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Ida Wessing

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3 papers

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YNICL Journal 2022 Journal Article

Neural correlates of fear conditioning are associated with treatment-outcomes to behavioral exposure in spider phobia – Evidence from magnetoencephalography

Kati Roesmann
Julius Toelle
Elisabeth Johanna Leehr
Ida Wessing
Joscha Böhnlein
Fabian Seeger
Hanna Schwarzmeier
Niklas Siminski

BACKGROUND: Models of anxiety disorders and the rationale of exposure therapy (ET) are grounded on classical fear conditioning. Yet, it is unclear whether lower fear ratings of conditioned safety versus threat cues and corresponding neural markers of safety-learning and/or fear inhibition assessed before treatment would predict better outcomes of behavioral exposure. METHODS: Sixty-six patients with spider phobia completed pre-treatment clinical and experimental fear conditioning assessments, one session of virtual reality ET, a post-treatment clinical assessment, and a 6-month follow-up assessment. Tilted Gabor gratings served as conditioned stimuli (CS) that were either paired (CS+) or remained unpaired (CS-) with an aversive phobia-related and phobia-unrelated unconditioned stimulus (UCS). CS+/CS- differences in fear ratings and magnetoencephalographic event-related fields (ERFs) were related to percentual symptom reductions from pre- to post-treatment, as assessed via spider phobia questionnaire (SPQ), behavioral avoidance test (BAT), and remission status at 6-month follow-up. RESULTS: We observed no associations between pre-treatment CS+/CS- differences in fear ratings and any treatment outcome. CS+/CS- differences in source estimations of ERFs revealed that higher CS- activity in bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) was related with SPQ- and BAT-reductions. Associations between CS+/CS- differences and treatment outcomes were also observed in left ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) regions, which additionally revealed associations with the follow-up remission status. CONCLUSIONS: Results provide initial evidence that neural pre-treatment CS+/CS- differences may hold predictive information regarding outcomes of behavioral exposure. Our findings highlight a key role of neural responses to safety cues with potentially inhibitory effects on affect-generating structures during fear conditioning.

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YNIMG Journal 2020 Journal Article

Fear generalization of implicit conditioned facial features – Behavioral and magnetoencephalographic correlates

Kati Roesmann
Nele Wiens
Constantin Winker
Maimu Alissa Rehbein
Ida Wessing
Markus Junghoefer

Acquired fear responses often generalize from conditioned stimuli (CS) towards perceptually similar, but harmless generalization stimuli (GS). Knowledge on similarities between CS and GS may be explicit or implicit. Employing behavioral measures and whole-head magnetoencephalography, we here investigated the neurocognitive mechanisms underpinning implicit fear generalization. Twenty-nine participants underwent a classical conditioning procedure in which 32 different faces were either paired with an aversive scream (16 CS+) or remained unpaired (16 CS-). CS+ and CS- faces systematically differed from each other regarding their ratio of eye distance and mouth width. High versus low values on this “threat-related feature (TF)” implicitly predicted the presence or absence of the aversive scream. In pre- and post-conditioning phases, all CS and 32 novel GS faces were presented. 16 GS+ faces shared the TF of the 16 CS+ faces, while 16 GS- faces shared the TF of the 16 CS- faces. Behavioral tests confirmed that participants were fully unaware of TF-US contingencies. CS+ compared to CS- faces revealed higher unpleasantness, arousal and US-expectancy ratings. A generalization of these behavioral fear responses to GS+ compared to GS- faces was observed by trend only. Source-estimations of event-related fields showed stronger neural responses to both CS+ and GS+ compared to CS- and GS- in anterior temporal (<100 ms) and temporo-occipital (<150 ms; 553–587 ms) ventral brain regions. Reverse effects were found in dorsal frontal areas (<100 ms; 173–203 ms; 257–290 ms). Neural data also revealed selectively enhanced responses to CS+ but not GS+ stimuli in occipital regions (110–167 ms; 330–413 ms), indicating perceptual discrimination. Our data suggest that the prioritized perceptual analysis of threat-associated conditioned faces in ventral networks rapidly generalizes to novel faces sharing threat-related features. This generalization process occurs in absence of contingency awareness and may thus contribute to implicit attentional biases. The coexisting perceptual discrimination suggests that fear generalization is not a mere consequence of insufficient stimulus discrimination but rather an active, integrative process.

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YNIMG Journal 2013 Journal Article

The neural basis of cognitive change: Reappraisal of emotional faces modulates neural source activity in a frontoparietal attention network

Ida Wessing
Maimu A. Rehbein
Christian Postert
Tilman Fürniss
Markus Junghöfer

Emotions can be regulated effectively via cognitive change, as evidenced by cognitive behavioural therapy. The neural correlates of cognitive change were investigated using reappraisal, a strategy that involves the reinterpretation of emotional stimuli. Hemodynamic studies revealed cortical structures involved in reappraisal and highlighted the role of the prefrontal cortex in regulating subcortical affective processing. Studies using event-related potentials elucidated the timing of reappraisal by showing effective modulation of the Late Positive Potential (LPP) after 300ms but also even earlier effects. The present study investigated the spatiotemporal dynamics of the cortical network underlying cognitive change via inverse source modelling based on whole-head magnetoencephalography (MEG). During MEG recording, 28 healthy participants saw angry and neutral faces and followed instructions designed to down- or up-regulate emotions via reappraisal. Differences between angry and neutral face processing were specifically enhanced during up-regulation, first in the parietal cortex during M170 and across the whole cortex during LPP-M, with particular involvement of the parietal and dorsal prefrontal cortex regions. Thus, our data suggest that the reappraisal of emotional faces involves specific modulations in a frontoparietal attention network.

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