Attentional bias toward threatening or emotional information is considered a cognitive marker of anxiety, and it has been described in various clinical and subclinical populations. This study used an emotional Stroop task to investigate whether math anxiety is characterized by an attentional bias toward math-related words. Two previous studies failed to observe such an effect in math-anxious in...

Idiopathic environmental intolerance (IEI) represents a functional somatic syndrome marked by diverse bodily complaints attributed to various substances in the environment. Evidence for abnormalities in affective information processing similar to somatoform disorders (SFD) has recently been found in people with IEI. In order to further investigate these cognitive-emotional abnormalities, we com...

Online blog data provide numerous benefits over clinical and laboratory studies, including increased sample size and more genuine responses. By investigating the number of feeling words that a blogger uses in a blog sentence, we can characterize the degree to which individuals elaborate on their emotional experiences. In this study, data were obtained from the website, wefeelfine.org, which col...

In four experiments, we have investigated the influence of the affective meaning of words on memory for two kinds of contextual features that differ in the amount of effortful processes they require to be encoded in memory (i.e., color and spatial location). The main results showed that memory for color in which words were typed was better for emotional than for neutral words, but only when col...

This study is intended to clarify the functional role of different ERP components as indicators of the processing of emotions. The effect of emotional connotation of words on hemispheric lateralization is also explored. Visual ERPs were recorded to unilaterally presented positive, negative, and neutral words that should be categorized according to their emotional connotation. The P2 amplitude w...

Objective: Our aim was to evaluate whether one single section of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), a neuromodulatory technique that non-invasively modifies cortical excitability, could induce acute changes in affective processing in patients with major depression. enrolling 24 age-, gender-matched, drug-free, depressed subjects. Anode and cathode were placed over the left and righ...

Background: The aim of the present study was to examine whether patients with Dementia of Alzheimer’s Type (DAT) show a working memory emotional enhancement effect. Methods: We used an affective version of the working memory operation span test that included negative and positive words as well as neutral ones (as in the classical version). Results: Results showed that while healthy older adults...

Neuroscientific investigations regarding aspects of emotional experiences usually focus on one stimulus modality (e.g., pictorial or verbal). Similarities and differences in the processing between the different modalities have rarely been studied directly. The comparison of verbal and pictorial emotional stimuli often reveals a processing advantage of emotional pictures in terms of larger or mo...