This meta-analysis explores the role of the cerebellum in social cognition. Recent meta-analyses of neuroimaging studies since 2008 demonstrate that the cerebellum is only marginally involved in ...social cognition and emotionality, with a few meta-analyses pointing to an involvement of at most 54% of the individual studies. In this study, novel meta-analyses of over 350 fMRI studies, dividing up the domain of social cognition in homogeneous subdomains, confirmed this low involvement of the cerebellum in conditions that trigger the mirror network (e.g., when familiar movements of body parts are observed) and the mentalizing network (when no moving body parts or unfamiliar movements are present). There is, however, one set of mentalizing conditions that strongly involve the cerebellum in 50–100% of the individual studies. In particular, when the level of abstraction is high, such as when behaviors are described in terms of traits or permanent characteristics, in terms of groups rather than individuals, in terms of the past (episodic autobiographic memory) or the future rather than the present, or in terms of hypothetical events that may happen. An activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analysis conducted in this study reveals that the cerebellum is critically implicated in social cognition and that the areas of the cerebellum which are consistently involved in social cognitive processes show extensive overlap with the areas involved in sensorimotor (during mirror and self-judgments tasks) as well as in executive functioning (across all tasks). We discuss the role of the cerebellum in social cognition in general and in higher abstraction mentalizing in particular. We also point out a number of methodological limitations of some available studies on the social brain that hamper the detection of cerebellar activity.
•This meta-analysis explores the role of the cerebellum in social cognition.•There is low cerebellar involvement in conditions that trigger the mirror network.•There is also low cerebellar involvement during social mentalizing.•Abstraction in mentalizing (traits, stereotypes, one's future…) strongly involves the cerebellum.
In recent years, research has witnessed an increasing interest in the bidirectional relationship between emotion and sleep. Sleep seems important for restoring daily functioning, whereas deprivation ...of sleep makes us more emotionally aroused and sensitive to stressful stimuli and events. Sleep appears to be essential to our ability to cope with emotional stress in everyday life. However, when daily stress is insufficiently regulated, it may result in mental health problems and sleep disturbances too. Not only does emotion impact sleep, but there is also evidence that sleep plays a key role in regulating emotion. Emotional events during waking hours affect sleep, and the quality and amount of sleep influences the way we react to these events impacting our general well-being. Although we know that daytime emotional stress affects sleep by influencing sleep physiology, dream patterns, dream content and the emotion within a dream, its exact role is still unclear. Other effects that have been found are the exaggeration of the startle response, decrease in dream recall and elevation of awakening thresholds from rapid eye movement (REM), REM-sleep, increased or decreased latency to REM-sleep, increase in percentage of REM-density, REM-sleep duration, as well as the occurrence of arousals in sleep as a marker of sleep disruption. Equally, the way an individual copes with emotional stress, or the way in which an individual regulates emotion may modulate the effects of emotional stress on sleep. The research presented here supports the idea that adaptive emotion regulation benefits our follow-up sleep. We thus conclude the current review with a call for future research in order to clarify further the precise relationship between sleep, emotion and emotion regulation, as well as to explain further how sleep dissolves our emotional stress.
Various neuropsychological studies have shown that decision-making deficits can occur in a wide range of patients with brain damage or dysfunctions. Decisions under ambiguity, as measured with the ...Iowa Gambling Task, primarily depend on the integrity of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and the amygdala, as well as on further brain regions such as the somatosensory cortex. However, little is known about the specific role of these structures in decisions under risk measured with tasks that offer explicit rules for gains and losses and winning probabilities, for example, the Game of Dice Task. We aimed to investigate the potential role of the amygdala for decisions under risk. For this purpose, we examined three patients with Urbach-Wiethe disease—a rare syndrome associated with selective bilateral mineralisation of the amygdalae. Neuropsychological performance was assessed with the Iowa Gambling Task (decisions under ambiguity), the Game of Dice Task (decisions under risk), and an extensive neuropsychological test battery focussing on executive functions. Furthermore, previous studies found relationships between generating skin conductance responses and deciding advantageously in the Iowa Gambling Task. Accordingly, we recorded skin conductance responses during both decision tasks as a measure of emotional reactivity. Results indicate that patients with selective amygdala damage have lower scores in both decisions under ambiguity and decisions under risk. Decisions under risk are especially compromised in patients who also demonstrate deficits in executive functioning. In both gambling tasks, patients showed reduced skin conductance responses compared to healthy comparison subjects. The results suggest that deciding advantageously under risk conditions involves both the use of feedback from previous trials, as required by decisions under ambiguity, and in addition, executive functions.
Recent social neuroscientific evidence indicates that implicit and explicit inferences on the mind of another person (i.e., intentions, attributions or traits), are subserved by a shared mentalizing ...network. Under both implicit and explicit instructions, ERP studies reveal that early inferences occur at about the same time, and fMRI studies demonstrate an overlap in core mentalizing areas, including the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) and the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). These results suggest a rapid shared implicit intuition followed by a slower explicit verification processes (as revealed by additional brain activation during explicit vs. implicit inferences). These data provide support for a default-adjustment dual-process framework of social mentalizing.
In recent years there has been an expansion of scientific work on consciousness. However, there is an increasing necessity to integrate evolutionary and interdisciplinary perspectives and to bring ...affective feelings more centrally into the overall discussion. Pursuant especially to the theorizing of Endel Tulving (1985, 2004, 2005), Panksepp (1998a, 2003, 2005) and Vandekerckhove (2009) we will look at the phenomena starting with primary-process consciousness, namely the rudimentary state of autonomic awareness or unknowing (anoetic) consciousness, with a fundamental form of first-person ‘self-experience’ which relies on affective experiential states and raw sensory and perceptual mental existences, to higher forms of knowing (noetic and autonoetic) and self-aware consciousness. Since current scientific approaches are most concerned with the understanding of higher declarative states of consciousness, we will focus on these vastly underestimated primary forms of consciousness which may be foundational for all forms of higher ‘knowing consciousness’.
Recent studies suggest that a brain network mainly associated with episodic memory has a more general function in imagining oneself in another time, place or perspective (e.g. episodic future ...thought, theory of mind, default mode). If this is true, counterfactual thinking (e.g. 'If I had left the office earlier, I wouldn't have missed my train.') should also activate this network. Present functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study explores the common and distinct neural activity of counterfactual and episodic thinking by directly comparing the imagining of upward counterfactuals (creating better outcomes for negative past events) with the re-experiencing of negative past events and the imagining of positive future events. Results confirm that episodic and counterfactual thinking share a common brain network, involving a core memory network (hippocampal area, temporal lobes, midline, and lateral parietal lobes) and prefrontal areas that might be related to mentalizing (medial prefrontal cortex) and performance monitoring (right prefrontal cortex). In contrast to episodic past and future thinking, counterfactual thinking recruits some of these areas more strongly and extensively, and additionally activates the bilateral inferior parietal lobe and posterior medial frontal cortex. We discuss these findings in view of recent fMRI evidence on the working of episodic memory and theory of mind.
Emotion regulation influences how and when we experience emotion, impacting our sense of self and well being. While previous brain research on emotion regulation has focused on gray matter correlates ...of emotion regulation, this study represents a first exploratory study on white matter integrity of brain networks of ‘emotional approach’ as a bottom up experiential emotion regulation-strategy. Responding to the gap between cognitive and affective approaches of emotion regulation, pertaining to some of the daily emotional stressors, the present study investigates brain pathways of individual differences in ‘emotional approach’, or the tendency to affectively acknowledge, understand and express emotional experience (cf. 1). Diffusion tensor magnetic resonance imaging (DTI-MRI) measures of fractional anisotropy (FA) and mean diffusion (MD) evaluated dispositional emotion regulation in a group of 21 women with a ‘high emotional approach’ (HEA) (N = 11) and a ‘low emotional approach’ (LEA) (N = 10). HEA exhibited more FA of the cingulum, supporting emotion processing and emotion regulation, whereas LEA correlated to a higher FA in the right corticospinal tracts, supporting automatic action tendencies and a higher FA in the superior longitudinal fasciculus (SLF), supporting cognitive control and monitoring of emotion. LEA also correlated with an increase in MD in the body (p. = 0.05) and in the splenium of the corpus callosum (CC). A higher FA in the inferior longitudinal fasciculus (IFL) may indicate higher visual- affective integration within emotion processing, whereas more MD in the body and splenium of the CC decreases interhemispheric integration of emotional information within emotion processing and emotion regulation.
Emotion regulation ability (ERA) enables individuals to disengage from negative stimuli. In this study, we investigated the role of ERA in the depression-related negativity bias. Seventy-four ...individuals with major depressive disorder and eighty-three nonclinical individuals were screened for depressiveness using the Beck Depression Inventory. ERA was assessed using the Action Orientation After Failure Subscale of the Action Control Scale. We used a classical Stroop task variant, wherein the color words were preceded by either a self-relevant positive (success-related), negative (failure-related), or neutral word prime. The expected depressiveness × emotional prime interaction did not reach significance but the expected ERA × emotional prime interaction did. The latter effect was qualified by a three-way interaction between ERA, depressiveness, and emotional prime. Specifically, ERA predicted the negativity bias in individuals with high depressiveness scores. Using the Johnson–Neyman technique, we found that this effect was significant at the level of mild to moderate depression and beyond. Thus, poor ERA in individuals with depression may cause the depression-related negativity bias, whereas (at least) moderate ERA may protect individuals with depression from this bias. Future studies should assess ERA in individuals with depressive symptomatology and investigate how it influences their everyday functioning and treatment outcomes.
•Emotion regulation ability moderates depression effects.•High emotion regulation ability reduces depression-related negativity bias.•This effect emerges at mild to moderate depression scores.
Abstract
COVID-19 can induce neurological sequelae, negatively affecting the quality of life. Unravelling this illness's impact on structural brain connectivity, white-matter microstructure (WMM), ...and cognitive performance may help elucidate its implications. This cross-sectional study aimed to investigate differences in these factors between former hospitalised COVID-19 patients (COV) and healthy controls. Group differences in structural brain connectivity were explored using Welch-two sample t-tests and two-sample Mann–Whitney U tests. Multivariate linear models were constructed (one per region) to examine fixel-based group differences. Differences in cognitive performance between groups were investigated using Wilcoxon Rank Sum tests. Possible effects of bundle-specific FD measures on cognitive performance were explored using a two-group path model. No differences in whole-brain structural organisation were found. Bundle-specific metrics showed reduced fiber density (p = 0.012, Hedges’ g = 0.884) and fiber density cross-section (p = 0.007, Hedges’ g = 0.945) in the motor segment of the corpus callosum in COV compared to healthy controls. Cognitive performance on the motor praxis and digit symbol substitution tests was worse in COV than healthy controls (p < 0.001, r = 0.688; p = 0.013, r = 422, respectively). Associations between the cognitive performance and bundle-specific FD measures differed significantly between groups. WMM and cognitive performance differences were observed between COV and healthy controls.
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