Highly anxious individuals have a lower detection threshold to potentially harmful stimuli in their environment. Recent self-report studies suggest that sensitivity to olfactory stimuli may be dependent upon the type of anxiety and odors investigated. Improving on previous studies, the current study employed a psychophysical measure of olfactory ability to explore the relationship between olfactory sensitivity and anxiety. We hypothesized that anxiety symptoms will be linked to increased olfactory sensitivity, but also that this relationship will be different for anxiety subtypes and odor category. One hundred twenty-seven young healthy individuals (age 18-39, M=20.8, SD=3.5) completed questionnaires measuring symptoms of generalized anxiety (GAD-7), social anxiety (Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale), and depression (PHQ-9). To assess olfactory sensitivity, they performed eight odor concentrations sorting tasks with four common (e.g., food, floral) and four socially relevant odors (e.g., human body odor compound, perfume). Generalized anxiety symptoms were weakly positively correlated with sensitivity to common odors, but not to social odors. However, this association was rendered non-significant when depressive symptoms were controlled for. In contrast, social anxiety symptoms were positively correlated with sensitivity to social odors, but not to common odors. The latter relationship was partially mediated by perceived threat of social odors and was robust to models controlling for depressive symptoms. In conclusion, in a non-clinical sample of healthy individuals, anxiety symptoms are related to enhanced olfactory sensitivity in a domain-specific manner, with the evidence stronger for social anxiety.
College students tend to report high perceived stress and are at a high risk for internalizing symptoms. Deficits in positive valence systems function, including blunted reward responsiveness as measured by the reward positivity (RewP) event-related potential, are key factors underlying risk for internalizing symptoms. This study aimed to (1) test the effects of a single-session positive emotion-focused training called Brief Promoting Positive Emotions (BPPE) on RewP and (2) test RewP as a moderator of the effect of BPPE on changes in perceived stress and internalizing symptoms one month later. Ninety-two college students (Mage = 19.44, SD = 1.15) reported on perceived stress and internalizing symptoms before being randomized to BPPE (n = 47) or a study skills comparison condition (n = 45). Following the training, participants completed a monetary incentive delay task while electroencephalogram data were recorded. One month later, participants reported perceived stress and internalizing symptoms again (n = 66). No significant group differences in RewP were found. RewP moderated the training effects on one-month follow-up perceived stress, but not symptoms of depression or social anxiety. In the BPPE group, a relatively blunted RewP was associated with decreases in perceived stress one month later, whereas in the comparison group, a more blunted RewP predicted increases in perceived stress. Although preliminary given the relatively small sample, results suggest that college students with lower RewP may benefit from brief trainings aimed at enhancing positive emotions and highlight the potential utility of neural measures in informing more personalized approaches to training.
Attentional control theory (ACT) posits that anxiety impairs inhibitory control. However, whether this deficit is general or specific to negative distractors remains debated. This study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate differences in inhibitory-control-related processing between individuals with high and low trait anxiety under varying emotional distractor contexts. The final analysis sample comprised 24 high-trait-anxiety (HTA) and 24 low-trait-anxiety (LTA) participants who completed a modified rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task. They were instructed to identify a first target (T1), presented against a negative or neutral emotional background image overlaid with colored squares and embedded in a continuous stream of neutral landscape distractors, followed by a second target (T2) presented after a short (200 ms) or long (600 ms) stimulus-onset asynchrony. The analysis focused on the T2-elicited late positive potential (LPP), a neural marker of resource allocation to T2 under T1 background interference. Behaviorally, participants showed a reliable attentional blink effect, with lower T2 accuracy at Lag 2 than at Lag 6. Background valence also affected performance, with lower overall accuracy following negative than neutral backgrounds. The ERP results revealed a significant Group × Background Valence interaction on the T2-LPP. In the HTA group, LPP amplitudes were smaller following negative than neutral backgrounds. Under neutral backgrounds, T2-LPP amplitudes were larger in HTA than in LTA. These findings suggest that high trait anxiety is associated with valence-dependent alterations in later resource allocation during emotional distraction, reflected in a context-dependent T2-LPP pattern rather than a uniform reduction in inhibitory control.
Stress impairs prefrontal-dependent behavioral control and shifts processing toward automatic defaults, but whether this extends to the quality of real-world professional relationships, where skilled interpersonal engagement is itself a predictor of client outcomes, is unknown. In a four-wave longitudinal study of 46 community supervision officers, we tested whether diurnal cortisol predicted relationship quality assessed by independent observers from 2126 video-recorded sessions (732 supervisees) and by officers themselves via survey (432 supervisees). Two-level models with latent mean centering identified two within-person effects implicating different cortisol indices and different relational dimensions: higher total cortisol output (log AUCg) predicted lower observer-rated Caring/Fairness, and flatter diurnal slope predicted lower observer-rated Trust. These effects were independent, robust across sensitivity specifications, and specific, with neither index predicting the other's target. The slope effect reflected the trajectory of diurnal decline rather than evening or waking level alone. No cortisol index predicted officer-reported relationship quality, consistent with both the controlled-to-automatic framework and the trait-like variance structure of officer self-report (63-73% between-person). The findings suggest that HPA dysregulation covaries with what independent observers see in professional relational behavior but not with what the professional perceives. That distinct cortisol indices reached distinct relational dimensions is consistent with separable biological pathways rather than a general stress-to-relationship process.
BACKGROUND:Suicidal ideation (SI) is common in patients with major depressive disorder (MDD) and may represent a clinically meaningful phenotype within MDD rather than merely a marker of more severe depressive symptoms. SI may involve disturbances in affective regulation, cognitive control, reward valuation, self-referential processing, and pain/social-threat processing. Although MDD with SI has been linked to gray matter abnormalities in anterior cingulate, prefrontal, limbic, and cerebellar regions, it remains unclear whether these abnormalities show SI-related morphometric covariance patterns-that is, coordinated interindividual variation in gray matter morphology-at the network level. To address this question, we compared gray matter structural covariance networks between MDD patients with and without SI. METHODS:Using data from the REST-meta-MDD project, we included 226 healthy controls and 226 patients with MDD. The MDD cohort comprised an SI group (MDD-SI, n = 113) and a non-SI group (MDD-NSI, n = 113). Depressive symptoms were assessed with the 17-item Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HAMD-17), and depression severity excluding the suicide item (HAMD-16; HAMD-17 minus item 3) was additionally considered. Source-based morphometry (SBM) was used to construct group-level gray matter structural covariance networks and compare their loading coefficients across groups. Exploratory post hoc associations with SI scores and an exploratory internal machine-learning classification analysis were also examined. RESULTS:In the analysis including all participants, relative to healthy controls, the MDD-SI group showed reduced expression of the anterior cingulate covariance network and cerebellar covariance network C, whereas the MDD-NSI group showed increased expression of cerebellar covariance network C and frontal covariance network G. Compared with the MDD-NSI group, the MDD-SI group showed reduced expression in the anterior cingulate covariance network, cerebellar covariance network C, frontal covariance network E, and frontal covariance network G. In an exploratory internal classification analysis, the stacking model achieved an AUC of 0.82 in the internal test subset. Because the cohort-level SBM/ICA representation was derived before the training-test split, this value should not be interpreted as fully independent out-of-sample validation. CONCLUSIONS:This study provides network-level evidence that SI in MDD is associated with coordinated gray matter alterations involving anterior cingulate, cerebellar, and frontal covariance networks. The machine-learning findings are exploratory and require validation using scanner-balanced, fully independent cohorts and training-derived imaging representations.
BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES:Previous studies have focused on how individuals with social anxiety process visual information. This study aimed to investigate whether social anxiety affects the processing of facial and vocal expressions when presented separately or together. METHODS:A total of thirty participants with social anxiety disorders (SAD) and thirty-one healthy controls (HC) took part in a forced two-choice emotion identification task. The task involved presenting expressions of anger and happiness through visual, auditory and audiovisual modalities while simultaneously recording the participants' electroencephalography (EEG) data. RESULTS:The results showed that the SAD group had larger P3a amplitudes when recognising anger through auditory and audiovisual stimuli than those HC. However, we found no significant facilitation effect in the audiovisual condition compared to the unimodal conditions for either group. CONCLUSION:Compared with healthy controls, those with social anxiety displayed an interpretation bias towards angry emotions conveyed by auditory and audiovisual modalities at the late processing stage. These findings have significant implications for reducing anxiety levels in individuals with social anxiety through cognitive interventions.
Many cognitive processes depend on integrating information as it becomes available to construct meaningful interpretations. Prior work has shown graded context effects, especially in language, but it remains less clear how ERP activity changes across successive positions in structured sequences from different symbolic domains. Twenty-seven participants processed structurally comparable four-element sequences across lexical, algebraic, and graphical domains, in which elements A to C established the context and D completed the sequence, while event-related potentials were recorded. In the 250-500 ms interval, centro-parietal mean amplitude showed a robust positive ordinal effect of sequence position (p < .001). Adjacent amplitude changes were unequal: the final C-to-D transition was substantially larger than both the A-to-B and B-to-C transitions (both p < .001). The largest amplitudes occurred over parietal sites, whereas position sensitivity was clearest over central sites. A categorical 0-180 ms analysis showed position-dependent early-window activity, but did not reproduce the defining late C-to-D-dominant profile. These results identify a clear late position-related ERP trajectory as structured meaning develops across the sequence and reaches task-relevant completion. Element D concentrates contextual completion, comparison, and response-related operations, which may have contributed to the enlarged final transition. The pooled ordinal effect demonstrates sequence-position sensitivity in the combined cross-domain dataset, whereas transition-level differences indicate domain-specific implementation of this trajectory.
Bilingual conversation requires coordination between a speaker who selects and produces the target language and a listener who monitors and responds to that output. The present study examined whether emotional state moderates the association between interbrain synchronization and behavioral performance during a controlled dyadic bilingual task. Sixty-two Chinese-English bilinguals formed 31 proficiency-matched dyads. One partner named pictures in Chinese or English, whereas the other made animacy judgments on the producer's spoken responses. Dyads completed mixed- and single-language blocks under experimentally induced negative, neutral, and positive emotional states while dual-EEG was recorded. Behaviorally, both negative and positive states were associated with faster overall responses than the neutral state in production and comprehension. Both states also reduced mixing costs in production, whereas the corresponding comprehension effects were more restricted. Critically, the association between interbrain phase-locking value (PLV) and reaction time differed across emotional states. Under neutral emotion, stronger PLV was often associated with slower responses. Several corresponding associations were more negative under the negative condition, with the clearest negative-neutral difference observed for producer alpha-band PLV. The positive condition produced a more heterogeneous pattern across interlocutor roles, frequency bands, and task contrasts. These findings indicate that PLV-behavior associations during bilingual interaction are not uniform across emotional states. These findings show that emotional context moderates how cross-brain phase consistency covaries with bilingual performance.
Repeated physiological stress responding in daily life is a main mediator of the association between chronic stress and somatic disease. Scalable methods to detect physiological stress responses in daily life are lacking. A potential solution is "additional heart rate" (aHR), which estimates cardiac autonomic responses to psychological stress by subtracting the expected heart rate based on physical activity and posture from the observed heart rate. Here, we identified prolonged periods (>6 min) of substantial increases (>10 BPM) in aHR (aHR periods) in 24-hour recordings of electrocardiogram and accelerometer signals in a healthy sample (n = 827). We examined the heritability and test-retest reliability of the total duration and mean intensity of aHR periods in an exploratory analysis, and then their association with individual characteristics and affective states. Results revealed moderate temporal test-retest reliability (r = .42 and .40) and modest heritability (h² = .15 and .11) of the duration and intensity of aHR periods. Duration and intensity of aHR periods decreased significantly with age (R2 = .02) and BMI (R2 = .01), and males exhibited longer aHR periods than females (3.93 vs 3.20 min/hour, t = 3.16). Neuroticism and exercise behavior were not associated with duration or intensity of aHR periods. Within-person analyses revealed a marginal positive association of aHR periods with momentary negative affect (β = 0.095, p = .033), but not with positive affect. Correcting heart rate for physical activity and posture can thus enable detection of physiological stress responses in daily life, but monitoring over longer periods of weeks to months is necessary to characterize individual risk for stress-related disease outcomes.
Debate has long persisted regarding whether the SNARC effect represents a stable representation in long-term memory (LTM) or a dynamic construction in working memory (WM). Adopting an integrative perspective, this study proposes that the SNARC effect is a dynamic instantiation of LTM templates within WM. By introducing the SPoARC effect as a competitive reference and utilizing event-related potentials (ERPs), we compared the mechanisms underlying implicit (parity judgment) and explicit (magnitude comparison) numerical processing. Behavioral results revealed a significant trade-off between the two effects: SPoARC was relatively stronger in the parity judgment task, whereas SNARC was relatively stronger in the magnitude comparison task. ERP data unveiled the complete neural time course: early N1 and P2 components reflected the pre-allocation of attentional resources and conflict detection, while the critical Late Negative Component (LNC) showed significantly increased amplitude in the explicit task. The LNC pattern suggests that explicit processing recruit additional cognitive resources to activate and maintain spatial-numerical templates from LTM. These findings suggest that the SNARC effect is not a fixed representation but a dynamic product regulated top-down by the central executive system: explicit tasks reinforce this association through gain control, whereas in implicit tasks, resources are prioritized for sequential information.
BACKGROUND:Electroencephalography (EEG) hyperscanning enables the examination of inter-individual neural coordination during social interaction. However, EEG inter-brain synchrony (IBS) studies vary in paradigms, metrics, frequency bands, regions, and statistical reporting. We examined whether conditions related to social interaction enhance EEG IBS and whether EEG IBS is associated with external outcomes. METHODS:We searched the Web of Science Core Collection, PubMed, IEEE Xplore, and APA PsycInfo and APA PsycArticles via EBSCOhost through May 14, 2026. Eligible studies used EEG hyperscanning or simultaneous scalp EEG recordings from at least two individuals and reported dyad- or group-level EEG IBS. Main analyses synthesized condition-related effects using Hedges' g; secondary analyses synthesized associations using Fisher's z. Random-effects models were used. RESULTS:Fifty-four unique studies were included. The core main analysis showed stronger EEG IBS under social-interaction-related conditions (k = 14, Hedges' g = 0.887, 95% CI [0.533, 1.241], p < .001). The core secondary analysis showed a positive association with external outcomes (k = 6, Fisher's z = 0.456, 95% CI [0.288, 0.621], p < .001; r = 0.426). Expanded models remained significant for condition effects (k = 36, g = 0.691) and outcome associations (k = 30, z = 0.474; r = 0.441). The restrictive secondary model also remained significant (k = 26, z = 0.418; r = 0.395). CONCLUSIONS:Social-interaction-related conditions were associated with stronger EEG IBS, and EEG IBS was positively associated with external outcomes. Interpretation should consider heterogeneity in task design, frequency band, shared stimulation, behavioral synchrony, outcome domain, and statistical modeling.
Reward and emotion are tightly intertwined, yet their interaction remains underexplored. The present study employed an adapted monetary incentive delay (MID) paradigm combined with electrophysiological recordings, using emotional faces as incentive cues (signaling gain, neutral, or loss prospect) to investigate how the alignment between emotional valence and incentive contexts affects the incentive representation and subsequent task motivation. Specifically, in valence-congruent blocks, happy, neutral, and angry faces indicate monetary gain, neutral, and loss conditions, respectively; in valence-incongruent blocks, angry, neutral, and happy faces indicate gain, neutral, and loss conditions, respectively. Participants completed a discrimination task in response to the subsequent target and received performance-contingent feedback. Behaviorally, responses were faster in both gain and loss conditions compared to the neutral condition. Analyses of cue-locked ERP components (fronto-central negativity, parietal positivity, and CNV) revealed no reliable emotion-category differences within the gain context. In contrast, significant processing differences between happy and angry cues emerged in the loss context. These findings demonstrate that the impact of emotional expressions on incentive anticipation varies distinctively across gain and loss prospects, highlighting a nuanced and context-dependent interplay between reward and emotion processing.
Spatial and numerical processing are tightly connected capacities of human cognition. It is assumed that space and numbers draw on common neural networks. Here, we used functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) during spatial-numerical bisection tasks to assess neural activity in a natural production paradigm. Thirty-six neurotypical participants used a touch pen during line bisection, number line bisection, number line estimation, number bisection, and an active neutral task (figure-copying). Accordingly, we systematically varied spatial and numerical requirements in a series of four bisection tasks and a neutral task, in an ecologically valid setting with comparable visuo-motor affordances (i.e., ticking a line vs. drawing a figure/number) that are compatible with fNIRS recordings. We had four main findings. (1) All employed bisection tasks showed comparable activation in the bilateral supramarginal gyrus and intraparietal sulcus. (2) Prefrontal activation in the bilateral inferior frontal gyrus was higher for tasks with greater numerical requirements (i.e., number line estimation and number bisection). (3) Relative to figure-copying, number bisection showed stronger deactivation in the left angular gyrus. However, planned contrasts between line bisection, number line bisection and number line estimation did not show different neural activity. (4) In connectivity analyses, number bisection showed a higher functional connectivity from the left intraparietal sulcus to the angular gyrus, compared to number line estimation. Overall, functional connectivity was higher in the left hemisphere. This study provides evidence that inferior frontal regions are engaged in more conceptual spatial-numerical processing in an ecologically valid experimental setting.
Spider phobia is one of the most common types of specific phobias that can be effectively treated with exposure therapy. During exposure therapy, the patients experience encounters with spiders in a safe environment. Exposure sessions are traditionally performed face-to-face and modulate the intensity of the experience by varying the distance to the feared animal. More recently, immersive virtual reality (VR) has been introduced as an alternative treatment option that allows for novel ways of modulating the experienced intensity. In 23 participants (M age = 31.00), we tested whether embodiment with a virtual arm, or visual realism of a spider, influenced self-rated anxiety and pupillary responses as the spider crawled over the virtual arm. Embodiment was manipulated by asking participants to place their arm congruently (high embodiment) or incongruently (low embodiment) with the virtual arm, and visual realism was manipulated by changing the spider's movement, texture and colour to be either realistic or simple. Differences in pupil size between conditions were analysed with permutation testing, and anxiety ratings with repeated measures ANOVA. Results showed that embodiment with the VR arm increased pupil-size and self-rated anxiety (p < .001). In contrast, increased realism of the spider had no effect on pupil-size or anxiety ratings. Findings support that embodiment in immersive VR intensifies emotional experiences, which could have implications for controlling arousal and anxiety within VR exposure therapy settings.
Recognizing a familiar stimulus is essential to our everyday life. Recent studies revealed details of the nature of the neural dynamics of familiarity representations for human faces. Still, we know relatively little on how different familiar and non-familiar stimulus processing is for non-human face stimuli. Here we report the results of an EEG study, examining the neural dynamics of personally familiar human and dog faces. Participants viewed highly variable images of personally familiar and unfamiliar faces as well as of their own dogs and breed-matched unfamiliar ones. Multivariate pattern analyses were used to examine the time course of differential processing of familiar and unfamiliar human and dog face stimuli. Time-resolved classification revealed that familiarity is decodable from the EEG data from 90 ms onwards, similarly for human and non-human faces. The temporal dynamics were very similar for these categories. Familiarity information, starting at 140-160 ms, generalised across face categories and this generalisation was maintained in a very long time-window. In addition, temporal generalisation analysis showed that familiarity representations have an early, category-specific (90-140 ms) as well as a later, category-independent (>180 ms) processing stage. Our results extend previous human face familiarity evidence to another non-human face category and suggest that familiarity is a general, stimulus-invariant step during recognition memory processing.
