TY - JOUR A1 - Platte, Petra A1 - Herbert, Cornelia A1 - Pauli, Paul A1 - Breslin, Paul A. S. T1 - Oral Perceptions of Fat and Taste Stimuli Are Modulated by Affect and Mood Induction JF - PLoS ONE N2 - This study examined the impact of three clinical psychological variables (non-pathological levels of depression and anxiety, as well as experimentally manipulated mood) on fat and taste perception in healthy subjects. After a baseline orosensory evaluation, ‘sad’, ‘happy’ and ‘neutral’ video clips were presented to induce corresponding moods in eighty participants. Following mood manipulation, subjects rated five different oral stimuli, appearing sweet, umami, sour, bitter, fatty, which were delivered at five different concentrations each. Depression levels were assessed with Beck’s Depression Inventory (BDI) and anxiety levels were assessed via the Spielberger’s STAI-trait and state questionnaire. Overall, subjects were able to track the concentrations of the stimuli correctly, yet depression level affected taste ratings. First, depression scores were positively correlated with sucrose ratings. Second, subjects with depression scores above the sample median rated sucrose and quinine as more intense after mood induction (positive, negative and neutral). Third and most important, the group with enhanced depression scores did not rate low and high fat stimuli differently after positive or negative mood induction, whereas, during baseline or during the non-emotional neutral condition they rated the fat intensity as increasing with concentration. Consistent with others’ prior observations we also found that sweet and bitter stimuli at baseline were rated as more intense by participants with higher anxiety scores and that after positive and negative mood induction, citric acid was rated as stronger tasting compared to baseline. The observation that subjects with mild subclinical depression rated low and high fat stimuli similarly when in positive or negative mood is novel and likely has potential implications for unhealthy eating patterns. This deficit may foster unconscious eating of fatty foods in sub-clinical mildly depressed populations. KW - analysis of variance KW - anxiety KW - citric acid KW - depression KW - glutamate KW - quinine KW - sensory perception KW - sucrose Y1 - 2013 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-96421 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Mavratzakis, Aimee A1 - Herbert, Cornelia A1 - Walla, Peter T1 - Emotional facial expressions evoke faster orienting responses, but weaker emotional responses at neural and behavioural levels compared to scenes: a simultaneous EEG and facial EMG study JF - NeuroImage N2 - In the current study, electroencephalography (EEG) was recorded simultaneously with facial electromyography (fEMG) to determine whether emotional faces and emotional scenes are processed differently at the neural level. In addition, it was investigated whether these differences can be observed at the behavioural level via spontaneous facial muscle activity. Emotional content of the stimuli did not affect early P1 activity. Emotional faces elicited enhanced amplitudes of the face-sensitive N170 component, while its counterpart, the scene-related N100, was not sensitive to emotional content of scenes. At 220-280 ms, the early posterior negativity (EPN) was enhanced only slightly for fearful as compared to neutral or happy faces. However, its amplitudes were significantly enhanced during processing of scenes with positive content, particularly over the right hemisphere. Scenes of positive content also elicited enhanced spontaneous zygomatic activity from 500-750 ms onwards, while happy faces elicited no such changes. Contrastingly, both fearful faces and negative scenes elicited enhanced spontaneous corrugator activity at 500-750 ms after stimulus onset. However, relative to baseline EMG changes occurred earlier for faces (250 ms) than for scenes (500 ms) whereas for scenes activity changes were more pronounced over the whole viewing period. Taking into account all effects, the data suggests that emotional facial expressions evoke faster attentional orienting, but weaker affective neural activity and emotional behavioural responses compared to emotional scenes. KW - Emotion KW - Affective processing KW - Faces and scenes KW - Electroencephalography KW - Spontaneous facial EMG KW - N170 KW - N100 KW - Early posterior negativity Y1 - 2016 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-191535 VL - 124 IS - Part A ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Lugo, Zulay R. A1 - Quitadamo, Lucia R. A1 - Bianchi, Luigi A1 - Pellas, Fréderic A1 - Veser, Sandra A1 - Lesenfants, Damien A1 - Real, Ruben G. L. A1 - Herbert, Cornelia A1 - Guger, Christoph A1 - Kotchoubey, Boris A1 - Mattia, Donatella A1 - Kübler, Andrea A1 - Laureys, Steven A1 - Noirhomme, Quentin T1 - Cognitive Processing in Non-Communicative Patients: What Can Event-Related Potentials Tell Us? JF - Frontiers in Human Neuroscience N2 - Event-related potentials (ERP) have been proposed to improve the differential diagnosis of non-responsive patients. We investigated the potential of the P300 as a reliable marker of conscious processing in patients with locked-in syndrome (LIS). Eleven chronic LIS patients and 10 healthy subjects (HS) listened to a complex-tone auditory oddball paradigm, first in a passive condition (listen to the sounds) and then in an active condition (counting the deviant tones). Seven out of nine HS displayed a P300 waveform in the passive condition and all in the active condition. HS showed statistically significant changes in peak and area amplitude between conditions. Three out of seven LIS patients showed the P3 waveform in the passive condition and five of seven in the active condition. No changes in peak amplitude and only a significant difference at one electrode in area amplitude were observed in this group between conditions. We conclude that, in spite of keeping full consciousness and intact or nearly intact cortical functions, compared to HS, LIS patients present less reliable results when testing with ERP, specifically in the passive condition. We thus strongly recommend applying ERP paradigms in an active condition when evaluating consciousness in non-responsive patients. KW - P300 KW - event-related potentials KW - locked-in syndrome KW - vegetative state KW - unresponsive wakefulness syndrome KW - minimally conscious state Y1 - 2016 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-165165 VL - 10 IS - 569 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Herbert, Cornelia A1 - Sütterlin, Stefan T1 - Do not respond! Doing the think/no-think and go/no-go tasks concurrently leads to memory impairment of unpleasant items during later recall N2 - Previous research using neuroimaging methods proposed a link between mechanisms controlling motor response inhibition and suppression of unwanted memories.The present study investigated this hypothesis behaviorally by combining the think/no-think paradigm (TNT) with a go/no-go motor inhibition task. Participants first learned unpleasant cue-target pairs. Cue words were then presented as go or no-go items in the TNT. Participants’ task was to respond to the cues and think of the target word aloud or to inhibit their response to the cue and the target word from coming to mind. Cued recall assessed immediately after the TNT revealed reduced recall performance for no-go targets compared to go targets or baseline cues not presented in the TNT. The results demonstrate that doing the no-think and no-go task concurrently leads to memory suppression of unpleasant items during later recall. Results are discussed in line with recent empirical research and theoretical positions. KW - Psychologie KW - memory suppression KW - emotion KW - response inhibition KW - go/no-go task KW - think/no-think paradigm Y1 - 2012 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-76028 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Herbert, Cornelia A1 - Sfärlea, Anca A1 - Blumenthal, Terry T1 - Your emotion or mine: labeling feelings alters emotional face perception—an ERP study on automatic and intentional affect labeling JF - Frontiers in Human Neuroscience N2 - Empirical evidence suggests that words are powerful regulators of emotion processing. Although a number of studies have used words as contextual cues for emotion processing, the role of what is being labeled by the words (i.e., one's own emotion as compared to the emotion expressed by the sender) is poorly understood. The present study reports results from two experiments which used ERP methodology to evaluate the impact of emotional faces and self- vs. sender-related emotional pronoun-noun pairs (e.g., my fear vs. his fear) as cues for emotional face processing. The influence of self- and sender-related cues on the processing of fearful, angry and happy faces was investigated in two contexts: an automatic (experiment 1) and intentional affect labeling task (experiment 2), along with control conditions of passive face processing. ERP patterns varied as a function of the label's reference (self vs. sender) and the intentionality of the labeling task (experiment 1 vs. experiment 2). In experiment 1, self-related labels increased the motivational relevance of the emotional faces in the time-window of the EPN component. Processing of sender-related labels improved emotion recognition specifically for fearful faces in the N170 time-window. Spontaneous processing of affective labels modulated later stages of face processing as well. Amplitudes of the late positive potential (LPP) were reduced for fearful, happy, and angry faces relative to the control condition of passive viewing. During intentional regulation (experiment 2) amplitudes of the LPP were enhanced for emotional faces when subjects used the self-related emotion labels to label their own emotion during face processing, and they rated the faces as higher in arousal than the emotional faces that had been presented in the “label sender's emotion” condition or the passive viewing condition. The present results argue in favor of a differentiated view of language-as-context for emotion processing. KW - emotion regulation KW - language-as-context KW - affect labeling KW - face processing KW - event-related brain potentials KW - social context KW - social cognition KW - perspective taking Y1 - 2013 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-97065 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Herbert, Cornelia A1 - Kübler, Andrea A1 - Vögele, Klaus T1 - Risk for Eating Disorders Modulates Startle-Responses to Body Words N2 - Body image disturbances are core symptoms of eating disorders (EDs). Recent evidence suggests that changes in body image may occur prior to ED onset and are not restricted to in-vivo exposure (e.g. mirror image), but also evident during presentation of abstract cues such as body shape and weight-related words. In the present study startle modulation, heart rate and subjective evaluations were examined during reading of body words and neutral words in 41 student female volunteers screened for risk of EDs. The aim was to determine if responses to body words are attributable to a general negativity bias regardless of ED risk or if activated, ED relevant negative body schemas facilitate priming of defensive responses. Heart rate and word ratings differed between body words and neutral words in the whole female sample, supporting a general processing bias for body weight and shape-related concepts in young women regardless of ED risk. Startle modulation was specifically related to eating disorder symptoms, as was indicated by significant positive correlations with self-reported body dissatisfaction. These results emphasize the relevance of examining body schema representations as a function of ED risk across different levels of responding. Peripheral-physiological measures such as the startle reflex could possibly be used as predictors of females’ risk for developing EDs in the future. KW - Psychologie Y1 - 2013 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-78140 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Herbert, Cornelia A1 - Kübler, Andrea T1 - Dogs Cannot Bark: Event-Related Brain Responses to True and False Negated Statements as Indicators of Higher-Order Conscious Processing N2 - The present study investigated event-related brain potentials elicited by true and false negated statements to evaluate if discrimination of the truth value of negated information relies on conscious processing and requires higher-order cognitive processing in healthy subjects across different levels of stimulus complexity. The stimulus material consisted of true and false negated sentences (sentence level) and prime-target expressions (word level). Stimuli were presented acoustically and no overt behavioral response of the participants was required. Event-related brain potentials to target words preceded by true and false negated expressions were analyzed both within group and at the single subject level. Across the different processing conditions (word pairs and sentences), target words elicited a frontal negativity and a late positivity in the time window from 600–1000 msec post target word onset. Amplitudes of both brain potentials varied as a function of the truth value of the negated expressions. Results were confirmed at the single-subject level. In sum, our results support recent suggestions according to which evaluation of the truth value of a negated expression is a time- and cognitively demanding process that cannot be solved automatically, and thus requires conscious processing. Our paradigm provides insight into higher-order processing related to language comprehension and reasoning in healthy subjects. Future studies are needed to evaluate if our paradigm also proves sensitive for the detection of consciousness in non-responsive patients. KW - Psychologie Y1 - 2011 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-74907 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Herbert, Cornelia A1 - Kübler, Andrea T1 - Dogs Cannot Bark: Event-Related Brain Responses to True and False Negated Statements as Indicators of Higher-Order Conscious Processing JF - PLoS ONE N2 - The present study investigated event-related brain potentials elicited by true and false negated statements to evaluate if discrimination of the truth value of negated information relies on conscious processing and requires higher-order cognitive processing in healthy subjects across different levels of stimulus complexity. The stimulus material consisted of true and false negated sentences (sentence level) and prime-target expressions (word level). Stimuli were presented acoustically and no overt behavioral response of the participants was required. Event-related brain potentials to target words preceded by true and false negated expressions were analyzed both within group and at the single subject level. Across the different processing conditions (word pairs and sentences), target words elicited a frontal negativity and a late positivity in the time window from 600-1000 msec post target word onset. Amplitudes of both brain potentials varied as a function of the truth value of the negated expressions. Results were confirmed at the single-subject level. In sum, our results support recent suggestions according to which evaluation of the truth value of a negated expression is a time-and cognitively demanding process that cannot be solved automatically, and thus requires conscious processing. Our paradigm provides insight into higher-order processing related to language comprehension and reasoning in healthy subjects. Future studies are needed to evaluate if our paradigm also proves sensitive for the detection of consciousness in non-responsive patients. KW - Locked-in syndrome KW - Vegetative state KW - Own-name KW - Language comprehension KW - Sentence comprehension KW - Text information KW - Time-course KW - Verification KW - Potentials KW - Activation Y1 - 2011 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-135165 VL - 6 IS - 10 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Herbert, Beate M. A1 - Muth, Eric R. A1 - Pollatos, Olga A1 - Herbert, Cornelia T1 - Interoception across Modalities: On the Relationship between Cardiac Awareness and the Sensitivity for Gastric Functions JF - PLoS One N2 - The individual sensitivity for ones internal bodily signals ("interoceptive awareness") has been shown to be of relevance for a broad range of cognitive and affective functions. Interoceptive awareness has been primarily assessed via measuring the sensitivity for ones cardiac signals ("cardiac awareness") which can be non-invasively measured by heartbeat perception tasks. It is an open question whether cardiac awareness is related to the sensitivity for other bodily, visceral functions. This study investigated the relationship between cardiac awareness and the sensitivity for gastric functions in healthy female persons by using non-invasive methods. Heartbeat perception as a measure for cardiac awareness was assessed by a heartbeat tracking task and gastric sensitivity was assessed by a water load test. Gastric myoelectrical activity was measured by electrogastrography (EGG) and subjective feelings of fullness, valence, arousal and nausea were assessed. The results show that cardiac awareness was inversely correlated with ingested water volume and with normogastric activity after water load. However, persons with good and poor cardiac awareness did not differ in their subjective ratings of fullness, nausea and affective feelings after drinking. This suggests that good heartbeat perceivers ingested less water because they subjectively felt more intense signals of fullness during this lower amount of water intake compared to poor heartbeat perceivers who ingested more water until feeling the same signs of fullness. These findings demonstrate that cardiac awareness is related to greater sensitivity for gastric functions, suggesting that there is a general sensitivity for interoceptive processes across the gastric and cardiac modality. KW - anterior insula KW - water load test KW - cephalic-vagal influences KW - emotional experience KW - heartbeat perception KW - myoelectric activity KW - cardiovascular arousal KW - dyspeptic symptoms KW - balloon distension KW - eating disorders Y1 - 2012 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-130733 VL - 7 IS - 5 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Citron, Francesca M. M. A1 - Abugaber, David A1 - Herbert, Cornelia T1 - Approach and Withdrawal Tendencies during Written Word Processing: Effects of Task, Emotional Valence, and Emotional Arousal JF - frontiers in Psychology N2 - The affective dimensions of emotional valence and emotional arousal affect processing of verbal and pictorial stimuli. Traditional emotional theories assume a linear relationship between these dimensions, with valence determining the direction of a behavior (approach vs. withdrawal) and arousal its intensity or strength. In contrast, according to the valence-arousal conflict theory, both dimensions are interactively related: positive valence and low arousal (PL) are associated with an implicit tendency to approach a stimulus, whereas negative valence and high arousal (NH) are associated with withdrawal. Hence, positive, high-arousal (PH) and negative, low-arousal (NL) stimuli elicit conflicting action tendencies. By extending previous research that used several tasks and methods, the present study investigated whether and how emotional valence and arousal affect subjective approach vs. withdrawal tendencies toward emotional words during two novel tasks. In Study 1, participants had to decide whether they would approach or withdraw from concepts expressed by written words. In Studies 2 and 3 participants had to respond to each word by pressing one of two keys labeled with an arrow pointing upward or downward. Across experiments, positive and negative words, high or low in arousal, were presented. In Study 1 (explicit task), in line with the valence-arousal conflict theory, PH and NL words were responded to more slowly than PL and NH words. In addition, participants decided to approach positive words more often than negative words. In Studies 2 and 3, participants responded faster to positive than negative words, irrespective of their level of arousal. Furthermore, positive words were significantly more often associated with “up” responses than negative words, thus supporting the existence of implicit associations between stimulus valence and response coding (positive is up and negative is down). Hence, in contexts in which participants' spontaneous responses are based on implicit associations between stimulus valence and response, there is no influence of arousal. In line with the valence-arousal conflict theory, arousal seems to affect participants' approach-withdrawal tendencies only when such tendencies are made explicit by the task, and a minimal degree of processing depth is required. KW - approach KW - withdrawal KW - valence KW - arousal KW - emotion KW - words KW - polarity effects Y1 - 2016 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-165318 VL - 6 IS - 1935 ER -