TY  - JOUR
A1  - Fischer, Rico
A1  - Ventura-Bort, Carlos
A1  - Hamm, Alfons O.
A1  - Weymar, Mathias
T1  - Transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation (tVNS) enhances conflict-triggered adjustment of cognitive control
JF  - Cognitive, affective, & behavioral neuroscience : a journal of the Psychonomic Society
N2  - Response conflicts play a prominent role in the flexible adaptation of behavior as they represent context-signals that indicate the necessity for the recruitment of cognitive control. Previous studies have highlighted the functional roles of the affectively aversive and arousing quality of the conflict signal in triggering the adaptation process. To further test this potential link with arousal, participants performed a response conflict task in two separate sessions with either transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation (tVNS), which is assumed to activate the locus coeruleus-noradrenaline (LC-NE) system, or with neutral sham stimulation. In both sessions the N2 and P3 event-related potentials (ERP) were assessed. In line with previous findings, conflict interference, the N2 and P3 amplitude were reduced after conflict. Most importantly, this adaptation to conflict was enhanced under tVNS compared to sham stimulation for conflict interference and the N2 amplitude. No effect of tVNS on the P3 component was found. These findings suggest that tVNS increases behavioral and electrophysiological markers of adaptation to conflict. Results are discussed in the context of the potentially underlying LC-NE and other neuromodulatory (e.g., GABA) systems. The present findings add important pieces to the understanding of the neurophysiological mechanisms of conflict-triggered adjustment of cognitive control.
KW  - Conflict adaptation
KW  - Cognitive control
KW  - Transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation
KW  - tVNS
KW  - ERP
KW  - N2
Y1  - 2018
U6  - https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-018-0596-2
SN  - 1530-7026
SN  - 1531-135X
VL  - 18
IS  - 4
SP  - 680
EP  - 693
PB  - Springer
CY  - New York
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Weck, Florian
A1  - Grikscheit, Florian
A1  - Höfling, Volkmar
A1  - Kordt, Anne
A1  - Hamm, Alfons O.
A1  - Gerlach, Alexander L.
A1  - Alpers, Georg W.
A1  - Arolt, Volker
A1  - Kircher, Tilo
A1  - Pauli, Paul
A1  - Rief, Winfried
A1  - Lang, Thomas
T1  - The role of treatment delivery factors in exposure-based cognitive behavioral therapy for panic disorder with agoraphobia
JF  - Journal of anxiety disorders
N2  - Treatment delivery factors (i.e., therapist adherence, therapist competence, and therapeutic alliance) are considered to be important for cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) for panic disorder and agoraphobia (PD/AG). In the current study, four independent raters conducted process evaluations based on 168 two-hour videotapes of 84 patients with PD/AG treated with exposure-based CBT. Two raters evaluated patients’ interpersonal behavior in Session 1. Two raters evaluated treatment delivery factors in Session 6, in which therapists provided the rationale for conducting exposure exercises. At the 6-month follow-up, therapists’ adherence (r = 0.54) and therapeutic alliance (r = 0.31) were significant predictors of changes in agoraphobic avoidance behavior; therapist competence was not associated with treatment outcomes. Patients’ interpersonal behavior in Session 1 was a significant predictor of the therapeutic alliance in Session 6 (r = 0.17). The findings demonstrate that treatment delivery factors, particularly therapist adherence, are relevant to the long-term success of CBT for PD/AG.
KW  - Interpersonal behavior
KW  - Panic disorder with agoraphobia
KW  - Therapeutic alliance
KW  - Therapist adherence
KW  - Therapist competence
Y1  - 2016
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.janxdis.2016.05.007
SN  - 0887-6185
SN  - 1873-7897
VL  - 42
SP  - 10
EP  - 18
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - Oxford
ER  - 
TY  - GEN
A1  - Weymar, Mathias
A1  - Ventura-Bort, Carlos
A1  - Genheimer, Hannah
A1  - Wirkner, Janine
A1  - Wendt, Julia
A1  - Hamm, Alfons O.
T1  - THE P300 AND THE LC-NE SYSTEM: NEW INSIGHTS FROM TRANSCUTANEOUS VAGUS NERVE STIMULATION (TVNS)
T2  - Psychophysiology : journal of the Society for Psychophysiological Research
KW  - P300
KW  - norepinephrine
KW  - transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation
Y1  - 2017
SN  - 0048-5772
SN  - 1469-8986
VL  - 54
SP  - S145
EP  - S145
PB  - Wiley
CY  - Hoboken
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Szeska, Christoph
A1  - Richter, Jan
A1  - Wendt, Julia
A1  - Weymar, Mathias
A1  - Hamm, Alfons O.
T1  - Promoting long-term inhibition of human fear responses by non-invasive transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation during extinction training
JF  - Scientific reports
N2  - Inhibiting fear-related thoughts and defensive behaviors when they are no longer appropriate to the situation is a prerequisite for flexible and adaptive responding to changing environments. Such inhibition of defensive systems is mediated by ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), limbic basolateral amygdala (BLA), and brain stem locus-coeruleus noradrenergic system (LC-NAs). Non-invasive, transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation (tVNS) has shown to activate this circuit. Using a multiple-day single-cue fear conditioning and extinction paradigm, we investigated long-term effects of tVNS on inhibition of low-level amygdala modulated fear potentiated startle and cognitive risk assessments. We found that administration of tVNS during extinction training facilitated inhibition of fear potentiated startle responses and cognitive risk assessments, resulting in facilitated formation, consolidation and long-term recall of extinction memory, and prevention of the return of fear. These findings might indicate new ways to increase the efficacy of exposure-based treatments of anxiety disorders.
KW  - Amygdala
KW  - Autonomic nervous system
KW  - Electromyography – EMG
KW  - Extinction
KW  - Fear conditioning
Y1  - 2020
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-58412-w
SN  - 2045-2322
VL  - 10
IS  - 1
PB  - Nature Publishing Group
CY  - London
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Pahnke, Rike
A1  - Mau-Möller, Anett
A1  - Junge, Martin
A1  - Wendt, Julia
A1  - Weymar, Mathias
A1  - Hamm, Alfons O.
A1  - Lischke, Alexander
T1  - Oral Contraceptives Impair Complex Emotion Recognition in Healthy Women
JF  - Frontiers in neuroscience
N2  - Despite the widespread use of oral contraceptives (OCs), remarkably little is known about the effects of OCs on emotion, cognition, and behavior. However, coincidental findings suggest that OCs impair the ability to recognize others’ emotional expressions, which may have serious consequences in interpersonal contexts. To further investigate the effects of OCs on emotion recognition, we tested whether women who were using OCs (n = 42) would be less accurate in the recognition of complex emotional expressions than women who were not using OCs (n = 53). In addition, we explored whether these differences in emotion recognition would depend on women’s menstrual cycle phase. We found that women with OC use were indeed less accurate in the recognition of complex expressions than women without OC use, in particular during the processing of expressions that were difficult to recognize. These differences in emotion recognition did not depend on women’s menstrual cycle phase. Our findings, thus, suggest that OCs impair women’s emotion recognition, which should be taken into account when informing women about the side-effects of OC use.
KW  - oral contraceptives
KW  - menstrual cycle
KW  - estrogen
KW  - progesterone
KW  - emotion recognition
KW  - social cognition
Y1  - 2019
U6  - https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2018.01041
SN  - 1662-453X
VL  - 12
PB  - Frontiers Research Foundation
CY  - Lausanne
ER  - 
TY  - GEN
A1  - Dolcos, Florin
A1  - Katsumi, Yuta
A1  - Moore, Matthew
A1  - Berggren, Nick
A1  - de Gelder, Beatrice
A1  - Derakshan, Nazanin
A1  - Hamm, Alfons O.
A1  - Koster, Ernst H. W.
A1  - Ladouceur, Cecile D.
A1  - Okon-Singer, Hadas
A1  - Ventura-Bort, Carlos
A1  - Weymar, Mathias
T1  - Neural correlates of emotion-attention interactions
BT  - From perception, learning, and memory to social cognition, individual differences, and training interventions
T2  - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe
N2  - Due to their ability to capture attention, emotional stimuli tend to benefit from enhanced perceptual processing, which can be helpful when such stimuli are task-relevant but hindering when they are task-irrelevant. Altered emotion-attention interactions have been associated with symptoms of affective disturbances, and emerging research focuses on improving emotion-attention interactions to prevent or treat affective disorders. In line with the Human Affectome Project's emphasis on linguistic components, we also analyzed the language used to describe attention-related aspects of emotion, and highlighted terms related to domains such as conscious awareness, motivational effects of attention, social attention, and emotion regulation. These terms were discussed within a broader review of available evidence regarding the neural correlates of (1) Emotion-Attention Interactions in Perception, (2) Emotion-Attention Interactions in Learning and Memory, (3) Individual Differences in Emotion-Attention Interactions, and (4) Training and Interventions to Optimize Emotion-Attention Interactions. This comprehensive approach enabled an integrative overview of the current knowledge regarding the mechanisms of emotion-attention interactions at multiple levels of analysis, and identification of emerging directions for future investigations.
T3  - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - 862 
KW  - emotion
KW  - attention
KW  - perception
KW  - learning and memory
KW  - individual differences
KW  - training interventions
KW  - psychophysiology
KW  - neuroimaging
KW  - affective neuroscience
KW  - health and well-being
KW  - linguistics
Y1  - 2019
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-516213
SN  - 1866-8364
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Dolcos, Florin
A1  - Katsumi, Yuta
A1  - Moore, Matthew
A1  - Berggren, Nick
A1  - de Gelder, Beatrice
A1  - Derakshan, Nazanin
A1  - Hamm, Alfons O.
A1  - Koster, Ernst H. W.
A1  - Ladouceur, Cecile D.
A1  - Okon-Singer, Hadas
A1  - Ventura-Bort, Carlos
A1  - Weymar, Mathias
T1  - Neural correlates of emotion-attention interactions
BT  - From perception, learning, and memory to social cognition, individual differences, and training interventions
JF  - Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews
N2  - Due to their ability to capture attention, emotional stimuli tend to benefit from enhanced perceptual processing, which can be helpful when such stimuli are task-relevant but hindering when they are task-irrelevant. Altered emotion-attention interactions have been associated with symptoms of affective disturbances, and emerging research focuses on improving emotion-attention interactions to prevent or treat affective disorders. In line with the Human Affectome Project's emphasis on linguistic components, we also analyzed the language used to describe attention-related aspects of emotion, and highlighted terms related to domains such as conscious awareness, motivational effects of attention, social attention, and emotion regulation. These terms were discussed within a broader review of available evidence regarding the neural correlates of (1) Emotion-Attention Interactions in Perception, (2) Emotion-Attention Interactions in Learning and Memory, (3) Individual Differences in Emotion-Attention Interactions, and (4) Training and Interventions to Optimize Emotion-Attention Interactions. This comprehensive approach enabled an integrative overview of the current knowledge regarding the mechanisms of emotion-attention interactions at multiple levels of analysis, and identification of emerging directions for future investigations.
KW  - emotion
KW  - attention
KW  - perception
KW  - learning and memory
KW  - individual differences
KW  - training interventions
KW  - psychophysiology
KW  - neuroimaging
KW  - affective neuroscience
KW  - health and well-being
KW  - linguistics
Y1  - 2019
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2019.08.017
SN  - 0149-7634
SN  - 1873-7528
VL  - 108
SP  - 559
EP  - 601
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - Oxford
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Ventura-Bort, Carlos
A1  - Dolcos, Florin
A1  - Wendt, Julia
A1  - Wirkner, Janine
A1  - Hamm, Alfons O.
A1  - Weymar, Mathias
T1  - Item and source memory for emotional associates is mediated by different retrieval processes
JF  - Neuropsychologia : an international journal in behavioural and cognitive neuroscience
N2  - Recent event-related potential (ERP) data showed that neutral objects encoded in emotional background pictures were better remembered than objects encoded in neutral contexts, when recognition memory was tested one week later. In the present study, we investigated whether this long-term memory advantage for items is also associated with correct memory for contextual source details. Furthermore, we were interested in the possibly dissociable contribution of familiarity and recollection processes (using a Remember/Know procedure). The results revealed that item memory performance was mainly driven by the subjective experience of familiarity, irrespective of whether the objects were previously encoded in emotional or neutral contexts. Correct source memory for the associated background picture, however, was driven by recollection and enhanced when the content was emotional. In ERPs, correctly recognized old objects evoked frontal ERP Old/New effects (300-500 ms), irrespective of context category. As in our previous study (Ventura-Bort et al., 2016b), retrieval for objects from emotional contexts was associated with larger parietal Old/New differences (600-800 ms), indicating stronger involvement of recollection. Thus, the results suggest a stronger contribution of recollection-based retrieval to item and contextual background source memory for neutral information associated with an emotional event.
KW  - event-related potentials
KW  - emotion
KW  - source memory
KW  - remember/know
KW  - old/new
KW  - effect
Y1  - 2017
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2017.12.015
SN  - 0028-3932
SN  - 1873-3514
VL  - 145
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - Oxford
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Wendt, Julia
A1  - Weymar, Mathias
A1  - Junge, Martin
A1  - Hamm, Alfons O.
A1  - Lischke, Alexander
T1  - Heartfelt memories
BT  - Cardiac vagal tone correlates with increased memory for untrustworthy faces
JF  - Emotion : a new journal from the American Psychological Association
N2  - During social interactions, we rapidly judge others’ trustworthiness on basis of their facial characteristics. Face-based trustworthiness judgments may not only affect our current but also our future interactions because we seem to be more inclined to remember untrustworthy than trustworthy faces. Memory formation of salient stimuli like untrustworthy faces may be modulated by the interplay between the autonomic and central nervous system, which can be indexed by changes in vagally mediated heart rate variability (HRV). To test this assumption, we investigated whether differences in HRV would be associated with differences in memory formation of untrustworthy faces in a sample of healthy participants (n = 34, all female). Untrustworthy faces were remembered more accurately than trustworthy faces, albeit only by participants with high and not low HRV. Across participants, increased memory accuracy for untrustworthy faces was associated with increased HRV. We discuss these findings in the context of neurobiological theories regarding the interplay between the autonomic and central nervous system during the regulation of autonomic, emotional and cognitive processes. (PsycInfo Database Record
KW  - trustworthiness
KW  - face memory
KW  - heart rate variability
KW  - amygdala
KW  - prefrontal cortex
Y1  - 2018
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000396
SN  - 1528-3542
SN  - 1931-1516
VL  - 19
IS  - 1
SP  - 178
EP  - 182
PB  - American Psychological Association
CY  - Washington
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Wirkner, Janine
A1  - Ventura-Bort, Carlos
A1  - Schulz, Paul
A1  - Hamm, Alfons O.
A1  - Weymar, Mathias
T1  - Event-related potentials of emotional and neutral memories
BT  - the role of encoding position and delayed testing
JF  - Psychophysiology : journal of the Society for Psychophysiological Research
N2  - Previous research found that memory is not only better for emotional information but also for neutral information that has been encoded in the context of an emotional event. In the present ERP study, we investigated two factors that may influence memory for neutral and emotional items: temporal proximity between emotional and neutral items during encoding, and retention interval (immediate vs. delayed). Forty-nine female participants incidentally encoded 36 unpleasant and 108 neutral pictures (36 neutral pictures preceded an unpleasant picture, 36 followed an unpleasant picture, and 36 neutral pictures were preceded and followed by neutral pictures) and participated in a recognition memory task either immediately (N=24) or 1 week (N=25) after encoding. Results showed better memory for emotional pictures relative to neutral pictures. In accordance, enhanced centroparietal old/new differences (500-900 ms) during recognition were observed for unpleasant compared to neutral pictures, most pronounced for the 1-week interval. Picture position effects, however, were only subtle. During encoding, late positive potentials for neutral pictures were slightly lower for neutral pictures following unpleasant ones, but only at trend level. To summarize, we could replicate and extend previous ERP findings showing that emotionally arousing events are better recollected than neutral events, particularly when memory is tested after longer retention intervals. Picture position during encoding, however, had only small effects on elaborative processing and no effects on memory retrieval.
KW  - attention
KW  - emotion
KW  - ERPs
KW  - memory
KW  - old
KW  - new effect
KW  - serial position effect
Y1  - 2018
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1111/psyp.13069
SN  - 0048-5772
SN  - 1469-8986
VL  - 55
IS  - 7
PB  - Wiley
CY  - Hoboken
ER  -