specifically associated with 'evaluation of one's own emotion', potentially associated with interoceptive and experiential processing; and (iii) the STS and TPJ were specifically associated with 'evaluation of others' emotions', potentially reflecting their roles in TOM and empathy. These findings suggest that different types of explicit emotional evaluation may involve common and distinct networks and provide new insights on multiple mechanisms underlying explicit emotional evaluation.
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IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK
This study examined survey data and neural reactivity associated with voluntarily engaging in high arousal negative experiences (VANE). Here we suggest how otherwise negative stimuli might be ...experienced as positive in the context of voluntary engagement. Participants were recruited from customers who had already purchased tickets to attend an "extreme" haunted attraction. Survey data measuring self-report affect, expectations, and experience was collected from 262 adults (139 women and 123 men; age M = 27.5 years, SD = 9.3 years) before and after their experience. Changes in electroencephalographic (EEG) indices of reactivity to cognitive and emotional tasks were further assessed from a subsample of 100 participants. Results suggested that participants' reported affect improved, particularly for those that reported feeling tired, bored, or stressed prior to the experience. Among those whose moods improved, neural reactivity decreased in response to multiple tasks. Together, these data suggest that VANE reduces neural reactivity following stress. This result could explain post-VANE euphoria and may be adaptive in that it could help individuals to cope with subsequent stressors. To the extent that this phenomenon replicates in clinical situations, it could inform clinical interventions by using VANE principles to reduce neural reactivity to subsequent stressors.
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CEKLJ, FFLJ, NUK, ODKLJ, PEFLJ, UPUK
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