Effect of Cage-Induced Stereotypies on Measures of Affective State and Recurrent Perseveration in CD-1 and C57BL/6 Mice.

Stereotypies are abnormal repetitive behaviour patterns that are highly prevalent in laboratory mice and are thought to reflect impaired welfare. Thus, they are associated with impaired behavioural inhibition and may also reflect negative affective states. However, in mice the relationship between stereotypies and behavioural inhibition is inconclusive, and reliable measures of affective valence are lacking. Here we used an exploration based task to assess cognitive bias as a measure of affective valence and a two-choice guessing task to assess recurrent perseveration as a measure of impaired behavioural inhibition to test mice with different forms and expression levels of stereotypic behaviour. We trained 44 CD- 1 and 40 C57BL/6 female mice to discriminate between positively and negatively cued arms in a radial maze and tested their responses to previously inaccessible ambiguous arms. In CD-1 mice (i) mice with higher stereotypy levels displayed a negative cognitive bias and this was influenced by the form of stereotypy performed, (ii) negative cognitive bias was evident in back-flipping mice, and (iii) no such effect was found in mice displaying bar-mouthing or cage-top twirling. In C57BL/6 mice neither route-tracing nor bar-mouthing was associated with cognitive bias, indicating that in this strain these stereotypies may not reflect negative affective states. Conversely, while we found no relation of stereotypy to recurrent perseveration in CD-1 mice, C57BL/6 mice with higher levels of route-tracing, but not bar-mouthing made more repetitive responses in the guessing task. Our findings confirm previous research indicating that the implications of stereotypies for animal welfare may strongly depend on the species and strain of animal as well as on the form and expression level of the stereotypy. Furthermore, they indicate that variation in stereotypic behaviour may represent an important source of variation in many animal experiments.

Selektives Lernen bei induzierten Stimmungszuständen: Resultat des Stimmungszustandes oder bloss der Aufgabenstellung?

Investigated the interaction between induced mood states and selective learning among 28 college students. Ss were asked to behave as if they were happy or depressed while learning a list of words with neutral, positive, and negative affective valence. Results document the mood congruity effect. This effect was stronger among Ss who predicted the relationship between mood and word valence than among Ss who were unaware of this relationship.

Mood and Memory: Mood congruity effects in absence of mood

Themood-congruity effect refers to facilitated processing of information when the affective valence of this information is congruent with the subject’s mood. In this paper we argue that mood may be a sufficient but not a necessary condition to produce the mood-congruity effect of selective learning. Two experiments are presented in which subjects learned lists of words with neutral, positive, and negative affective valences. In the learning task the subjects were instructed to behave as if they were depressed or happy. The mood-congruity effect was indeed obtained. The effect was stronger with subjects who “predicted” the relationship between mood and affective word valence than with subjects who were unaware of this relationship. The results are not simply attributed to task demands, but are interpreted in terms of a model of cognitive processes and people’s knowledge about mood states.

The power of emotional valence – from cognitive to affective processes in reading

The comprehension of stories requires the reader to imagine the cognitive and affective states of the characters. The content of many stories is unpleasant, as they often deal with conflict, disturbance or crisis. Nevertheless, unpleasant stories can be liked and enjoyed. In this fMRI study, we used a parametric approach to examine (1) the capacity of increasing negative valence of story contents to activate the mentalizing network (cognitive and affective theory of mind, ToM), and (2) the neural substrate of liking negatively valenced narratives. A set of 80 short narratives was compiled, ranging from neutral to negative emotional valence. For each story mean rating values on valence and liking were obtained from a group of 32 participants in a prestudy, and later included as parametric regressors in the fMRI analysis. Another group of 24 participants passively read the narratives in a three Tesla MRI scanner. Results revealed a stronger engagement of affective ToM-related brain areas with increasingly negative story valence. Stories that were unpleasant, but simultaneously liked, engaged the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), which might reflect the moral exploration of the story content. Further analysis showed that the more the mPFC becomes engaged during the reading of negatively valenced stories, the more coactivation can be observed in other brain areas related to the neural processing of affective ToM and empathy.

Affective and linguistic processing of speech prosody: DC potential studies

Speech melody or prosody subserves linguistic, emotional, and pragmatic functions in speech communication. Prosodic perception is based on the decoding of acoustic cues with a predominant function of frequency-related information perceived as speaker's pitch. Evaluation of prosodic meaning is a cognitive function implemented in cortical and subcortical networks that generate continuously updated affective or linguistic speaker impressions. Various brain-imaging methods allow delineation of neural structures involved in prosody processing. In contrast to functional magnetic resonance imaging techniques, DC (direct current, slow) components of the EEG directly measure cortical activation without temporal delay. Activation patterns obtained with this method are highly task specific and intraindividually reproducible. Studies presented here investigated the topography of prosodic stimulus processing in dependence on acoustic stimulus structure and linguistic or affective task demands, respectively. Data obtained from measuring DC potentials demonstrated that the right hemisphere has a predominant role in processing emotions from the tone of voice, irrespective of emotional valence. However, right hemisphere involvement is modulated by diverse speech and language-related conditions that are associated with a left hemisphere participation in prosody processing. The degree of left hemisphere involvement depends on several factors such as (i) articulatory demands on the perceiver of prosody (possibly, also the poser), (ii) a relative left hemisphere specialization in processing temporal cues mediating prosodic meaning, and (iii) the propensity of prosody to act on the segment level in order to modulate word or sentence meaning. The specific role of top-down effects in terms of either linguistically or affectively oriented attention on lateralization of stimulus processing is not clear and requires further investigations.

Anxiety trait modulates psychophysiological reactions, but not habituation processes related to affective auditory stimuli

BACKGROUND: It is well known that there are specific peripheral activation patterns associated with the emotional valence of sounds. However, it is unclear how these effects adapt over time. The personality traits influencing these processes are also not clear. Anxiety disorders influence the autonomic activation related to emotional processing. However, personality anxiety traits have never been studied in the context of affective auditory stimuli. METHODS: Heart rate, skin conductance, zygomatic muscle activity and subjective rating of emotional valence and arousal were recorded in healthy subjects during the presentation of pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral sounds. Recordings were repeated 1 week later to examine possible time-dependent changes related to habituation and sensitization processes. RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: There was not a generalized habituation or sensitization process related to the repeated presentation of affective sounds, but rather, specific adaptation processes for each physiological measure. These observations are consistent with previous studies performed with affective pictures and simple tones. Thus, the measures of skin conductance activity showed the strongest changes over time, including habituation during the first presentation session and sensitization at the end of the second presentation session, whereas the facial electromyographic activity habituated only for the neutral stimuli and the heart rate did not habituate at all. Finally, we showed that the measure of personality trait anxiety influenced the orienting reaction to affective sounds, but not the adaptation processes related to the repeated presentation of these sounds.

State affective instability in borderline personality disorder assessed by ambulatory monitoring

BACKGROUND: Although affective instability is an essential criterion for borderline personality disorder (BPD), it has rarely been reported as an outcome criterion. To date, most of the studies assessing state affective instability in BPD using paper-pencil diaries did not find indications of this characteristic, whereas in others studies, the findings were conflicting. Furthermore, the pattern of instability that characterizes BPD has not yet been identified. METHOD: We assessed the affective states of 50 female patients with BPD and 50 female healthy controls (HC) during 24 hours of their everyday life using electronic diaries. RESULTS: In contrast to previous paper-and-pencil diary studies, heightened affective instability for both emotional valence and distress was clearly exhibited in the BPD group but not in the HC group. Inconsistencies in previous papers can be explained by the methods used to calculate instability (see Appendix). In additional, we were able to identify a group-specific pattern of instability in the BPD group characterized by sudden large decreases from positive mood states. Furthermore, 48% of the declines from a very positive mood state in BPD were so large that they reached a negative mood state. This was the case in only 9% of the HC group, suggesting that BPD patients, on average, take less time to fluctuate from a very positive mood state to a negative mood state. CONCLUSION: Future ambulatory monitoring studies will be useful in clarifying which events lead to the reported, sudden decrease in positive mood in BPD patients.

Mapping Emotion Terms into Affective Space: Further Evidence for a Four-Dimensional Structure

Recent empirical work on the semantics of emotion terms across many different cultures and languages, using a theoretical componential approach, suggested that four dimensions are needed to parsimoniously describe the semantic space of the emotion domain as reflected in emotion terms (Fontaine, Scherer, Roesch, & Ellsworth, 2007; Fontaine, Scherer, & Soriano, 2013). In addition to valence, power, and arousal, a novelty dimension was discovered that mostly differentiated surprise from other emotions. Here, we further explore the existence and nature of the fourth dimension in semantic emotion space using a much larger and much more representative set of emotion terms. A group of 156 participants each rated 10 out of a set of 80 French emotion terms with respect to semantic meaning. The meaning of an emotion term was evaluated with respect to 68 emotion features representing the appraisal, action tendency, bodily reaction, expression, and feeling components of the emotion process. A principal component analysis confirmed the four-dimensional valence, power, arousal, and novelty structure. Moreover, this larger and much more representative set of emotion terms revealed that the novelty dimension not only differentiates surprise terms from other emotion terms, but also identifies substantial variation within the fear and joy emotion families.

Comparing the prodrome of schizophrenia-spectrum psychoses and affective disorders with and without psychotic features

Following encouraging results in the early detection of psychotic disorders, interest in the early detection of affective, especially bipolar disorders, has recently been renewed. However, the differentiation between affective disorders with and without psychotic features is often missing, although it has been suggested that affective disorders with psychotic features may be distinct from those without psychotic features and closely linked to non-affective psychoses.