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  - 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  - 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  -