Neurocognitive effects of phobia-related stimuli in animal-fearful individuals

Abstract

Two experiments were conducted to explore neurocognitive effects of phobia-related stimuli. Contingency assessments and event-related potentials (ERPs) were collected from animal-fearful individuals during probabilistic classification learning in diverse motivational-affective contexts. As revealed by ERPs, attentional amplification of cortical sensory processing occurred in response to phobiarelated stimuli. In particular, the posterior selection negativity in the ERPs to phobia-related stimuli had its origin in a bottom-up route, probably the amygdaloid-extrastriate cortex path. No evidence for top-down modulation of phobia-related attentional amplification was obtained. The covariation bias occurred only when aversive motivational-affective expectancies prevailed, suggesting a role of retrieval from associative emotional memory. Finally, phobia-related cue competition was probably related to the disruption of elaboration in memory of neutral and aversive stimulus pairings that was induced by belonging pairings of phobia-related and aversive stimuli. The findings have far-reaching implications for the interface between cognition and emotion.

Better Not to Know? Emotion Regulation Fails to Benefit from Affective Cueing

“…Most likely, informative cues already triggered an emotion allowing participants to anticipate what they would experience in response to the target. This possibility accords with existing evidence on cued affective responding (Kolassa et al, 2005; Kopp and Altmann, 2005; Miltner et al, 2005; Michalowski et al, 2009, 2014) and on the relation between LPP amplitude and emotion (Yang et al, 2012; Herbert et al, 2013; Langeslag and van Strien, 2013; Sarlo et al, 2013; Galli et al, 2014). …”

“…Correspondingly, ERP studies found that affectively informative cues increase the LPP if they predict an emotional as compared to a neutral stimulus (Kolassa et al, 2005; Kopp and Altmann, 2005; Miltner et al, 2005; Michalowski et al, 2009, 2014). For example, in a study by Michalowski et al (2015), a colored fixation cross informed participants whether an upcoming picture would be neutral, unpleasant, or contained a spider.…”

Exposure therapy triggers lasting reorganization of neural fear processing

“…Activity in each individual region is summarized in Table 1. 0.0003], with differential activation to phobogenic vs. neutral images absent at follow-up [t(11) = 1.57, P = 0.14]. This pattern suggests that fear-cued enhancements in sensory cortex processing (16,25) may represent a relatively recalcitrant phenomenon that is moderated only after gradual adjustment.…”

Brain dynamics in spider-phobic individuals exposed to phobia-relevant and other emotional stimuli.

“…Based on a previous study (Kolassa et al, 2006), it was predicted that the P1 component is enlarged in spider phobics compared to healthy volunteers irrespective of the hedonic valence of the stimulus materials. Subsequently, indexed by the EPN and LPP components (cf., Kopp & Altmann, 2005;Kolassa et al, 2005;Miltner et al, 2005), a fear-specific modulation was expected contrasting the processing of fearful stimuli in spider-fearful and healthy groups. Moreover, presenting other emotional arousing pictures allowed a more refined assessment of fear-specific processing in spider phobics.…”