Backgrounds:Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation(rTMS) has been widely used in the treatment of insomnia, but there is a lack of research on whether this method could enhance the cognitive flexibility(CF) of individuals with insomnia symptoms. Objectives:To investigate the effects of rTMS on the CF of undergraduates with insomnia symptoms. Methods:29 participants were randomly assigned into Active group(n = 15) and Sham group(n = 14), receiving 1 Hz rTMS interventions targeting the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex for 2 weeks, comprising 10 sessions (active vs sham stimulation). Sleep quality and CF were assessed using the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index(PSQI), Insomnia Severity Index(ISI), Cognitive Flexibility Inventory(CFI), and the Number-Letter Task (N-L task) at baseline(T0), post-intervention(T1), and 8 weeks' follow-up(T2), and event-related potential(ERP) data during the N-L task were recorded. Results:Following the intervention, compared to the Sham group, the ISI and PSQI scores in the Active group were significantly decreased, and the CFI score was significantly increased (P < 0.01); the results of the N-L task indicated that at T1, the switch cost of reaction time and accuracy for the Sham group were significantly higher than those for the Active group(P < 0.05). ERP analysis indicated that at T2, under switch conditions, the amplitude of the frontal area P2 in the Active group was significantly greater than that in the Sham group, and the beta-band ERD at parietal region in the Active group was significantly lower than that in the Sham group (P < 0.05). Conclusions:rTMS could improve sleep quality and enhance the CF of undergraduates with insomnia symptoms. Clinical Trials Registration:The effect of transcranial magnetic stimulation on cognitive flexibility in college students with insomnia (ChiCTR2400081263) URL: https://www.chictr.org.cn/showproj.html?proj=202951.

Background:It is well known that parents play an important role in the family, particularly the mental health literacy of parents is essential for the growth and development of children. As the parents of children with special needs, they are facing more difficulties and psychological pressure, resulted in more mental health problems. Purpose:The current study examined the effect of social support on mental health literacy, and its underlying mechanisms regarding the mediating role of coping styles and moderating role of social comparison. Methods:Using a cross-sectional design, 165 parents of children with special needs (22-67 years old, M=37.72, SD=8.78) participated in the study. The general information questionnaire, Mental Health Literacy Scale (MHLS), Social Support Rating Scale, Simplified Coping Style Questionnaire, and Social Comparison Orientation Scale were used. Results:We found that objective support positively predicted the mental health literacy, positive coping style played a mediating role between objective support and mental health literacy. In addition, the relationship between objective support and positive coping styles was moderated by social comparisons; for lower levels of opinion social comparison, the effect of objective support on positive coping styles was significantly stronger. Conclusion:We revealed the underlying mechanisms between social support and mental health literacy. The present study has profound implications for mental health literacy services for parents who have children with special needs.

Background: Deaf college students have been found to experience more difficulties in emotion regulation due to their hearing loss. However, few studies have used neurological measures to assess the characteristics of implicit emotion regulation among deaf college students. Methods: 30 typical hearing college students and 27 deaf college students completed the implicit emotion regulation task while recording ERP data. Results: The behavioral results indicated that deaf college students exhibited higher emotional experience intensity compared to typical hearing control. The ERP results showed that deaf college students had lower LPP amplitudes when using reappraisal and suppression strategies. Furthermore, the LPP of cognitive reappraisal was associated with an increase in depression scores among deaf students. Conclusions: Deaf college students may have deficits in implicit emotion regulation, which can effectively predict depression.

At present there is little knowledge on whether and how multiple pieces of unconscious information can simultaneously affect a single conscious response. In the present study, we manipulated the congruency relation between a masked prime arrow and the target arrow, as well as that between masked flankers and the target arrow. The results demonstrated that the masked prime and flankers produced independent unconscious priming effects on the response to the target. In the process of studying the above phenomenon, two secondary findings were made. First, although the prime congruency effect was obtained, the flanker congruency effect was smaller when the flankers were displayed simultaneously with the target than when they were displayed sequentially before the target. This suggested that priming stimulation required enough time to be processed to a sufficient extent to produce an unconscious priming effect. Second, when the prime stimulus was removed, leaving only the flankers, the flanker priming effect increased, suggesting that the attention attracted to the prime and its conscious mask could also reduce the flanker congruency effect. These results observed across several experiments were replicated in one within-subjects experiment. We proposed an "independent unconscious influence hypothesis" for the phenomenon. This hypothesis was further integrated into a more comprehensive unconscious information processing model. The possible causes of the observed phenomena were discussed.

Parents of atypically developing children such as parents of children with ASD, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and intellectual disability experience higher levels of parenting stress than parents of typically developing children. However, whether they possess enhanced emotional negativity bias was unclear. In the present study, 28 parents of typically developing children and 29 parents of atypically developing children were recruited. The emotional Stroop task and event-related potentials were adopted to measure their emotional negativity bias, in which participants were required to respond to the borders' color of face pictures. Behaviorally, the impact of parenting stress on emotional negativity bias was not found. At the electrophysiological level, the P2 differential amplitude (negative minus positive) was greater in parents of atypically developing children than in parents of typically developing children, reflecting an enhanced early attentional bias toward negative faces. N2 amplitude for the emotionally negative face was smaller than the positive face in parents of atypically developing children, indicating a too weak attentional control to inhibit distractors. Furthermore, sustained attention to negative faces was observed in parents of atypically developing children, that is, the emotionally negative face elicited greater frontal P3 (300 ~ 500 ms) than the positive faces. These findings revealed that compared to parents of typically developing children, parents of atypically developing children owned an enhanced emotional negativity bias at the early and late stages of information processing.

Social comparison is a common phenomenon in our daily life, through which people get to know themselves, and plays an important role in depression. In this study, event-related potential (ERP) was used to explore the temporal course of social comparison processing in the subthreshold depression group. Electrophysiological recordings were acquired from 30 subthreshold depressed individuals and 31 healthy individuals while they conducted the adapted dot estimation task. The ERP results revealed that there was a significant difference of feedback-related negativity (FRN) in the process of social comparison. Especially only in the subthreshold depression, the FRN amplitudes of worse off than some, better off than many comparisons were larger than those of upward comparisons and downward comparisons. Our results suggested that the abnormal reward sensitivity for worse off than some, better off than many comparisons might be prodromal symptoms in the subthreshold depression.

To investigate whether fairness decision among deaf college students is the same to the normal hearing college students, we recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine how the brain affected when the deaf college students perform the ultimatum gaming task. For the behavioral outcomes, a main effect of proposal type was found for both deaf and normal hearing college students, the more unfair of the offer, the lower of acceptance rate have, which indicated that the deaf college students have the same unfairness aversion and fair decision-making as normal hearing college students at the behavioral level. The ERPs results revealed there was a significant interaction between group and proposal type at the early stage (N1). Interestingly, only in the deaf college group, the mean wave amplitude of N1 induced by moderately and very unfair offers were significantly greater than that of fair offers. In addition, we found that the deaf college students had smaller amplitudes on P2 and P3 than normal hearing college students, which showed the deaf college students are more strongly motivated to be fair. Based on these, we should provide more fairness information and attention to the mental health of the deaf people.

Subthreshold depression can effectively and timely carry out early identification, prevention of major depressive disorder(MDD). Social comparison affects emotion, yet the neural mechanisms in subthreshold depression is unclear. We employed event-related potentials (ERPs) technique to investigate the effect of facial emotion recognition under social comparison in subthreshold depression. The results indicated that there was an interaction between social comparison and emotional processing of P300, LPC in the two groups, both positive and negative emotions were affected by the worse off than some, better off than many. The amplitude of N1 was smaller under positive emotion condition in the subthreshold depression group, suggesting that the subthreshold depression group did not allocate more attentional resources to visual stimuli in the early stage. These results advance our understanding of the effect of social comparison on emotion processing and contribute to understanding the cognitive mechanisms that underlie and maintain subthreshold depression.

近年众多研究表明，经皮迷走神经刺激(tVNS)作为一种新型、非侵入式的神经调控技术对个体的抑制控制功能具有积极的调节作用。已有研究发现，tVNS对抑制控制的调节作用可能是通过调控蓝斑核—去甲肾上腺素系统(LC-NE)的活动和神经递质GABA的浓度来实现的。然而，目前对tVNS调控抑制控制的神经机制仍存在诸多尚未明确的问题。未来研究在进一步优化tVNS的刺激参数后，可以从tVNS对抑制控制能力受损群体的调控作用及机制、如何实现和增强tVNS长期积极效应等方面进行深入探索。

Group interaction is an essential way of social interaction and plays an important role in our social development. It has been found that when individuals participate in group interactions, the group identity of the interaction partner affects the mental processing and behavioral decision-making of subjects. However, little is known about how deaf college students, who are labeled distinctly different from normal hearing college students, will react when facing proposers from different groups in the ultimatum game (UG) and its time course. In this study, we recruited 29 deaf college students who played the UG in which they received extremely unfair, moderately unfair, or fair offers from either outgroup members (normal hearing college students) or ingroup members (deaf college students), while their brain potentials were recorded. The behavioral results showed that group membership did not impact the acceptance rate of deaf college students. But, event-related potential (ERP) analysis demonstrated an enhanced feedback-related negativity (FRN) elicited by ingroup members compared to outgroup members. Importantly, we found that under fairness conditions, deaf college students induced more positive P2 and P3 facing ingroup members compared to outgroup members. Our results demonstrated that group membership may modulate the performance of deaf college students in the UG and the existence of ingroup bias among deaf college students. This provides some evidence for the fairness characteristics of special populations, so that to improve the educational integration of colleges and universities.

At present there is little knowledge on how multiple pieces of unconscious information influence a single conscious response. For example, it is unclear whether the multiple pieces of unconscious information can independently affect the same response simultaneously. In the present study, we manipulated the congruency relation between a masked arrow in the prime and the arrow in the target, as well as that between masked flankers and the target arrow. The results demonstrated that the masked prime and flankers produced independent unconscious priming effects on the response to the target. We proposed an “independent unconscious influence hypothesis” for the phenomenon. This hypothesis was integrated into a more comprehensive unconscious information processing model. In the process of studying the above problem, two secondary findings were made. First, the flanker congruency effect was smaller when the flankers were displayed simultaneously with target than when they were displayed before the target. This suggested that priming stimulation required enough time to be processed to a sufficient extent to produce an unconscious priming effect. Second, the attention to the prime and its conscious mask was found to reduce the flanker congruency effect, whose possible causes were discussed. These results were replicated across between-subjects and within-subjects designs.

已有研究从行为和认知神经角度出发揭示了睡眠剥夺对执行功能的影响及其机制,但行为层面的证据表明睡眠剥夺对抑制控制、工作记忆、认知灵活性3个执行功能子成分的影响并未得出一致结论,其效应可能受到任务类型、个体差异等因素的调节.认知神经机制的相关研究强调了前额叶皮层和神经补偿在执行功能睡眠剥夺效应中的重要作用,并且指出N2-P3成分是一个反映执行功能在睡眠剥夺状态下变化的良好认知神经指标.此外,研究者总结出4种理论假说:唤醒水平假说、注意控制假说、警觉性假说以及神经心理学假说.未来研究需要从阐明"认知不纯"现象、采用动态发展视角、联合不同睡眠参数、关注慢性睡眠剥夺等多个方面进行全面深化和拓展.

This experiment used event-related potentials (ERPs) to study the tactile-visual information conflict processing in a tactile-visual pairing task and its modulation by tactile-induced emotional states. Eighteen participants were asked to indicate whether the tactile sensation on their body matched or did not match the expected tactile sensation associated with the object depicted in an image. The type of tactile-visual stimuli (matched vs. mismatched) and the valence of tactile-induced emotional states (positive vs. negative) were manipulated following a 2 × 2 factorial design. Electrophysiological analyses revealed a mismatched minus matched negative difference component between 420 and 620 ms after stimulus onset in the negative tactile-induced emotional state condition. This ND420-620 component was considered as a sign of the cross-modal conflict processing during the processing of incongruent tactile-visual information. In contrast, no significant mismatched minus matched negative difference component was found in the positive tactile-induced emotional state condition. Together, these results support the hypothesis that a positive emotional state induced by a positive tactile stimulation improves tactile-visual conflict processing abilities.

EDITORIAL article Front. Hum. Neurosci., 22 November 2021Sec. Cognitive Neuroscience https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2021.791589

This study investigated the event-related brain potentials associated with the olfactory-visual cross-modal Stroop effect and its modulation by olfactory-induced and self-reported affective states. Eighteen healthy participants were presented with an olfactory stimulus and the image of a plant, and they had to categorize the olfactory attribute of the image as “aromatic” or “pungent” by pressing the relevant button as quickly as possible. The type of olfactory-visual stimuli (congruent or incongruent) and the valence of the olfactory-induced emotional states (positive or negative) were manipulated following a 2 × 2 factorial design. Interference effects were observed at the behavioral and the electrophysiological levels: response times recorded in the incongruent condition were higher than those observed in the congruent condition; an incongruent minus congruent negative difference component was discovered between 350 and 550 ms after stimulus onset in the negative—but not in the positive—olfactory-induced emotional state condition. This ND350-550 component was interpreted as reflecting the amount of selective attention involved in the olfactory-visual cross-modal Stroop effect. These results are also consistent with a facilitatory effect of positive emotional state on selective attention which could reduce brain potentials associated with the cross-modal interference effect.

Past attempts to characterize the neural mechanisms of affective priming have conceptualized it in terms of classic cognitive conflict, but have not examined the neural oscillatory mechanisms of subliminal affective priming. Using behavioral and electroencephalogram (EEG) time frequency (TF) analysis, the current study examines the oscillatory dynamics of unconsciously triggered conflict in an emotional facial expressions version of the masked affective priming task. The results demonstrate that the power dynamics of conflict are characterized by increased midfrontal theta activity and suppressed parieto-occipital alpha activity. Across-subject and within-trial correlation analyses further confirmed this pattern. Phase synchrony and Granger causality analyses (GCAs) revealed that the fronto-parietal network was involved in unconscious conflict detection and resolution. Our findings support a response conflict account of affective priming, and reveal the role of the fronto-parietal network in unconscious conflict control.

Encoding of spatial information in the superficial layers of the medial entorhinal cortex (sMEC) involves theta-modulated spiking and gamma oscillations, as well as spatially tuned grid cells and border cells. Little is known about the role of the arousal-promoting histaminergic system in the modification of information encoded in the sMEC in vivo, and how such histamine-regulated information correlates with behavioral functions. Here, we show that histamine upregulates the neural excitability of a significant proportion of neurons (16.32%, 39.18%, and 52.94% at 30 μM, 300 μM, and 3 mM, respectively) and increases local theta (4-12 Hz) and gamma power (low: 25-48 Hz; high: 60-120 Hz) in the sMEC, through activation of histamine receptor types 1 and 3. During spatial exploration, the strength of theta-modulated firing of putative principal neurons and high gamma oscillations is enhanced about 2-fold by histamine. The histamine-mediated increase of theta phase-locking of spikes and high gamma power is consistent with successful spatial recognition. These results, for the first time, reveal possible mechanisms involving the arousal-promoting histaminergic system in the modulation of spatial cognition.

Cognitive control over conflict, mediated by the prefrontal cortex, is an important skill for successful decision-making. Although it has been shown that cognitive control may operate unconsciously, it has recently been proposed that control operations may be driven by the metacognitive awareness of conflict, e.g. arising from the feeling of task difficulty or the ease of action selection, and therefore crucially depends on conflict awareness. Behavioral and electroencephalography (EEG) data are presented from 64 subjects performing a masked priming paradigm to test this hypothesis. Although the subjective experience of conflict elicited behavioral adaptation, this was also the case when conflict was present, but not experienced. In EEG, typical oscillatory markers of conflict processing in the theta-, alpha-and beta-band were observed (relative broadband), but these were differentially modulated by conflict experience. This demonstrates that conflict adaptation does not depend on conflict experience, but that conflict experience is associated with increased cognitive control.

The extent to which subjective awareness influences reward processing, and thereby affects future decisions, is currently largely unknown. In the present report, we investigated this question in a reinforcement learning framework, combining perceptual masking, computational modeling, and electroencephalographic recordings (human male and female participants). Our results indicate that degrading the visibility of the reward decreased, without completely obliterating, the ability of participants to learn from outcomes, but concurrently increased their tendency to repeat previous choices. We dissociated electrophysiological signatures evoked by the reward-based learning processes from those elicited by the reward-independent repetition of previous choices and showed that these neural activities were significantly modulated by reward visibility. Overall, this report sheds new light on the neural computations underlying reward-based learning and decision-making and highlights that awareness is beneficial for the trial-by-trial adjustment of decision-making strategies. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT The notion of reward is strongly associated with subjective evaluation, related to conscious processes such as “pleasure,” “liking,” and “wanting.” Here we show that degrading reward visibility in a reinforcement learning task decreases, without completely obliterating, the ability of participants to learn from outcomes, but concurrently increases subjects' tendency to repeat previous choices. Electrophysiological recordings, in combination with computational modeling, show that neural activities were significantly modulated by reward visibility. Overall, we dissociate different neural computations underlying reward-based learning and decision-making, which highlights a beneficial role of reward awareness in adjusting decision-making strategies.