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Action video game players (AVGPs) outperform nonvideo game players (NVGPs) on a wide variety of attentional tasks, mediating benefits to perceptual and cognitive decision processes. A key issue in the literature is the extent to which such benefits transfer beyond cognition. Using steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEP) as a neural measure of attentional resource allocation, we investigated whether the attentional benefit of AVGPs generalizes to the processing of rapidly presented facial emotions. AVGPs (n = 36) and NVGPs (n = 32) performed a novel, attention-demanding emotion discrimination task, requiring the identification of a target emotion in one of two laterally presented streams of emotional faces. The emotional faces flickered at either 2.0 Hz or 2.5 Hz. AVGPs outperformed NVGPs at detecting the target emotions regardless of the type of emotion. Correspondingly, attentional modulation of the SSVEP at parieto-occipital recording sites was larger in AVGPs compared with NVGPs. This difference appeared to be driven by a larger response to attended information, as opposed to a reduced response to irrelevant distractor information. Exploratory analyses confirmed that this novel paradigm elicited the expected pattern of event-related potentials associated with target detection and error processing. These components did not, however, differ between groups. Overall, the results indicate enhanced discrimination of facial emotions in AVGPs arising from enhanced attentional processing of emotional information. This presents evidence for the attentional advantage of AVGPs to extend beyond perceptual and cognitive processes.

This study investigates the relationship between video game playing time and Internet Gaming Disorder (IGD), using self-reported and actual game play data from League of Legends players. Two new metrics were derived documenting players' tendencies to come back quickly to play a new game and the sensitivity of this come-back-fast behavior to the reward of winning. Surprisingly, none of nine media consumption variables, whether logged or self-reported, were related to IGD. Rather, mental health factors, such as anxiety and depression, were the best predictors of IGD. In addition, personality factors, such as conscientiousness and need-for-cognition appeared as protective. In all, these results indicate that policies and procedures aimed solely at limiting screen time are unlikely to be effective at reducing IGD prevalence or symptoms, and rather call for mental health factors to be considered to safeguard individuals' well-being.

Supplemental digital content is available in the text., Purpose The aim of this study was to investigate the indirect effects of cardiorespiratory fitness on scholastic performance through executive functions. More precisely, we examined the contribution of the different domains of executive functions, and whether this relationship was specific to certain school topics. Methods Children 8–12 yr old completed nine cognitive tests and the multistage fitness test. Structural equation modeling techniques were used to analyze the role of different domains of executive functions (inhibition, working memory, cognitive flexibility, and a common factor to all tasks) in the relationship between cardiorespiratory fitness and school grades in three domains: (i) mathematics; (ii) grammar, spelling, and vocabulary; and (iii) text comprehension and expression. Covariate analyses included age and socioeconomic status. Results The results of this study showed that an indirect effect of the various domains of executive functions explained, in part, the relationship between cardiorespiratory fitness and (i) mathematics (β = 0.12, SE = 0.03, P < 0.001), and between cardiorespiratory fitness and (ii) grammar, spelling, and vocabulary (β = 0.12, SE = 0.03, P < 0.001). No relationship between cardiorespiratory fitness and (iii) text comprehension and expression was observed. Although executive functions correlated with school grades, cognitive flexibility drove the indirect effect when all executive function domains were simultaneously taken into account. Conclusions These results show the role that executive functions play in understanding the relationship between cardiorespiratory fitness and scholastic performance. Importantly, not all executive function domains contributed equally because cognitive flexibility played a leading role in this wide age range. Furthermore, the relationship between cardiorespiratory fitness and scholastic performance was strongest for mathematics and for low-level language topics but nonsignificant for higher-level language topics, providing a more modulated view of the effect of cardiorespiratory fitness on language.

Contradictory statements are often heard about the effects of digital technology use on health or cognition, posing practical dilemmas to parents, educators, health professionals and policy makers. We argue that one source of inconsistencies lies in an oversimplistic concept of "screen time", which fails to capture the complexity of digital media practices. For example, research shows that action video game play and media “multitasking,” two activities that count as screen time, have opposite effects on attention. We urge adoption of standardised definitions and propose guiding principles to achieve greater granularity, accuracy and consistency in conceptualising and addressing media effects.

Training is typically characterized by a trade-off between developing efficient performance, or expertise, and maintaining the ability to generalize one's knowledge beyond the trained domain. Here we ask whether it may be possible to train individuals to enhance their generalization abilities despite this natural trade-off. We first review the proposal that enhanced attentional control and cognitive flexibility may be potential mechanisms that will produce broad generalization. We then consider the case of action video game play which has been associated with enhancements in both attentional control and cognitive flexibility as well as generalization beyond the trained intervention.

The view that better perceptual skills can open the door to greater cognitive fitness calls for identifying interventions that enhance perception. We review here the impact of action video game play on perception. Cross-sectional studies indicate that action video game players outperform non-players by about ¾ of a standard deviation across all perceptual skills. More specifically, tasks relying on the dorsal system and peripheral vision appear most enhanced in action video game players. Despite their crucial role for establishing a causal role of action video game play on perception, the paucity of intervention studies limits interpretation. Yet, the existing dose–response curve already calls for at least 20 hours of play for significant effects to emerge. When considering the mechanisms at play, we propose that attentional control may mediate the noted perceptual benefits by increasing the quality of the perceptual information gathered, facilitating in turn the development of better perceptual templates.

Over the past 30 years, a large body of research has accrued demonstrating that video games are capable of placing substantial demands on the human cognitive, emotional, physical, and social processing systems. Within the cognitive realm, playing games belonging to one particular genre, known as the action video game genre, has been consistently linked with demands on a host of cognitive abilities including perception, top-down attention, multitasking, and spatial cognition. More recently, a number of new game genres have emerged that, while different in many ways from “traditional” action games, nonetheless seem likely to load upon similar cognitive processes. One such example is the multiplayer online battle arena genre (MOBA), which involves a mix of action and real-time strategy characteristics. Here, a sample of over 500 players of the MOBA game League of Legends completed a large battery of cognitive tasks. Positive associations were observed between League of Legends performance (quantified by participants’ in-game match-making rating) and a number of cognitive abilities consistent with those observed in the existing action video game literature, including speed of processing and attentional abilities. Together, our results document a rich pattern of cognitive abilities associated with high levels of League of Legends performance and suggest similarities between MOBAs and action video games in terms of their cognitive demands.

Action video game players (AVGPs) display superior performance in various aspects of cognition, especially in perception and top-down attention. The existing literature has examined these performance almost exclusively with stimuli and tasks devoid of any emotional content. Thus, whether the superior performance documented in the cognitive domain extend to the emotional domain remains unknown. We present 2 cross-sectional studies contrasting AVGPs and nonvideo game players (NVGPs) in their ability to perceive facial emotions. Under an enhanced perception account, AVGPs should outperform NVGPs when processing facial emotion. Yet, alternative accounts exist. For instance, under some social accounts, exposure to action video games, which often contain violence, may lower sensitivity for empathy-related expressions such as sadness, happiness, and pain while increasing sensitivity to aggression signals. Finally, under the view that AVGPs excel at learning new tasks (in contrast to the view that they are immediately better at all new tasks), the use of stimuli that participants are already experts at predicts little to no group differences. Study 1 uses drift-diffusion modeling and establishes that AVGPs are comparable to NVGPs in every decision-making stage mediating the discrimination of facial emotions, despite showing group difference in aggressive behavior. Study 2 uses the reverse inference technique to assess the mental representation of facial emotion expressions, and again documents no group differences. These results indicate that the perceptual benefits associated with action video game play do not extend to overlearned stimuli such as facial emotion, and rather indicate equivalent facial emotion skills in AVGPs and NVGPs. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Reports an error in "Meta-analysis of action video game impact on perceptual, attentional, and cognitive skills" by Benoit Bediou, Deanne M. Adams, Richard E. Mayer, Elizabeth Tipton, C. Shawn Green and Daphne Bavelier (

Individuals often need to negotiate how to distribute jointly produced goods—equally (e.g., 50:50) or equitably (e.g., proportionally to their contributions). We examined whether people have stable preferences, or whether they switch between equality and equity in different situations. Pairs of anonymous participants first produced a common pie, and then distributed it in an ultimatum game. Results suggest that individuals apply different justice principles depending on their contribution. When they produced less than 50%, proposers divided the pie equally. However, when they produced more than 50%, their offers fell between equality and equity. Responders' ratings of fairness and satisfaction varied similarly; with low production, equality was preferred, whereas with high production, equity was preferred. Nevertheless, equal and equitable offers were generally accepted, and only outright unfair offers were rejected. This suggests that individuals are relatively flexible about which justice principle should be applied, but punish proposers whose offers violate both principles.

It has been suggested that the left pre-supplementary motor area (pre-SMA) could be implicated in facial emotion expression and recognition, especially for laughter/happiness. To test this hypothesis, in a single-blind, randomized crossover study, we investigated the impact of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) on performances of 18 healthy participants during a facial emotion recognition task. Using a neuronavigation system based on T1-weighted magnetic resonance imaging of each participant, TMS (5 pulses, 10 Hz) was delivered over the pre-SMA or the vertex (control condition) in an event-related fashion after the presentation of happy, fear, and angry faces. Compared with performances during vertex stimulation, we observed that TMS applied over the left pre-SMA specifically disrupted facial happiness recognition (FHR). No difference was observed between the 2 conditions neither for fear and anger recognition nor for reaction times (RT). Thus, interfering with pre-SMA activity with event-related TMS after stimulus presentation produced a selective impairment in the recognition of happy faces. These findings provide new insights into the functional implication of the pre-SMA in FHR, which may rely on the mirror properties of pre-SMA neurons.

Abnormal decoding of social information has been associated with the conversion from prodromal Alzheimer's disease (AD) to dementia. Since the distributed neural networks involved in face processing are differentially affected in prodromal and dementia states of AD and in Fronto-Temporal Dementia (FTD), we hypothezed a differential impairment in face processing in these populations. Facial expression, gender and gaze direction decoding abilities were examined in patients with probable amnesic Mild Cognitive Impairment (aMCI, N = 10) fulfilling criteria for prodromal AD, in patients with mild and moderate AD (N = 10) as well as in FTD patients (N = 10) and in a group of age- and sex-matched healthy comparison subjects (N = 10). Gender recognition was preserved in all groups. Compared to controls, patients with mild or moderate AD were impaired in expression recognition and FTD patients were impaired in expression and gaze direction determination, whereas MCI patients were not impaired at all.

Resume La depression est un trouble de l’humeur associe a des troubles du traitement des messages sociaux et emotionnels. Cet article presente une revue de la litterature des etudes comportementales, cliniques, pharmacologiques et d’imagerie s’interessant au traitement d’un type particulier de stimuli : les visages. D’une maniere generale, ces etudes montrent la presence d’anomalies du traitement des expressions faciales emotionnelles chez les patients depressifs, plus particulierement pour la joie et la tristesse. Au niveau comportemental, les etudes font etat, dans la depression, d’une diminution de la reconnaissance des expressions faciales positives ainsi que d’une augmentation de la reconnaissance des expressions negatives, notamment la tristesse. Des biais attentionnels et mnesiques sont egalement observes avec ce type de stimuli. Au niveau clinique, les troubles semblent s’ameliorer sous traitement antidepresseur. Cependant, des anomalies plus legeres pourraient subsister et seraient meme presentes chez les sujets presentant un risque accru de depression. Au niveau pharmacologique, des anomalies de transmission serotoninergique semblent impliquees. Enfin, au niveau cerebral ces troubles sont associes a des anomalies structurales et fonctionnelles au niveau d’un reseau cerebral impliquant l’amygdale, le cortex prefrontal (median, orbitofrontal et cingulaire anterieur) ainsi que l’hippocampe. Enfin, l’etude de la dynamique temporelle cerebrale est en accord avec des perturbations precoces de l’orientation attentionnelle vers les visages emotionnels chez des patients deprimes. Les avancees recentes de pharmacogenetique et de neuro-imagerie genetique mettant en relation les anomalies cerebrales fonctionnelles et pharmacologiques avec les troubles cognitifs ou emotionnels observes dans la depression offrent donc des perspectives interessantes.

Resume Les deficits du self monitoring dans la schizophrenie peuvent etre etudies grâce a des tests de « memoire de source » ou il est demande aux sujets de reconnaitre la source de mots qu’on leur a presentes prealablement selon differentes modalites. Des resultats obtenus a un test de fluence verbale, nous avons extrait une liste de mots courants a partir de laquelle nous avons construit par tri aleatoire deux tests de memoire de la source afin de comparer les performances de trois groupes : 30 patients schizophrenes, 22 patients presentant un episode depressif majeur et 24 volontaires sains. Les resultats aux tests de memoire de la source confirment les donnees de la litterature et montrent un deficit de reconnaissance de la source chez les patients schizophrenes presentant des symptomes positifs. Ce deficit semble specifique de la schizophrenie, aucune difference n’ayant ete observee entre les performances des deux autres groupes. Ce deficit est a type de confusion (ou inversion) entre les mots issus d’une source reelle, externe et ceux issus d’une source interne, imaginee. Ces resultats corroborent l’hypothese d’un deficit de reconnaissance de la source dans la schizophrenie.

Auditory hallucinations have been associated with a disruption in monitoring one's own speech suggesting an autonoetic agnosia in schizophrenia. This deficit can be measured by a source monitoring task. Low frequency transcranial magnetic stimulations (rTMS) applied to the left temporoparietal cortex can inhibit cortical areas involved both in autonoetic agnosia (which means 'the inability to identify self-generated mental events') and in auditory hallucinations (AH) phenomena. Although improvements in AH have been repeatedly reported following rTMS treatment, effects on autonoetic agnosia measured by source monitoring have never been investigated. We aimed to investigate the relation between improvements in AH and source monitoring performance after rTMS treatment. Twenty four right-handed refractory schizophrenic patients with hallucinations randomly received sham or active 10.0001-Hz rTMS to the left temporoparietal cortex and performed 2 source monitoring tasks requiring discrimination between silent- and overt-reading words before and after rTMS sessions. Compared to sham, active rTMS significantly improved AH. Source monitoring performances and the improvements tended to correlate, which would support a specific relation between autonoetic agnosia and auditory hallucinations.

Background: Impaired facial expression recognition in schizophrenia patients contributes to abnormal social functioning and may predict functional outcome in these patients. Facial expression processing involves individual neural networks that have been shown to malfunction in schizophrenia. Whether these patients have a selective deficit in facial expression recognition or a more global impairment in face processing remains controversial. Objective: To investigate whether patients with schizophrenia exhibit a selective impairment in facial emotional expression recognition, compared with patients with major depression and healthy control subjects. Methods: We studied performance in facial expression recognition and facial sex recognition paradigms, using original morphed faces, in a population with schizophrenia ( n = 29) and compared their scores with those of depression patients ( n = 20) and control subjects ( n = 20). Results: Schizophrenia patients achieved lower scores than both other groups in the expression recognition task, particularly in fear and disgust recognition. Sex recognition was unimpaired. Conclusion: Facial expression recognition is impaired in schizophrenia, whereas sex recognition is preserved, which highly suggests an abnormal processing of changeable facial features in this disease. A dysfunction of the top-down retrograde modulation coming from limbic and paralimbic structures on visual areas is hypothesized.

Although brain imaging evidence accumulates to suggest that the amygdala plays a key role in the processing of novel stimuli, only little is known about its role in processing expressed novelty conveyed by surprised faces, and even less about possible interactive encoding of novelty and valence. Those investigations that have already probed human amygdala involvement in the processing of surprised facial expressions either used static pictures displaying negative surprise (as contained in fear) or "neutral" surprise, and manipulated valence by contextually priming or subjectively associating static surprise with either negative or positive information. Therefore, it still remains unresolved how the human amygdala differentially processes dynamic surprised facial expressions displaying either positive or negative surprise. Here, we created new artificial dynamic 3-dimensional facial expressions conveying surprise with an intrinsic positive (wonderment) or negative (fear) connotation, but also intrinsic positive (joy) or negative (anxiety) emotions not containing any surprise, in addition to neutral facial displays either containing ("typical surprise" expression) or not containing ("neutral") surprise. Results showed heightened amygdala activity to faces containing positive (vs. negative) surprise, which may either correspond to a specific wonderment effect as such, or to the computation of a negative expected value prediction error. Findings are discussed in the light of data obtained from a closely matched nonsocial lottery task, which revealed overlapping activity within the left amygdala to unexpected positive outcomes.

A major characteristic of credit markets is information asymmetry.To combat its problems, as credit rationing, principals can use a menu of contracts to screen clients with different risk level. We conduct a laboratory experiment to address an important question for such settings —does the framing of the offered menu of contracts interfere with the self-selection mechanism? The answer is yes. We find subjects' choices shift when the same (positive) outcomes of the same menu of contracts are presented in two different frames. Subjects exhibit loss aversion in their perception of the positive outcomes below the reference point, and self-selection fails to occur. Uno de los mayores problemas actuales es el racionamiento del crédito, derivado funda- mentalmente de las asimetrías informativas. Para disminuir las asimetrías informativas, los bancos pueden aplicar «screening». Esto es, pueden ofrecer a sus clientes un menú de contratos y, dependien- do de la elección de éstos, inferir su nivel de riesgo. Si las elecciones de los clientes de alto riesgo y de bajo riesgo difieren entre sí, hay autoselección de clientes y, por tanto, «screening». En este artículo presentamos un experimento que examina una cuestión esencial en estos contextos —¿Interfiere el punto de referencia de los clientes en su autoselección?— La respuesta es sí. De hecho, las elecciones cambian cuando los mismos datos (positivos) de los mismos contratos se presentan con una referen- cia diferente. Por ello, proponemos una aproximación teórica derivada de la «Prospect Theory» para explicar nuestros resultados. Observamos una aversión a las pérdidas percibidas que hace fracasar la autoselección.

Outcome monitoring is crucial for subsequent adjustments in behavior and is associated with a specific electrophysiological response, the feedback-related negativity (FRN). Besides feedback generated by one's own action, the performance of others may also be relevant for oneself, and the observation of outcomes for others' actions elicits an observer FRN (oFRN). To test how these components are influenced by social setting and predictive value of feedback information, we compared event-related potentials, as well as their topographies and neural generators, for performance feedback generated by oneself and others in a cooperative versus competitive context. Our results show that (1) the predictive relevance of outcomes is crucial to elicit an FRN in both players and observers, (2) cooperation increases FRN and P300 amplitudes, especially in individuals with high traits of perspective taking, and (3) contrary to previous findings on gambling outcomes, oFRN components are generated for both cooperating and competing observers, but with smaller amplitudes in the latter. Neural source estimation revealed medial prefrontal activity for both FRN and oFRN, but with additional generators for the oFRN in the dorsolateral and ventral prefrontal cortex, as well as the temporoparietal junction. We conclude that the latter set of brain regions could mediate social influences on action monitoring by representing agency and social relevance of outcomes and are, therefore, recruited in addition to shared prediction error signals generated in medial frontal areas during action outcome observation.

Error detection is essential for monitoring performance and preparing subsequent behavioral adjustments, and is associated with specific neural responses in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). To investigate whether different brain mechanisms subserve the processing of commission vs. accuracy errors, we recorded EEG in adult participants while they performed a novel speeded GO-NOGO aiming task ("the Shoot-NoShoot paradigm"). Our ERP results show that commission errors (responding during NOGO trials) elicited a classical error-related negativity (ERN) component, followed by an error-related positivity (Pe), as well as a negativity peaking before response onset (pre-ERN). By contrast, spatial accuracy errors elicited a feedback-related negativity (FRN), which correlated with the spatial discrepancy between response and target position across subjects. Fast hits also elicited a pre-ERN but no ERN, suggesting that this pre-response monitoring component might be related to the detection of error likelihood. Although source analysis revealed similar generators in ACC for these different error-related negativities, the respective timing differed, suggesting that commission errors are detected rapidly based on internal motor representations, whereas the detection of accuracy errors in ACC relies on the additional and swift processing of external visual information.

Patients suffering from various neurological and psychiatric disorders show different levels of facial emotion recognition (FER) impairment, sometimes from the early phases of the disease. Investigating the relative severity of deficits in FER across different clinical and high-risk populations has potential implications for the diagnosis and treatment of these diseases, and could also allow us to understand the neurobiological mechanisms of emotion perception itself. To investigate the role of the dopaminergic system and of the frontotemporal network in FER, we reanalyzed and compared data from four of our previous studies investigating FER performance in patients with frontotemporal dysfunctions and/or dopaminergic system abnormalities at different stages. The performance of patients was compared to the performance obtained by a specific group of matched healthy controls using Cohen’s d effect size. We thus compared emotion and gender recognition in patients with frontotemporal dementia (FTD), amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI), Alzheimer’s disease (AD) at the mild dementia stage, major depressive disorder, Parkinson’s disease treated by l-DOPA (PD-ON) or not (PD-OFF), remitted schizophrenia (SCZ-rem), first-episode schizophrenia treated by antipsychotic medication (SCZ-ON), and drug-naïve first-episode schizophrenia (SCZ-OFF), as well as in unaffected siblings of patients with schizophrenia (SIB). The analyses revealed a pattern of differential impairment of emotion (but not gender) recognition across pathological conditions. On the one hand, dopaminergic medication seems not to modify the moderate deficits observed in SCZ and PD groups (ON vs. OFF), suggesting that the deficit is independent from the dopaminergic system. On the other hand, the observed increase in effect size of the deficit among the aMCI, AD, and FTD groups (and also among the SIB and SCZ-rem groups) suggests that the deficit is dependent on neurodegeneration of the frontotemporal neural networks. Our transnosographic approach combining clinical and high-risk populations with the impact of medication provides new information on the trajectory of impaired emotion perception in neuropsychiatric conditions, and on the role of the dopaminergic system and the frontotemporal network in emotion perception.

Individual differences in reward-drive have been associated with increased attention toward facial signals of aggression, heightened experience of anger and vulnerability to display aggressive behaviour. Recent fMRI research suggests that these effects rely on reduced ventromedial prefrontal (and increased amygdala) response to aggressive facial displays compared with neutral and sad expressions in subjects scoring high on reward-drive. However, nothing is known about the timing of this modulation. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), we provide the first evidence that greater proneness to display hostile and aggressive behaviour (measured by high scores on the reward-drive) is associated with a reduced midline frontocentral response to aggressive faces within 200–300 ms. In addition to confirming a particular interaction between anger processing and aggression related personality traits in ventromedial prefrontal brain regions, our study brings a first indication of when their interaction occurs in the brain, strengthening results from previous classical as well as functional connectivity fMRI studies.

BackgroundEpidemiological studies of schizophrenia suggest that this disorder has a substantial genetic component. Cognitive and social abilities, as well as the volumes of brain regions involved in emotion processing, have been found to be distributed along a continuum when comparing patients, siblings and controls, with siblings showing intermediate scores.AimsTo establish whether facial expression recognition is impaired in unaffected siblings of patients.MethodEmotion and gender recognition were evaluated in a three-group pre–post study design in drugnaive patients with first-episode schizophrenia (n=40) and their unaffected siblings (n=30) compared with controls (n=26).ResultsPatients and their healthy siblings showed impaired emotion recognition but normal gender recognition compared with controls. Patients' performance did not improve despite effective clinical stabilisation.ConclusionsImpaired performance in healthy siblings and time stability in patients provides evidence of impairment of facial emotion recognition as an actual phenotype of schizophrenia.

L’editeur a le regret de vous informer que cet article ayant deja ete publie dans: Neurophysiologie Clinique/Clinical Neurophysiology, 37 (2007) 77–87, doi:10.1016/j.neucli.2007.04.001 , cette seconde publication faite par erreur a ete retiree.

Aims Abnormal emotion processing in schizophrenia affects social and functional outcome. Spatiotemporal brain mechanisms underlying this deficit are unclear. Materials and methods Event-related potential (ERP) responses to emotional and neutral face processing during an implicit (gender detection) and an explicit (expression detection) task were compared between a group of healthy volunteers (n = 10) and a group of patients with schizophrenia (n = 10). Results Whereas patients had normal primary visual cortex responses, the early modulation of occipital, temporal, and frontal responses by emotional expression observed in controls was absent in patients. The occipito-temporal N170 amplitude was reduced in patients relative to controls during expression detection, but not during gender detection. Frontal activity within 180–250 ms was reduced in patients compared to controls. As opposed to controls, no significant difference was seen in patients at the right temporal electrode (T6) between amplitudes of long-latency ERPs elicited by distinct emotions during the expression detection task. Conclusion In patients with schizophrenia, abnormal early extraction of expression-related information in the occipito-temporal cortex (before 170 ms) impairs structural encoding of facial expressions (N170) and may disrupt motivation- and task-dependent context processing (180–250 ms time window) of expression-related facial features. Moreover, top–down neuromodulation from frontal and limbic structures to visual occipito-temporal cortex may not be sufficient to optimize the extraction of expression-specific face features.

some behavioral disturbances observed in Parkinson's disease (PD) could be related to impaired recognition of various social messages particularly emotional facial expressions.facial expression recognition was assessed using morphed faces (five emotions: happiness, fear, anger, disgust, neutral), and compared to gender recognition and general cognitive assessment in 12 patients with Parkinson's disease and 14 controls subjects.facial expression recognition was impaired among patients, whereas gender recognitions, visuo-perceptive capacities and total efficiency were preserved. Post hoc analyses disclosed a deficit for fear and disgust recognition compared to control subjects.the impairment of emotional facial expression recognition in PD appears independent of other cognitive deficits. This impairment may be related to the dopaminergic depletion in basal ganglia and limbic brain regions. They could take a part in psycho-behavioral disorders and particularly in communication disorders observed in Parkinson's disease patients.

International audience; We used facial affect labeling and matching tasks to study effects of (1) emotion and (2) identity on facial affect processing in patients with remitted schizophrenia (n=30) compared with healthy controls (n=30). The patients (1) had a specific deficit for labeling facial affects of sadness and anger but not happiness, disgust and fear; they (2) performed as well as controls in matching facial affects in one face but were impaired in matching facial affects in two different faces. The patients' impairment in facial affect processing may be emotion-specific. The effects of identity on facial affect processing are discussed in the light of several hypotheses (a deficit of context processing, a global-local processing impairment or a selective attention deficit), and may be related to frontal, prefrontal or amygdala dysfunctions.

Background Almost a quarter of patients with schizophrenia present with resistant auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH), a phenomenon that may relate to activation of brain areas underlying speech perception. Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) at 1 Hz reduces cortical activation, and recent results have shown that 1-Hz left temporoparietal rTMS may reduce AVH. The aim of this study was to replicate recent data and investigate whether low-frequency rTMS with a high total stimulation number delivered in a shorter 5-day block produces similar benefit. Methods Ten right-handed schizophrenia patients with resistant AVH received 5 days of active rTMS and 5 days of sham rTMS (2,000 stimulations per day at 90% of motor threshold) over the left temporoparietal cortex in a double-blind crossover design. The two weeks of stimulation were separated by a 1-week washout period. Results AVH were robustly improved (56%) by 5 days active rTMS, whereas no variation was observed after sham. Seven patients were responders to active treatment, five of whom maintained improvement for at least 2 months. Conclusions These data confirm the efficiency of low-frequency rTMS applied to the left temporoparietal cortex, compared with sham stimulation, in reducing resistant AVH. This improvement can be obtained in only 5 days without serious initial adverse events.