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Matthias Wittfoth

Possible papers associated with this exact author name in Arrow. This page groups case-insensitive exact name matches and is not a full identity disambiguation profile.

3 papers

1 author row

YNICL Journal 2022 Journal Article

Bifocal emotion regulation through acupoint tapping in fear of flying

Dina Wittfoth
Jelena Beise
Jorge Manuel
Michael Bohne
Matthias Wittfoth

Very few studies have investigated the neural underpinnings of bifocal-multisensory interventions such as acupoint tapping (tapping) despite their well-documented efficacy. The present study aims to investigate the neural and behavioral responses to tapping during the perception of phobic and generally fear-inducing stimulation in a group of participants with fear of flying. We studied 29 flight-phobic participants who were exposed to phobia-related, fear-inducing and neutral stimulation while undergoing fMRI and a bifocal-multisensory intervention session consisting of tapping plus cognitive restructuring in a within-subject design. During tapping we found an up-regulation of neural activation in the amygdala, and a down-regulation in the hippocampus and temporal pole. These effects were different from automatic emotion regulatory processes which entailed down-regulation in the amygdala, hippocampus, and temporal pole. Mean scores (±SD) on the Fear of Flying scale dropped from 2.51(±0.65) before the intervention to 1.27(±0.68) after the intervention (p <.001). The proportion of participants meeting the criteria for fear of flying also dropped from 89.7 percent before the intervention to 24.0 percent after the intervention (p <.001). Taken together, our results lend support to the effectiveness of tapping as a means of emotion regulation across multiple contexts and add to previous findings of increased amygdala activation during tapping, as opposed to amygdala down-regulation found in other emotion regulation techniques. They expand on previous knowledge by suggesting that tapping might modulate the processing of complex visual scene representations and their binding with visceral emotional reponses, reflected by the down-regulation of activation in the hippocampus and temporal pole. Bifocal emotion regulation was useful in ameliorating aversive reactions to phobic stimuli in people with fear of flying.

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YNIMG Journal 2009 Journal Article

How the brain resolves high conflict situations: Double conflict involvement of dorsolateral prefrontal cortex

Matthias Wittfoth
Dina M. Schardt
Manfred Fahle
Manfred Herrmann

Executive control is a human ability that allows to overcome automatic stimulus-response mappings and to act appropriate in the context of a task where the selection of relevant stimuli and the suppression of interfering information are crucial. In order to address the question which brain areas are involved in the detection and processing of two simultaneously operating sources of interference derived from a spatial incompatibility task, we used functional MRI to contrast neural activity related to a double conflict situation to single incompatibility conditions. Results show signal increase of left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex when monitoring simultaneously presented conflict. There was no additional activity in the medial prefrontal cortex or anterior cingulate cortex although these regions are expected to play an important role in all types of conflict monitoring. Further analyses of conflict resolution and post-error adaptation pointed to different underlying functional mechanisms. While the resolution of high conflict was associated with rostral ACC activation, the post-error adaptation reflecting activity during post-error trials suggests a specific medial and lateral prefrontal network which was functionally distinct from conflict-related activity. Our results also suggest a major role for the basal ganglia during error detection and resolution.

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YNIMG Journal 2006 Journal Article

Comparison of two Simon tasks: Neuronal correlates of conflict resolution based on coherent motion perception

Matthias Wittfoth
Daniela Buck
Manfred Fahle
Manfred Herrmann

The present study aimed at characterizing the neural correlates of conflict resolution in two variations of the Simon effect. We introduced two different Simon tasks where subjects had to identify shapes on the basis of form-from-motion perception (FFMo) within a randomly moving dot field, while (1) motion direction (motion-based Simon task) or (2) stimulus location (location-based Simon task) had to be ignored. Behavioral data revealed that both types of Simon tasks induced highly significant interference effects. Using event-related fMRI, we could demonstrate that both tasks share a common cluster of activated brain regions during conflict resolution (pre-supplementary motor area (pre-SMA), superior parietal lobule (SPL), and cuneus) but also show task-specific activation patterns (left superior temporal cortex in the motion-based, and the left fusiform gyrus in the location-based Simon task). Although motion-based and location-based Simon tasks are conceptually very similar (Type 3 stimulus–response ensembles according to the taxonomy of [Kornblum, S. , Stevens, G. (2002). Sequential effects of dimensional overlap: findings and issues. In: Prinz, W. , Hommel. , B. (Eds.), Common mechanism in perception and action. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 9–54]) conflict resolution in both tasks results in the activation of different task-specific regions probably related to the different sources of task-irrelevant information. Furthermore, the present data give evidence those task-specific regions are most likely to detect the relationship between task-relevant and task-irrelevant information.

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