Affective Neuroscience

The electroencephalogram (EEG) may be described by a large number of different feature types and automated feature selection methods are needed in order to reliably identify features which correlate with continuous independent variables. A method is presented for the automated identification of features that differentiate two or more groups in neurological datasets based upon a spectral decomposition of the feature set. Furthermore, the method is able to identify features that relate to continuous independent variables. The proposed method is first evaluated on synthetic EEG datasets and observed to reliably identify the correct features. The method is then applied to EEG recorded during a music listening task and is observed to automatically identify neural correlates of music tempo changes similar to neural correlates identified in a previous study. Finally, the method is applied to identify neural correlates of music-induced affective states. The identified neural correlates resi...

In this thesis I study personal musical experience in the light of so-called embodied cognition. According to this research paradigm, meaning arises from our interaction with the physical world in a process where the human body has a mediating role. The process has been shown to be metaphorical by nature, due to which I base my introspective findings mostly on the conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) of Lakoff & Johnson. Interaction with environment invokes affects, which has consequences in terms of person’s preference for metaphoric content.
The goal of my work is to investigate reasons for my penchant for certain kind of music. Addressing this involves scrutinising my own perceptions and feelings when listening to italo disco, thus, music that I like, and supporting the findings with theories and earlier research. Besides CMT and also traditional music analysis, I utilise, for example, the complementary theories of the sonic object and musical gestures in pointing out experiential entities from textural and timbral elements of an italo disco song. The entities (sonic objects) are expected to arise from an affective sensation of motion, a process where conceptual metaphor plays an important role. Therefore, at the second stage of the analysis, I demonstrate metaphors on the grounds of the sonic objects in an attempt of establishing at least a part of my personal “metaphorical repertoire”. Arnie Cox’s mimetic hypothesis and framework for the study of musical affect is applied particularly during the second part of the analysis.
The results of the inquiry confirm my hypothesis about the central role of conceptual metaphor in the emergence of (personal) musical experience. The set of metaphors I succeeded to point out suggest that I’m inclined to music that communicates powerful and energetic, thus clearly arousing affects–music that responds to the need of indulging in fantasy.

Trigeminal neuralgia secondary to multiple sclerosis (MS-TN) is a facial neuropathic pain syndrome similar to classic trigeminal neuralgia (TN). While TN is caused by neurovascular compression of the fifth cranial nerve (CN V), how MS-related demyelination correlates with pain in MS-TN is not understood. We aim to examine diffusivities along CN V in MS-TN, TN, and controls in order to reveal differential neuroimaging correlates across groups. 3T MR diffusion weighted, T1, T2 and FLAIR sequences were acquired for MS-TN, TN, and controls. Multi-tensor tractography was used to delineate CN V across cisternal, root entry zone (REZ), pontine and peri-lesional segments. Diffusion metrics including fractional anisotropy (FA), and radial (RD), axial (AD), and mean diffusivities (MD) were measured from each segment. CN V segments showed distinctive diffusivity patterns. The TN group showed higher FA in the cisternal segment ipsilateral to the side of pain, and lower FA in the ipsilateral REZ...

Trigeminal neuralgia secondary to multiple sclerosis (MS-TN) is a facial neuropathic pain syndrome similar to classic trigeminal neuralgia (TN). While TN is caused by neurovascular compression of the fifth cranial nerve (CN V), how MS-related demyelination correlates with pain in MS-TN is not understood. We aim to examine diffusivities along CN V in MS-TN, TN, and controls in order to reveal differential neuroimaging correlates across groups. 3T MR diffusion weighted, T1, T2 and FLAIR sequences were acquired for MS-TN, TN, and controls. Multi-tensor tractography was used to delineate CN V across cisternal, root entry zone (REZ), pontine and peri-lesional segments. Diffusion metrics including fractional anisotropy (FA), and radial (RD), axial (AD), and mean diffusivities (MD) were measured from each segment. CN V segments showed distinctive diffusivity patterns. The TN group showed higher FA in the cisternal segment ipsilateral to the side of pain, and lower FA in the ipsilateral REZ...

Understanding the heritability of neural systems linked to psychopathology is not sufficient to implicate them as intergenerational neural mediators. By closely examining how individual differences in neural phenotypes and psychopathology cosegregate as they fall through the family tree, we can identify the brain systems that underlie the parent-to-child transmission of psychopathology. Although research has identified genes and neural circuits that contribute to the risk of developing anxiety and depression, the specific neural systems that mediate the inborn risk for these debilitating disorders remain unknown. In a sample of 592 young rhesus monkeys that are part of an extended multigenerational pedigree, we demonstrate that metabolism within a tripartite prefrontal-limbic-midbrain circuit mediates some of the inborn risk for developing anxiety and depression. Importantly, although brain volume is highly heritable early in life, it is brain metabolism-not brain structure-that is ...

Background Aluminum (AL) is a neurotoxic substance that plays an important role in the etiology, pathogenesis and development of Amyloid-β plaques. This study was carried out to evaluate neuroprotective effect of Aqueous Cinnamon Extract against aluminum chloride (ALCl3)-induced Alzheimer's disease. Materials and methods 40 adult male albino rats, randomly divided into four equal groups. Group I: control; Group 2 were administered 200 mg/kg b. w./day aqueous cinnamon extract (ACE) via oral tube; Group 3: received daily intraperitoneal (i.p.) injection of ALCl3 (100 mg/kg body weight) for 60 days to induce neurotoxicity; Group 4 received a combination of ALCl3 and ACE in the same dose and route as group 2 & 3. Results AL administration significantly enhanced the memory impairment, Aβ burden and the cerebellum exhibited significant reduction in the number of Purkinje cells, marked decrease in the density of dendritic arborization and prominent perineuronal spaces in the molecular layer around basket and stellate cells, loss of dendritic spines, neurofibrillary degeneration and appearance of neuritic plaques. Concomitant administration of ACE with AL displayed an observable protection against these changes with progressive improvement in memory and in intellectual performance. It has also been suggested that the loss of astrocyte functions may precede neurodegeneration and that aluminum could be a contributing factor [1]. Astrocytes are the principal target of the toxic action of aluminum [2] and it can cause astrocyte death through apoptosis [3]. Conclusion: ACE may be considered an efficacious therapeutic strategy to alleviate Amyloid-β plaques. It is recommended that AL not be used in cooking utensils, water tubes, and to control occupational exposure.

Who's Laughing Now? Feminist Perspectives on Humour and Laughter is a collection of engaging, creative, and academic contributions that illustrate the sociopolitical importance of humour in our lives. This collection, masterfully assembled by Anna Frey, will make you laugh, reflect, and-mostly-question the power of humour to shape how we understand gender. This is a must read! (Pamela J. Downe Ph.D, Associate Professor, Department of Archaeology & Anthropology, University of Saskatchewan, Past-President/Présidente sortante, Canadian Anthropology Society/Société canadienne d'anthropologie)

From dour old women to buzzkills who can't take a joke, the stereotype of the humourless feminist has repeatedly been deployed to derail and delegitimize the women's rights movement. This collection skips the tired debates that ask whether feminists can be funny-we know the answer to this already-to instead investigate contemporary expressions and functions of humour within international feminist movements and communities. This interdisciplinary volume showcases critical analyses of cultural texts and events, personal accounts of producing and encountering feminist humour, and creative interruptions that pair laughter with insight. As a whole, this work seeks to sideline caricatures of the humourless feminist by promoting a vision of a diverse movement vibrant with innovative, generous, threatening, and, ultimately, triumphant laughter.

In this work, we propose different variants of the self-attention based network for emotion prediction from movies, which we call AttendAffectNet. We take both audio and video into account and incorporate the relation among multiple modalities by applying self-attention mechanism in a novel manner into the extracted features for emotion prediction. We compare it to the typically temporal integration of the self-attention based model, which in our case, allows to capture the relation of temporal representations of the movie while considering the sequential dependencies of emotion responses. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed architectures on the extended COGNIMUSE dataset [11, [2] and the MediaEval 2016 Emotional Impact of Movies Task [3], which consist of movies with emotion annotations. Our results show that applying the self-attention mechanism on the different audiovisual features, rather than in the time domain, is more effective for emotion prediction. Our approach is also proven to outperform many state-of-the-art models for emotion prediction. The code to reproduce our results with the models' implementation is available at: https://github.com/ivyhaOlO/AttendAffectNet.

Introduction: Anxiety and depression are very widespread among cancer patients. The
state of anxiety covers a wide range of symptoms connected to fear, restlessness and
changes in the autonomy of the patient. Neurofeedback is a behavioral technique of operant learning, in which participants learn to effect the electric activity of their brain,
through a dynamic process of visual and auditory feedback. This training seeks to change
the frequency of subjects’ electroencephalogram (EEG), something achieved by the majority
of participants. Neurofeedback is a technique which has been successfully used in recent
decades as a tool for treating a number of clinical cases. Amongst the clinical cases studied
are autism, epilepsy, chronic pain, cases of major depression and also the effects of cancer
upon different psychological parameters and the quality patients’ lives. Pelvic cancer and
its medical treatment seem to increase anxiety and depression, which affect patients’ daily
lives. Case study: In the case study, 20 sessions of Neurofeedback were applied to a patient
with pelvic cancer and anxiety (state anxiety): the SCL-90 scale for the measurement of
psychometric traits was applied before and after each session. Conclusion: Important
improvements were noted to this patient on the above scales, issued during the sessions
and within each session, before and after the intervention.
© 2015 Published by Elsevier Sp. z o.o. on beh

This study was planned to explore the protective role of curcumin (Cur) against maternal and fetal oxidative stress and cerebral damage induced by lead (Pb) during pregnancy. Positively pregnant female rats were divided into seven groups: control group, Cur group (300 mg/kg of Cur/b.wt.), DMSO group (50% DMSO), two Pb-treated groups (exposed to 160 and 320 mg/kg b.wt./day of Pb acetate, respectively), and two groups treated with both Pb and Cur (exposed to Pb as previous groups together with 300 mg/kg b.wt./day of Cur). Treatments through oral gavage once a day started from gestation day 1 (GD1) till day 20 (GD20), where the mother rats of different experimental groups were sacrificed to obtain the fetuses. Different chemical parameters were assessed. Brain specimens of mother and fetal groups were processed with examination. The results displayed that Pb administration to pregnant rats resulted in a dose-dependent toxicity for both mothers and fetuses. Also, there was a significant...

The error-related negativity putatively reflects the activity of performance-monitoring processes influenced by motivational factors, and is overactive in certain anxiety states, suggesting that affective factors affect its generation. We examined the effects of emotionally arousing and neutral task-irrelevant backgrounds on the error-related negativity to determine whether an affective context 'mismatch' alters error-related neural processing. Event-related potentials were acquired while healthy participants performed a modified Eriksen flanker task wherein flanker stimuli were superimposed on neutral, pleasant, and unpleasant pictures. The error-related negativity varied as a function of picture valence, peaking both earlier and larger in the context of pleasant backgrounds than neutral or unpleasant backgrounds. Findings support the hypothesis that affective factors influence the error-related negativity, potentially reflecting an affective mismatch associated with performance monitoring.