This registered replication report supported the convergent validity of ERN recorded during flanker, Go/no-go, and Stroop tasks. Convergent validity of ΔERN across tasks was not replicated, and ERN did not show divergent validity from N2. ERN and ΔERN were unrelated to internalizing/externalizing symptoms. These findings underscore the importance of considering the psychometric validity of ERPs as it provides a foundation for interpreting and comparing ERPs across different tasks and studies.

Transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation (taVNS) modulates cortical excitability in the primary motor cortex (M1) contralateral to the stimulated ear in healthy middle-aged and older adults. The likely underlying mechanisms are an increase in GABA_Aergic inhibition and a decrease in glutamatergic activity that mediates I-wave generation. The duration of taVNS seems to be important, as effects were observed after 60 min of stimulation but not after 30 min.

The first ERP report on the neural mechanisms of how choice and deliberation promote memory. According to the LPC old/new effect, value encoding was a potential mechanism for chosen items in a certain decision. However, in terms of the FN400 old/new effect, the memory advantage of chosen items was weakened by deliberation in uncertain decisions. These results suggest that decision-making can promote item memory through two independent processes: value encoding and elaboration encoding.

This article presents crucial insights into deviations from rational decision-making paradigms by replicating and extending Hewig et al.'s (2011) seminal study. While reaffirming key findings, our work unveils novel psychophysiological nuances, advancing understanding of economic game decision-making, emphasizing its non-rational nature and the role of cognitive control.

The present study examined the effects of taVNS at individualized (set by participant) versus constant (set at 0.5 mA for all participants) current intensity on behavioral and self-report scores associated with vigilance loss and salivary markers of locus coeruleus-norepinephrine activity. Although no positive effects of taVNS in mitigating the vigilance decrement were observed, we highlight the need to further investigate the effects of taVNS at different stimulation parameters on arousal states.

For the first time in a crossmodal sensory context, event-related potentials revealed a link between trait anxiety and task-dependent sensory selection. Trait anxiety was related to reduced neural correlates of visual but not tactile distractor gating, and not sensorimotor performance. These findings shed light on modality-specific sensory processing alterations resulting from individual differences in anxiety which did not manifest behaviorally.

Breathing-based regulation of physiological stress responses offers a potential for anxiety management. A key challenge is to help people learn to do this in the context of an actual stressor. We used a stressful virtual reality (VR) game as a setting in which participants were encouraged to use breath-based regulation of their responses. Participants successfully achieved this, suggesting promise for VR-based gameplay to learn and practice biofeedback-related anxiety management.

Our findings identified components, including the LRP, reafference potential (RAP), and motor post-imperative negative variation within the same study. Moreover, we revealed several RAPs occurring at critical response moments, highlighting the role of this sensory processing in response control.

 The effects of transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation (taVNS) for 30 min were detected in rats with in vivo microPET. Acute taVNS reduces in vivo [¹¹C]UCB-J binding, a measure of presynaptic density. Acute taVNS does not modulate in vivo glucose metabolism measured by [¹⁸F]FDG uptake. Modulation of presynaptic density may promote the therapeutic effects of taVNS.

We utilized an hidden Markov model approach to estimate rather than assume the presence of intraindividual variability in distinct latent acute parasympathetic nervous system states in response to a race-related stress task, finding that the majority of responses were characterized as blunted. Frequency of prior exposure to racial discrimination did not impact these states. Blunted reactivity could be screened for in Black young adults as an important form of physiological dysregulation.

Our results indicate that initial saccadic timing is predicted by the P1 and N1 responses to the search display onset, reflecting the role that both the modulation and selection of visual input have in determining saccade execution. We believe that these findings have an important role in helping to shape the growing body of literature surrounding models of eye movement behavior by finding neurophysiological evidence that supports roles for both information accumulation and decision processes in determining the speed of the impending saccadic decision.

Small animal phobia (SAP) is under-researched, with previous studies using limited, unbalanced samples and univariate analyses. This study employs for the first time a machine learning method to classify 32 SAP individuals based on structural MRI versus 90 matched controls. Key brain structures included frontal and temporal regions, as well as the amygdala and thalamus. In further analyses we showed that The default mode and the affective networks were among the most predictive networks.

The mechanisms of search preparation during high-load search at working memory capacity are not very well understood. We used electrophysiological markers of attentional selection to show that participants can prepare for three colors simultaneously if they must, for example, because target colors appear randomly. However, if target colors alternate predictably, participants make use of strategic opportunities to reduce working memory load and only activate the one color template that is directly relevant for the upcoming search episode.

This study extends the literature on smoking and patterns of cardiovascular reactivity and adaptation to recurrent stress. Here, we provide evidence for the negative impact of smoking on blood pressure habituation. Smokers exhibited less systolic blood pressure tolerance to stress. This poorer response profile may be a mechanism that leads to further cardiotoxic effects on health. The findings add to emerging literature by indicating that smoking is related to poorer adjustment across time.

The ABM-positive-search training was employed to modify attentional bias in socially anxious individuals. The dot-probe task was used to measure the changes of attentional bias while recording electrical activity in the brain. We found, after training, individuals in the ABM-positive-search group had more obvious changes in attentional bias than those in the placebo control group.

We demonstrated trial-by-trial correlations between tonic and phasic pupil size and its derivative with heart rates, galvanic skin responses, pulse wave amplitude, and respiration rate and amplitude during an emotional face–word Stroop task, highlighting pupil size as an effective “real-time” index for autonomic arousal during emotional conflict and valence processing, arguably mediated by the locus coeruleus–norepinephrine system.

The study shows that motivation affects the choice of emotion regulation strategy between distraction and reappraisal by influencing early attention and cognitive processing, as reflected in frontal P2 and early LPP. These findings provide new support for the motivational dimensional model of emotion-cognition from the perspective of emotion regulation.

Employing the fast periodic visual stimulation (FPVS) EEG approach, we detected a reliable index of emotional expression change with enhanced processing for happy compared to angry faces in young children (4–6 years). Our findings highlight the potential of this method to detect the processing of expression change implicitly in a short amount of time.

Conventional accelerometer-based additional heart rate focuses solely on concurrent movement intensity to predict heart rate. This study introduces a novel method to correct heart rate not only for ongoing physical activity but also for postural changes, type of physical activity, and past physical activity. This approach enhances the ability to differentiate between the impact of physical and mental demands on heart rate in daily life.

The present study examined the unique and interactive effects of behavioral inhibitory control and threat reactivity on suicide risk in youth. Results reveled that greater reactivity to unpredictable threat was associated with increased suicide risk at low, but not high, levels of inhibitory control. These findings shed light on subgroups of youth who may be at elevated risk.

Our research challenges the notion that those with hearing impairment have altered cardiac vagal activity or skin sympathetic activity in daily life (daytime & sleep) compared to those with normal hearing. However, hearing impairment did impact cardiac sympathetic activity, leading to a larger change between daytime and sleep.

There is a growing understanding that unexpected sounds trigger global inhibition of motor actions. Previous work has suggested that unexpected sounds can also inhibit microsaccades and eye movements during active vision tasks. Here we show that unexpected sounds cause rapid inhibition of the oculomotor system within a window of at least 175 ms when programming both voluntary and reflexive simple saccades. Unexpected sounds also aid response inhibition, thus showing that their effect is inhibitory in nature.

Our findings provide initial evidence that movement and EDA synchrony may be a characteristic of the dyad, demonstrating the predictive power of both synchrony modalities on the within-therapist (but not between-therapist) level for client symptom change. Furthermore, our results showed that movement and EDA synchrony are negatively correlated.

This article investigates the role of emotion regulation strategies in the relationship between frontal theta and beta band power and positive affect. Through self-report measures and spectral analysis of resting state EEG data, both theta and beta differentially predicted positive affect while an indirect effect of beta on positive affect via reappraisal was found.

In this paper, we reviewed and analysed studies using functional near-infrared spectroscopy to monitor haemoglobin changes in mental fatigue. This is significant because the potential for mental fatigue is huge and its detection has yet to be established. The findings of this review corroborate the efficacy of fNIRS as a predictive tool for early detection of mental fatigue, and that it is a robust method for monitoring brain activity during mental fatigue.

Appropriate preprocessing is essential for deriving meaningful insights from mobile. Electroencephalography (EEG) data. Through a systematic review focusing on the P3 event-related potential during walking and standing, we uncovered a spectrum of preprocessing approaches. Additionally, we presented an interactive visualization tool to facilitate the exploration and comparison of preprocessing strategies. This tool may advance mobile EEG research practices by fostering informed decision-making and transparency.

Selective attention to specific levels of valence was found to facilitate the early affective event-related brain potentials (ERPs) discrimination of target words. We show that this effect particularly benefits from low word length and high word frequency, confirming the important role of prior associative learning between word forms and affect for early ERP effects of affective words. Additionally, the interaction of affective word properties (valence and arousal) supports the idea of valence–arousal conflict.

Consistent with the positive attenuation hypothesis and with findings in depressed individuals, children with a history of self-injurious thoughts and behaviors (SITBs) displayed significantly smaller late positive potential responses to ambiguous (i.e., medium intensity) positive emotional stimuli than children without a history of SITBs. Additionally, findings suggest that children's SITB history is associated with differential neural sensitivity to emotional stimuli rather than a more general difficulty in recognizing facial expressions.

This study explored the differences between taVNS and earlobe stimulation (ES) in modulating alertness levels. The results indicated that while taVNS and ES differ in their effects on physiological markers, their impact on behavioral measures is similar. This suggested that ES may not be a completely neutral control for taVNS.

We examined links between census-derived indices of neighborhood crime risk and event-related potential (ERP) indices of neural reactivity to emotional stimuli in a community sample of 7- to 11-year-old children. We found that higher levels of neighborhood crime risk were associated with larger late positive potential (LPP) amplitudes to full intensity threat-relevant stimuli (fearful faces) but not nonthreat negative (sad faces) or positive (happy faces) stimuli, but only for children from racial/ethnic minority backgrounds and not for non-Hispanic White children. These results suggest that living in higher crime areas may differentially impact racial/ethnic minority children and point to a potential neural marker of risk in these youth.

In this study, we demonstrate novel associations among EEG aperiodic slope, the temperament domains of orienting/regulation and surgency, and maternal anxiety/depressive symptoms in infancy. The results highlight that slope is associated with socioemotional outcomes as early as infancy and suggest that slope may index sensitivity to early environmental stressors.

This study demonstrates for the first time that the aperiodic component of resting pupil fluctuations can predict the excitation/inhibition balance in attentional processing. The results suggest that pupil fluctuations are as informative as neural signals from other neuroimaging modalities. This study provides a potential biomarker for the assessment of attentional processing and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.

This study tested whether continuous transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation (taVNS) at maximal intensity below pain accelerates fear extinction learning in a large sample. Our clear null findings add to existing mixed results on taVNS and extinction learning and strongly suggest that taVNS with commonly used stimulation parameters does not reliably optimize fear extinction learning in a differential conditioning protocol.

Our combined transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation and functional magnetic resonance imaging (tVNS-fMRI) approach revealed that non-invasive tVNS significantly enhances cognitive control by modulating neural activity in the anterior cingulate cortex. This discovery opens up promising paths for comprehending the brain mechanisms through which tVNS may enhance cognitive functions in neurological disorders. It therefore contributes to advancing our knowledge of tVNS's potential as a therapeutic intervention.

We found pupils dilate in the final moments before a target in a Stroop task. The rate of dilation was more rapid for trials where the participant anticipated a large reward which was performance-contingent, and individual differences in the rate of dilation predicted behavioural performance. These results provide new insights into the nature of preparatory effort and resolve previous contradictory results regarding the role of preparatory effort in pupil dilation.

To our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive demonstration of the physiological and psychological relaxation benefits derived from nature-based soundscapes. The soundscape, combining a variety of nature sounds with musical elements, increased heart rate variability and decreased both heart and respiratory rates, alongside improved subjective evaluations in emotional, cognitive, and social domains. This highlights the potential of nature-based soundscapes as an accessible therapeutic method.

In this study, an emotional memory task assumed to involve the LC-NE system was combined with pupillometry and event-related short bursts of taVNS. Real versus sham stimulation selectively increased memory performance for negative events. Short bursts of stimulation as such (real or sham stimulation), led to an increase in pupil dilation and an improvement in memory performance, possibly due to the attention-inducing sensory modulation of electrical stimulation.

Our study sheds new light on the significance of theta inter-trial phase coherence (ITC) as a neurophysiological marker of a core neural dysfunction in ADHD. Our findings suggest that variability in the temporal dynamics of phase synchronization at theta frequencies may underlie the impaired implementation of cognitive control during error processing. Moreover, this neural deficit appears to be related to ADHD symptomatology observed in early childhood.

When contrasting people with aphantasia (= absence of mental imagery), simulated aphantasia, and controls in a fear conditioning paradigm with subsequent imaginal extinction, we found that visual imagery is not necessary for imaginal extinction to occur. Therefore, imaginal exposure therapy could also be effective for people with aphantasia.