When anger dominates the mind: Increased motor corticospinal excitability in the face of threat

Abstract

Threat demands fast and adaptive reactions that are manifested at the physiological, behavioral, and phenomenological level and are responsive to the direction of threat and its severity for the individual. Here, we investigated the effects of threat directed toward or away from the observer on motor corticospinal excitability and explicit recognition. Sixteen healthy right‐handed volunteers completed a transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) task and a separate three‐alternative forced‐choice emotion recognition task. Single‐pulse TMS to the left primary motor cortex was applied to measure motor evoked potentials from the right abductor pollicis brevis in response to dynamic angry, fearful, and neutral bodily expressions with blurred faces directed toward or away from the observer. Results showed that motor corticospinal excitability increased independent of direction of anger compared with fear and neutral. In contrast, anger was better recognized when directed toward the observer compared with when directed away from the observer, while the opposite pattern was found for fear. The present results provide evidence for the differential effects of threat direction on explicit recognition and motor corticospinal excitability. In the face of threat, motor corticospinal excitability increases independently of the direction of anger, indicative of the importance of more automatic reactions to threat.

Prioritized neural processing of social threats during perceptual decision-making

“…A growing body of literature concurs with evolutionary accounts by highlighting a functional and anatomical link between neural systems that sustain emotional appraisal and those that underlie action preparation (de Gelder, Snyder, Greve, Gerard, & Hadjikhani, 2004; Grèzes, Valabregue, Gholipour, & Chevallier, 2014; Pichon, de Gelder, & Grezes, 2012; Van den Stock, 2011). Moreover, and in agreement with the present results, the influence of emotion stimuli on motor-related areas was observed from 150ms to 300ms post-stimulus onset (Borgomaneri, Gazzola, & Avenanti, 2014; Conty et al, 2012; El Zein, Gamond, Conty, & Grèzes, 2015a; El Zein et al, 2015b; Hortensius, de Gelder, & Schutter, 2016). We therefore suggest that the early potentiation of premotor activity during emotion decisions is related to the behavioral relevance for the observer of the perceived threat rather than its sensory properties.…”

The Influence of Conscious and Unconscious Body Threat Expressions on Motor Evoked Potentials Studied With Continuous Flash Suppression

“…When looking at later time points, specifically 300 ms, effects seem to be driven by actions in general rather than being emotion specific ( Borgomaneri et al, 2012 ). On the other hand, Hortensius et al (2016) found an effect of anger compared to both fear and neutral at 300 ms. In the current study, we used the time points 200, 400, 500, and 700 ms.…”

“…This also means, however, a possibly critical difference between our task and previous studies that did find modulation of MEP amplitude in response to whole body expressions of emotion, namely the explicit identification of the emotional content of the stimulus. Indeed, all previous studies included the recognition of the expressed emotion in the body stimulus, either by verbal report or button press ( Borgomaneri et al, 2012 , 2014 , 2015a , b , 2017 ; Hortensius et al, 2016 ). Whether such task manipulations actually influence the state of the motor cortex has not been directly tested yet, although similar discrepancies between results originating from differences in task instructions can be observed in emotion sensitive regions such as the amygdala ( de Gelder et al, 2012 ).…”

“… Bucchioni et al (2013) showed for example that MEP amplitude is enhanced when observing an actor passing a ball to another actor, rather than throwing the ball at a wall, suggesting the motor system certainly codes for more than simply the amount of perceived motion within an action. Recent work by Hortensius et al (2016) found increased MEP amplitude in response to dynamic angry whole body movements at 300 ms post stimulus onset compared to fearful and neutral movements, irrespective of whether the direction of the movement was toward or away from the observer. Further experiments looking at whole body expressions of emotion have shown an increase in MEP amplitude in response to fearful compared to neutral actions as early as 70–90 ms post stimulus onset ( Borgomaneri et al, 2015a ).…”

Perception of Threatening Intention Modulates Brain Processes to Body Actions: Evidence From Event-Related Potentials

“…Previous studies also support this view. For instance, Hortensius et al (2016) aimed to explore the threat detection advantage of body stimuli. In their study, fearful/angry body stimuli were directed toward or away from the observer.…”