Biology subjects

Fernandez-Folgueiras, U.

Publications and source records attributed to Fernandez-Folgueiras, U..

2 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2022

Menstrual cycle and exogenous attention toward emotional expressions

Several studies suggest that the menstrual cycle affects emotional processing. However, these results may be biased by including women with premenstrual syndrome (PMS) in the samples. PMS is characterized by negative emotional symptomatology, such as depression and/or anxiety, during the luteal phase. This study aimed to explore the modulation of exogenous attention to emotional facial expressions as a function of the menstrual cycle in women without PMS. For this purpose, 55 women were selected (from an original volunteer sample of 790) according to rigorous exclusion criteria. Happy, angry, and neutral faces were presented as distractors, while both behavioral performance in a perceptual task and event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. This task was applied during both phases of the menstrual cycle (luteal and follicular, counterbalanced), and premenstrual symptomatology was monitored daily. Traditional and Bayesian ANOVAs on behavioral data (reaction times and errors in the task) and ERP indices (P1, N170, N2, and LPP amplitudes) confirmed the expected lack of an interaction of phase and emotion. Taken together, these results indicate that women free of PMS present steady exogenous attention levels to emotionally positive and negative stimuli regardless of the menstrual phase.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2021

Fast unconscious processing of emotional stimuli in early stages of the visual cortex

Several cortical and subcortical brain areas have been reported to be sensitive to the emotional content of subliminal stimuli. However, the timing of these activations remains unclear. Our scope was to detect the earliest cortical traces of visual unconscious processing by recording event-related potentials (ERPs) from 43 participants. Subliminal spiders (emotional) and wheels (neutral), sharing similar low-level visual parameters, were presented at two different locations (fixation and periphery). The differential (peak to peak) amplitude from CP1 (77 milliseconds from stimulus onset) to C2 (100 milliseconds), two early visual ERP components originated in V1/V2 according to source localization analyses, was analyzed via Bayesian and traditional analyses. Spiders elicited greater CP1-C2 amplitudes than wheels when presented at fixation. This fast effect of subliminal stimulation -not reported previously to the best of our knowledge-has implications in several debates: i) the amygdala cannot be mediating these effects, ii) latency of other evaluative structures recently proposed, such as the visual thalamus, is compatible with these results, iii) the absence of peripheral stimuli effects points to a relevant role of the parvocellular visual system in unconscious processing.

neuroscience↗