We suggest that stronger frontal activation to happy faces in depressed patients may reflect increased demands on effortful emotion regulation processes triggered by mood-incongruent stimuli. The lack of strong differences in neural activation to negative emotional faces, relative to healthy controls, may be characteristic of the mild-to-moderate severity of illness in this sample and may be indicative of a certain cognitive-emotional processing reserve.

We use multivoxel pattern analysis (MVPA) to study the spatial clustering of color-selective neurons in the human brain. Our main objective was to investigate whether MVPA reveals the spatial arrangements of color-selective neurons in human primary visual cortex (V1). We measured the distributed fMRI activation patterns for different color stimuli (Experiment 1: cardinal colors (to which the LGN is known to be tuned), Experiment 2: perceptual hues) in V1. Our two main findings were that (i) cone-opponent cardinal color modulations produce highly reproducible patterns of activity in V1, but these were not unique to each color. This suggests that V1 neurons with tuning characteristics similar to those found in LGN are not spatially clustered. (ii) Unique activation patterns for perceptual hues in V1 support current evidence for a spatially clustered hue map. We believe that our work is the first to show evidence of spatial clustering of neurons with similar color preferences in human V1.

Eye movements, comprising predominantly fixations and saccades, are known to reveal information about perception and cognition, and they provide an explicit measure of attention. Nevertheless, fixations have not been considered as events in the analyses of data obtained during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments. Most likely, this is due to their brevity and statistical properties. Despite these limitations, we used fixations as events to model brain activation in a free viewing experiment with standard fMRI scanning parameters. First, we found that fixations on different objects in different task contexts resulted in distinct cortical patterns of activation. Second, using multivariate pattern analysis, we showed that the BOLD signal revealed meaningful information about the task context of individual fixations and about the object being inspected during these fixations. We conclude that fixation-based event-related (FIBER) fMRI analysis creates new pathways for studying human brain function by enabling researchers to explore natural viewing behavior.

Background Virtual reality (VR) enables the administration of realistic and dynamic stimuli within a social context for the assessment and training of emotion recognition. We tested a novel VR emotion recognition task by comparing emotion recognition across a VR, video and photo task, investigating covariates of recognition and exploring visual attention in VR. Methods Healthy individuals (n = 100) completed three emotion recognition tasks; a photo, video and VR task. During the VR task, emotions of virtual characters (avatars) in a VR street environment were rated, and eye-tracking was recorded in VR. Results Recognition accuracy in VR (overall 75%) was comparable to the photo and video task. However, there were some differences; disgust and happiness had lower accuracy rates in VR, and better accuracy was achieved for surprise and anger in VR compared to the video task. Participants spent more time identifying disgust, fear and sadness than surprise and happiness. In general, attention was directed longer to the eye and nose areas than the mouth. Discussion Immersive VR tasks can be used for training and assessment of emotion recognition. VR enables easily controllable avatars within environments relevant for daily life. Validated emotional expressions and tasks will be of relevance for clinical applications.

Neuroanatomical abnormalities have been reported along a continuum from at-risk stages, including high schizotypy, to early and chronic psychosis. However, a comprehensive neuroanatomical mapping of schizotypy remains to be established. The authors conducted the first large-scale meta-analyses of cortical and subcortical morphometric patterns of schizotypy in healthy individuals, and compared these patterns with neuroanatomical abnormalities observed in major psychiatric disorders. The sample comprised 3004 unmedicated healthy individuals (12–68 years, 46.5% male) from 29 cohorts of the worldwide ENIGMA Schizotypy working group. Cortical and subcortical effect size maps with schizotypy scores were generated using standardized methods. Pattern similarities were assessed between the schizotypy-related cortical and subcortical maps and effect size maps from comparisons of schizophrenia (SZ), bipolar disorder (BD) and major depression (MDD) patients with controls. Thicker right medial orbitofrontal/ventromedial prefrontal cortex (mOFC/vmPFC) was associated with higher schizotypy scores (r = 0.067, pFDR = 0.02). The cortical thickness profile in schizotypy was positively correlated with cortical abnormalities in SZ (r = 0.285, pspin = 0.024), but not BD (r = 0.166, pspin = 0.205) or MDD (r = −0.274, pspin = 0.073). The schizotypy-related subcortical volume pattern was negatively correlated with subcortical abnormalities in SZ (rho = −0.690, pspin = 0.006), BD (rho = −0.672, pspin = 0.009), and MDD (rho = −0.692, pspin = 0.004). Comprehensive mapping of schizotypy-related brain morphometry in the general population revealed a significant relationship between higher schizotypy and thicker mOFC/vmPFC, in the absence of confounding effects due to antipsychotic medication or disease chronicity. The cortical pattern similarity between schizotypy and schizophrenia yields new insights into a dimensional neurobiological continuity across the extended psychosis phenotype.

HighlightsConnectivity analyses complemented with a metric exploring switching in brain activity.Lower insula-salience connectivity predicts insufficient antidepressant response.This same insula region is activated less when switching from task to a rest.This could be a potential biomarkers for predicting future antidepressant response.

Purpose: There is a need for more intuitive perimetric screening methods, which can also be performed by elderly people and children currently unable to perform standard automated perimetry (SAP). Ideally, these methods should also be easier to administer, such that they may be used outside of a regular clinical environment. We evaluated the suitability of various methodological and analytical approaches for detecting and localizing VFD in glaucoma patients, based on eye movement recordings.Methods: The present study consisted of two experiments. In experiment 1, we collected data from 20 glaucoma patients and 20 age-matched controls, who monocularly viewed 28 1-min video clips while their eyes were being tracked. In experiment 2, we re-analyzed a published dataset, that contained data of 44 glaucoma patients and 32 age-matched controls who had binocularly viewed three longer-duration (3, 5, and 7 min) video clips. For both experiments, we first examined if the two groups differed in the basic properties of their fixations and saccades. In addition, we computed the viewing priority (VP) of each participant. Following a previously reported approach, for each participant, we mapped their fixation locations and used kernel Principal Component Analysis (kPCA) to distinguish patients from controls. Finally, we attempted to reconstruct the location of a patient's VFD by mapping the relative fixation frequency and the VP across their visual field.Results: We found direction dependent saccade amplitudes in glaucoma patients that often differed from those of the controls. Moreover, the kPCA indicated that the fixation maps of the two groups separated into two clusters based on the first two principal components. On average, glaucoma patients had a significantly lower VP than the controls, with this decrease depending on the specific video viewed.Conclusions: It is possible to detect the presence of VFD in glaucoma patients based on their gaze behavior made during video viewing. While this corroborates earlier conclusions, we show that it requires participants to view the videos monocularly. Nevertheless, we could not reconstruct the VFD with any of the evaluated methods, possibly due to compensatory eye movements made by the glaucoma patients.

The alleged association between the serotonin-transporter-linked polymorphic region (5-HTTLPR) and amygdala activation forms a cornerstone of the common view that carrying the short allele of this polymorphism is a potential risk factor for affective disorders. The authors of a recent meta-analysis showed that this association is statistically significant (Hedges's g = 0.35) but warned that estimates might be distorted because of publication bias. Here, we report a replication study of this relationship in 120 participants. We failed to find an association of 5-HTTLPR variation with amygdala activation during a widely used emotional-face-matching paradigm. Moreover, when we conducted a meta-analysis that included unpublished studies and data from the current study, the pooled meta-analytic effect size was no longer significant (g = 0.20, p = .06). These findings cast doubt on previously reported substantial effects, suggesting that the 5-HTTLPR-amygdala association is either much smaller than previously thought, conditional on other factors, or nonexistent.