International Journal of Psychophysiology

Interpersonal physiological synchrony (IPS) between interaction partners has been studied as a marker of social connectedness and coordination. However, little is known about how such interpersonal synchrony relates to the intrapersonal coordination of individuals' own autonomic systems during team interaction. The present study examined whether IPS and intrapersonal physiological synchrony (IAPS), defined as the within-person coordination of heart rate (HR), respiration, and electrodermal activity (EDA), function as competing or complementary regulatory processes. It also examined whether IAPS is state- or trait-like and whether teams high or low in both IPS and IAPS had better outcomes. Fifty five newly formed triads (N = 165; Mage = 23.87, 77% female) participated in a laboratory interaction including passive shared experiences and active collaborative tasks while continuous physiological activity was recorded. Synchrony within individuals and between team members was quantified using multidimensional recurrence quantification analysis. Across interaction segments, IAPS was positively associated with IPS in both HR and EDA, with stronger and more consistent associations during active teamwork versus during passive social contexts. These findings contradict a trade-off hypothesis and instead support a synergistic relationship between IAPS and IPS. IAPS exhibited state-like dynamics and sensitivity to features of the context, i.e., consistency within similar interaction contexts and higher in passive versus active social segments. Further, IAPS had limited associations with individual difference measures. Exploratory analyses indicated that teams characterized by both high IAPS and high IPS demonstrated more favorable outcomes, reflected in either higher objective task performance or greater perceived team efficacy depending on physiological modality. Together, these results suggest that effective team coordination is supported not only by IPS but also by the capacity to maintain coherent internal autonomic organization. They further highlight IAPS as a dynamic component of social functioning that merits exploration alongside interpersonal processes.

Introduction: Observation of a partner in pain elicits empathy-related cortical responses and social support can modulate pain. Objective: The aim of this study was to investigate empathy and the cortical response during observation of a romantic partner in pain with and without consoling touch. Methods: A total of 40 participants (20 couples) completed validated measures of handedness, pain and empathy. Each member of the couple was randomly assigned to be either the recipient of cold pressor pain or the consoling partner undergoing EEG. EEG activity was recorded from the consoling partner during baseline and pain conditions (with and without consoling touch) to investigate how observation of a partner in pain could alter mu rhythms. Results: Observing a romantic partner in pain significantly enhanced mu at electrodes C4 and Cz, yet addition of consoling touch did not significantly change mu rhythms. Personal Distress was positively associated with mu rhythm enhancement at electrode C4 during pain without consoling touch (r = .576, p = .008). Conclusion: Viewing a romantic partner in pain significantly increased mu rhythms, that was not further changed by offering consoling touch. The association between increases in mu rhythms and Personal Distress in the current study suggests that self-oriented distress may be especially relevant to sensorimotor cortex responses when witnessing a partner in pain, particularly when consoling touch is not possible. Keywords: pain; empathy, EEG, mu rhythms, cold pressor

We investigated how auditory and visual presentation of small numerical magnitudes and non- numerical magnitudes are passively processed at the neural level. Earlier research suggests automatic processing of quantities occurs rapidly in the brain. However, there are no studies on passive, pre-attentive change detection of magnitudes utilizing mismatch negativity (MMN) across sensory modalities in same participants, important to understand amodal processing of magnitudes. We recorded EEG in passive auditory and visual multi-feature oddball and control paradigms from the same adult individuals (N=104/105, respectively). In the auditory paradigm, the standard stimulus was a 2-part sound, while the deviant stimuli varied in frequency, intensity, gap length, and number of sounds (1-part and 3-part stimuli). In the visual paradigm, the standard stimulus was a dot array containing two medium-sized dots, while the deviant stimuli varied in numerosity (1 or 3 dots) and dot size (small or large). The results for the auditory paradigm showed significant MMN across all features, including comparisons with deviant-alone control stimuli, except for the 2-part vs. 1-part contrast. The results for the visual paradigm suggested differences in processing across all features apart from large and medium-size stimuli. These results replicate earlier MMN findings that the brain distinguishes pre-attentively changes in sound frequency, amplitude and gap. Auditorily presented small numerical magnitudes also showed pre-attentive processing but less robustly to the contrast 2 vs. 1. Visual pre-attentive processing of small numerical magnitudes was also observed. Together these findings could be interpreted to support the existence of abstract, pre- attentive processing of numerical magnitudes. Highlights* Auditory and visual processing of numerical and non-numerical magnitudes was examined with EEG * Auditory non-numerical magnitudes and medium vs. small dots replicated earlier MMN studies * aMMN and vMMN showed pre-attentive processing of changes in small numerosities 2 vs. 3 and 2 vs. 1 * 2 vs. 1 tone processing was less robust than 2 vs. 3 or the processing of the visual contrasts * The brain processes changes in small non-symbolic magnitudes pre-attentively

Objective: Women with premenstrual syndrome (PMS) experience affective lability, irritability, depressed mood, and anxiety during the late luteal phase of the menstrual cycle. Stress reactivity may contribute to the development of these symptoms, yet neural correlates remain unexplored. We examined neural, behavioral and endocrine stress responses across menstrual cycle phases in women with and without PMS. Methods: 26 women with PMS and 24 women without PMS participated in two fMRI sessions, during the mid-follicular (days 5 to 11) and late-luteal phases (days -7 to -1). Participants completed the Montreal Imaging Stress Task (MIST). Subjective stress ratings and salivary cortisol were collected at six time points before and after stress induction. Stress-related brain activation was assessed using whole-brain and region-of-interest analyses. Results: Subjective stress ratings increased as expected from before to after the MIST, with no group or phase differences. Salivary cortisol was significantly higher during the mid-follicular phase, with no group effect or significant pre-post MIST difference. While the stress task elicited activation patterns in stress-related regions, whole-brain analysis revealed no significant effects of group (PMS vs. no PMS) or menstrual cycle phase (follicular vs. luteal) on the neural stress response. Considering premenstrual symptom severity as a predictor revealed significant group-by-symptom severity interactions in the right inferior frontal gyrus and the right superior temporal gyrus. Conclusion: Using a within-subject repeated-measures design, we found neural responses to psychosocial stress to be stable across menstrual cycle phases. Individual differences in symptom severity may nevertheless be associated with differences in stress-related brain activation.

Music is a central component of psychedelic settings, yet little experimental work has examined how psilocybin and musical composition influence music-evoked emotional responses in healthy volunteers. This exploratory, double-blind, placebo-controlled study assessed these effects during the plateau phase of psilocybin and the corresponding time window in placebo sessions following oral administration of psilocybin (0.26 mg/kg) or placebo. The study consisted of two parts. In Part 1 (n = 19), a pilot stage, the first half of participants rated music-induced affective valence for eight compositions representing different genres/subgenres (Rock/Punk, Metal/Industrial Metal, Metal/Industrial Metal, Classical/Baroque, Electronic/Dub, Folk/Nordic Folk, Electronic/Techno, Electronic/Trance, Electronic/Psytrance) using a visual analogue scale (VAS). Based on Part 1, the classical composition with the highest overall affective valence and the psytrance composition with the largest psilocybin-placebo contrast (i.e., the composition most responsive to psilocybin) were selected for Part 2 (n = 17), in which the second half of participants assessed emotional responses to music using the Geneva Emotional Music Scale (GEMS-9). Psilocybin increased wonder, transcendence, and joyful activation across both contrasting compositions. Relative to each other, the classical composition elicited greater peacefulness, tenderness, and nostalgia, whereas the psytrance composition elicited greater tension across both psilocybin and placebo conditions. A composition x condition interaction was observed for sadness: under psilocybin, sadness increased during the classical composition and decreased during the psytrance composition. These findings suggest that psilocybin and contrasting musical compositions independently influence different aspects of music-evoked emotional responses, with limited interaction effects, and point to potential implications for protocol design and music selection in psychedelic settings.

A capacity to navigate social relationships is fundamental to human wellbeing. However, the cognitive mechanisms underlying social dysfunction in psychiatric conditions remain poorly understood. Using an abstract multi-person decision making task that isolates the relational structure of multi-person interactions, we compare non-clinical controls (NCC, n=51) and individuals with BPD symptoms (n=46), a condition characterized by disturbances in self-other boundaries and chronic feelings of loneliness. Generally, we found a pattern of less self-centered decision-making in BPD. More specifically, individuals with BPD showed signatures of perceiving opponents as a coherent group ("them"), but a markedly reduced tendency to represent themselves as part of their own team ("us"). This pattern of results points towards a disruption of a primary social basis function. Our laboratory findings extend to experienced loneliness in daily life as measured by ecological momentary assessments (EMA). Together, this suggests that BPD is characterized by an unbalanced representation of social structure, with an attenuated "we" alongside a heightened "they".

Pavlovian bias, a motor bias driven by emotionally-valenced context, has long been considered a proxy for emotion-action processing, which may become aberrant in affective disorders and suicidality. The orthogonal valenced Go/NoGo paradigm was developed to isolate this bias and has been widely adopted in translational psychiatry research under this interpretation. However, several unresolved theoretical inconsistencies highlight the need to dissociate potential confounding factors within this paradigm before assigning mechanistic and clinical interpretations to its findings. Using a novel paradigm that fully orthogonalized valence, action, and aimed transition in a normative sample of 25 individuals, we found that the "active escape bias" previously observed in aversive contexts--and interpreted as reflecting suicidality in the clinical population--was reproduced in appetitive contexts using trials with the same transition structure. Furthermore, computational modeling indicated that the bias patterns isolated by the orthogonal paradigm are primarily explained by the combined effects of aimed transition and cue salience, without requiring emotional-valence modulation. These findings call for a fundamental reconsideration of how orthogonal Go/NoGo paradigms are interpreted in translational psychiatry, particularly how the behavior they isolate is mechanistically linked to affective symptoms.

Background: Childhood trauma is a well-established risk factor for adverse mental health outcomes, yet large-scale cross-national evidence from the Arab region remains limited. This study examined the prevalence of childhood trauma and its associations with multiple transdiagnostic outcomes across 17 Arab countries. Methods: A cross-sectional online survey was conducted between September and October 2025 among 6,181 adults from 17 Arab countries. Childhood trauma was assessed using the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire-Short Form (CTQ-SF). Transdiagnostic mental health outcomes included depression, anxiety, posttraumatic stress symptoms (PTSS), maladaptive behavior, and social/functional impairment. Descriptive statistics, Pearson correlations, and multiple linear regression analyses were performed via IBM SPSS Statistics. Confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling were conducted via R (Lavaan) to evaluate a second-order latent construct representing global childhood trauma. Results: Childhood trauma was widely reported across the sample, with physical neglect and emotional neglect emerging as the most frequently endorsed domains. All trauma domains were significantly associated with poorer mental health outcomes (p < .001). In regression analyses adjusted for demographic factors, emotional abuse emerged as the strongest predictor of depression ({beta} = .472, p < .001) and PTSS ({beta} =.439, p < .001). Structural equation modeling supported a second-order global trauma construct, which showed strong associations with depression ({beta} = .70), anxiety ({beta} = .64), PTSS ({beta} = .68), maladaptive behavior ({beta} = .68), and social impairment ({beta} = .67). This latent factor showed strong associations with all mental health outcomes, explaining substantial variance in depression (R2 = .52), anxiety (R2 = .43), and PTSS (R2 = .48). The structural model demonstrated borderline-to-acceptable fit (CFI = .899, TLI = .890, RMSEA = .058, SRMR = .085), supporting the hypothesized latent structure while indicating scope for further model refinement. Conclusions: Childhood trauma is highly prevalent across the Arab region and is strongly associated with multiple dimensions of psychological distress, highlighting the urgent need for trauma-informed prevention, screening, and early intervention programs in the Arab region.

Neurofeedback shows promise as a clinical intervention, but its effectiveness is hindered by variability of response across individuals. One factor influencing neurofeedback success may be endogenous brain states, particularly the baseline power within target frequency bands. Transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) provides a potential mechanism to modulate these baseline frequency bands. This study explored whether tACS could effectively enhance participants' ability to gain neurofeedback control by increasing lateralised posterior alpha activity prior to engagement in a covert spatial attention-based neurofeedback task. Participants completed three counterbalanced sessions: 1) alpha tACS and active neurofeedback, 2) alpha tACS and sham neurofeedback, 3) gamma (40Hz) tACS and active neurofeedback. Neurofeedback performance was assessed via lateralised posterior alpha power shifts and Posner task reaction times. We identified no difference in reaction times or lateralised alpha power shifts across conditions. While participants reliably demonstrated lateralised posterior alpha patterns, consistent with the covert spatial attention neurofeedback protocol, no advantage of active neurofeedback over sham was observed. The lack of significant effects underscores the need for further rigorous tACS studies to identify the parameters essential for successful neural entrainment, and to evaluate its potential in enhancing neurofeedback efficacy.

Background: Deficits in inhibitory control are considered a central feature of alcohol use disorder (AUD), yet behavioral and neuroimaging findings have been inconsistent. One potential explanation is the marked heterogeneity of AUD, which encompasses multiple symptom dimensions that may differ in their underlying neurocognitive mechanisms. In this study, we investigated whether behavioral and neural markers of inhibitory control are associated with specific DSM-5 AUD symptom domains. Methods: A total of 589 participants (432 with non-treatment seeking AUD, 157 controls) completed a Stop-Signal Task (SST) during fMRI. Associations between DSM-5 symptom domains (impaired control over alcohol use, risky use, social problems, physical dependence) and SST performance, inhibition-related brain activation, and alcohol consumption were examined. Real-life drinking behavior was additionally assessed over 12 months using ecological momentary assessment (EMA). Results: Greater impaired control symptom severity was associated with poorer performance on go trials and diminished post-error slowing during SST. At the neural level, higher impaired control symptom severity was associated with reduced activation across fronto-insular, parietal, cingulate, supplementary motor, and cerebellar regions. In contrast, other symptom domains showed little to no associations with inhibition-related behavioral or neural measures. Higher impaired control symptom severity was associated with greater alcohol consumption across questionnaire-based and EMA-based assessments. Conclusions: In this large cohort, altered behavioral performance and recruitment of inhibition-related brain regions in the SST was selectively linked to impaired control symptoms. These findings highlight the importance of symptom-based approaches for understanding heterogeneity in addiction and may inform the development of more targeted interventions.

Semi-occluded vocal tract (SOVT) exercises are widely used in voice training and therapy, but their immediate electroglottographic (EGG) effects remain incompletely characterized. In this pilot methodological study, six female community singers completed a no-straw baseline recording and then 1-min straw-phonation exercises with four straws (Household metal, Metal VoiceStraw, plastic, and paper), each followed by a no-straw EGG recording. Thirty 1s recordings were analyzed with a standardized pipeline including contact quotient (CQ), waveform skewness, contact-phase rise/fall timing, temporal skewness (s_t), a normalized derivative asymmetry index (NDAI), average-cycle morphology, and EGG spectral descriptors. Relative to baseline, group-mean CQ was higher after all four straws (by 0.027-0.058), waveform skewness and NDAI were lower, and the EGG spectral centroid was lower (by 9.6-15.3%). Contact-phase timing asymmetry did not change consistently: s_t exceeded baseline after three straws and fell below it after one, and the rise/fall ratio decreased in three to five of six participants depending on the straw. Four participants ranked the Metal VoiceStraw first and two ranked paper first. Because every straw condition followed the baseline, warm-up and order effects cannot be separated from straw effects. These hypothesis-generating results identify CQ, waveform skewness, and EGG spectral centroid as candidate endpoints for a larger controlled study

Study Objectives: Sleep disturbances are common in youth with anxiety disorders, yet most prior work relies on subjective measures and does not capture underlying neural processes. We examined whether alterations in non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep oscillations are present in children with anxiety disorders and whether these features relate to internalizing symptoms and emotional functioning. Methods: Children aged 9-13 years with diagnosed anxiety disorders (ANX; n = 17) and typically developing non-psychiatric comparison participants (NC; n = 26) completed overnight polysomnography. Slow oscillations (SO) and slow and fast sleep spindles were characterized using validated automated detection algorithms. Participants also completed a pre-sleep emotional processing task, and parents provided standardized measures of youth mental health. Group differences and dimensional associations between NREM oscillations, internalizing symptoms, and behavioral indices of emotional processing were examined. Results: Sleep architecture did not differ between groups. Slow spindle duration was shorter in the ANX group. Across the full sample, shorter slow spindle duration was associated with greater internalizing symptoms, whereas higher SO density was positively associated with internalizing symptoms. Children in the ANX group exhibited greater facial emotional arousal and more frequent look-away behavior during the emotional processing task. Across participants, greater emotional arousal and look-away behavior were associated with shorter spindle duration during subsequent sleep. Conclusions: Specific features of NREM microarchitecture were associated with individual differences in internalizing symptoms and emotional functioning during early adolescence. These findings highlight the potential relevance of NREM oscillations for understanding developmental links between sleep and youth psychopathology.

Objective: Mindfulness is a robust predictor of mental health, yet the psychometric properties of the short-form Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ-15) have not been examined in Iranian populations. This study evaluated the psychometric properties, factor structure, and diagnostic utility of the FFMQ-15 among medical sciences students. Participants: A total of 348 students (178 females, 170 males) from Kermanshah University of Medical Sciences participated. Methods: Participants completed the FFMQ-15, Penn State Worry Questionnaire (PSWQ), Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS), and Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ). Data were analyzed using exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, composite reliability, and ROC curve analysis. Results: Both EFA and CFA supported the five-factor model, revealing a culturally unique item loading pattern. The FFMQ-15 demonstrated strong convergent and discriminant validity. ROC analysis indicated acceptable diagnostic accuracy for distinguishing high- and low-worry groups (AUC = 0.72, 95% CI: 0.66-0.78). Conclusions: The FFMQ-15 demonstrated acceptable psychometric properties in Iranian medical students. The non-reactivity facet exhibited cultural variability, suggesting that cross-cultural adaptation is essential. The instrument shows promise for screening in high-stress educational settings.

Treatment resistance in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is common, with 40-60% of patients failing to respond to pharmacotherapy. Identifying functional differences between responders and non-responders may guide alternative treatment strategies. We investigated resting-state brain differences between selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) responders and non-responders and compared them with healthy controls (HC). 3T MRI scans were acquired from 80 participants with OCD and 50 HCs. Structural and 5-minute resting-state data were processed using the CONN toolbox. Regions showing group differences in amplitude of low-frequency fluctuation (ALFF) were identified for seed-based connectivity analysis. ANCOVA revealed significant ALFF differences among groups in the anterior middle temporal gyrus (R-aMTG) and temporal pole (R-TP). SSRI responders showed reductions in seed-to-voxel connectivity than non-responders between these regions and the left superior and inferior occipital cortices, left superior parietal lobule, and left temporo-occipital middle temporal gyrus. Responders also showed reductions in connectivity with the left superior parietal lobule compared with HCs. Across the OCD group, Y-BOCS scores positively correlated with ALFF in the R-aMTG (p=0.008) and R-TP (p=0.044). Altered temporal cortical activity and connectivity with posterior regions were associated with SSRI treatment response, supporting a role for temporal-posterior cortical networks in OCD treatment response.

Financial exploitation often arises in social contexts in which individuals must evaluate fairness, trust, and interpersonal information during financial decisions. We examined whether neural responses to fairness in social versus nonsocial contexts relate to financial exploitation vulnerability and whether these relationships vary with age, emotional intelligence, and affect. A total of 310 adults spanning ages 21-89 completed an fMRI Ultimatum Game in which they accepted or rejected offers from human and computer partners, along with measures of financial exploitation vulnerability, emotional intelligence, and affect. Participants were strongly sensitive to offer fairness, and individual differences in behavioral sensitivity to partner type were associated with social-relative anterior insula responses to unfairness. Greater baseline negative affect was associated with stronger anterior insula differentiation between social and nonsocial fairness. Financial exploitation vulnerability was associated with prefrontal responses to social-relative fairness in ways that depended on individual characteristics: age moderated its association with dorsomedial prefrontal cortex activation, whereas emotional intelligence moderated its association with dorsolateral prefrontal cortex activation. Whole-brain connectivity analyses further showed that age moderated associations between emotional intelligence and executive control network connectivity with posterior cingulate and right temporoparietal regions. These findings suggest that vulnerability to financial exploitation is reflected in how social context is integrated with affective and individual characteristics across adulthood.

Objective. Intermittent theta burst stimulation (iTBS) is a repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) protocol used in clinical settings to alleviate symptoms of psychiatric disorders. Although the pulse parameters currently used in iTBS have remained unchanged since the first treatments, recent controllable TMS devices allow for the personalization of pulse shape and duration, opening the possibility of testing the efficacy of other pulse parameters in modulating corticospinal excitability (CSE). Methods. In a repeated-measures design, changes in CSE were induced by the administration of iTBS over the left primary motor cortex under three different conditions: long bidirectional pulse (L-Bi), long quasi-unidirectional pulse (L-QU), and a control short quasi-unidirectional pulse (S-QU). We assessed TMS-induced motor evoked potentials before and up to 70 minutes after iTBS. We hypothesized that L-QU pulses would induce greater facilitation than other conditions. Results. A mixed linear model showed that all conditions induced increased MEPs compared to baseline. However, the L-Bi pulse led to a larger and more sustained MEP increase than both unidirectional pulses, while the S-QU pulse appeared less effective in modulating CSE. We observed large within- and between-subject variability in responsiveness to the iTBS protocols. Conclusion. These results suggest that L-Bi pulses in iTBS protocols are more potent than unidirectional pulses in inducing CSE changes in the cortex of healthy adults. The individual variability in response to iTBS and the potential clinical relevance of these findings are discussed.

Normative trajectories of resting state bipolar EEG power over the lifespan were derived from a sample of 5781 participants from the Collaborative Study on the Genetics of Alcoholism (COGA), a large multi site study, using 12,906 observations from ages 12 through 70. Trajectories were analyzed using the means, variances, and correlations of data in seven frequency bands (from low theta to high beta) and 24 bipolar channels obtained from 17 electrodes of the 10-20 system. In order to make the study more useful for understanding EEG in the general population, only subjects never having an alcohol use disorder (AUD) diagnosis were included in the study. Bipolar EEG data is derived from the differencing of the signals in adjacent electrodes, either in a lateral (left-right) or sagittal (anterior-posterior) orientation; each difference is called a channel. The power values for the individual observations were calculated by standard Fourier transform based methods. In all cases there are sharp decreases in EEG power from ages 12 to the early 20s after which there are number of divergent patterns: general increases in the beta frequencies, and mixed patterns of increase and subsequent decrease in the theta and alpha frequencies. In these characteristics the lifespan trajectories presented here are similar to the monopolar trajectories described in our previous study \citet{Cho2026}. Sagittal and lateral bipolar trajectories are similar within each sex and between sexes; the primary difference is the much lower degree of regional difference in the sagittal trajectories as compared to the lateral trajectories. The pairwise inter-frequency (within channel) correlation trajectories between the four theta and alpha frequency bands and the four high alpha and beta frequency bands at each channel show striking sex differences unlike the corresponding monopolar correlations. There are a number of features in the bipolar power trajectories that suggest that the differencing procedure reduces not only local phase synchrony, but also effects of global and regional phase synchrony present in the monopolar data from which the bipolar signals are derived. The inter-frequency correlations at the individual channels are much higher in the bipolar data than the monopolar data, suggesting that global and regional phase synchrony components retained in the monopolar data have greater frequency specificity than the more purely local components in the bipolar data. Further analyses to examine many other features of the data will be undertaken in our subsequent work.

Individuals with major depressive disorder (MDD) show an attentional bias toward negatively valenced stimuli and thoughts. In this study, we applied a closed-loop neurofeedback procedure designed to reduce this bias. Participants were shown composite negative faces and neutral scenes with variable opacity and were instructed to attend to the neutral scene while ignoring the negative face. Internal attentional states were decoded in real time from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data. When a participant's decoded attentional state indicated a failure to ignore the negative faces, the faces became more visible (higher opacity), thus externalizing the brain's attentional lapse in that moment. Forty-eight individuals with MDD were randomly assigned to a real neurofeedback training group (N = 24) or a sham control group (N = 24); the control group received feedback yoked to a participant in the real group. All participants completed three fMRI neurofeedback sessions. The main outcome quantified the extent to which participants got ``stuck'' in the most negative attentional state of focusing strongly on the negative faces. We hypothesized that the real neurofeedback group would learn to escape that state by the end of training, relative to the sham control group. Consistent with our hypothesis, neurofeedback training reduced the probability of getting stuck in the most negative attentional state. In offline analyses, training reduced fMRI activity in the precuneus/posterior cingulate and the medial prefrontal cortex when participants successfully attended to scenes and ignored faces. These results demonstrate the efficacy of remediating the negative attentional bias in depression with closed-loop neurofeedback from real-time fMRI.

Increasing evidence implicates late chronotype and higher distinctness as two diurnal dimensions associated with a risk for affective dysregulation. Nonetheless, the underlying behavioural and neural mechanisms remain poorly understood. Previous works in depressive and anxious populations have demonstrated an important role of maladaptive self-blaming processes, with pivotal contributions from superior anterior temporal lobes (sATL), involved in social conceptual knowledge, and subgenual anterior cingulate cortex (sgACC), related to self-worth and social affiliative processing. In the current study, we first tested how diurnal rhythm characteristics were associated with self-blaming emotions and related coping mechanisms through hypothetical social scenarios where participants or their close friends acted towards one another against social norms. Secondly, to probe alterations in the neural correlates of self-blaming, the participants underwent functional neuroimaging during reliving of autobiographical guilt memories. On the behavioural level, late chronotypes demonstrated decreased self-distancing and contextually-maladaptive blaming patterns, i.e. increased blaming of the action recipients rather than the agents. This was paralleled by decreased self-blame-related activity in the sATL and sgACC. Distinctness was associated with altered task-dependent sATL connectivity with hippocampus, brainstem and cerebellum. Importantly, some of the neuroimaging findings reflected interactions between the diurnal rhythm characteristics and time-of-day. As such, the current work provides plausible correlates of adverse emotional outcomes in late chronotypes. Furthermore, it suggests that affective processing reflects an interplay between stable trait-like characteristics and dynamic state-like processes varying across the day, contributing to fine-grained understanding of how emotional cognition is embedded in the brain.

Musical aesthetic experience can reveal students' cognitive, aesthetic, and emotional responses to music. However, how professional vocal training alters brain functions in female college students with varying levels of musicianship to promote these is unknown. Here we applied fMRI, psychological measures and Goldsmiths musical sophistication index (Gold-MSI) assessments to study 27 non-music major female college students consisting of instrument group (normal pitch accuracy with instrumental training), general group (normal pitch accuracy without instrumental training) and poor-pitch group (poor pitch accuracy and without instrumental training). After 1 year of one-on-one instructional practice, we found that professional vocal training enhanced information processing related to musical cognition and pleasure during musical aesthetic experiences across all three groups, involving improvements in motor control of vocalization, auditory feedback processing, musical memory and attention together with musical pleasure. Specifically, instrument group showed activation of reward circuits, general group exhibited activation of laryngeal motor control circuits, and poor-pitch group displayed activation of sensory/sensorimotor/motor control circuits. Both pre- and post-training, the instrument group exhibited higher connectivity than the other two groups in the left amygdala-dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) and the right posterior superior temporal gyrus (pSTG)-left insula pathway. After professional vocal training, the general group showed higher connectivity in the left amygdala-dACC, whereas the poor-pitch group demonstrated increased connectivity in the right pSTG-left insula and dACC-nucleus accumbens pathways. Surprisingly, professional vocal training activated the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST), a subcortical emotion center, and connectivity with the medial prefrontal cortex associated with musical information processing. Thus, vocal training can significantly improve musical cognition and aesthetic pleasure, and facilitates neural modulation in the brain's emotional centers.