Improving emotional-action control by targeting long-range phase-amplitude neuronal coupling

Abstract

Control over emotional action tendencies is essential for everyday interactions. This cognitive function fails occasionally during socially challenging situations, and systematically in social psychopathologies. We delivered dual-site phase-coupled brain stimulation to facilitate theta-gamma phase-amplitude coupling between frontal regions known to implement that form of control, while neuropsychologically healthy human male participants were challenged to control their automatic action tendencies in a social–emotional approach/avoidance-task. Participants had increased control over their emotional action tendencies, depending on the relative phase and dose of the intervention. Concurrently measured fMRI effects of task and stimulation indicated that the intervention improved control by increasing the efficacy of anterior prefrontal inhibition over the sensorimotor cortex. This enhancement of emotional action control provides causal evidence for phase-amplitude coupling mechanisms guiding action selection during emotional-action control. Generally, the finding illustrates the potential of physiologically-grounded interventions aimed at reducing neural noise in cerebral circuits where communication relies on phase-amplitude coupling.

The Control of Movements via Motor Gamma Oscillations

“…This is, the increase of gamma activity during emotional action control was modulated by the PFC. Even more, in a transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) study, emotional control was elicited by increasing this PFC-M1 theta-gamma coupling ( Bramson et al, 2020 ). Other studies have characterized theta-gamma coupling and found that is modulated by sensory modulations.…”

Effects of Transcranial Alternating Current Stimulation and Neurofeedback on Alpha (EEG) Dynamics: A Review

“…In contrast to tACS, which uses a single-frequency stimulation (e.g., 10 Hz for alpha-band stimulation), NFB protocols usually train the whole bandwidth (e.g., the whole alpha bandwidth 8–13 Hz up). In multifrequency protocols, the NFB research field contains many studies using multifrequency protocols (Peniston and Kulkosky, 1991 ; Egner et al, 2002 ; Dohrmann et al, 2007 ; Friedrich et al, 2015 ; Vanneste et al, 2016 ; Güntensperger et al, 2019 ) whereas the multifrequency protocols in tACS seem to be quite an emerging field of research with a much shorter history than multifrequency NFB protocols (Helfrich et al, 2016 ; Lara et al, 2018 ; Bramson et al, 2020 ; Turi et al, 2020 ).…”

“…Despite the vast differences in mechanisms of action of tACS and NFB, according to the thorough research, both methods can successfully modulate various EEG bands (Lubar, 1997 ; Weber et al, 2011 ; Staufenbiel et al, 2014 ; Witkowski et al, 2016 ; Violante et al, 2017 ; Wischnewski and Schutter, 2017 ; Pimenta et al, 2018 ; Tseng et al, 2018 ; Abellaneda-Pérez et al, 2020 ). Both neuromodulatory methods have been also investigated in their ability to improve various brain functions such as motor performance (Joundi et al, 2012 ; Ros et al, 2014b ; Scharnowski et al, 2015 ; Moisa et al, 2016 ; Guerra et al, 2018 , 2019 ; Bologna et al, 2019 ), memory processes (Alexeeva et al, 2012 ; Polanía et al, 2012 ; Violante et al, 2017 ; Dobrakowski and Łebecka, 2020 ), attention (Escolano et al, 2014 ; Hopfinger et al, 2017 ; Berger and Davelaar, 2018 ; Deiber et al, 2020 ), creativity (Gruzelier, 2009 ; Agnoli et al, 2018 ; Di Bernardi Luft et al, 2018 ), emotional regulation (Johnston et al, 2010 ; Bramson et al, 2020 ), etc. (Hohn et al, 2019 ; Prim et al, 2019 ).…”

Phase–Amplitude Coupling, Mental Health and Cognition: Implications for Adolescence

“…These findings suggest that decreased resting-state theta–gamma PAC may be a biomarker of poorer mental health (specifically depression) and that lasting changes in PAC may be a mechanism underlying TMS treatment. Notably, cross-frequency theta–gamma tACS protocols have been demonstrated to influence memory ( Alekseichuk et al, 2016 ; Lara et al, 2018 ), cognitive control ( Turi et al, 2020 ), and emotional-action control ( Bramson et al, 2020 ). Alekseichuk et al (2016) reported that theta–gamma tACS has a greater effect on working memory than theta tACS.…”