Well-being and learning in school

Although there are various definitions for the term “well-being,” it is agreed that well-being in school represents a set of subjective feelings and attitudes toward school. Moreover, enjoyment (some use the term “happiness”) is recognized as a core element of well-being in general as well as at school. Well-being in school is defined as an indicator of the quality of scholastic life, and contributes to students’ physical and psychological health and development. As such it is strongly connected to learning. Well-being in school consists of cognitive, emotional, and physical components, i.e., a learner’s thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations. Consequently, it differs significantly from an individual’s cognitive appraisals like satisfaction, or from discrete positive emotions like enjoyment. Well-being in school can be described through the relationship of positive and negative aspects of school life

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.

Cognitive and emotional effects of carotid stenosis

PRINCIPLES Patients with carotid artery stenosis (CAS) are at risk of ipsilateral stroke and chronic compromise of cerebral blood flow. It is under debate whether the hypo-perfusion or embolism in CAS is directly related to cognitive impairment. Alternatively, CAS may be a marker for underlying risk factors, which themselves influence cognition. We aimed to determine cognitive performance level and the emotional state of patients with CAS. We hypothesised that patients with high grade stenosis, bilateral stenosis, symptomatic patients and/or those with relevant risk factors would suffer impairment of their cognitive performance and emotional state. METHODS A total of 68 patients with CAS of ≥70% were included in a prospective exploratory study design. All patients underwent structured assessment of executive functions, language, verbal and visual memory, motor speed, anxiety and depression. RESULTS Significantly more patients with CAS showed cognitive impairments (executive functions, word production, verbal and visual memory, motor speed) and anxiety than expected in a normative sample. Bilateral and symptomatic stenosis was associated with slower processing speed. Cognitive performance and anxiety level were not influenced by the side and the degree of stenosis or the presence of collaterals. Factors associated with less cognitive impairment included higher education level, female gender, ambidexterity and treated hypercholesterolemia. CONCLUSIONS Cognitive impairment and increased level of anxiety are frequent in patients with carotid stenosis. The lack of a correlation between cognitive functioning and degree of stenosis or the presence of collaterals, challenges the view that CAS per se leads to cognitive impairment.

Violence-related PTSD and neural activation when seeing emotionally charged male-female interactions.

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a disorder that involves impaired regulation of the fear response to traumatic reminders. This study tested how women with male-perpetrated interpersonal violence-related PTSD (IPV-PTSD) differed in their brain activation from healthy controls (HC) when exposed to scenes of male-female interaction of differing emotional content. Sixteen women with symptoms of IPV-PTSD and 19 HC participated in this study. During magnetic resonance imaging, participants watched a stimulus protocol of 23 different 20 s silent epochs of male-female interactions taken from feature films, which were neutral, menacing or prosocial. IPV-PTSD participants compared with HC showed (i) greater dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) activation in response to menacing vs prosocial scenes and (ii) greater anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), right hippocampus activation and lower ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) activty in response to emotional vs neutral scenes. The fact that IPV-PTSD participants compared with HC showed lower activity of the ventral ACC during emotionally charged scenes regardless of the valence of the scenes suggests that impaired social perception among IPV-PTSD patients transcends menacing contexts and generalizes to a wider variety of emotionally charged male-female interactions.

Restoring balance within cognitive unit or deservingness evaluation? The role of attitudes and deservingness in shaping emotional reactions to others’ outcomes

Based on Heider’s theory I persumed that personal attitudes are stronger predictors of emotional responses to others’ outcomes than deservingness evaluation. I manipulated outcome, attitude and deservingness experimentally, and measured specific emotions. It appeared deservingness to play a secondary role in eliciting joy and sorrow when interpersonal attitudes were involved.

What do brain network interactions tell about cognitive processes? How to seek causality?

Optimal adjustment of brain networks allows the biased processing of information in response to the demand of environments and is therefore prerequisite for adaptive behaviour. It is widely shown that a biased state of networks is associated with a particular cognitive process. However, those associations were identified by backward categorization of trials and cannot provide a causal association with cognitive processes. This problem still remains a big obstacle to advance the state of our field in particular human cognitive neuroscience. In my talk, I will present two approaches to address the causal relationships between brain network interactions and behaviour. Firstly, we combined connectivity analysis of fMRI data and a machine leaning method to predict inter-individual differences of behaviour and responsiveness to environmental demands. The connectivity-based classification approach outperforms local activation-based classification analysis, suggesting that interactions in brain networks carry information of instantaneous cognitive processes. Secondly, we have recently established a brand new method combining transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS), transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), and EEG. We use the method to measure signal transmission between brain areas while introducing extrinsic oscillatory brain activity and to study causal association between oscillatory activity and behaviour. We show that phase-matched oscillatory activity creates the phase-dependent modulation of signal transmission between brain areas, while phase-shifted oscillatory activity blunts the phase-dependent modulation. The results suggest that phase coherence between brain areas plays a cardinal role in signal transmission in the brain networks. In sum, I argue that causal approaches will provide more concreate backbones to cognitive neuroscience.