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1.
Pediatric Catecholaminergic Polymorphic Ventricular Tachycardia: A Translational Perspective for the Clinician-Scientist.
Kallas, D, Lamba, A, Roston, TM, Arslanova, A, Franciosi, S, Tibbits, GF, Sanatani, S
International journal of molecular sciences. 2021;(17)
Abstract
Catecholaminergic polymorphic ventricular tachycardia (CPVT) is a rare and potentially lethal inherited arrhythmia disease characterized by exercise or emotion-induced bidirectional or polymorphic ventricular tachyarrhythmias. The median age of disease onset is reported to be approximately 10 years of age. The majority of CPVT patients have pathogenic variants in the gene encoding the cardiac ryanodine receptor, or calsequestrin 2. These lead to mishandling of calcium in cardiomyocytes resulting in after-depolarizations, and ventricular arrhythmias. Disease severity is particularly pronounced in younger individuals who usually present with cardiac arrest and arrhythmic syncope. Risk stratification is imprecise and long-term prognosis on therapy is unknown despite decades of research focused on pediatric CPVT populations. The purpose of this review is to summarize contemporary data on pediatric CPVT, highlight knowledge gaps and present future research directions for the clinician-scientist to address.
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2.
Demystifying wine tasting: Cognitive psychology's contribution.
Parr, WV
Food research international (Ottawa, Ont.). 2019;:230-233
Abstract
Over recent decades, cognitive psychology has made a significant contribution to our understanding of wine-tasting phenomena. At the most fundamental level the discipline's contribution has made us aware that even an apparently 'simple' judgment, such as noting that a wine's odour reflects over-ripe fruit, involves not just our nose but sophisticated cognitive processing. With its information-processing model of how people interact with their surrounding world, and its methodologies and theories regarding how we perceive, conceptualise, remember, image, make judgments, and communicate our experiences, cognitive psychology has markedly advanced our understanding of wine tasting and wine tasters. This review highlights notable wine sensory research outcomes that make evident the importance of a taster's cognitive processes in their wine analysis and appreciation. These include data providing evidence for colour-flavour perceptual bias, prototypical thinking, knowledge-based wine judgments, the close links between olfactory memory, autobiographical memory and emotion, and the notion of wine expertise. Further, it will be argued that such data demonstrate how a consensus model, still dominant in much wine sensory analysis, is limited at best and inappropriate for sensory analysis of complex products such as wine in many contexts. Critical to this argument is appreciating that differences amongst tasters, reflecting each individual's physiology, experience and knowledge, are valid data in themselves rather than 'error in the machine' as they were conceptualised within traditional consensus models of sensory analysis. The article terminates with reference to a promise for even greater understanding of wine tasting phenomena that the future offers by links between cognitive psychology's behavioural data and recent technological advances in neuropsychology and neurophysiology (e.g., cerebral imaging techniques).
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3.
Emotion regulation in mood and anxiety disorders: A meta-analysis of fMRI cognitive reappraisal studies.
Picó-Pérez, M, Radua, J, Steward, T, Menchón, JM, Soriano-Mas, C
Progress in neuro-psychopharmacology & biological psychiatry. 2017;(Pt B):96-104
Abstract
Emotion regulation by means of cognitive reappraisal has been widely studied with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). To date, several meta-analyses of studies using cognitive reappraisal tasks in healthy volunteers have been carried out, but no meta-analyses have yet been performed on the fMRI data of clinical populations with identified alterations in emotion regulation capacity. We provide a comprehensive meta-analysis of cognitive reappraisal fMRI studies in populations of patients with mood or anxiety disorders, yielding a pooled sample of 247 patients and 262 controls from thirteen independent studies. As a distinguishing feature of this meta-analysis, original statistical brain maps were obtained from six of these studies. Our primary results demonstrated that patients with mood and anxiety disorders recruited the regulatory fronto-parietal network involved in cognitive reappraisal to a lesser extent in comparison to healthy controls. Conversely, they presented increased activation in regions that may be associated with the emotional experience (i.e., insula, cerebellum, precentral and inferior occipital gyri) and in regions whose activation may be the consequence of compensatory mechanisms (i.e., supramarginal gyri and superior parietal lobule). Moreover, activations in the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex and the left superior temporal gyrus were associated with reinterpretation emotion regulation strategies, whereas medial frontal and parietal activations were associated with the deployment of distancing strategies. The regions revealed by this meta-analysis conform to a pattern of dysfunctional brain activation during cognitive reappraisal common to mood and anxiety disorders. As such, this neural pattern may reflect a transdiagnostic feature of these disorders.
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4.
[The role of experience in the neurology of facial expression of emotions].
Gordillo, F, Pérez, MA, Arana, JM, Mestas, L, López, RM
Revista de neurologia. 2015;(7):316-20
Abstract
INTRODUCTION Facial expression of emotion has an important social function that facilitates interaction between people. This process has a neurological basis, which is not isolated from the context, or the experience of the interaction between people in that context. Yet, to date, the impact that experience has on the perception of emotions is not completely understood. AIMS To discuss the role of experience in the recognition of facial expression of emotions and to analyze the biases towards emotional perception. DEVELOPMENT The maturation of the structures that support the ability to recognize emotion goes through a sensitive period during adolescence, where experience may have greater impact on emotional recognition. Experiences of abuse, neglect, war, and stress generate a bias towards expressions of anger and sadness. Similarly, positive experiences generate a bias towards the expression of happiness. CONCLUSIONS Only when people are able to use the facial expression of emotions as a channel for understanding an expression, will they be able to interact appropriately with their environment. This environment, in turn, will lead to experiences that modulate this capacity. Therefore, it is a self-regulatory process that can be directed through the implementation of intervention programs on emotional aspects.
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5.
Where is the comfort in comfort foods? Mechanisms linking fat signaling, reward, and emotion.
Weltens, N, Zhao, D, Van Oudenhove, L
Neurogastroenterology and motility. 2014;(3):303-15
Abstract
BACKGROUND Food in general, and fatty foods in particular, have obtained intrinsic reward value throughout evolution. This reward value results from an interaction between exteroceptive signals from different sensory modalities, interoceptive hunger/satiety signals from the gastrointestinal tract to the brain, as well as ongoing affective and cognitive processes. Further evidence linking food to emotions stems from folk psychology ('comfort foods') and epidemiological studies demonstrating high comorbidity rates between disorders of food intake, including obesity, and mood disorders such as depression. PURPOSE This review paper aims to give an overview of current knowledge on the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying the link between (fatty) foods, their reward value, and emotional responses to (anticipation of) their intake in humans. Firstly, the influence of exteroceptive sensory signals, including visual, olfactory ('anticipatory food reward'), and gustatory ('consummatory food reward'), on the encoding of reward value in the (ventral) striatum and of subjective pleasantness in the cingulate and orbitofrontal cortex will be discussed. Differences in these pathways and mechanisms between lean and obese subjects will be highlighted. Secondly, recent studies elucidating the mechanisms of purely interoceptive fatty acid-induced signaling from the gastrointestinal tract to the brain, including the role of gut peptides, will be presented. These studies have demonstrated that such subliminal interoceptive stimuli may impact on hedonic circuits in the brain, and thereby influence the subjective and neural responses to negative emotion induction. This suggests that the effect of foods on mood may even occur independently from their exteroceptive sensory properties.
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6.
Current evidence regarding the management of mood and anxiety disorders using complementary and alternative medicine.
Bazzan, AJ, Zabrecky, G, Monti, DA, Newberg, AB
Expert review of neurotherapeutics. 2014;(4):411-23
Abstract
This article is an updated review on the potential uses of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) approaches for the management of patients with mood and anxiety disorders. We have focused this current paper on the different types of disorders and the CAM intervention which might be useful. This is in distinction to the prior paper which focused on the CAM interventions. In addition, we have provided a discussion of more recent studies that help to further inform practitioners about CAM interventions in these disorders. Mood and anxiety disorders are among the most prevalent mental health issues affecting people today and there are many approaches towards their management. CAM interventions can include supplements, botanical remedies, meditation and spiritual practices, acupuncture, and dietary practices. There are a growing number of research studies on the effectiveness of CAM interventions in mood and anxiety disorders, and this review evaluates and critiques such data.
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7.
Processing of food, body and emotional stimuli in anorexia nervosa: a systematic review and meta-analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging studies.
Zhu, Y, Hu, X, Wang, J, Chen, J, Guo, Q, Li, C, Enck, P
European eating disorders review : the journal of the Eating Disorders Association. 2012;(6):439-50
Abstract
The characteristics of the cognitive processing of food, body and emotional information in patients with anorexia nervosa (AN) are debatable. We reviewed functional magnetic resonance imaging studies to assess whether there were consistent neural basis and networks in the studies to date. Searching PubMed, Ovid, Web of Science, The Cochrane Library and Google Scholar between January 1980 and May 2012, we identified 17 relevant studies. Activation likelihood estimation was used to perform a quantitative meta-analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging studies. For both food stimuli and body stimuli, AN patients showed increased hemodynamic response in the emotion-related regions (frontal, caudate, uncus, insula and temporal) and decreased activation in the parietal region. Although no robust brain activation has been found in response to emotional stimuli, emotion-related neural networks are involved in the processing of food and body stimuli among AN. It suggests that negative emotional arousal is related to cognitive processing bias of food and body stimuli in AN.
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8.
Child maltreatment and memory.
Goodman, GS, Quas, JA, Ogle, CM
Annual review of psychology. 2010;:325-51
Abstract
Exposure to childhood trauma, especially child maltreatment, has important implications for memory of emotionally distressing experiences. These implications stem from cognitive, socio-emotional, mental health, and neurobiological consequences of maltreatment and can be at least partially explained by current theories concerning the effects of childhood trauma. In this review, two main hypotheses are advanced: (a) Maltreatment in childhood is associated with especially robust memory for emotionally distressing material in many individuals, but (b) maltreatment can impair memory for such material in individuals who defensively avoid it. Support for these hypotheses comes from research on child abuse victims' memory and suggestibility regarding distressing but nonabusive events, memory for child abuse itself, and autobiographical memory. However, more direct investigations are needed to test precisely when and how childhood trauma affects memory for emotionally significant, distressing experiences. Legal implications and future directions are discussed.
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9.
[Emotional tears].
Messmer, EM
Der Ophthalmologe : Zeitschrift der Deutschen Ophthalmologischen Gesellschaft. 2009;(7):593-602
Abstract
Emotional tears, an exclusively human means of communication, are complex and rarely the subject of scientific research. The same nerves, receptors, and transmitters seem to be involved in their production as those used for basal and reflex tears. However, stimuli must be received in a cognitive/social context, detected by "induction centers" in the telencephalon, and forwarded to effector centers. Increased concentrations of protein, prolactin, manganese, potassium, and serotonin have been detected in emotional tears. Various theories try to explain the reason for and benefit of emotional tears. A number of factors, such as ethnic group, social status, profession, hormonal situation, gender, and individual threshold, influence whether an individual is a "crier" or a "noncrier." Manipulative tears are a strong weapon for unbalancing other people, and the expression "crocodile tears" is used for both manipulative tears and aberrant gustolacrimal tears. Pathological crying occurs during depression, but it also occurs in the context of central nervous system disease as prolonged crying fits without cause or emotion. Absent emotional tearing is observed in congenital, often syndromal, disorders.
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10.
Children's recall of emotionally arousing, repeated events: a review and call for further investigation.
Price, HL, Connolly, DA
International journal of law and psychiatry. 2008;(4):337-46
Abstract
The influence, if any, of emotional arousal on memory is a controversial topic in the literature. Much of the research on memory for emotionally arousing events has focused on a few specific issues (e.g., differences in types of details recalled in emotionally arousing and neutral events; increasing ecological validity). Although gaining more recent attention, a neglected area in the literature has been memory for instances of repeated, emotionally arousing events. This issue has important implications for understanding children's ability to recall events in a forensic setting. We review existing findings on memory for emotionally arousing events in general and particularly in children, children's memory for events that occur repeatedly, and then discuss the scarce research on repeated emotionally arousing events and the need for further research in this area. We conclude that although it is clear that children are capable of accurately reporting arousing and repeated experiences, it is also apparent that circumstances both within and outside the control of investigative interviewers influence this ability.