A systematic review of studies that used NIRS to measure neural activation during emotion processing in healthy individuals

Abstract

Functional neuroimaging provides an avenue for earlier diagnosis and tailored treatment of psychological disorders characterized by emotional impairment. Near-infrared spectroscopy offers ecological advantages compared to other neuroimaging techniques and suitability of measuring regions involved in emotion functions. A systematic review was conducted to evaluate the capacity of NIRS to detect activation during emotion processing and to provide recommendations for future research. Following a comprehensive literature search, we reviewed 85 journal articles which compared activation during emotional experience, regulation or perception with either a neutral condition or baseline period among healthy participants. The quantitative synthesis of outcomes was limited to thematical analysis, owing to the lack of standardisation between studies. Although most studies found increased prefrontal activity during emotional experience and regulation, the findings were more inconsistent for emotion perception. Some researchers reported increased activity during the task, some reported decreases, some no significant changes, and some reported mixed findings depending on the valence and region. We propose that variations in the cognitive task and stimuli, recruited sample, and measurement and analysis of data are the primary causes of inconsistency. Recommendations to improve consistency in future research by carefully considering the choice of population, cognitive task and analysis approach are provided.

Similarities and differences in the induction and regulation of the negative emotions fear and disgust: A functional near infrared spectroscopy study

“…Emotion can conceptually be studied from aspects of emotion generation, emotion perception and emotion regulation (Elliott, Zahn, Deakin & Anderson, 2011 ; Westgarth, Hogan, Neumann & Shum, 2021 ) and specifically, emotion regulation is of interest because of its clinical relevance, associated with a myriad of psychiatric diagnoses (Hu, Zhang, Wang, Mistry, Ran & Wang, 2014 ) and being the main target of various forms of psychological therapy methods (Bateman & Fonagy, 2010 ; Beck, 2005 ; Buhle, Silvers, Wager et al ., 2014 ; Gross & Muñoz, 1995 ; Lynch, Trost, Salsman & Linehan, 2007 ; Renna, Quintero, Soffer et al ., 2018 ; Rottenberg & Gross, 2007 ). Cognitive control of emotion comprises of a set of mental processes that exert top‐down regulation to optimize goal‐directed behavior in demanding situations, when automatic behavior is found to be suboptimal (Diamond, 2013 ; Espy, 2004 ; Miller & Cohen, 2001 ; Rahm, Liberg, Kristoffersen‐Wiberg, Aspelin & Msghina, 2014 ).…”

“…Functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), with a superior ecological validity that allows more naturalistic experimental settings compared to other imaging methods and easy accessibility of the prefrontal cortex, is increasingly being used to probe cognitive and affective processes in cortical areas (Bendall, Eachus & Thompson, 2016 ; Crum, 2020 ; Doi, Nishitani & Shinohara, 2013 ; Westgarth et al ., 2021 ). fNIRS allows the determination of relative changes in the concentration of oxygenated (oxy‐Hb) and deoxygenated hemoglobin (deoxy‐Hb), while simultaneous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and fNIRS recordings have shown that the blood oxygen level‐dependent (BOLD) and fNIRS signals are strongly correlated to each other (Cui, Bray, Bryant, Glover & Reiss, 2011 ; Strangman, Culver, Thompson & Boas, 2002 ).…”

Characteristics of prefrontal activity during emotional and cognitive processing in patients with bipolar disorder: A multi-channel functional near-infrared spectroscopy study

“…Though the correlation remained at a weak-to-moderate level, partly due to the comparatively large individual difference in frontal activity induced by emotion stimuli, which was also reported in other fNIRS studies concerning neural correlates of emotion induction ( Huang et al, 2017 ). In healthy volunteers, increased hemodynamic activity in PFC induced by negative stimuli was demonstrated in numerous neuroimaging studies, as a result of the salient effect of negative emotion ( Glotzbach et al, 2011 ; Aldhafeeri et al, 2012 ; Ozawa et al, 2014 ; Westgarth et al, 2021 ). In congruent with most neuroimaging studies investigating emotion processing in patients with BD, the present study revealed that negativity bias was more prominent in patients with BD ( Altshuler et al, 2008 ; Frey et al, 2013 ; Matsubara et al, 2014 , 2015 ; Segar et al, 2021 ).…”

Neurocognitive impairment in night and shift workers: a meta-analysis of observational studies

“…The methodological quality of the studies was examined by a total of 14 questions ranging from, for example, precision of the research question to the appropriateness of statistical analysis, resulting in either good, fair or poor quality. QATOCCS has been selected due to the cross-sectional design of the included studies and its use in neurobehavioural research 20. Quality assessment was conducted independently by two researchers followed by an inter-rater reliability of 0.90.…”

“…QATOCCS has been selected due to the cross-sectional design of the included studies and its use in neurobehavioural research. 20 Quality assessment was conducted independently by two researchers followed by an inter-rater reliability of 0.90. Differences were again resolved by consensus.…”