Writing stands as one of humanity\'s most profound inventions, facilitating the efficient sharing and transmission of vast amounts of information. Similar to images and facial expressions, visual (written) words possess the ability to evoke emotional connotations. Understanding how the brain perceives these emotional nuances encoded in highly symbolic visual words is a key focus of the emerging field of \"affective neurolinguistics.\" At the core of this inquiry lies the examination of the early posterior negativity (EPN), an event-related potentials (ERPs) component peaking around 300 ms after stimulus onset in the occipitotemporal scalp region. EPN has consistently emerged in response to emotional stimuli, encompassing pictures, faces, and visual words. However, prior research has notably lacked observation of EPN in response to Chinese emotional words, raising questions about potential differences in emotional processing between Chinese and other languages. Given the logographic nature of the Chinese writing system and the prevalence of compound words in the Chinese lexicon, this study aims to explore whether the emotional processing of Chinese monomorphic and compound words elicits an EPN response. Two experiments were conducted: Experiment 1 utilized one-character words (monomorphic words), while Experiment 2 employed two-character words (compound words). Participants were assigned a go/no-go task, instructed to respond to unknown words (word recognition task) or blue stimuli (color decision task). Data analysis using a data-driven mass univariate approach revealed significant ERP differences between emotional and neutral words. Notably, the time course, scalp topography, and cortical generators of the difference ERP presented a characteristic EPN response in both experiments. These findings strongly support the notion that the processing of emotional connotations in both Chinese monomorphic and compound words is reflected by the EPN, paving the way for future research using EPN as an emotion-related ERP component for investigating emotional processing of Chinese words.

OBJECTIVE: Clinically anxious youth are hypervigilant to emotional stimuli and display difficulty shifting attention from emotional to nonemotional stimuli, suggesting impairments in cognitive control over emotion. However, it is unknown whether the neural substrates of such biases vary across the clinical-to-nonclinical range of anxiety or by age.
METHODS: Youth aged 7 to 17 years with clinical anxiety (n = 119) or without an anxiety diagnosis (n = 41) matched emotional faces or matched shapes flanked by emotional face distractors during magnetic resonance imaging, probing emotion processing and cognitive control over emotion, respectively. Building from the National Institute of Mental Health Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) framework, clinically anxious youth were sampled across diagnostic categories, and non-clinically affected youth were sampled across minimal-to-subclinical severity.
RESULTS: Across both conditions, anxiety severity was associated with hyperactivation in the right inferior parietal lobe, a substrate of hypervigilance. Brain-anxiety associations were also differentiated by attentional state; anxiety severity was associated with greater left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex activation during emotion processing (face matching) and greater activation in the left posterior superior temporal sulcus and temporoparietal junction (and slower responses) during cognitive control over emotion (shape matching). Age also moderated associations between anxiety and cognitive control over emotion, such that anxiety was associated with greater right thalamus and bilateral posterior cingulate cortex activation for children at younger and mean ages, but not for older youth.
CONCLUSIONS: Aberrant function in brain regions implicated in stimulus-driven attention to emotional distractors may contribute to anxiety in youth. Results support the potential utility of attention modulation interventions for anxiety that are tailored to developmental stage.
BACKGROUND: Dimensional Brain Behavior Predictors of CBT Outcomes in Pediatric Anxiety; https://clinicaltrials.gov; NCT02810171.

In the processing of emotions, the brain prepares and reacts in distinctive manners depending upon the negative or positive nuance of the emotion elicitors. Previous investigations showed that negative elicitors generally evoke more intense neural activities than positive and neutral ones, as reflected in the augmented amplitude of all sub-components of the event-related potentials (ERP) late posterior positivity (LPP) complex, while less is known about the emotion of disgust. The present study aimed to examine whether the LPP complex during the processing of disgust stimuli showed greater amplitude than other emotion elicitors with negative or positive valences, thus confirming it as a neural marker of disgust-related negativity bias at earlier or later stages. Thus, in the present study, we leveraged the ERP technique during the execution of an affective self-administered visual stimuli task to disentangle the neural contributions associated with images of positive, negative, disgust, or neutral emotions. Crucially, we showed that handling with disgust elicitors prompted the greatest neural activity and the highest delay during self-administration. Overall, we demonstrated progressive neural activities associated with the unpleasantness of the emotion elicitors and peculiar processing for disgust compared with all other emotions.

UNASSIGNED: As a source of audio-visual stimulation, movies expose people to various emotions. Interestingly, several genres are characterized by negative emotional content. Albeit theoretical approaches exist, little is known about preferences for specific movie genres and the neuronal processing of negative emotions.
UNASSIGNED: We investigated associations between movie genre preference and limbic and reward-related brain reactivity to close this gap by employing an fMRI paradigm with negative emotional faces in 257 healthy participants. We compared the functional activity of the amygdala and the nucleus accumbens (NAcc) between individuals with a preference for a particular movie genre and those without such preference.
UNASSIGNED: Amygdala activation was relatively higher in individuals with action movie preference (p TFCE-FWE = 0.013). Comedy genre preference was associated with increased amygdala (p TFCE-FWE = 0.038) and NAcc activity (p TFCE-FWE = 0.011). In contrast, crime/thriller preference (amygdala: p TFCE-FWE ≤ 0.010, NAcc: p TFCE-FWE = 0.036), as well as documentary preference, was linked to the decreased amygdala (p TFCE-FWE = 0.012) and NAcc activity (p TFCE-FWE = 0.015). The study revealed associations between participants\' genre preferences and brain reactivity to negative affective stimuli. Interestingly, preferences for genres with similar emotion profiles (action, crime/thriller) were associated with oppositely directed neural activity. Potential links between brain reactivity and susceptibility to different movie-related gratifications are discussed.

Impaired socioemotional functioning characterizes autistic children, but does weak inhibition control underlie their socioemotional difficulty? This study addressed this question by examining whether and, if so, how inhibition control is affected by face realism and emotional valence in school-age autistic and neurotypical children. Fifty-two autistic and 52 age-matched neurotypical controls aged 10-12 years completed real and cartoon emotional face Go/Nogo tasks while event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. The analyses of inhibition-emotion components (i.e., N2, P3, and LPP) and a face-specific N170 revealed that autistic children elicited greater N2 while inhibiting Nogo trials and greater P3/LPP and late LPP for real but not cartoon emotional faces. Moreover, autistic children exhibited a reduced N170 to real face emotions only. Furthermore, correlation results showed that better behavioral inhibition and emotion recognition in autistic children were associated with a reduced N170. These findings suggest that neural mechanisms of inhibitory control in autistic children are less efficient and more disrupted during real face processing, which may affect their age-appropriate socio-emotional development.

Schizotypy, a personality structure that resembles schizophrenia symptoms, is often associated with abnormal facial emotion perception. Based on the prevailing sense of threat in psychotic experiences, and the immediate perceptual history of seeing others\' facial expressions, individuals with high schizotypal traits may exhibit a heightened tendency to anticipate anger. To test this, we used insights from Representational Momentum (RM), a perceptual phenomenon in which the endpoint of a dynamic event is systematically displaced forward, into the immediate future. Angry-to-ambiguous and happy-to-ambiguous avatar faces were presented, each followed by a probe with the same (ambiguous) expression as the endpoint, or one slightly changed to express greater happiness/anger. Participants judged if the probe was \"equal\" to the endpoint and rated how confident they were. The sample was divided into high (N = 46) and low (N = 49) schizotypal traits using the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire (SPQ). First, a forward bias was found in happy-to-ambiguous faces, suggesting emotional anticipation solely for dynamic faces changing towards a potential threat (anger). This may reflect an adaptative mechanism, as it is safer to anticipate any hostility from a conspecific than the opposite. Second, contrary to our hypothesis, high schizotypal traits did not heighten RM for happy-to-ambiguous faces, nor did they lead to overconfidence in biased judgements. This may suggest a typical pattern of emotional anticipation in non-clinical schizotypy, but caution is needed due to the use of self-report questionnaires, university students, and a modest sample size. Future studies should also investigate if the same holds for clinical manifestations of schizophrenia.

The present meta-analysis summarizes brain activation for social cognition and emotion-processing tasks in borderline personality disorder (BPD). We carried out two meta-analyses to elaborate on commonalities and potential differences between the two types of tasks. In the first meta-analysis, we implemented a more liberal strategy for task selection (including social and emotional content). The results confirmed previously reported hyperactivations in patients with BPD in the bilateral amygdala and prefrontal cortex and hypoactivations in bilateral inferior frontal gyri. When applying a stricter approach to task selection, focusing narrowly on social cognition tasks, we only found activation in prefrontal areas, particularly in the anterior cingulate and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. We review the role of these areas in social cognition in healthy adults, suggesting that the observed BPD hyperactivations may reflect an overreliance on self-related thought in social cognition.

Abnormal emotion processing is a core feature of schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSDs) that encompasses multiple operations. While deficits in some areas have been well-characterized, we understand less about abnormalities in the emotion processing that happens through language, which is highly relevant for social life. Here, we introduce a novel method using deep learning to estimate emotion processing rapidly from spoken language, testing this approach in male-identified patients with SSDs (n = 37) and healthy controls (n = 51). Using free responses to evocative stimuli, we derived a measure of appropriateness, or \"emotional alignment\" (EA). We examined psychometric characteristics of EA and its sensitivity to a single-dose challenge of oxytocin, a neuropeptide shown to enhance the salience of socioemotional information in SSDs. Patients showed impaired EA relative to controls, and impairment correlated with poorer social cognitive skill and more severe motivation and pleasure deficits. Adding EA to a logistic regression model with language-based measures of formal thought disorder (FTD) improved classification of patients versus controls. Lastly, oxytocin administration improved EA but not FTD among patients. While additional validation work is needed, these initial results suggest that an automated assay using spoken language may be a promising approach to assess emotion processing in SSDs.

UNASSIGNED: Abnormal visual processing has been proposed as a mechanism underlying excessive focus on minor appearance flaws in body dysmorphic disorder (BDD). Existing BDD research has not differentiated the various stages of face processing (featural, first-order configural, holistic and second-order configural) that are required for higher-order processes such as emotion recognition. This study investigated a hierarchical visual processing model to examine the nature of abnormalities in face processing in BDD.
UNASSIGNED: Thirty BDD participants and 27 healthy controls completed the Navon task, a featural and configural face processing task and a facial emotion labelling task.
UNASSIGNED: BDD participants performed similarly to controls when processing global and local non-face stimuli on the Navon task, when detecting subtle changes in the features and spacing of a target face, and when labelling emotional faces. However, BDD participants displayed poorer performance when viewing inverted faces, indicating difficulties in configural processing.
UNASSIGNED: The findings only partially support prior work. However, synthesis of results with previous findings indicates that heterogenous task methodologies may contribute to inconsistent findings. Recommendations are provided regarding the task parameters that appear most sensitive to abnormalities in BDD.

Emotions are processed in the brain through a cortical route, responsible for detailed-conscious recognition and mainly based on image High Spatial Frequencies (HSF), and a subcortical route, responsible for coarse-unconscious processing and based on Low SF (LSF). However, little is known about possible changes in the functioning of the two routes in ageing. In the present go/no-go online task, 112 younger adults and 111 older adults were asked to press a button when a happy or angry face appeared (go) and to inhibit responses for neutral faces (no-go). Facial stimuli were presented unfiltered (broadband image), filtered at HSF and LSF, and hybrids (LSF of an emotional expression superimposed to the HSF of the same face with a neutral expression). All stimuli were also presented rotated on the vertical axis (upside-down) to investigate the global analysis of faces in ageing. Results showed an overall better performance of younger compared to older participants for all conditions except for hybrid stimuli. The expected face-inversion effect was confirmed in both age groups. We conclude that, besides an overall worsening of the perceptual skill with ageing, no specific impairment in the functioning of both the cortical and the subcortical route emerged.