Biological psychology
-
Biological psychology · Jan 2017
Temperament differentially influences early information processing in men and women: Preliminary electrophysiological evidence of attentional biases in healthy individuals.
Preferential processing of threat-related information is a robust finding in anxiety disorders. The observation that attentional biases are also present in healthy individuals suggests factors other than clinical symptoms to play a role. Using a dot-probe paradigm while event-related potentials were recorded in 59 healthy adults, we investigated whether temperament and gender, both related to individual variation in anxiety levels, influence attentional processing. ⋯ Taking gender differences into account, we observed that women showed enhanced attention engagement with negative compared to neutral information, indicated by larger P2 amplitudes in congruent than in incongruent negative conditions. Attentional processing was influenced by the temperament traits negative affect and effortful control. Our results emphasize that gender and temperament modulate attentional biases in healthy adults.
-
Biological psychology · Jul 2016
Amplitude of low frequency fluctuations during resting state predicts social well-being.
Social well-being represents primarily public phenomena, which is crucial for mental and physical health. However, little is known about the neural basis of this construct, especially how it is maintained during resting state. To explore the neural correlates of social well-being, this study correlated the regional fractional amplitude of low frequency fluctuations (fALFF) with social well-being of healthy individuals. ⋯ Furthermore, we demonstrated the different role of three pursuits of human well-being (i.e., pleasure, meaning and engagement) in these associations. Specifically, the pursuits of meaning and engagement, not pleasure mediated the effect of the fALFF in right pSTG on social well-being, whereas the pursuit of engagement mediated the effect of the fALFF in right thalamus on social well-being. Taken together, we provide the first evidence that spontaneous brain activity in multiple regions related to self-regulatory and social-cognitive processes contributes to social well-being, suggesting that the spontaneous activity of the human brain reflects the efficiency of social well-being.
-
Biological psychology · Feb 2016
Discrepancies between dimensions of interoception in autism: Implications for emotion and anxiety.
Emotions and affective feelings are influenced by one's internal state of bodily arousal via interoception. Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC) are associated with difficulties in recognising others' emotions, and in regulating own emotions. We tested the hypothesis that, in people with ASC, such affective differences may arise from abnormalities in interoceptive processing. ⋯ The divergence of these two interoceptive axes can be computed as a trait prediction error. This error correlated with deficits in emotion sensitivity and occurrence of anxiety symptoms. Our results indicate an origin of emotion deficits and affective symptoms in ASC at the interface between body and mind, specifically in expectancy-driven interpretation of interoceptive information.
-
Biological psychology · Jul 2015
Spontaneous regional brain activity links restrained eating to later weight gain among young women.
Theory and prospective studies have linked restrained eating (RE) to risk for future weight gain and the onset of obesity, but little is known about resting state neural activity that may underlie this association. To address this gap, resting fMRI was used to test the extent to which spontaneous neural activity in regions associated with inhibitory control and food reward account for potential relations between baseline RE levels and changes in body weight among dieters over a one-year interval. Spontaneous regional activity patterns corresponding to RE were assessed among 50 young women using regional homogeneity (ReHo) analysis, which measured temporal synchronization of spontaneous fluctuations within a food deprivation condition. ⋯ Furthermore, food-deprived dieting women with high dietary restraint scores exhibited more spontaneous local activity in brain regions associated with the expectation and valuation for food reward [i.e., orbitofrontal cortex (OFC)/ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC)] and reduced spontaneous local activity in inhibitory control regions [i.e., bilateral dorsal-lateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC)] at baseline. Notably, the association between baseline RE and follow-up weight gain was mediated by decreased local synchronization of the right DLPFC in particular and, to a lesser degree, increased local synchronization of the right VMPFC. In conjunction with previous research, these findings highlight possible neural mechanisms underlying the relation between RE and risk for weight gain.
-
Biological psychology · Jul 2015
The influence of early life sexual abuse on oxytocin concentrations and premenstrual symptomatology in women with a menstrually related mood disorder.
Oxytocin (OT), associated with affiliation and social bonding, social salience, and stress/pain regulation, may play a role in the pathophysiology of stress-related disorders, including menstrually-related mood disorders (MRMD's). Adverse impacts of early life sexual abuse (ESA) on adult attachment, affective regulation, and pain sensitivity suggest ESA-related OT dysregulation in MRMD pathophysiology. We investigated the influence of ESA on plasma OT, and the relationship of OT to the clinical phenomenology of MRMD's. ⋯ In women with ESA, OT was significantly, inversely correlated with premenstrual psychological and somatic symptoms (r's=-0.45 to -0.64, p's<0.05). The relationship between OT and premenstrual symptomatology was uniformly low and non-significant in women without ESA. In women with ESA, OT may positively modulate MRMD symptomatology.