Biological psychology
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Biological psychology · May 2018
Dissociating meditation proficiency and experience dependent EEG changes during traditional Vipassana meditation practice.
Meditation, as taught by most schools of practice, consists of a set of heterogeneous techniques. We wanted to assess if EEG profiles varied across different meditation techniques, proficiency levels and experience of the practitioners. We examined EEG dynamics in Vipassana meditators (Novice, Senior meditators and Teachers) while they engaged in their traditional meditation practice (concentration, mindfulness and loving kindness in a structured manner) as taught by S. ⋯ Goenka. Seniors and Teachers (vs Novices) showed trait increases in delta (1-4 Hz), theta-alpha (6-10 Hz) and low-gamma power (30-40 Hz) at baseline rest; state-trait increases in low-alpha (8-10 Hz) and low-gamma power during concentrative and mindfulness meditation; and theta-alpha and low-gamma power during loving-kindness meditation. Permutation entropy and Higuchi fractal dimension measures further dissociated high proficiency from duration of experience as only Teachers showed consistent increase in network complexity from baseline rest and state transitions between the different meditation states.
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Biological psychology · May 2018
Will they like me? Neural and behavioral responses to social-evaluative peer feedback in socially and non-socially anxious females.
The current study examined neural and behavioral responses to social-evaluative feedback processing in social anxiety. Twenty-two non-socially and 17 socially anxious females (mean age = 19.57 years) participated in a Social Judgment Paradigm in which they received peer acceptance/rejection feedback that was either congruent or incongruent with their prior predictions. Results indicated that socially anxious participants believed they would receive less social acceptance feedback than non-socially anxious participants. ⋯ This theta response was only observed in non-socially anxious individuals. Together, results corroborate cognitive-behavioral studies demonstrating a negative expectancy bias in socially anxiety with respect to social evaluation. Furthermore, the present findings highlight a functional role for theta oscillatory dynamics in processing cues that convey social-evaluative threat, and this social threat-monitoring mechanism seems less sensitive in socially anxious females.
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Biological psychology · Feb 2018
Neurophysiological correlates of attentional bias for emotional faces in socially anxious individuals - Evidence from a visual search task and N2pc.
Visual search paradigms have provided evidence for the enhanced capture of attention by threatening faces. Especially in social anxiety, hypervigilance for threatening faces has been found repeatedly across behavioral paradigms, whose reliability however have been questioned recently. In this EEG study, we sought to determine whether the detection of threat (angry faces) is specifically enhanced in individuals with high (HSA) compared to low social anxiety (LSA). ⋯ HSA also showed enhanced N2pc amplitudes in response to emotional facial expressions (angry and happy), indicating a general attentional bias for emotional faces. Overall, the results show that social anxiety may be characterized not only by a spatial attentional bias for threatening faces, but for emotional faces in general. In addition, the results further demonstrate the utility of the N2pc component in capturing subtle attentional biases.
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Biological psychology · Apr 2017
Sigh rate during emotional transitions: More evidence for a sigh of relief.
Evidence suggests that sighs regulate stress and emotions, e.g. by facilitating relief. This study aimed to investigate sigh rates during relief. In addition, links between sighs, anxiety sensitivity and HPA-axis activity were explored. ⋯ Sigh frequency increased with steeper cortisol declines for high anxiety sensitive persons. Results confirm a relationship between sighs and relief. In addition, results suggest that sigh frequency is importantly related to HPA-axis activity, particularly in high anxiety sensitive persons.
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Biological psychology · Mar 2017
Effects of touch on emotional face processing: A study of event-related potentials, facial EMG and cardiac activity.
Being touched is known to affect emotion, and even a casual touch can elicit positive feelings and affinity. Psychophysiological studies have recently shown that tactile primes affect visual evoked potentials to emotional stimuli, suggesting altered affective stimulus processing. As, however, these studies approached emotion from a purely unidimensional perspective, it remains unclear whether touch biases emotional evaluation or a more general feature such as salience. ⋯ All measures replicated known effects of emotional face processing: Disgust and fear modulated early ERPs, anger increased the cardiac orienting response, and expressions elicited emotion-congruent facial EMG activity. Tactile primes also affected these measures, but priming never interacted with the type of emotional expression. Thus, touch may additively affect general stimulus processing, but it does not bias or modulate immediate affective evaluation.