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Social and affective neurosciences are topics of increasing popularity and great urgency in contemporary brain research. Before the introduction of the noninvasive brain stimulation methods used presently, most of the research on social and emotional processes relied on behavioral methods, lesions, and/or correlational methods alone. The possibility to noninvasively and transiently interfere with the ongoing brain function using a site-specific technique as transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) allows us to understand brain–behavior relationships with another level of causality that cannot be achieved with imaging or behavioral methods alone. In this chapter, we will review how tDCS has been used in social and emotional neuroscience studies, with a focus on basic research.

The study of addiction and impulsion control disorders has shown that behaviors of seeking and consumption of addictive substances are subserved by neurobiological alterations specifically related to brain networks for reward, stress, and executive control, representing the brain's adaptation to the continued use of an addictive substance. In parallel, studies using neuromodulation techniques such as transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) have demonstrated promising effects in modulating cognitive and motor functions. This review aims to describe the neurobiology of addiction and some of the most relevant cognitive models of addictive behavior and to clarify how tDCS application modulates the intake and craving for several addictive substances, such as food, alcohol, nicotine, cocaine, crack, methamphetamine, and cannabis. We also discuss the positive and null outcomes of the use of this neuromodulatory technique in the treatment of addiction disorders resulting from the use of these substances. The reviewed findings lead us to conclude that tDCS interventions hold several promising clinical avenues in addiction and impulsive control. However, methodological investigations are necessary for undercover optimal parameters before implementing its clinical application.

The ultimatum game (UG) is an endowment sharing game in which a proposer suggests a division of an asset to a recipient, who must accept or reject it. Economic studies showed that despite recipients usually rejecting unfair offers, perception and reaction to unfairness are highly dependent on who is the proposer. Event-related potentials (ERPs) commonly detected in UG games are the medial frontal negativity (MFN), a component detected in recipients facing unfair offers, and the P300, a component related to attentional and memory processes. Given this, we aimed to investigate the behavioral and ERP responses of healthy people playing the UG game with Down syndrome (DS) and typical development (TD) proposers. Nineteen subjects participated in this study. The UG behavioral data were similar to previous studies. ERP analysis showed no MFN in participants facing unfair offers. A higher P300 amplitude was detected when participants faced fair offers from TD compared to DS fair offers. We also found a positive correlation between P300 amplitude for TD offers and self-esteem scale score. Together these findings indicate that insertion of an atypical player in the UG led to changes in participants' perception and expectancy of the game.

The concepts of grouping, emergence, and superadditivity (when a whole is qualitatively different from the sum of its parts) are critical in Gestalt psychology and essential to properly understand the information processing mechanisms underlying visual perception. However, very little is known about the neural processes behind these phenomena (particularly in terms of their generality vs. specificity and their time-course). Here, we used the configural superiority effect as a way to define "emergence" and "emergent features" operationally, employing an approach that can isolate different emergent features and compare them on a common scale. By assessing well-established event related potentials in a HD-EEG system, we found that the critical processes behind configural superiority and superadditive Gestalt phenomena are present in the window between 100 and 200 ms after stimulus onset and that these effects seem to be driven by specific attentional selection mechanisms. Also, some emergent features seem to be differentially processed in different brain hemispheres. These results shed new light on the issues of the generality vs. specificity of the neural correlates of different Gestalt principles, the hemispheric asymmetries in the processing of hierarchical image structure and the role of the N1 ERP component in reflecting feature selective mechanisms. ispartof: SCIENTIFIC REPORTS vol:8 issue:1 ispartof: location:England status: published

Abstract. Social neuroscience and psychology have made substantial advances in the last few decades. Nonetheless, the field has relied mostly on behavioral, imaging, and other correlational research methods. Here we argue that transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is an effective and relevant technique to be used in this field of research, allowing for the establishment of more causal brain-behavior relationships than can be achieved with most of the techniques used in this field. We review relevant brain stimulation-aided research in the fields of social pain, social interaction, prejudice, and social decision-making, with a special focus on tDCS. Despite the fact that the use of tDCS in Social Neuroscience and Psychology studies is still in its early days, results are promising. As better understanding of the processes behind social cognition becomes increasingly necessary due to political, clinical, and even philosophical demands, the fact that tDCS is arguably rare in Social Neuroscience research is very noteworthy. This review aims at inspiring researchers to employ tDCS in the investigation of issues within Social Neuroscience. We present substantial evidence that tDCS is indeed an appropriate tool for this purpose.

There is increasing evidence that both mind wandering (MW) and attention are influenced by culture. However, studies on the interference between MW and attention across cultures are virtually nonexistent. Here we researched how individuals from 2 cultures (Portuguese, Brazilian) differ in terms of type of thoughts and content of MW during the course of the attention network task (ANT). Additionally, we tested the existence of culture-specific associations between type of thoughts and content of mind wandering and each component of the attention network system (alert, orienting, executive). No statistically significant differences were found between Brazilian and Portuguese participants in terms of nature and content of mind-wandering thoughts. Both groups tended to be predominantly involved in task-related interference thoughts during the attention task. At the end of the task, both groups reported having been predominantly out of focus, dominated mostly by inner language thoughts. Despite the similarities, the type of thoughts and content of MW seemed to affect performance in the attention task differently in each group. First, and regarding ANT overall performance, only Portuguese had a significantly facilitating effect in response time associated with task-interfering thoughts. Second, regarding ANT network e ffects, Portuguese participants, when compared with Brazilians, seemed to be more sensitive to orientation cues in all thought conditions, benefited more from alerting cues when they reported on-task thoughts, and took better advantage of mind wandering to reduce attentional conflict., Uminho - Universidade do Minho(401143/2014-7), This study was partially conducted at the Psychology Research Centre (UID/PSI/01662/2013), University of Minho, and supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology and cofinanced by FEDER through COMPETE2020 under the PT2020 (Grant POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007653). Paulo S. Boggio is a CNPq researcher fellow (Grant 311641/2015-6). Gabriel Rêgo was supported by Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (PhD Grant FAPESP2015/18713-9)., info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

People react aversely when faced with unfair situations, a phenomenon that has been related to an electroencephalographic (EEG) potential known as medial frontal negativity (MFN). To our knowledge, the existence of the MFN in children has not yet been demonstrated. Here, we recorded EEG activity from 15 children playing the ultimatum game (UG) and who afterward performed a recognition task, in order to assess whether they could recognize the unfair and fair (familiar) proposers among unfamiliar faces. During the recognition task, we also acquired pupil dilation data to investigate subconscious recognition processes. A typical (adult-like) MFN component was detected in reaction to unfair proposals. We found a positive correlation between reaction time and empathy, as well as a negative correlation between reaction time and systematic reasoning scores. Finally, we detected a significant difference in pupil dilation in response to unfamiliar faces versus UG proposers. Our data provide the first evidence of MFN in children, which appears to index similar neurophysiological phenomena as in adults. Also, reaction time to fair proposals seems to be related to individual traits, as represented by empathy and systematizing. Our pupil dilation data provide evidence that automatic responses to faces did not index fairness, but familiarity. These findings have implications for our understanding of social development in typically developing children.

The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) is involved in the cognitive appraisal and modulation of the pain experience. In this sham-controlled study, with healthy volunteers, we used bi-hemispheric transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over the DLPFC to assess emotional reactions elicited by pain observation. Left-cathodal/right-anodal tDCS decreased valence and arousal evaluations compared to other tDCS conditions. Compared to sham condition, both left-cathodal/right-anodal and left-anodal/right-cathodal tDCS decreased hostility, sadness and self-pain perception. These decreased sensations after both active tDCS suggest a common role for left and right DLPFC in personal distress modulation. However, the differences in arousal and valence evaluations point to distinct roles of lateralized DLPFC in cognitive empathy, probably through distinct emotion regulation mechanisms., This experiment was supported by the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq-480891/2012-5). LMM is supported by a scientific initiation grant (CNPq – 160553/2013-0). OML is supported by a FAPESP PhD grant (FAPESP – 2012/24696-1). PSB is a CNPq research fellow (304164/2012-7).

Recent research suggests that V1 plays an active role in the judgment of size and distance. Nevertheless, no research has been performed using direct brain stimulation to address this issue. We used transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS) to directly modulate the early stages of cortical visual processing while measuring size and distance perception with a psychophysical scaling method of magnitude estimation in a repeated-measures design. The subjects randomly received anodal, cathodal, and sham tDCS in separate sessions starting with size or distance judgment tasks. Power functions were fit to the size judgment data, whereas logarithmic functions were fit to distance judgment data. Slopes and R2 were compared with separate repeated-measures analyses of variance with two factors: task (size vs. distance) and tDCS (anodal vs. cathodal vs. sham). Anodal tDCS significantly decreased slopes, apparently interfering with size perception. No effects were found for distance perception. Consistent with previous studies, the results of the size task appeared to reflect a prothetic continuum, whereas the results of the distance task seemed to reflect a metathetic continuum. The differential effects of tDCS on these tasks may support the hypothesis that different physiological mechanisms underlie judgments on these two continua. The results further suggest the complex involvement of the early visual cortex in size judgment tasks that go beyond the simple representation of low-level stimulus properties. This supports predictive coding models and experimental findings that suggest that higher-order visual areas may inhibit incoming information from the early visual cortex through feedback connections when complex tasks are performed.

This poster describes a transdisciplinary practical-theoretical on-going research, which address on the discussion about the possible applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques, such as genetic algorithms, which underlie the Maturana and Varela’s autopoietic concept considering the achievement of emergent results as heuristic to creativity. Through human interaction using neuronal bio-feedback it is possible to provide more natural fitness function to such algorithms.