TY  - JOUR
A1  - Gerdes, Antje B. M.
A1  - Wieser, Matthias J.
A1  - Mühlberger, Andreas
A1  - Weyers, Peter
A1  - Alpers, Georg W.
A1  - Plichta, Michael M.
A1  - Breuer, Felix
A1  - Pauli, Paul
T1  - Brain activations to emotional pictures are differentially associated with valence and arousal ratings
N2  - Several studies have investigated the neural responses triggered by emotional pictures, but the specificity of the involved structures such as the amygdala or the ventral striatum is still under debate. Furthermore, only few studies examined the association of stimuli’s valence and arousal and the underlying brain responses. Therefore, we investigated brain responses with functional magnetic resonance imaging of 17 healthy participants to pleasant and unpleasant affective pictures and afterwards assessed ratings of valence and arousal. As expected, unpleasant pictures strongly activated the right and left amygdala, the right hippocampus, and the medial occipital lobe, whereas pleasant pictures elicited significant activations in left occipital regions, and in parts of the medial temporal lobe. The direct comparison of unpleasant and pleasant pictures, which were comparable in arousal clearly indicated stronger amygdala activation in response to the unpleasant pictures. Most important, correlational analyses revealed on the one hand that the arousal of unpleasant pictures was significantly associated with activations in the right amygdala and the left caudate body. On the other hand, valence of pleasant pictures was significantly correlated with activations in the right caudate head, extending to the nucleus accumbens (NAcc) and the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. These findings support the notion that the amygdala is primarily involved in processing of unpleasant stimuli, particularly to more arousing unpleasant stimuli. Reward-related structures like the caudate and NAcc primarily respond to pleasant stimuli, the stronger the more positive the valence of these stimuli is.
KW  - Psychologie
KW  - emotional pictures
KW  - amygdala
KW  - caudate
KW  - valence
KW  - arousal
Y1  - 2010
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-68153
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Münßinger, Jana I.
A1  - Halder, Sebastian
A1  - Kleih, Sonja C.
A1  - Furdea, Adrian
A1  - Raco, Valerio
A1  - Hösle, Adi
A1  - Kübler, Andrea
T1  - Brain Painting: first evaluation of a new brain-computer interface application with ALS-patients and healthy volunteers
N2  - Brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) enable paralyzed patients to communicate; however, up to date, no creative expression was possible. The current study investigated the accuracy and user-friendliness of P300-Brain Painting, a new BCI application developed to paint pictures using brain activity only. Two different versions of the P300-Brain Painting application were tested: A colored matrix tested by a group of ALS-patients (n = 3) and healthy participants (n = 10), and a black and white matrix tested by healthy participants (n = 10). The three ALS-patients achieved high accuracies; two of them reaching above 89% accuracy. In healthy subjects, a comparison between the P300-Brain Painting application (colored matrix) and the P300-Spelling application revealed significantly lower accuracy and P300 amplitudes for the P300-Brain Painting application. This drop in accuracy and P300 amplitudes was not found when comparing the P300-Spelling application to an adapted, black and white matrix of the P300-Brain Painting application. By employing a black and white matrix, the accuracy of the P300-Brain Painting application was significantly enhanced and reached the accuracy of the P300-Spelling application. ALS-patients greatly enjoyed P300-Brain Painting and were able to use the application with the same accuracy as healthy subjects. P300-Brain Painting enables paralyzed patients to express themselves creatively and to participate in the prolific society through exhibitions.
KW  - Psychologie
KW  - brain–computer interfaces
KW  - P300
KW  - amyotrophic lateral sclerosis
KW  - event-related potential
Y1  - 2010
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-68168
ER  -