Cerebral cortex and autonomic nervous system responses during emotional memory processing

Abstract

Psychiatric symptoms are often accompanied by somatic symptoms induced by the activity of the autonomic nervous system (ANS). The aim of this study was to calculate the time lag between electroencephalography (EEG) and electrocardiography (ECG) responses, to clarify the changes in the relationship between the cerebral cortex (CC) and the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) during emotional recall processing. Twenty-two healthy young adults were examined. Their EEG and ECG data were simultaneously recorded during emotional audiovisual recall tasks using pleasant and unpleasant stimuli for 180 s, with three repetitions (Epochs 1 & 2 and Epoch 3). The EEG data were analyzed using a fast Fourier transform (FFT) to obtain a time series of relative power spectra, X E , in the theta 1, theta 2, alpha 1, alpha 2, alpha 3, beta 1, beta 2, and beta 3 bands. Time series of RR (inter-beat) intervals (time intervals between successive R waves) derived from the ECG spectral analysis using FFT was applied to the resampled time series of RR intervals over about 60 s to obtain a time series of power spectra for the ratio low frequency/high frequency (LH/HF), X C , which reflects the activity of the sympathetic nervous function. The time lag between X E and X C was calculated using wavelet-crosscorrelation analysis. The results demonstrated that the brain responded to unfamiliar emotionally pleasant stimuli in Epochs 1 & 2 earlier than the SNS, whereas the brain and SNS responded to unfamiliar unpleasant stimuli nearly simultaneously. The brain was activated rapidly in response to familiar unpleasant stimuli, although SNS responded more rapidly to familiar pleasant stimuli than the brain in Epoch 3. Our results quantitatively describe the relationship between the CC and the ANS during emotional recall.

Allelic Variants Within the ABO Blood Group Phenotype Confer Protection Against Critical COVID-19 Hospital Presentation

“…Khalil et al ( 44 ) analyzing the ABO blood group associations with COVID-19 in a Middle East and North African cohort could not corroborate previous studies that indicated a link between the ABO blood groups and susceptibility to or severity of SARS-CoV-2 infection. Only a limited number of genetic studies have addressed COVID-19 severity and comparing critical to noncritical in hospital patients with conflicting results and not with respect to ABO gene polymorphisms ( 15 , 45 , 46 ). One study provided results for single polymorphism and COVID-19 infection ( 2 ).…”

“…These authors reported that health professionals with type O blood group were less likely to be infected compared to those with other blood types. More recent studies on SARS-CoV-2 reported similar associations between viral infection and the ABO blood groups (15,16). However, divergent results are still coming forth with respect to the role of the ABO blood groups as a risk marker for COVID-19 severity linked to possible comorbidities and methodological differences as well as population differences in tissue receptors associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection (4,13,(17)(18)(19).…”

Electrophysiological Representations of Multivariate Human Emotion Experience

“…Specifically, the functional roles of Alpha and Beta activities have been widely acknowledged, for emotion regulation (Zhang et al, 2020), emotional memory processing (Mizuno-Matsumoto et al, 2020), etc. Accordingly, the EEG features extracted from the Alpha and Beta bands also achieved competent performance on emotion recognition tasks (Zheng et al, 2017;Wang et al, 2011) in the affective computing field.…”

General Anesthesia and Autonomic Nervous System: Control and Management in Neurosurgery

“…Surgical stress causes changes in the permeability of cell membranes, their ultrastructural damage, which will result in a decrease in the functional reserves of organs [36]. The result of surgical stress will be the development of multiple organ dysfunction with the progression of cardiovascular, respiratory failure; impaired liver, kidney, gastrointestinal tract, immunological reactivity, and regulation of the aggregate state of blood in the form of hypercoagulation [29,39].…”