TY  - JOUR
A1  - Peperkorn, Henrik M.
A1  - Diemer, Julia E.
A1  - Alpers, Georg W.
A1  - Mühlberger, Andreas
T1  - Representation of Patients' Hand Modulates Fear Reactions of Patients with Spider Phobia in Virtual Reality
JF  - frontiers in Psychology
N2  - Embodiment (i.e., the involvement of a bodily representation) is thought to be relevant in emotional experiences. Virtual reality (VR) is a capable means of activating phobic fear in patients. The representation of the patient’s body (e.g., the right hand) in VR enhances immersion and increases presence, but its effect on phobic fear is still unknown. We analyzed the influence of the presentation of the participant’s hand in VR on presence and fear responses in 32 women with spider phobia and 32 matched controls. Participants sat in front of a table with an acrylic glass container within reaching distance. During the experiment this setup was concealed by a head-mounted display (HMD). The VR scenario presented via HMD showed the same setup, i.e., a table with an acrylic glass container. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two experimental groups. In one group, fear responses were triggered by fear-relevant visual input in VR (virtual spider in the virtual acrylic glass container), while information about a real but unseen neutral control animal (living snake in the acrylic glass container) was given. The second group received fear-relevant information of the real but unseen situation (living spider in the acrylic glass container), but visual input was kept neutral VR (virtual snake in the virtual acrylic glass container). Participants were instructed to touch the acrylic glass container with their right hand in 20 consecutive trials. Visibility of the hand was varied randomly in a within-subjects design. We found for all participants that visibility of the participant’s hand increased presence independently of the fear trigger. However, in patients, the influence of the virtual hand on fear depended on the fear trigger. When fear was triggered perceptually, i.e., by a virtual spider, the virtual hand increased fear. When fear was triggered by information about a real spider, the virtual hand had no effect on fear. Our results shed light on the significance of different fear triggers (visual, conceptual) in interaction with body representations.
KW  - virtual reality
KW  - presence
KW  - immersion
KW  - perception
KW  - fear
KW  - specific phobia
Y1  - 2016
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-165307
VL  - 7
IS  - 268
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Glotzbach, Evelyn
A1  - Mühlberger, Andreas
A1  - Gschwendtner, Kathrin
A1  - Fallgatter, Andreas J
A1  - Pauli, Paul
A1  - Herrmann, Martin J
T1  - Prefrontal Brain Activation During Emotional Processing: A Functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy Study (fNIRS)
JF  - The Open Neuroimaging Journal
N2  - The limbic system and especially the amygdala have been identified as key structures in emotion induction and regulation. Recently research has additionally focused on the influence of prefrontal areas on emotion processing in the limbic system and the amygdala. Results from fMRI studies indicate that the prefrontal cortex (PFC) is involved not only in emotion induction but also in emotion regulation. However, studies using fNIRS only report prefrontal brain activation during emotion induction. So far it lacks the attempt to compare emotion induction and emotion regulation with regard to prefrontal activation measured with fNIRS, to exclude the possibility that the reported prefrontal brain activation in fNIRS studies are mainly caused by automatic emotion regulation processes. Therefore this work tried to distinguish emotion induction from regulation via fNIRS of the prefrontal cortex. 20 healthy women viewed neutral pictures as a baseline condition, fearful pictures as induction condition and reappraised fearful pictures as regulation condition in randomized order. As predicted, the view-fearful condition led to higher arousal ratings than the view-neutral condition with the reappraise-fearful condition in between. For the fNIRS results the induction condition showed an activation of the bilateral PFC compared to the baseline condition (viewing neutral). The regulation condition showed an activation only of the left PFC compared to the baseline condition, although the direct comparison between induction and regulation condition revealed no significant difference in brain activation. Therefore our study underscores the results of previous fNIRS studies showing prefrontal brain activation during emotion induction and rejects the hypothesis that this prefrontal brain activation might only be a result of automatic emotion regulation processes.
KW  - fNIRS
KW  - Emotional processing
KW  - emotional regulation
Y1  - 2011
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-141714
VL  - 5
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Seibt, Beate
A1  - Mühlberger, Andreas
A1  - Likowski, Katja U.
A1  - Weyers, Peter
T1  - Facial mimicry in its social setting
JF  - Frontiers in Psychology
N2  - In interpersonal encounters, individuals often exhibit changes in their own facial expressions in response to emotional expressions of another person. Such changes are often called facial mimicry. While this tendency first appeared to be an automatic tendency of the perceiver to show the same emotional expression as the sender, evidence is now accumulating that situation, person, and relationship jointly determine whether and for which emotions such congruent facial behavior is shown. We review the evidence regarding the moderating influence of such factors on facial mimicry with a focus on understanding the meaning of facial responses to emotional expressions in a particular constellation. From this, we derive recommendations for a research agenda with a stronger focus on the most common forms of encounters, actual interactions with known others, and on assessing potential mediators of facial mimicry. We conclude that facial mimicry is modulated by many factors: attention deployment and sensitivity, detection of valence, emotional feelings, and social motivations. We posit that these are the more proximal causes of changes in facial mimicry due to changes in its social setting.
KW  - cultural differences
KW  - political leaders
KW  - mimicry
KW  - cooperation
KW  - self-focused attention
KW  - emotional empathy
KW  - nonconscious mimicry
KW  - expressive displays
KW  - gender differences
KW  - speech anxiety
KW  - behavior
KW  - responses
KW  - facial expression
KW  - EMG
KW  - competition
KW  - mood
Y1  - 2015
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-151415
VL  - 6
IS  - 1122
ER  - 
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  - Schwarz, Katharina A.
A1  - Wieser, Matthias J.
A1  - Gerdes, Antje B. M.
A1  - Mühlberger, Andreas
A1  - Pauli, Paul
T1  - Why are you looking like that? How the context influences evaluation and processing of human faces
JF  - Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience
N2  - Perception and evaluation of facial expressions are known to be heavily modulated by emotional features of contextual information. Such contextual effects, however, might also be driven by non-emotional aspects of contextual information, an interaction of emotional and non-emotional factors, and by the observers’ inherent traits. Therefore, we sought to assess whether contextual information about self-reference in addition to information about valence influences the evaluation and neural processing of neutral faces. Furthermore, we investigated whether social anxiety moderates these effects. In the present functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, participants viewed neutral facial expressions preceded by a contextual sentence conveying either positive or negative evaluations about the participant or about somebody else. Contextual influences were reflected in rating and fMRI measures, with strong effects of self-reference on brain activity in the medial prefrontal cortex and right fusiform gyrus. Additionally, social anxiety strongly affected the response to faces conveying negative, self-related evaluations as revealed by the participants’ rating patterns and brain activity in cortical midline structures and regions of interest in the left and right middle frontal gyrus. These results suggest that face perception and processing are highly individual processes influenced by emotional and non-emotional aspects of contextual information and further modulated by individual personality traits.
KW  - social anxiety
KW  - facial expression
KW  - context
KW  - self-reference
Y1  - 2013
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-132126
VL  - 8
IS  - 4
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Klauke, Benedikt
A1  - Winter, Bernward
A1  - Gajewska, Agnes
A1  - Zwanzger, Peter
A1  - Reif, Andreas
A1  - Herrmann, Martin J.
A1  - Dlugos, Andrea
A1  - Warrings, Bodo
A1  - Jacob, Christian
A1  - Mühlberger, Andreas
A1  - Arolt, Volker
A1  - Pauli, Paul
A1  - Deckert, Jürgen
A1  - Domschke, Katharina
T1  - Affect-Modulated Startle: Interactive Influence of Catechol-O-Methyltransferase Val158Met Genotype and Childhood Trauma
JF  - PLoS One
N2  - The etiology of emotion-related disorders such as anxiety or affective disorders is considered to be complex with an interaction of biological and environmental factors. Particular evidence has accumulated for alterations in the dopaminergic and noradrenergic system - partly conferred by catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) gene variation - for the adenosinergic system as well as for early life trauma to constitute risk factors for those conditions. Applying a multi-level approach, in a sample of 95 healthy adults, we investigated effects of the functional COMT Val158Met polymorphism, caffeine as an adenosine A2A receptor antagonist (300 mg in a placebo-controlled intervention design) and childhood maltreatment (CTQ) as well as their interaction on the affect-modulated startle response as a neurobiologically founded defensive reflex potentially related to fear- and distress-related disorders. COMT val/val genotype significantly increased startle magnitude in response to unpleasant stimuli, while met/met homozygotes showed a blunted startle response to aversive pictures. Furthermore, significant gene-environment interaction of COMT Val158Met genotype with CTQ was discerned with more maltreatment being associated with higher startle potentiation in val/val subjects but not in met carriers. No main effect of or interaction effects with caffeine were observed. Results indicate a main as well as a GxE effect of the COMT Val158Met variant and childhood maltreatment on the affect-modulated startle reflex, supporting a complex pathogenetic model of the affect-modulated startle reflex as a basic neurobiological defensive reflex potentially related to anxiety and affective disorders.
KW  - COMT VAL(158)MET polymorphism
KW  - serotonin transporter gene
KW  - life events
KW  - community sample
KW  - acoustic startle
KW  - prepulse inhibition
KW  - panic disorder
KW  - caffeine-induced anxiety
KW  - fear-potentiated startle
KW  - posttraumatic-stress-disorder
Y1  - 2012
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-132184
VL  - 7
IS  - 6
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Andreatta, Marta
A1  - Mühlberger, Andreas
A1  - Glotzbach-Schoon, Evelyn
A1  - Pauli, Paul
T1  - Pain predictability reverses valence ratings of a relief-associated stimulus
JF  - Front in Systems Neuroscience
N2  - Relief from pain is positively valenced and entails reward-like properties. Notably, stimuli that became associated with pain relief elicit reward-like implicit responses too, but are explicitly evaluated by humans as aversive. Since the unpredictability of pain makes pain more aversive, this study examined the hypotheses that the predictability of pain also modulates the valence of relief-associated stimuli. In two studies, we presented one conditioned stimulus \((_{FORWARD}CS+)\) before a painful unconditioned stimulus (US), another stimulus \((_{BACKWARD}CS+)\) after the painful US, and a third stimulus (CS−) was never associated with the US. In Study 1, \(_{FORWARD}CS+\) predicted half of the USs while the other half was delivered unwarned and followed by \(_{BACKWARD}CS+\). In Study 2, all USs were predicted by \(_{FORWARD}CS+\) and followed by \(_{BACKWARD}CS+\). In Study 1 both \(_{FORWARD}CS+\) and \(_{BACKWARD}CS+\) were rated as negatively valenced and high arousing after conditioning, while \(_{BACKWARD}CS+\) in Study 2 acquired positive valence and low arousal. Startle amplitude was significantly attenuated to \(_{BACKWARD}CS+\) compared to \(_{FORWARD}CS+\) in Study 2, but did not differ among CSs in Study 1. In summary, predictability of aversive events reverses the explicit valence of a relief-associated stimulus.
KW  - threat unpredictability
KW  - implicit and explicit responses
KW  - forward conditioning
KW  - backward conditioning
KW  - pain relief
Y1  - 2013
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-129275
VL  - 7
IS  - 53
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Ewald, Heike
A1  - Glotzbach-Schoon, Evelyn
A1  - Gerdes, Antje B. M.
A1  - Andreatta, Marta
A1  - Müller, Mathias
A1  - Mühlberger, Andreas
A1  - Pauli, Paul
T1  - Delay and trace fear conditioning in a complex virtual learning environment - neural substrates of extinction
JF  - Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
N2  - Extinction is an important mechanism to inhibit initially acquired fear responses. There is growing evidence that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) inhibits the amygdala and therefore plays an important role in the extinction of delay fear conditioning. To our knowledge, there is no evidence on the role of the prefrontal cortex in the extinction of trace conditioning up to now. Thus, we compared brain structures involved in the extinction of human delay and trace fear conditioning in a between-subjects-design in an fMRI study. Participants were passively guided through a virtual environment during learning and extinction of conditioned fear. Two different lights served as conditioned stimuli (CS); as unconditioned stimulus (US) a mildly painful electric stimulus was delivered. In the delay conditioning group (DCG) the US was administered with offset of one light (CS+), whereas in the trace conditioning group (TCG) the US was presented 4s after CS+ offset. Both groups showed insular and striatal activation during early extinction, but differed in their prefrontal activation. The vmPFC was mainly activated in the DCG, whereas the TCG showed activation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) during extinction. These results point to different extinction processes in delay and trace conditioning. VmPFC activation during extinction of delay conditioning might reflect the inhibition of the fear response. In contrast, dlPFC activation during extinction of trace conditioning may reflect modulation of working memory processes which are involved in bridging the trace interval and hold information in short term memory.
KW  - prefrontal cortex
KW  - delay conditioning
KW  - trace conditioning
KW  - extinction
KW  - virtual reality
KW  - fMRI
KW  - medial prefrontal cortex
KW  - event-related FMRI
KW  - orbifrontal cortex
KW  - contextual fear
Y1  - 2014
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-116230
SN  - 1662-5161
VL  - 8
IS  - 323
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Herrmann, Martin J.
A1  - Glotzbach, Evelyn
A1  - Mühlberger, Andreas
A1  - Gschwendtner, Kathrin
A1  - Fallgatter, Andreas J.
A1  - Pauli, Paul
T1  - Prefrontal Brain Activation During Emotional Processing: A Functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy Study (fNIRS)
JF  - The Open Neuroimaging Journal
N2  - The limbic system and especially the amygdala have been identified as key structures in emotion induction and regulation. Recently research has additionally focused on the influence of prefrontal areas on emotion processing in the limbic system and the amygdala. Results from fMRI studies indicate that the prefrontal cortex (PFC) is involved not only in emotion induction but also in emotion regulation. However, studies using fNIRS only report prefrontal brain activation during emotion induction. So far it lacks the attempt to compare emotion induction and emotion regulation with regard to prefrontal activation measured with fNIRS, to exclude the possibility that the reported prefrontal brain activation in fNIRS studies are mainly caused by automatic emotion regulation processes. Therefore this work tried to distinguish emotion induction from regulation via fNIRS of the prefrontal cortex. 20 healthy women viewed neutral pictures as a baseline condition, fearful pictures as induction condition and reappraised fearful pictures as regulation condition in randomized order. As predicted, the view-fearful condition led to higher arousal ratings than the view-neutral condition with the reappraise-fearful condition in between. For the fNIRS results the induction condition showed an activation of the bilateral PFC compared to the baseline condition (viewing neutral). The regulation condition showed an activation only of the left PFC compared to the baseline condition, although the direct comparison between induction and regulation condition revealed no significant difference in brain activation. Therefore our study underscores the results of previous fNIRS studies showing prefrontal brain activation during emotion induction and rejects the hypothesis that this prefrontal brain activation might only be a result of automatic emotion regulation processes.
KW  - fNIRS
KW  - Emotional processing
KW  - emotional regulation
Y1  - 2011
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-97437
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Pauli, Paul
A1  - Glotzbach-Schoon, Evelyn
A1  - Andreatta, Marta
A1  - Reif, Andreas
A1  - Ewald, Heike
A1  - Tröger, Christian
A1  - Baumann, Christian
A1  - Deckert, Jürgen
A1  - Mühlberger, Andreas
T1  - Contextual fear conditioning in virtual reality is affected by 5HTTLPR and NPSR1 polymorphisms: effects on fear-potentiated startle
JF  - Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience
N2  - The serotonin (5-HT) and neuropeptide S (NPS) systems are discussed as important genetic modulators of fear and sustained anxiety contributing to the etiology of anxiety disorders. Sustained anxiety is a crucial characteristic of most anxiety disorders which likely develops through contextual fear conditioning. This study investigated if and how genetic alterations of the 5-HT and the NPS systems as well as their interaction modulate contextual fear conditioning; specifically, function polymorphic variants in the genes coding for the 5-HT transporter (5HTT) and the NPS receptor (NPSR1) were studied. A large group of healthy volunteers was therefore stratified for 5HTTLPR (S+ vs. LL carriers) and NPSR1 rs324981 (T+ vs. AA carriers) polymorphisms resulting in four genotype groups (S+/T+, S+/AA, LL/T+, LL/AA) of 20 participants each. All participants underwent contextual fear conditioning and extinction using a virtual reality (VR) paradigm. During acquisition, one virtual office room (anxiety context, CXT+) was paired with an unpredictable electric stimulus (unconditioned stimulus, US), whereas another virtual office room was not paired with any US (safety context, CXT−). During extinction no US was administered. Anxiety responses were quantified by fear-potentiated startle and ratings. Most importantly, we found a gene × gene interaction on fear-potentiated startle. Only carriers of both risk alleles (S+/T+) exhibited higher startle responses in CXT+ compared to CXT−. In contrast, anxiety ratings were only influenced by the NPSR1 polymorphism with AA carriers showing higher anxiety ratings in CXT+ as compared to CXT−. Our results speak in favor of a two level account of fear conditioning with diverging effects on implicit vs. explicit fear responses. Enhanced contextual fear conditioning as reflected in potentiated startle responses may be an endophenotype for anxiety disorders.
KW  - 5HTTLPR
KW  - NPSR1
KW  - gene × gene interaction
KW  - contextual fear conditioning
KW  - fear-potentiated startle
Y1  - 2013
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-96516
ER  -