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Background: Individuals with skin-picking disorder (SPD) display reduced neural sensitivity to slow/soft touch. This functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study investigated the effects of Soft Touch Training (STT) on neural correlates of touch processing and SPD symptoms., Method: Females with a primary diagnosis of SPD (n = 57) were randomly assigned to receive either four weeks of STT (guided soft brushing of selected skin regions) or Progressive Muscle Relaxation (PMR) training (guided tensing and relaxing of selected muscle regions). The app-assisted intervention consisted of 15-minute daily training sessions at home. Before and after the four-week intervention, the two groups participated in a standardized tactile stimulation procedure during fMRI (affective vs nonaffective touch of the forearm). Intervention-based changes in subjective and neural responses to the tactile stimulation as well as SPD severity were compared between the groups., Results: STT increased the pleasantness ratings for (affective) touch administered during fMRI, which was accompanied by decreased activation in the parietal operculum (PO) and supramarginal gyrus (SMG), as well as increased PO-SMG connectivity. These findings possibly reflect normalized affective touch processing due to STT. Both interventions (STT and PMR) reduced SPD severity., Conclusions: This study demonstrated that a brief app-assisted touch training can change the experience of receiving touch from others and the associated brain activity and connectivity. Adaptations of the training relating to duration/ frequency of sessions might enhance its effectiveness., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

The knowledge about effects of placebos and nocebos on specific visual attention processes is still very limited. In the present eye-tracking study, it was analyzed if a nocebo (sham transcranial magnetic stimulation) is able to elicit left-sided attentional deficits (pseudo-neglect). Fifty-two healthy participants performed a search task on the computer, once with and once without the nocebo. Indicators of left-biased search behavior (e.g. fixation count, reaction times for left vs. right-sided target detection) and affective state (e.g., valence, arousal) were assessed. The sample was divided into two groups (nocebo responder, non-responder) based on the experienced effectiveness of the nocebo. The nocebo treatment was associated with a positive and calm affective state. Contrary to the verbal suggestion, the nocebo increased the number of fixations and the dwell time on the left side of the computer screen. Moreover, the nocebo decreased the detection time for targets on the left side. These paradoxical nocebo effects were restricted to nocebo responders. Possible implications of nocebo-related compensatory behaviors for neuropsychological therapy are discussed., (Copyright © 2018. Published by Elsevier B.V.)

Objective: In healthy individuals, the perception of an intense bitter taste decreased the reward value of visual food cues, as reflected by the reduction of a specific event-related brain potential (ERP), frontal late positivity. The current cross-modal ERP study investigated responses of female patients with binge-eating symptoms (BES) to this type of visual-gustatory stimulation., Methods: Women with BES (n=36) and female control participants (n=38) viewed food images after they rinsed their mouth with either bitter wormwood tea or water., Results: Relative to controls, the patients showed elevated late positivity (LPP: 400-700ms) to the food images in the bitter condition. The LPP source was located in the medial prefrontal cortex. Both groups did not differ in the ratings for the fluids (intensity, bitterness, disgust)., Conclusions: This ERP study showed that a bitter taste did not decrease late positivity to visual food cues (reflecting food reward) in women with BES., Significance: The atypical bitter responding might be a biological marker of this condition and possibly contributes to overeating. Future studies should additionally record food intake behavior to further investigate this mechanism., (Copyright © 2017 International Federation of Clinical Neurophysiology. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) typically begins in childhood. Previous research has demonstrated that adult patients respond with elevated late positivity (LP) to negative facial expressions. In the present study on pediatric SAD, we investigated responses to negative facial expressions and the role of social context information. Fifteen children with SAD and 15 non-anxious controls were first presented with images of negative facial expressions with masked backgrounds. Following this, the complete images which included context information, were shown. The negative expressions were either a result of an emotion-relevant (e.g., social exclusion) or emotion-irrelevant elicitor (e.g., weight lifting). Relative to controls, the clinical group showed elevated parietal LP during face processing with and without context information. Both groups differed in their frontal LP depending on the type of context. In SAD patients, frontal LP was lower in emotion-relevant than emotion-irrelevant contexts. We conclude that SAD patients direct more automatic attention towards negative facial expressions (parietal effect) and are less capable in integrating affective context information (frontal effect)., (Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Previous neuroimaging research showed that a disgust placebo (inert pill presented with the verbal suggestion of disgust relief) reduced visual cortex activation during the viewing of disgust-inducing images. In order to investigate whether this effect of automatic emotion regulation was associated with changed visual scanning patterns of the pictures, we conducted two eye tracking experiments. In the first study, 23 women underwent a retest design during which they passively viewed images depicting disgusting, fear-eliciting, neutral items and fractals both with, and without a placebo. The placebo provoked a substantial decrease in experienced disgust. Although none of the recorded eye movement parameters (number of fixations, fixation duration, saccade amplitude, blinking rate) showed placebo-related changes, placebo effects were suggested by an analysis of spatial fixation patterns. In the second study, which focused on attentional (dis)engagement, 46 women looked at two pictures which were presented side-by-side on the screen. These picture pairs (disgust-neutral, neutral-neutral) were once viewed with and once without a placebo. The placebo again provoked a marked decrease of experienced disgust and enhanced the number of fixations for disgusting images. This change might reflect a greater willingness of the participants to view these stimuli while on the placebo., (Copyright © 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Background: A specific non-motor impairment in Parkinson's disease (PD) concerns difficulties to accurately identify facial emotions. Findings are numerous but very inconsistent, ranging from general discrimination deficits to problems for specific emotions up to no impairment at all. By contrast, only a few studies exist about emotion experience, altered affective traits and states in PD., Objective: To investigate the decoding capacity for affective facial expressions, affective experience of emotion-eliciting images and affective personality traits in PD., Methods: The study sample included 25 patients with mild to moderate symptom intensity and 25 healthy controls (HC) of both sexes. The participants were shown pictures of facial expressions depicting disgust, fear, and anger as well as disgusting and fear-relevant scenes. Additionally, they answered self-report scales for the assessment of affective traits., Results: PD patients had more problems in controlling anger and disgust feelings than HC. Higher disgust sensitivity in PD was associated with lower functioning in everyday life and lower capacity to recognize angry faces. Furthermore, patients reported less disgust towards poor hygiene and spoiled food and they stated elevated anxiety. However, the clinical group displayed intact facial emotion decoding and emotion experience. Everyday life functionality was lowered in PD and decreased with stronger motor impairment. Furthermore, disease duration was negatively associated to correct classification of angry faces., Conclusions: Our data indicate that problems with emotion regulation may appear already in earlier disease stages of PD. By contrast, PD patients showed appropriate emotion recognition and experience. However, data also point to a deterioration of emotion recognition capacity with the course of the disease. Compensatory mechanisms in PD patients with less advanced disease are discussed., (Copyright © 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Fear of pain is a main motivator for avoidance or delay of dental treatment in patients afflicted with dentophobia. Studies employing passive viewing paradigms found motivated attention to the phobic object to be associated with enhanced amplitudes of the late positive potential (LPP). The aim of the current study was to investigate, if explicit attention-guiding instructions are able to modify the LPP. Twenty-three patients suffering from dentophobia and 23 controls were presented with pictures showing disorder-relevant or neutral contents, which were combined with different instructions: to distract the attention away from the picture, to classify the content, or to decide whether the scene elicited fear of pain. Relative to controls, dentophobics displayed enhanced late positivity (300-1000 ms after picture onset) in the fear of pain condition at frontal and central recording sites, whereas there was no group difference during classification and distraction. Within patients, fear of pain elicited greater positivity than classification and distraction. The findings are discussed within the framework of attentional direction. Future studies could investigate whether psychotherapy differentially affects neural correlates of attention regulation., (Copyright © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Successful cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) for spider phobia is able to change patients' brain activation during visual symptom provocation. The present voxel-based morphometry study investigated whether this therapy approach can additionally affect brain structure. We analyzed gray matter volume of 12 spider-phobic patients prior to CBT and in a six-month follow-up investigation, and contrasted the results with data from 13 non-phobic controls. CBT provoked a dramatic decrease in syndrome severity in the clinical group as indexed by self-report and by a behavioral approach test. This was accompanied by a reduction of left supplementary motor area volume, which was correlated with the reduction of symptom severity. The therapy-related decrease of left amygdala volume was marginally significant. Nevertheless, in both sessions the patients were characterized by increased amygdala volume relative to controls. Our findings have to be considered preliminary and need replication in a bigger sample., (Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Decision makers tend to prefer decision-consistent information and/or neglect decision-inconsistent information (selective exposure). In the present EEG study the neural mechanisms of the classic selective exposure effect were examined by investigating oscillatory brain responses to consistent vs. inconsistent information. Twenty participants made an economic decision and subsequently were exposed to 45 consistent and 45 inconsistent images concerning their decision. EEG was recorded from 31 electrodes and differences between oscillatory brain responses towards consistent and inconsistent information were examined. The main result was an increase of induced theta power (5-8Hz, 0-0.7s) in the consistent compared to the inconsistent condition at right temporo-parietal electrodes, as well as a corresponding increase of evoked theta power at frontal electrodes. Since theta oscillations are often observed during memory formation, we conclude that decision-consistent information triggers memory formation, whereas decision-inconsistent information seems not to do so. This finding supports the classic motivational perspective of Leon Festinger on the selective exposure effect., (Copyright © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Background and Objectives: The goal of the present study was to investigate a threat engagement, disengagement, and sensitivity bias in individuals suffering from pathological worry., Methods: Twenty participants high in worry proneness and 16 control participants low in worry proneness completed an emotional go/no-go task with worry-related threat words and neutral words., Results: Shorter reaction times (i.e., threat engagement bias), smaller omission error rates (i.e., threat sensitivity bias), and larger commission error rates (i.e., threat disengagement bias) emerged only in the high worry group when worry-related words constituted the go-stimuli and neutral words the no-go stimuli. Also, smaller omission error rates as well as larger commission error rates were observed in the high worry group relative to the low worry group when worry-related go stimuli and neutral no-go stimuli were used., Limitations: The obtained results await further replication within a generalized anxiety disorder sample. Also, further samples should include men as well., Conclusions: Our data suggest that worry-prone individuals are threat-sensitive, engage more rapidly with aversion, and disengage harder., (Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

The activation of cortical attention networks during affective picture processing has been extensively studied, whereas little is known about affective imagery. It is still unclear whether differences in emotional stimulus content are able to modulate visual cortex activation during imagery. Moreover, individual differences in emotional reactivity and imagery ability have not been investigated. The aim of this experiment was to examine these processes by means of near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS). Thirty-five healthy adults were instructed to look at affective (disgust and happy) and neutral pictures and afterwards visualize them during multi-channel NIRS recording. Our main results indicated a differential involvement of parietal and occipital areas in the perception and imagery of affective pictures. In general, picture perception provoked increased oxygenated hemoglobin in occipital regions, whereas imagery was associated with an increase in parietal areas. Emotional content modulated activation of the left occipital cortex during both picture perception and imagery. Affective pictures (disgust and happy) provoked greater activation compared to neutral ones. Additionally, the self-rated imagery ability of the participants was positively correlated with their occipital activation during affective imagery. Thus, occipital activation might be crucial for the quality of imagery. In contrast, all correlations with emotional traits (e.g. trait disgust) and oxygenation were nonsignificant, which might be due to the fact that those personality factors predominantly modulate the activation of subcortical limbic structures which are not accessible with NIRS., (2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Objectives: Dental phobia is currently classified as a specific phobia of the blood-injection-injury (BII) subtype. In another subtype, animal phobia, enhanced amplitudes of late event-related potentials have consistently been identified for patients during passive viewing of disorder-relevant pictures. However, this has not been shown for BII phobics, and studies with dental phobics are lacking. Findings on cardiac responses in BII phobia during exposure are heterogeneous, as some studies showed a diphasic pattern of heart rate acceleration and deceleration, whereas others observed pure acceleration. In contrast, heart rate increase has consistently been shown for dental phobics, resembling the reaction of animal phobics. Moreover, the BII subtype is characterized by elevated disgust reactivity whereas the role of habitual disgust proneness in dental phobia is unclear., Methods: We recorded the electroencephalogram and the electrocardiogram from 18 dental phobic and 18 healthy women while they watched pictures depicting dental treatment, disgust, fear and neutral items., Results: Phobics relative to controls showed an enhanced late positive potential (300-700 ms) and heart rate acceleration towards phobic material, reflecting motivated attention and fear. Affective ratings revealed that dental phobics experienced significantly higher levels of fear than disgust during exposure to phobia-relevant material. Patients' elevated habitual disgust proneness was restricted to specific domains, such as the oral incorporation of offensive objects., Conclusion: The psychophysiology of dental phobia resembles the fear-dominated subtypes of specific phobia reported in earlier studies. Future studies should continue to investigate whether the current classification of this disorder as BII phobia needs to be reconsidered., (Copyright © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

The growing availability of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with its property of high spatial resolution has energized the search for specific neural substrates of basic emotions and their feeling components. In the present article, we address the question as to whether recent fMRI studies on primary affective experiences have truly helped to pinpoint emotion-specific areas in the human brain or whether these studies are afflicted with methodological problems which make such inferences difficult. As one approach for improvement, we suggest the combination of fMRI with methods characterized by high temporal resolution, such as electroencephalography (EEG). Simultaneous recoding allows the correlation of temporally specific EEG components (e.g., the late positive potential) with regional blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) signals during affective experiences. Combined information on the source as well as the exact temporal pattern of a neural affective response will help to improve our understanding of emotion-specific brain activation.

Background: The underlying neurobiological mechanisms that account for the onset and maintenance of binge-eating disorder (BED) are not sufficiently understood. This functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study explored the neural correlates of visually induced food reward and loathing., Method: Sixty-seven female participants assigned to one of four groups (overweight BED patients, overweight healthy control subjects, normal-weight healthy control subjects, and normal-weight patients with bulimia nervosa) participated in the experiment. After an overnight fast, the participants' brain activation was recorded during each of the following three conditions: visual exposure to high-caloric food, to disgust-inducing pictures, and to affectively neutral pictures. After the fMRI experiment, the participants rated the affective value of the pictures., Results: Each of the groups experienced the food pictures as very pleasant. Relative to the neutral pictures, the visual food stimuli provoked increased activation in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), and insula across all participants. The BED patients reported enhanced reward sensitivity and showed stronger medial OFC responses while viewing food pictures than all other groups. The bulimic patients displayed greater arousal, ACC activation, and insula activation than the other groups. Neural responses to the disgust-inducing pictures as well as trait disgust did not differ between the groups., Conclusions: This study provides first evidence of differential brain activation to visual food stimuli in patients suffering from BED and bulimia nervosa.

The question to what extent emotion-related brain activation depends upon the presentation design (block design vs. event-related design) and the stimulus type (scene pictures vs. pictures with facial mimic) has hardly been addressed in previous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) research. In the present fMRI experiment, 40 right-handed subjects viewed pictures with fear-inducing and disgust-inducing content as well as facial expressions of fear and disgust. Pictures of neutral objects and neutral facial mimic were used as control stimuli. The pictures were presented in a block design for half of the subjects; the other half viewed the same stimuli as singular events in randomized sequence. The participants had been instructed to passively view the pictures. Disgust-evoking scenes provoked activation in the amygdala, the insula and the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). This applied to the blocked as well as to the event-related design. Fear-relevant scenes were associated with activity in the insula, the OFC and the middle temporal gyri in the event-related design. The presentation in a block design only led to activation in the middle temporal gyri. Facial expressions of disgust and fear did not trigger significant activation neither in the blocked nor event-related design. This surprising outcome may be a result of context and task effects. The face stimuli which were presented together with the more complex scenes in a passive viewing paradigm possibly were not salient enough to trigger emotional processing.

The major goal of the present functional magnetic resonance imaging study was to investigate the influence of disgust sensitivity on hemodynamic responses during disgust induction. Fifteen subjects viewed three different film excerpts (duration: 135 s each) with disgust-evoking, threatening and neutral content. The films were presented in a block design with four repetitions of each condition. Afterwards, subjects gave affective ratings for the films and answered the questionnaire for the assessment of disgust sensitivity (QADS, []). The subjects' overall disgust sensitivity was positively related to their experienced disgust, as well as to their prefrontal cortex activation during the disgust condition. Further, there was a positive correlation between subjects' scores on the QADS subscale spoilage/decay and their amygdala activation (r=0.76). This was reasonable since the disgust film clip depicted a cockroach-invasion and the subscale spoilage/decay contains, among others, an item asking for disgust towards cockroaches. The study stresses, in accordance to previous studies, the importance of considering personality traits when studying affective responses in fMRI studies.

This functional magnetic resonance imaging study investigated the disgust- and fear-reactivity of patients suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Ten OCD patients were scanned while viewing blocks of pictures showing OCD triggers from their personal environment and OCD-irrelevant disgust-inducing, fear-inducing and neutral scenes. Afterwards, the patients rated the intensity of the induced disgust, fear and OCD symptoms. The responses were compared with those of 10 healthy control subjects. The disorder-relevant pictures provoked intense OCD symptoms in the clinical group associated with increased activation in the bilateral prefrontal cortex, the left insula, the right supramarginal gyrus, the left caudate nucleus and the right thalamus. The patients gave higher disgust and fear ratings than the controls for all aversive picture categories. Neural responses towards the disorder-irrelevant disgusting and fear-inducing material included more pronounced insula activation in patients than controls. Summarizing, photos of individual OCD-triggers are an effective means of symptom provocation and activation of the fronto-striato-thalamo-parietal network. The increased insular reactivity of OCD patients during all aversive picture conditions might mirror their susceptibility to experience negative somatic states.

The majority of neuroimaging studies on affective processing have indicated that there are specific brain structures, which are selectively responsive to fear and disgust. Whereas the amygdala is assumed to be fear-related, the insular cortex is most likely involved in disgust processing. Since these findings are mainly a result of studies focusing exclusively either on fear, or on disgust, but rarely on both emotions together, the present experiment explored the neural effects of viewing disgusting and fear-inducing pictures in contrast to neutral pictures. This was done by means of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with 19 subjects (nine males, ten females), who also gave affective ratings for the presented pictures. The fear and the disgust pictures were able to induce the target emotions and they received comparable valence and arousal ratings. The processing of both aversive picture types was associated with an increased brain activation in the occipital-temporal lobe, in the prefrontal cortex, and in the thalamus. The amygdala was significantly activated by disgusting, but not by fear-inducing, pictures. Thus, our data are in contrast with the idea of highly emotion-specific brain structures and rather suggest the existence of a common affective circuit.