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1 Abstract Book Brain Circuits for Positive Emotions October 19-23, 2014 Congressi Stefano Franscini, Monte Verità Ascona, Switzerland 3 Keynote lectures, 31 lectures by renowned experts, 18 short lectures chosen among the abstracts, poster session Organizers: Claudio Bassetti, Neurology, Bern; Carlo Calanchini, Psychiatry, Lugano; Marco Celio, Neuroanatomy, Fribourg. Scientific committee: Walter Perrig, Psychology, Berne; Werner Strik, Psychiatry, Berne; Giovanni Ventimiglia, Istituto di Studi Filosofici, Lugano. 2 We are grateful to following sponsors for supporting financially the congress: “Brain Circuits for Positive Emotions” 3 SESSIONS Sunday morning, October 19 Arrival of the participants 12:00- Welcome Address (Restaurant) 12:15 12:30- Light lunch 13:45 Sunday afternoon, October 19 Philosophy, Art and Ethology: Chair G. Ventimiglia (Auditorium) 14:00- Kevin Mulligan: The harmfulness of happiness 14:30 14:30- Tim Schröder: The positive emotional aspects of 15:00 reward 15:00- Massimo Reichlin: Positive emotions and the 15:30 generation of conscience 15:30- Coffee break 16:00 16:00- Francesco Tamiati: Trumpet Concert: Evoking 16:30 Emotions (Balint Room) 16:45- Christian Mikutta: Music and the emotional brain 17:15 17:15- Diana Omigie: Emotion processing network 17:30 activated by musical stimuli 17:30- Isabel Behncke-Izquierdo: Ancient joy: laughter 17:50 and play in the wild bonobos of Wamba, RD Congo 18:00- Welcome drink 18:30 18:30- Keynote lecture (Auditorium) 19:30 Jaak Panksepp: Psychiatric implications of understanding primal emotional feelings in other animals 19:3021:00 Dinner Monday morning, October 20 Neuroanatomy: Chair M. Celio (Auditorium) 08:15- L. Sognonini, C. Cometta: History and video of the 08:30 Monte Verità 08:30- Carmen Cavada: Architecture of the primate 09:00 orbitofrontal cortex relevant for emotional processing 09:0009:30 09:3010:00 10:0010:30 10:3011:00 11:0011:15 11:1511:30 11:3011:45 12:3013:45 Gonzalo Alvarez- Bolado: Embryonic Development of Emotional Circuits Gert Holstege: How the emotional motor system controls the pelvic organs Coffee break Marco Celio: The lateral hypothalamus and the expression of emotions Hari Subramanian: The periaqueductal gray and control of emotional expression Elise Wattendorf: Hypothalamic involvement in laughter and related anticipatory processes Henry Evrard: Organization of the primate insular cortex Lunch Monday afternoon, October 20 Neurophysiology: Chair W. Schultz (Auditorium) 14:00- Wolfram Schultz: Reward, learning and choices 14:30 14:30- Ralph Adolphs: Single-unit recordings of emotion 15:00 in the human brain 15:00- Angela Roberts: Prefrontal contribution to the 15:30 regulation of positive and negative emotional states 15:3016:00 16:0016:20 16:2016:40 16:4017:00 17:0017:15 17:1517:30 18 :0019 :15 19:3021:00 Coffee break Steve Kennerley: Deciding how to decide: the role of the prefrontal cortex Igor Kagan: Integration of reward, effort and risk in decision-making Sarah Garfinkel: Embodied emotions: cardiovascular coupling with emotion types Urs Albrecht: Circadian clock in mood related behaviors Kallia Apazoglou: Reversal Olfactory Learning Poster session with drinks Dinner Tuesday morning, October 21 Neurology: Chair C. Bassetti (Auditorium) 08:30- Clif Saper: Circuitry producing cataplexy in 09:00 response to positive emotions 09:00- Christian Lüscher: Recovering from too strong 09:30 reward: towards a synaptic model of addiction 09:30- Patrik Vuilleumier: Brain systems underlying the 10:00 perception, representation, and control of different types of emotions 10:0010:30 10:3011:00 11:0011:20 11:2011:35 11:3511:50 12:3013:45 Coffee break Claudio Bassetti: The neurology of laughter René Müri: The neurology of facial and emotional expression Ramin Khatami: The role of dopamine and hypocretin in cataplexy. Jean-Marie Annoni: Decision making in multiple sclerosis Lunch and group picture Tuesday afternoon, October 21 Excursion to the three Castles in Bellinzona, typical dinner and Teatro « Dimitri » in Verscio Wednesday morning, October 22 Social Neurosciences: Chair T. Singer (Auditorium) 08:30- Tania Singer: From Empathy to Compassion and 09:00 their Plasticity 09:00- Dean Mobbs: The neural basis of social motivators 09:30 09:30- Adam Guastella: Oxytocin and the social brain 10:00 10:00- Coffee break 10:30 4 10.30 11:00 11:00 11:20 11:2011:35 11:3511:50 12:3013:45 Ralph Adolphs: Attending to the social world Glenn Fox: Neural correlates of gratitude Christin Burgdorf : Attachment style predicts opioidergic modulation of warmth liking Philip Gerrans: Depersonalization and the insular cortex. Lunch Wednesday afternoon, October 22 Psychiatry: Chair W. Strik and C. Calanchini (Auditorium) 14:00- Ann M. Kring: Schizophrenia and the emotional 14:30 brain 14:30- Fabio Macciardi: Genomic and epigenomic 15:00 mechanism shape the emotional brain 15:00- Antonio Andreoli: Circuits of wellbeing and 15:30 emotionally unstable personalities 15:30- Coffee break 16:00 16:00- Emanuela Mundo: Brain plasticity and positive 16:30 emotions: the role of the therapeutic experiences 16:3017:00 17:0017:20 17:2017:35 18:1519:15 20:0021:00 19:3021:00 across different diagnosis. George Koob: Addiction as a window on the neurocircuitry of emotion Birgit Derntl: Emotional competencies in schizophrenia: brain and behavior Luca Passamonti: Openess and the dopaminergic neural network Keynote lecture (Auditorium) Robert Provine: Laughter Carlo Calanchini: Capire le emozioni: un percorso tortuoso. Talk in italian for the general public Dinner Thursday morning, October 23 Psychology: Chair W. Perrig (Auditorium) 08:30- David Sander: What is the role of the Amygdala in 09:00 positive emotions? 09:00- Willibald Ruch: Mapping the field of humor: 09:30 Beyond emotion, cognition and virtue 09:30- Paul Pauli: The pleasure of relief 10:00 10:00- Coffee break 10:30 10:30- Rainer Schwarting: Rat 50-kHz vocalizations in 11:00 affective and social neuroscience 11:00- Barbara Studer: Emotional stability promotes 11:15 intelligence 11:15- Eva Pool: Attention orientation to positive 11:30 rewarding stimuli 11:30- Christian Waugh: Savoring positive emotions 11:45 11:45- Keynote Lecture (Auditorium) 12:30 Mario De Caro: Philosophy and the science of emotions 12:4513:45 Lunch and Award Ceremony for the CSF young scientist award Thursday afternoon, October 23 Departure of the participants Centro Stefano Franscini (CSF) Award A CSF award will be attributed to the best presentation given during our CSF conference. The Award corresponds to the sum of CHF 500, and is delivered together with a certificate and a small CSF / Monte Verità memento. The scientific/organizing committee will designate the winner of this prize according to the following two criteria: - best oral presentation (content and form) - doctoral degree received within the last 3 years (age < 33 years). The award will be presented by to the winner by a representative of the CSF, Thursday October 23, at lunch time. 5 SEQUENTIAL LIST OF SPEAKERS SUNDAY, OCTOBER 19 Philosophy, Art and Ethology: Chair G. Ventimiglia Kevin Mulligan Philosophy, University of Geneva, Geneva The harmfulness of happiness Sunday, October 19, 14:00-14:30 Can happiness or its pursuit harm you? Recent discussion of happiness often seems to ignore this possibility. Perhaps the best-known example of this possibility outside philosophy is one from economics: inability to defer gratification or present happiness will make you worse off. But many other cases have been described by philosophers over the centuries which are perhaps not as well-known. Some of these rely on a parallel between belief and emotions. Incorrect beliefs can certainly harm you. If someone knows that you believe what is not the case, he may be able to bankrupt you. Is there anything like “incorrect” happiness ? And if so, can it be harmful? We often assess emotions in terms of correctness (appropriateness, justification) and incorrectness. Fear of a dog which is not dangerous is incorrect. So is indignation about a situation which is, in fact, not unjust. And shame about a deed which, in fact, was not shameful. Suppose now that you are happy about an impending promotion but in fact your promotion is not going to take place or is going to take place but is undeserved. Might it then be the case that your happiness is bad for you ? A second type of case relies not on an analogy between belief and emotions but on a relation between them: some beliefs makes us happy, others unhappy; if you systematically prefer beliefs which flatter you or “make you feel good” to unpleasant beliefs, you are very likely to end up with lots of incorrect beliefs, and so can be easily bankrupted, fooled, tricked, and manipulated. A third type of case also brings in a social dimension of happiness. Suppose you are happy when and because other people are happy. Perhaps you are just prone to affective contagion. Perhaps you are happy in ways suggested by people you take as models. Perhaps your happiness tracks the happiness of those who are near and dear to you, in whom you are “invested” (Frankfurt), or indeed of higher-order social groups (nations, countries, races). In each case, the happiness of others may harm you. For example, if the happiness of others makes you happy, then their unhappiness may well make you unhappy. Can the pursuit of happiness make you unhappy ? Some types of happiness are relatively easy to bring about – pleasure in skiing, the enjoyment of good claret. Others are not so easy to manipulate, for example, joy, serenity or bliss. Or at least so it is sometimes claimed. Are these two assertions plausible ? If so, is it possible that overconcentration on the more easily manipulable pleasures makes us blasé or even less liable to the less easily manipulable happinesses ? I suggest different ways in which the four possibilities mentioned might be evaluated and argue that it is crucial to distinguish between different types of pleasure – pleasure in activity, localized and unlocalised pleasure, the pleasure of realizing a goal, pleasure from, pleasure in – and different types of happiness – fun, joy, enjoyment, bliss serenity and satisfaction. Kevin Mulligan is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, full professor of analytic philosophy and Chairman of the Department of philosophy at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. His work concerns ontology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of logic and the history of Austrian philosophy from Bolzano to Musil and Wittgenstein. He is the author of “Wittgenstein et la philosophie austro-allemande » (2012, Paris, Vrin) and his most recent articles are “Foolishness, Stupidity and Cognitive Values”, «Formal Concepts», «Is Preference primitive?» Tim Schröder Philosophy, University of Ohio, Columbus The positive emotional aspects of reward Sunday, October 19, 14:30-15:00 The reward system is known to have a strong effect on motivation and action, and a strong effect on feelings of pleasure. What is the connection between these two facts? There is an ancient hypothesis that all actions are done, ultimately, for the sake of pleasure or the avoidance of displeasure (this is 'psychological hedonism'). Is this hypothesis vindicated by research on the reward system? In this talk, I will argue that it is not. In fact, the evidence of neuroscience, once appropriately interpreted, provides a powerful new argument that psychological hedonism is false. Tim Schroeder is a Professor of Philosophy at Ohio State University, and also currently a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University (the institution where he received a PhD in philosophy in 1998). His research has involved looking at the neuroanatomy and neurophysiology of reward, pleasure, and action, and interpreting the results in terms meaningful to traditional philosophical research, such as 'desire' and 'weakness of will'. He has written papers on consciousness, concepts, Tourette syndrom, addiction, and other topics, and written two books. Three Faces of Desire was published by Oxford in 2004; In 6 Praise of Desire (co-authored with Nomy Arpaly) was published by Oxford in 2014 as Bioethics and Journal of Medicine and Philosophy and has been a speaker at major national and international conferences concerning ethics. Massimo Reichlin University San Raffaele , Milano Positive emotions and the generation of conscience Sunday, October 19, 14:30-15:00 Much of the empirical research on the relationships between emotions and morality centres on negative emotions. It is often said, for example, that emotions such as contempt, anger and disgust are basic in shaping our fundamental moral approaches – the community-based, the autonomy-based, and the divinity-based moral outlooks. Recent neuro-scientific work on moral judgments has particularly stressed the relationship between the expressions of oral and smelling disgust and the formation of moral judgments, advancing the hypothesis that the moral faculty be exapted from such evolution-driven forms of physical disgust. While not denying the role that negative emotions play in the generation and reinforcement of moral responses, I will suggest that a relevant role may be played by positive emotions as well. From an ontogenetic point of view, in particular, the primordia of moral conscience might be seen in the loving and caring relationship between the mother (and other relevant adults) and the new-born. Empathy, which certainly plays a role in the development of the moral faculty, is a mechanism that allows to feel others’ emotions: it is an important source of positive emotions towards others, those having to do with compassion, care and a disposition to understand their predicament. Both in young and in adult humans, the capacity to develop a sympathetic and morally well-disposed character seems to depend in a large part on the passive experience of the care and love that individuals receive (and sometimes do not receive), and on the emotionallyladen mutual recognition that takes place in primary, deeply felt human relationships. Morality is a virtuous circle, for it is only by being the object of caring relationships that a capacity to understand others and a disposition to care for them is developed. It can be suggested, thus, that a much more attentive study of positive emotions by empirical research may shed important light on the complex phenomenon of moral experience Massimo Reichlin is associated professor of bioethics, human medical sciences and moral phylosophy at the University San Raffaele, Milano, Italy. He has focused on contemporary ethics and in recent years he also worked on neuroethics and approches to ethics that move from research of developmental psychology. Since 2002 he is a member of the Ethics Committee of the Scientific Institute San Raffaele Hospital in Milan. He has published articles in leading journals in international journals such Coffee Break 15.30-16.00 Francesco Tamiati First trumpet, Teatro La Scala, Milano Trumpet Concert: Evoking Emotions (Balint Room) Sunday, October 19, 16:00-16:30 Francesco Tamiati, born in 1965 in Vercelli, Italy, has completed his studies at the Conservatory "A. Vivaldi "in Alessandria with Luigi Sechi, graduating in 1984 with honors. He started at a young age his concert activity, he won even before completing his studies (between 1980 and 1981) numerous competitions including first prize in Stresa, Torino and Alessandria, in addition to being ranked first in the "Rotary International Youth Orchestra ". Since January 2002, he held the role of "Trumpet" at the orchestra of the "Teatro alla Scala" and the 'Philharmonic Orchestra of "Teatro alla Scala". He then completed his training following courses with solo trumpet of the four major orchestras: Armando Ghitalla (Boston Symphony Orchestra), John Wallace (Philharmonia Orchestra of London), Hannes Läubin (Bayerischer Rundfunk Symphonie Orchester), Philip Smith (New York Philharmonic). As the first trumpet has played with major orchestras Italian RAI of Milano and Torino, Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Teatro San Carlo in Napoli, La Fenice in Venezia, Orchestra da Camera di Mantova. He was also first trumpet holder of the Teatro dell'Opera di Genova and the Orchestra of Italian Switzerland (Lugano). At the same time plays an intense soloist accompanied by various orchestras with which he has made recordings for radio and television. He has given concerts as well as in Italy and in Switzerland, Belgium, Germany, India and Peru. As a soloist, he has participated to the preparation of two operas for the Teatro alla Scala in Milano, among which the world premiere of "Lohengrin" by Salvatore Sciarrino. He recently took part in the concert production and television production of "Mass in B Minor" by Bach, conducted by Maestro Riccardo Muti, and the production of concerts conducted by Maestro Daniel Barenboim "Histoire du soldat by Igor Stravinsky." Francesco Tamiati is very involved in chamber music and in duo with pianist Fulvio Bottega or with the organist Joseph Radini, both with various chamber groups including, "Nextime Ensemble", "Ensemble E. Varèse," Cammer Opera Ensemble ""Trumpets and Timpani Ensemble Theatre alla 7 Scala" virtuosos of La Scala". He is also a founding member of the "Italian Brass Quintet". Wide is his experience in the field of education. F. Tamiati was professor of trumpet at the respective Conservatives: "G. Cantelli" of Novara and "GF Ghedini "of Cuneo and has given master classes as well as in Italy (Conservatorio" G. Nicolini "in Piacenza, Conservatorio" G. Verdi "Conservatory" G. Tartini in Trieste in Peru and India). Since 2003 he has become professor of trumpet at the 'Accademia del Teatro alla Scala in Milano. He is also a lecturer at the Conservatory of Italian Switzerland in Lugano. Francesco Tamiati plays a Besson Cornet Piston Flugelhorn Prestige model and a model Curtois 156r - 4 valves. Christian Mikutta, MD, is currently a Post Doc at the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California, Berkeley, USA. He has been a resident in psychiatry at the University of Psychiatry in Bern, Switzerland. He is interested at the brain behavior face to music and published several articles about this subject. The last one has for title „Professional musicians listen differently to music“. science research demonstrates that, in the general public, music is widely exploited as a tool with which to manage mood and arousal. However, while a growing body of neuroscience research has been able to reveal neural correlates of distinct musical emotions ranging from the basic (e.g. happy and sad) to the aesthetic (e.g. wonder and nostalgia), still elusive are insights into the dynamics of the communication between implicated brain areas and the specific roles each of these play. The current series of studies takes advantage of the excellent spatial and temporal resolution of intracranial electroencephalography recordings, which can be collected from epileptic patients implanted with depth electrodes for presurgical evaluation. In the first two studies, participants were presented with positively and negatively valenced musical chords, which they either monitored for timbral oddballs (Study 1) or rated for pleasantness (Study 2). In a third ongoing study, they are presented with short melodies, whose individual notes have been characterized in terms of Information Content (IC) - a measure of stimulus unexpectedness, the listeners’ experience of which is held to be a rich source of positive musical emotions. Analysis of data from Studies 1 and 2 showed that the amygdala tends to drive both the orbitofrontal cortex and the auditory cortex during the processing of valenced stimuli, and demonstrated a specific role of the orbitofrontal cortex in the processing of positively valenced stimuli. In addition, the use of subjective ratings (Study 2) to sort trials according to stimuli considered ‘pleasant’ and ‘unpleasant’ allowed the demonstration of a critical role of the orbitofrontal cortex in evaluative judgments and subjective experience: this compared to the amygdala, which was in contrast shown to be more concerned with the physical properties of the stimuli. Finally, preliminary results of the third study suggest modulations of activity in key members of the emotion network, specifically the amygdala, by the IC of musical events, drawing an important link between music as an ‘ambiguous stimulus situation’ and the role of the amygdala in ‘modulating moment-to-moment vigilance’ in such situations (Whalen, 1998). Taken together the three studies provide important insights into the behaviour of individual members of the emotion processing network and demonstrate the promise of using both musical stimuli and intracranial recordings in the study of this system. Diana Omigie Isabel Behncke-Izquierdo Christian Mikutta Psychiatry, University of Berne, Berne Music and the emotional brain Sunday, October 19, 16:45-17:15 Music’s power to evoke emotions is partly the fundament of it’s success throughout human societies. First the basal neural mechanisms of music decoding will reviewed. In particular the extraction of relevant acoustic features of music will be explored. To address this issue we used intracranial recordings (electroencephalography, ECoG) from auditory cortex in the human superior temporal gyrus (STG) to determine what acoustic information in music can be reconstructed from population neural activity. Further we highlight the interactions of the decoding process in the STG, hippocampal regions and heart rate using simultaneous recorded ECoG and hippocampal depth electrode data during music listening. Finally we discuss the correlation of music syntactic processing and music induced emotions. Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Frankfurt am Main Emotion processing network activated by musical stimuli Sunday, October 19, 17:15-17:30 Short talk Music constitutes an everyday stimulus that can convey a range of complex and rich emotions. Indeed social Social and Evolutionary Neuroscience Research Group , Oxford, UK Ancient joy: laughter and play in the wild bonobos of Wamba, RD Congo Sunday, October 19, 17:30-17:45 Short talk 8 Play and laughter represent important evolutionary continuities between animal play and human joy, laughter, humour and creativity. I set to examine these themes in bonobos since they are, together with chimpanzees, our closest living relatives yet bonobos are the ape we know less about. Moreover, bonobo tolerance, juvenilised (neotenous) features and relaxed hierarchies make them the ideal species for the study of laughter and play. Crucially, bonobos have solved a problem that neither humans nor other apes have managed to solve: that of living peacefully and with no lethal aggression. How do they do it? We know that matriarchy and bisexual sex in all partner combinations play an important role in creating this unusual peace. But there is another, crucial element to bonobo conundrum that has not been uncovered: bonobos play, and they play throughout their lives. Play, positive emotion, laughter and the regular experience of joy seems to be crucial to the unique social system bonobos exist in. In humans, the behaviours that bond groups (such as laughter, dance, music, and ritual) are all underpinned by play to different degrees. I ask whether its time to examine the role of positive emotion and play rather than just focusing on sexual behavior to explain bonobos unusual social system. Moreover laughter in apes has relevance to understanding the importance of laughter in human evolution, as it may constitute a good example of an evolutionary continuity. Although laughter in humans has received considerable attention by researchers, laughter in apes is an area ripe for exploration. Matsusaka (2004) looked at the context and laughter in wild chimpanzees; however to my knowledge no studies of laughter in wild bonobos have been done. Unfortunately we know relatively litte of bonobo behavior in the wild as their natural habitat is restricted to the tropical jungles south of the river Congo in DRC and the country’s endemic political instability has made research difficult. Because play only happens if animals are relaxed, studying play in wild animals (and particularly in adults) can only happen under very unusual conditions: requires first-rate habituation to human observers. Wamba research site, managed by Kyoto University, is unique in this regard, and constitutes the longest running bonobo field site in the world. There I spent three years following a community of 30 wild habituated bonobos, focusing on laughter and social play behavior, and adult play in particular. I will present my findings on laughter in wild bonobos and highlight the unique playful role of adult males in bonobo society. Welcome Drink 18.00- 18.30 Keynote lecture Jaak Panksepp Washington State University, Washington Psychiatric Implications of Understanding Primal Emotional Feelings in Other Animals Sunday, October 19, 18:30-19:30 Because of its bipolar positive and negative affective structure, raw emotional feelings are an optimal way to make scientific progress on the neural constitution of consciousness. Such research has revealed the existence of profound neuroanatomical and neurochemical homologies in the systems that control emotionality across mammalian and avian species. Wherever in their brains one applies localized Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) and obtains coherent instinctual emotional behavior patterns, animals treat these within-brain state shifts as 'rewards' and 'punishments' in various simple learning tasks. Humans consistently report desirable and undesirable affective changes to such DBS. These effects serve as gold standards for the detailed scientific study of affective qualia in animal and human brains. Such work helps clarify the neural nature of phenomenal-affective consciousness, namely why various emotional arousals feel good and bad in distinct ways. Abundant convergent evidence indicates how such primary-process subcortical neural networks generate homologous emotional feelings in all mammals that have been studied, and how they control learning and memory. This knowledge illuminates our own deeper nature, and allows neuroscientists to empirically understand (across-species) how the brain generates affective mental states. In other words, this type of research helps reveal the causal/constitutive infrastructure of human minds (i.e., the “hard problem” of consciousness), through the detailed neuroscientific analysis of the affective minds of other animals. It provides a new foundation for understanding psychiatric disorders as well and the development of new mind medicines. Three new anti-depressants that have arisen from this strategy will be summarized (see, Panksepp, et al., 2014, Clinical Psychological Science, 2, pp 472-494). In short, the progressive understanding of the evolutionary infrastructure of the cross-species subcortical emotional circuitry can illuminate the affective depths of our own minds, as well as those of our fellow animals, and thereby promote new and more effective psychiatric therapeutics. Jaak Panksepp holds the Baily Endowed Chair of Animal Well-Being Science in Washington State University's College of Veterinary Medicine and is Emeritus Distinguished Research Professor of Psychobiology at the Department of Psychology of Bowling Green State University. His research pioneered the neuroscientific study of primary-process emotions in mammals, with the goal of understanding the evolutionary infrastructure of human emotional feelings. He coined the term “affective neuroscience” as the name for the field that studies the 9 neural mechanisms of emotion, across species, not only from neuro-ethological but also experiential perspectives (i.e., monitoring the rewarding and punishing properties of artificial arousal of basic mammalian emotional action systems). His group generated the first neural (opioidaddictive) model of mother-infant social bonding, and the neuroscience of playfulness and laughter in animals (both with implications for development of new antidepressants). His most recent book (with Lucy Biven) is the Archaeology of Mind (Norton, 2012), which explores some of the clinical implications of Affective Neuroscience (Oxford, 1998). With Ken Davis, he developed the Affective Neuroscience Personality Scale to evaluate primal emotional proclivities in humans. They are currently writing a book on the Psychobiology of Personality. Dinner 19.30 – 21.00 10 MONDAY, OCTOBER 20 Neuroanatomy: Chair M. Celio Carmen Cavada Anatomy, Autonomous University of Madrid, Madrid Architecture of the primate orbitofrontal cortex relevant for emotional processing Monday, October 20, 08:30-09:00 The orbitofrontal and the medial prefrontal cortices share many connections that set them apart from the lateral prefrontal sector and from the rest of the cortex; they are often considered together and named orbitomedial frontal cortex (OmFC). The cortical and subcortical connections of the primate OmFC cortex relevant for emotional processing will be reviewed. Particular attention will be paid to identifying knowledge domains and data in need of further exploration and understanding. The OmFC is the cortical region most tightly linked with the hypothalamus. It receives abundant hypothalamic input, mostly from the posterior hypothalamus, and projects rather specifically to posterior, lateral and dorsal hypothalamic areas, perifornical nucleus, and mammillary complex. The OmFC also projects to the periaqueductal gray matter. Thus, the OmFC, unlike the lateral prefrontal cortex, is in a key position to monitor and initiate the autonomic responses associated with emotion. In addition, the OmFC sustains dense and specific connections with the amygdala and with a constellation of cortical areas, including many limbic areas. The connections with the amygdala are mostly reciprocal, in particular those with the basal, accessory basal, lateral, cortical anterior and periamygdaloid nuclei. The OmFC projects to the central and paralaminar amygdaloid nuclei and receives afferents from the medial nucleus. The limbic cortical areas connected with the OmFC include insular, temporopolar, cingulate, retrosplenial, and medial temporal areas involved in memory processing. In sum, the OmFC, by virtue of its connections with cortical areas and with specific subcortical regions, is in a critical position to process information relevant for emotion and to control emotional output. The precise synaptic organization of the cortical and subcortical circuits involved in emotional processing through the OmFC is, however, largely unresolved. Approaches to fill this knowledge gap will be discussed. Carmen Cavada leads the research group “Primate Central Nervous System: Architecture and Disease Models”. Her prime broad objective is understanding primate, including human, brain structure. She has studied the connections of the parietal and frontal association areas. More recently, she has been interested on the dopaminergic innervation of diverse brain centers, including the thalamus, striatum, amygdala and cerebral cortex, and is engaged in projects aiming at generating and evaluating primate models of neurological conditions, including Parkinson’s disease. She trained as MD at the University of Bilbao, and after her PhD work at the Autonomous University of Madrid, she did postdoctoral work at Erasmus University (Rotterdam, The Netherlands, with HGJM Kuypers) and Yale University (New Haven, CT, USA, with PS GoldmanRakic). She is currently a Professor at the Autonomous University of Madrid, Medical School. Gonzalo Alvarez-Bolado Anatomy, University of Heidelberg, Embryonic Development of Emotional Circuits Monday, October 20, 09:00-09:30 The prenatal development of the brain is to a large extent under genetic regulation and generates a “scaffolding” for the essential learning processes that occur after birth. This applies also to the emotional brain, which is formed by a number of heterogeneous structures of the central nervous system including neocortical areas, the hippocampus, the preoptic area, amygdala and septum, the hypothalamus, some thalamic nuclei and the “core” and “paracore” regions of the the brainstem. These are interconnected by complex axonal pathways only partially elucidated. Important advances have been made in our understanding of the formation of some portions of this system. The specification of cortical regions (including those involved in the processing of emotions) is starting to be understood even at the most fundamental molecular level. In particular, it is becoming clear how partially overlapping expression of transcription factor genes regulates a limited number of specific enhancers whose activity in turn defines the protodomains that will become the adult regions of the cortex. The genetic control of cell fate acquisition by the nuclei of the “limbic thalamus” is being unraveled as well. Because of its involvement in eating behaviors (which in turn have a strong emotional component), the development of the hypothalamus is the focus of intense research. The outlines are appearing of the regulation of hypothalamic regional specification, its subdivision into domains following a longitudinal axis and the formation of the corresponding hypothalamic nuclei. The field is rich however in unanswered questions. The ontogenesis of other key portions of the emotional brain like the amygdala, the septum and the limbic brainstem is only starting to attract attention. Even more mysterious is the question of how the axonal pathways between the different parts are established. A possible model would be the emergence of thalamo-cortical connections (in the somatosensory system), a dynamic process involving axo- 11 axonal “handshake” interactions and guidepost cells. Circuits labeled by restricted gene expression, like certain amygdalo-hypothalamic projections, offer another possible mechanism for interconnectivity. And classical hypotheses linking pathway formation to neurogenetic birthdate or to specific adhesion molecule combinations have yet to be put to the test systematically in the limbic system. We do not know to which degree our emotional life is pre-established by these ontogenetic mechanisms (nature vs nurture). But since their alteration can bear an effect on adult behavior, research to their elucidation deserves renewed efforts. Gonzalo Alvarez-Bolado, MD, PhD, leads the research group “Gehirnentwicklung” in the Dept. of Neuroanatomy of the University of Heidelberg, Germany. He became an adept of the hypothalamus religion while working as a postdoc with Larry Swanson at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Later he went to work with Peter Gruss in the Max Planck Institute (Göttingen, Germany) to learn how to use molecular genetics to understand neuroanatomy. Ever since then, he and his group generate and analyze mouse mutants to figure out how such a complex structure as the hypothalamus selfassembles. Gert Holstege University of Queensland, Australia, How the emotional motor system controls the pelvic organs Monday, October 20, 09:30-10:00 Micturition (urination), defecation, ejaculation and child delivery can only take place when the individual finds him- or herself in safe circumstances, because such activities are incompatible with fight or fly. For this reason the function of the pelvic organs as bladder, uterus, ovaries, prostate, testicles, and rectum, as well as the pelvic floor muscles, has to be under precise control of the central nervous system. The importance of this control is also shown by patients who suffer from a transection of the thoracic spinal cord, often caused by a traffic accident. These patients suffer more from the inability to control their pelvic organs than from their inability to walk. This presentation is about how pelvic organ control is organized. In simple terms, the pelvic organs spinal relay center (POSRC), a cell group in the sacral cord dorsal horn receives, via the pelvic nerve, information about the situation in the pelvic organs. It forwards this information via long ascending pathways specifically to the central part of the midbrain periaqueductal gray (PAG). The PAG, in turn, has access to the pelvic organ stimulating center (POSC) in the dorsal pontine tegmentum. The POSC, via long descending pathways, maintains direct connections with the parasympathetic motoneurons in the sacral cord. They innervate, via the pelvic nerve, all the pelvic organs and via the pudendal nerve, the pelvic floor muscles. Recent PET-scan studies in humans have shown that the POSC and PFSC are also active during male ejaculation and female orgasm. The PAG not only receives information from the pelvic organs, but also from the brain regions taking part in the emotional motor system (EMS), such as the amygdala, bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, hypothalamus and, especially in humans, the medial orbitofrontal cortex. Via these pathways the EMS controls the pelvic organs. Lesions in these PAG afferent pathways cause urinary and fecal urge-incontinence in the elderly, one of the most awful diseases at present. Gert Holstege, MD, PhD, completed his MD at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, where he continued to work as a neuroscientist with Hans Kuypers. He discovered the “Emotional Motor System”, which controls the general level setting systems, as well as blood pressure, heart rate, breathing and the activities of the pelvic organs such as micturition and sexual behavior. After working in California for the NASA for 3 years, he joined the University of Groningen (Netherlands), where he became a Full Professor of Neuroanatomy, and where he started to study human behavior using PET-scanning. After retirement he holds a position at the University of Queensland (Australia). His main interest focuses on clinical problems concerning pelvic organ control such as urge-incontinence in the elderly and hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD). Coffee Break 10.00-10.30 Marco Celio Anatomy, University of Fribourg, Fribourg (Switzerland) The lateral hypothalamus and the expression of emotions Monday, October 20, 10:30-11:00 The lateral hypothalamus is an extension of the brainstem reticular formation and, as such, it is difficult to subdivide into circumscribed anatomical entities. In the most ventrolateral portion of the lateral hypothalamus, a horizontally orientated chord of parvalbumin-positive neurons, which is surrounded by a cuff of Foxb1expressing neurons, has been identified. The glutamatergic neurons of this PV1-Foxb1 nucleus project predominantly to the periaqueductal gray and to its direct surroundings. Various neuropeptides and receptors are expressed by the neurons of the PV1-Foxb1 nucleus, and gene array- analysis has disclosed it to be the target of an important ascending glycinergic inhibitory input. A direct excitatory projection from the latero-orbital 12 prefrontal cortex sends collaterals to the PV1-Foxb1 nucleus, continue towards the PAG and the rostral brainstem and ends intermingling with terminals deriving from the PV1-Foxb1 nucleus itself. Using the transsynaptic rabies-virus tracing technique, a brain-wide mapping of the afferences of the PV1-Foxb1 nucleus has revealed an extraordinary richness of sources. Preliminary data gleaned from experiments with excitotoxins in rats and chemogenetic approaches in mice indicate that the PV1-Foxb1 nucleus plays a role in the sensation of pain, as well as in the control of blood pressure and vocalization. This recondite portion of the hypothalamus thus appears to be implicated in the expression of emotions and the associated autonomic responses. Marco Celio, MD, is an anatomist at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland). After having spent his postdoctoral fellowship with Wofgang Zenker in Zürich (to study neuroanatomy) and Floyd Bloom at the SalkInstitute in La Jolla (for an introduction into neuroscience), he became anatomy professor in Kiel (Germany) in the former lab of one of the discoverers of Neurosecretion (Wolfgang Bargmann). Since 1989 he continues in Fribourg his research on the use of calcium binding proteins as neuronal markers. The serendipitous observation of a tiny, parvalbumin-positive string of neurons in the ventrolateral hypothalamus lead him to spent two sabbaticals in the lab of Clif Saper, Boston, to study their connectivity. This lateral hypothalamic nucleus and its possible involvement in emotional expression is Marco's main scientific preoccupation. Hari Subramanian University of Queensland, The periaqueductal gray and control of emotional expression Monday, October 20, 11:00-11:15 Short talk The PAG is a critical realy of the limbic brain and determines motor expression of emotions [such as vocalization (speech in humans), laughing, crying, fear and anxiety]. This includes facial modulation, laryngeal, pharyngeal, respiratory and cardiovascular control, and control of autonomic systems that is required for expression of emotions. For this the PAG maintains strong connections to the pre-motor inter-neuronal control circuits located in the caudal brainstem and spinal cord. We previously (references 1-5) have examined the motor expression of emotions and associated autonomic changes that can be produced from various parts of the PAG. However it is not known what type of activity patterns the PAG neurons express in vivo. In this study the PAG was mapped for extracellular neuronal activity within its various subregions in the rat and cat during triggered emotional and autonomic expression in vivo. Electrophysiological characteristics such as burst frequency & adaptation, power & amplitude density, threshold activation constants, inter-spike intervals and the topography of neuronal circuit function was investigated. The PAG was found to be predominantly quiescent in the resting state. Silent PAG cells could be activated by iontophoresis of DL Homocysteic acid (DLH) an excitatory amino acid glutamate agonist. Cells made to fire in this manner ceased activity when either DLH ejection was terminated or by co-iontophoresis of muscimol (GABA agonist). Spontaneoulsy active cells were very few, restricted to the dorsal PAG region and these cells recorded extracellularly typically fired in a slow and irregular pattern. Activation of either behavioural (such as vocalization, fear) and/or autonomic interventions caused immediate activation of PAG neurons mainly in the lateral and ventrolateral PAG. In such instances, lateral and ventrolateral PAG cells showed two distinct types of activity patterns; 1) single spike firing and 2) burst firing, The cells fired both tonically and phasically when correlated with specific autonomic output such as the diaphragm EMG. Predominantly the non-bursting PAG neurons had a near normal distribution around 200 to 250 msec, while burst-firing cells typically showing a bimodal distribution. The functional implications of PAG circuit physiology are discussed in terms of descending motor and autonomic control of emotional expression. 1. Subramanian et al (2008). Journal of Neuroscience. 28(47):12274-12283. 2. Subramanian & Holstege (2009). Journal of Neuroscience, 29(12): 3824-32. 3. Subramanian & Holstege G (2011). Journal of Neurophysiology. 105(6): 2852-62. 4. Subramanian (2013). Journal of Physiology, 591:109-22. 5. Subramanian & Holstege (2013). Journal of Comparative Neurology: 521(13):3083-98. Elise Wattendorf Anatomy and Program in Neuroscience, University of Fribourg, Fribourg Hypothalamic involvement in laughter and related anticipatory processes Monday, October 20, 11:15-11:30 Short talk Anticipation of tickling is intimately related to the ensuing laughter reaction. A similar sensory related network is known to be activated before just as during the stimulation itself, presumably to increase accuracy and speed of the behavioral response. Yet, concerning the motor control of laughter, only brain regions related to real-time processing are known. Here, the midbrain periaqueductal gray (PAG) acts as coordination center and receives input from limbic related regions such as the hypothalamus and the basal ganglia. Our previous 13 functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) study confirmed involvement of these brain regions during laughter. A new imaging study was designed to investigate the sequence of neuronal processes related to ticklish laughter, in particular emotional and motor-related processes preceding the vocalization. Our data reveal that increasing duration of anticipation is related to higher activity in the anterior insula, the nucleus accumbens and the lateral posterior hypothalamus. Real somatosensory stimulation activates middle and posterior parts of the insula, the putamen, the lateral, posterior hypothalamus and the periaqueductal gray (PAG). On the one hand, expectation of the sensory stimulation involves neuronal processes related to subjective emotional appraisal. On the other hand, activity related to true tickling confirms existing data which point to a pivotal function of the hypothalamus and the PAG during expression of positive emotions. Consistent with its potential in connecting emotional with motor related processes during the preparation of ticklish laughter, hypothalamic activity comprises both the anticipatory and stimulation related periods of time. Henry Evrard Max Planck Institut for Biological Kybernetik, Tübingen, Germany Organization of the primate insular cortex Monday, October 20, 11:30-11:45 Short talk We combine neuroanatomical, functional, and comparative approaches to investigate the organization of the primate insula. Cyto- and myelo-architectonic examinations in the macaque monkey showed that the classical granular, dysgranular and agranular sectors of the insula are subdivided into respectively 4, 4, and 7 consistent and sharply delimited areas. Two granular areas, ‘Idfp’ and ‘Idfa’, form a continuous longitudinal strip in the fundus of the superior limiting sulcus of the insula (SLS); they constitute together the ‘primary interoceptive cortex’. Functional imaging combined with tracer injection in the loci of BOLD signal confirmed that Idfp is consistently activated by graded innocuous and noxious temperatures and receives specific and topographically organized thalamocortical projections from the posterior part of the ventromedial thalamic nucleus (VMpo). Injections in Idfa revealed largely segregated projections from the basal part of the ventromedial nucleus (VMb) suggesting separate representations of distinct food-related and taste activities. The dysgranular areas ventral to the SLS contain subtle architectonic ‘modules’ arrayed in distinct longitudinal strips parallel to the SLS. Ongoing tracing experiments indicate that each module has a distinct set of neuronal connections and suggest the existence of a vertical granular-to-dysgranular integration of the interoceptive afferents of Idfp and Idfa with salient proprioceptive, environmental and limbic inputs from the rest of the brain across the dysgranular modules. Large tracer injections covering the agranular areas produced dense retrograde labeling in the dysgranular areas, suggesting dysgranular-to-agranular projections that could be necessary for generating coherent homeostatic emotions. One agranular area, ‘Ial’, specifically contains the von Economo neuron (VEN) and its fork cell companion (renamed “fork neuron”, FN). Tracer injections in the brainstem showed that both cells project to specific periaqueductal gray (PAG) columns and could provide a sensory feedback complement to the efferent projections of the cingulate cortex to PAG. A comparison of the areal distribution of the VEN in monkeys and humans indicate that the human VEN occurs in a disproportionately larger region and within more than one architectonic area, consistent with recent evidence that the human anterior insula developed disproportionally more than the rest of the insula and the brain. Although there is no direct anatomical and functional homolog of the human anterior and mid insula in the macaque monkey, the present findings could provide major clues on the basic principles of organization of a brain region that uniquely evolved in humans to engender subjective awareness of feelings. Lunch 12.30 – 13.45 Neurophysiology: Chair W. Schultz Wolfram Schultz University of Cambridge, Cambridge Reward, learning and choices Monday, October 20, 14:00-14:30 Rewards can be conceptualised as probability distributions of value, which offers a formal approach to the study of value and risk. Key parameters defining probability distributions are expected value and standard deviation (risk). Thus value and risk are fundamental reward characteristics and important variables for economic decision making. We will show that the dopamine reward signal codes the subjective value for the individual decision maker rather than objective (physical) value in temporal discounting and other behavioural situations. The second moment of reward probability distributions, standard deviation, is a good measure of economic risk. Monkeys are risk seeking with the usually employed, small rewards but show risk neutrality and even risk avoidance with higher volumes. Indeed, dopamine neurons and neurons in orbitofrontal cortex code risk, separately from value. Humans show prefrontal risk 14 signals that reflect individual risk attitudes and affect value signals according to basic concepts of economic utility theory. Amygdala reward signals comply with the most basic requirement for learning (contingency), show systematic variations with the instantaneous probability of expected rewards and predict economic choices in save-spend decisions. Our social studies on interacting monkeys identify neuronal reward observation and agency signals. Wolfram Schultz graduated in medicine from the University of Heidelberg and did postdoctoral training in Germany, the US and Sweden. He was a Professor of Neurophysiology at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland and moved to the University of Cambridge, where he is Welcome Trust Principal Research Fellow and Professor of Neuroscience. He studies the brain's reward system, including dopamine neurons, using neurophysiology in behavioural tasks informed by animal learning theory and economic decision theory. Ralph Adolphs California Institute of Technology, Pasadena Single-unit recordings of emotion in the human brain Monday, October 20, 14:30-15:00 Emotions can be thought of as internal states with specific functional properties. Those functional properties are reflected in neurophysiological measures. I will review work by our group on single-unit recordings from the human amygdala, relate these findings to lesion and fMRI studies, and also to abnormal emotion processing in autism. I will conclude with a framework for how to operationalize and study emotions. Single-unit recordings can be obtained from the amygdala in neurosurgical patients who are being monitored for epilepsy surgery. We have found robust neuronal responses to faces that express specific emotions, and in particular to those regions of the face that are the most informative about the emotion (the eyes and the mouth). Amygdala neurons track the subjective judgment of the emotion, rather than the objective emotion displayed on the stimulus. These findings fit with data from patients who have amygdala lesions, and who are impaired in both the recognition of, and the subjective experience of emotions—particularly fear. The findings also fit with some of the deficits seen in people with autism. We recently found that single neurons within the amygdala of patients with autism fail to encode information about the eye regions of faces. Finally, all these studies raise the challenge of how to operationalize “emotions” so that they can be studied scientifically. I suggest we separate the functional characteristics of emotions from their subjective experience, and aim towards functional criteria that could be used to study emotions across different animal species. Ralph Adolphs received his PhD in neurobiology from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), working on the auditory system of owls. He then did a postdoc with Antonio Damasio at the University of Iowa, conducting cognitive neuroscience studies in lesion patients. In 2004 he returned to Caltech, where he now holds the Bren Professorship of Psychology and Neuroscience and directs a Conte Center on the Neurobiology of Social Decision-Making. His research focuses on social neuroscience, and includes studies of lesion patients and people with autism in order to understand how the brain generates social behavior. He lives with his wife and two cats close to Caltech and likes running in the mountains, eating good food, and drinking good beer. Angela Roberts Department of Physiology, Development & Neuroscience, Cambridge, UK Prefrontal contribution to the regulation of positive and negative emotional states Monday, October 20, 15:00-15:30 Emotional states can be elicited as a consequence of the cognitive appraisal of motivationally relevant stimuli in the external world. They can be considered as the product of changes across a wide range of output pathways including behavioural, autonomic and endocrine. Whilst there has been considerable investigation into the neurobiological mechanisms underlying the processing of reward and punishment and their effects on the observed behaviour and decision making of animals, less attention has been paid to the other physiological aspects of the emotional state. To address this issue we have developed a program of investigation into the regulation of both positive and negative emotional states in the marmoset monkey measuring behavioural and cardiovascular responses to positive and aversive Pavlovian conditioned stimuli. Focussing on the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) we have shown that anterior regions of medial OFC (area 11) are important in regulating both appetitive and aversive conditioned emotional responses and that localised excitotoxic lesions of this region cause a fractionation of the emotional response. In a conflict decision making task, which pits punishment against reward, comparison of the contribution of the antOFC with another region that has been implicated in the regulation of emotional states, the ventrolateral PFC (area 12/47), reveals the dissociable contribution of these two regions to the decision making process. Angela Roberts is Professor of Behavioral Neuroscience in the Departement of Physiology, Development and 15 Neuroscience (PDN) at the University of Cambridge, where she is the scientific director of the marmoset brain research center. After graduating in Neurobiology in the University of Sussex, she received a PhD in Neuroendocrinology at the University of Cambridge, where she became specialized in primate behavioral neuroscience. Her main research interests are the executive control functions of the prefrontal cortex and related brain structures such as the basal ganglia and the amygdala. Current work in her lab aims to identify the neural circuits that are dysregulated in anxiety and mood disorders as well as obsessive compulsive disorders. Coffee Break 15.30-16.00 Steve Kennerley Soberly Dept. of Motor Neuroscience, University College, London Deciding how to decide: the role of the prefrontal cortex Monday, October 20, 16:00-16:30 We have known since the case of Phineas Gage in 1848 that regions of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) are essential for emotion, decision-making and goal-directed behavior. Over the past 15 years, results from human neuroimaging and animal electrophysiology studies have all highlighted that a set of PFC areas – the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), dorsolateral PFC (DLPFC), orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and ventromedial PFC (VMPFC) – are modulated by reward and/or decision-making tasks. Yet what remains relatively elusive is a neural signature of “how” each PFC area contributes to decision-making. Recent lesion studies provide some insight into this issue: ACC lesions cause deficits in action based decision making, whereas OFC lesions disrupt stimulus based decision making. This suggests neurons within different PFC subregions may represent relevant decision attributes in different value reference frames. Further, optimal decision-making often requires a decision about what information to use to compare decision alternatives. Here I will discuss recent electrophysiological results obtained while subjects gathered information in a sequential multi-attribute decision making task. On every trial, subjects were presented with decisions between two options (left/right), each comprising two pictures associated with the reward probability and size of the option. On some trials, we controlled the order in which information was presented, allowing us to constrain whether an option (left vs right) or attribute (reward probability vs magnitude) comparison could be made. Subjects were free to view the cues as they were presented, thus eye movements provided a proxy for the information gathering strategies influencing decisionmaking. A normative dynamic programming approach was used to derive the optimal information gathering strategy. When the first picture was attended, a significant proportion of neurons throughout all four of the aforementioned PFC areas encoded its value. However, neurons in ACC and DLPFC differentially encoded cue value based on an action reference frame, while OFC neurons differentially encoded cue value based on the decision attribute, replicating the lesionbased double dissociation between these two regions. As more information was obtained, value signals evolved from encoding the value of what was currently attended to what would be eventually chosen. By utilizing the natural dynamics of the information gathering and choice strategies, we provide evidence of “how” different PFC subpopulations make simultaneous (but specialized) contributions to value computation and comparison. Steve Kennerley is a Senior Lecturer in the Sobell Department of Motor Neuroscience at University College London (UCL). His research focuses on understanding the neuronal mechanisms underlying reinforcement learning, decision-making and action selection. His PhD work with Prof. Matthew Rushworth (Oxford) used interference techniques (TMS, lesion studies) to establish the essential role of different medial frontal regions in these processes. His post-doc with Prof. Jonathan Wallis (Berkeley) described the functional specialization of neurons in different prefrontal cortex (PFC) regions during working memory and decision making tasks. His current research explores the neural basis of model-based versus modelfree reinforcement learning, in addition to his ongoing work describing the types of neural computations performed by different PFC regions during the evolution of a decision process. Igor Kagan Deutsches Primatenzentrum, Göttingen Integration of reward, effort and risk in decisionmaking Monday, October 20, 16:30-17:00 Decision-making often involves weighing the benefits (e.g. reward) and costs (e.g. effort) of several options. Humans and animals generally avoid effortful actions when a similarly rewarded low-effort option is available, but are willing to expend more effort to attain a higher gain. Additionally, the subjective value of the options can be modulated by the attitude to the outcome uncertainty. It has been shown that monkeys exhibit riskseeking behavior when making choices with low-effort eye movements. We studied the integration of effort and risk variables in the arm reaching task entailing different levels of effort and reward. Similarly to eye movements, monkeys showed risk-seeking behavior in the reaching task, preferring a risky gamble over a certain option even when the expected value of a certain option was higher. 16 However, monkeys were much more willing to gamble with low-effort as compared to high-effort actions, suggesting that the effort diminishes the risk-seeking behavior. To understand how different decision variables are represented in the neural circuitry, we are perturbing activity in specific brain regions and establishing a causal link between changes in neuronal patterns and behavior. Here I will focus on reversible pharmacological inactivation and electrical microstimulation of the thalamic pulvinar, an area that might be involved in the integration of visuomotor contingencies. I will show how the suppression or the enhancement of pulvinar activity affects choice behavior, and hypothesize on the contribution of the pulvinar to goal-directed actions. Igor Kagan leads the Decision and Awareness Group at the German Primate Center in Goettingen. He obtained his PhD from the Israel Institute of Technology and Harvard Medical School, working on neurophysiology of active vision in primates. During a postdoc in the Richard Andersen Lab at Caltech he developed fMRI techniques to study spatial decision-making in behaving monkeys, in combination with inactivation and electrophysiology. His main research interests are interhemispheric and thalamocortical mechanisms of value- and effort-based decisions, and the cross-species comparison between humans and monkeys. Sarah Garfinkel Sackler Center for Consciousness, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK Embodied emotions: cardiovascular coupling with emotion types Monday, October 20, 17:00-17:20 20’ talk Emotion and cognition are dynamically coupled to bodily arousal. The physiological dimension to emotional processing is widely recognised, yet relatively poorly understood mechanistically. Using a combination of neuroimaging, autonomic monitoring and affective psychological challenges in patients and healthy individuals we are characterising the neural processes that link visceral function and mental state, which suggest both emotion-specific interactions and important individual differences. The present focus of our research is on the expression and attenuation of anxiety, the role of cardiovascular responses on the processing of threat and safety signals and the physiological expression and behavioural impact of relaxation states and anger. One experimental strategy to assess how bodily arousal influences cognitive and emotional processes is to capitalize on naturally-occurring bodily fluctuations, notably cardiovascular rhythmicity. In the cardiac cycle, the strength and timing of individual heartbeats is encoded by bursts of afferent neural activity from arterial baroreceptors to brainstem during systole (ventricular ejection period). Emotional feelings, notably anxiety, may be intensified by feedback regarding the state of cardiovascular arousal. By exploiting heart timing to tap into this afferent cardiac feedback pathway, we have shown that fear processing is accentuated by concurrent baroreceptor activation in both healthy controls and phobic patients. These effects have implications for fear extinction and anxiety management and are mediated within the brain by amygdala. Anger represents an approach, rather than withdrawal, emotion, often facilitating action. We show that subliminal presentation of anger stimuli raises blood pressure and increases performance accuracy on a perceptual decision-making task, yet impair reaction time measures of performance on a semantic/lexical decision-making task where relaxation states facilitated performance. During this lexical decision-making task, subliminal processing of anger, and its expression as blood pressure elevation, were associated with enhanced activity within pons and amygdala, yet there was widespread attenuation of activity across occipital, parietal and frontal cortices. These studies extend work we conducted investigating the networks involved in positive and negative selfgenerated thoughts, where individual differences in emotional temperament modulated the networks support positive and negative thinking as function of focus in time. Our experimental findings illustrate the value of integrating physiological and neuroimaging techniques in affective neuroscience and highlight bidirectional coupling of cognitive and autonomic responses in emotion. We are now characterising clinical relevance and potential application of these phenomena. Urs Albrecht Biochemistry, University of Fribourg, Fribourg Circadian clock in mood related behaviors Monday, October 20, 17:20-17:35 Short talk The circadian clock has been implicated in addiction and several forms of depression. However, the molecular mechanisms involving the circadian clock in these processes are not known. Because dopamine may play an important role, we analyzed the murine promoters of genes encoding key enzymes important in dopamine metabolism. We find that transcription of the monoamine oxidase A (Maoa) promoter is regulated by the clock components Bmal1, Npas2 and Per2. A mutation in the clock gene Per2 in mice leads to reduced expression and activity of MAOA in the mesolimbic dopaminergic system, a reward circuit involved in addiction and depression. Furthermore, we observe increased levels of dopamine and altered neuronal activity in the striatum, leading to behavioral alterations in Per2 mutant mice in despair- 17 based tests. These findings indicate a role of circadian clock components in dopamine metabolism highlighting a role of the clock in regulating mood related behaviors. Kallia Apazoglou LABNIC, Campus Biotech, Geneva, CH Reversal Olfactory Learning Monday, October 20, 17:35-17:50 Short talk We use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in order to determine how and to what extend olfactory stimuli i) affect cognitive procedures and ii) are affected by mood. In our study we deliver an olfactory stimulus as the outcome of a chosen visual stimulus in order to induce associative learning in humans. The design consists of three abstract photos (fractals) among which the individual is forced to choose one. An odour is delivered after a 5sec delay according to a probabilistic association of the chosen photo with one of three possible groups of odours. The participant has to explore and learn successive associations for each visual stimulus in order to receive a group of odours he prefers or to avoid a group that he dislikes. By using different combinations of odours, initial associative learning and subsequent reversal are examined when driven by the selection of a liked odor or avoidance of a disliked odor or both. Model-based fMRI analyses are performed by taking into account predictive values and errors calculated by a computational model of reward/avoidance-based learning. Results highlight both common and partly distinct brain circuits for learning from liked and disliked odors, including differential recruitment of affective and salience networks encompassing the amygdala, hippocampus, striatum, insula, and anterior cingulate cortex. Poster Session and Drinks 18.00 – 19.30 Dinner 19.30 – 21.00 18 TUESDAY, OCTOBER 21 Neurology: Chair C. Bassetti Clif Saper Neurology, Harvard Medical School Circuitry producing cataplexy in response to positive emotions Tuesday, October 21, 08:30-09:00 Since the early descriptions by Gelineau in the 1870’s and Kinnier Wilson in the 1920’s, it has been recognized that cataplexy is a pathognomic sign of narcolepsy. The sudden onset of paralysis most commonly occurs during a positive emotion, most commonly laughter, but sometimes eating or during sexual behavior. The relationship between the two has long been a mystery. Our laboratory recently identified a set of REM sleepactive glutamatergic neurons in the sublaterodorsal area of the pons which have direct projections to the ventromedial medulla and the spinal cord, where they contact GABA and/or glycine containing neurons. The latter are thought to inhibit alpha-motor neurons in the spinal cord, producing atonia during REM sleep. We also found GABAergic inputs to these neurons from a REM-off region in the ventrolateral periaqueductal gray matter and adjacent lateral pontine tegmentum , where inhibition of the neurons causes increased REM sleep and episodes of cataplexy. This REM-off region, in turn, receives intense input from the orexin-hypocretin neurons in the lateral hypothalamus, whose loss causes narcolepsy. We have posited that it there may be inhibitory inputs to the ventrolateral periaqueductal gray region from forebrain sites that are activated during strong positive emotions. This input would cause the “weak in the knees” feeling that some people experience during intense laughter, but could not cause full cataplexy because the same emotions would activate orexin neurons, which excite the REM-off neurons and prevent atonia. However, in individuals lacking orexin neurons, the inhibition of the REM-off neurons during positive emotions would be unopposed and could cause cataplexy. To test this hypothesis, we looked for a positive experience in mice that would cause intense cataplexy. We found that consumption of chocolate caused eight times as much cataplexy as usual in orexin-knockout mice. We then looked at cFos expression in the brains of those animals, and found that there was particularly intense expression in the medial prefrontal cortex and the central nucleus of the amygdala, and that this cFos expression correlated with the number of minutes spent in cataleptic attacks. We then disabled each of these structures in turn, and found that the amount of cataplexy induced by chocolate was diminished in each case. Our findings implicate the medial prefrontal cortex and the central nucleus of the amygdala as sites in the forebrain that may process positive emotions that result in mild muscle weakness in intact individuals and in cataplexy in narcoleptics who have lost their orexin neurons. Clifford Saper, MD, is the James Jackson Putnam Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School and the Chairman of the Department of Neurology at BIDMC. The focus of the Saper laboratory is on the integrated functions maintained by the hypothalamus. These include regulation of wake-sleep cycles, body temperature, and feeding. These functions interact with one another extensively, and all three are driven by homeostatic mechanisms as well as by circadian influences. We also are interested in determining the homologous circuitry in human brains, and in determining how it may be disrupted in specific neurological and psychiatric disorders. Christian Lüscher Depts. of Basic and Clinical Neurosciences, University of Geneva, Geneva Recovering from too strong reward: towards a synaptic model of addiction Tuesday, October 21, 09:00-09:30 Dopamine neurons of the ventral tegmental area (VTA) code for the prediction error of reward. While this activity is transient (typically lasting less than 100 ms), it has a strong impact on learning. Addictive drugs on the other hand activate the mesolimbic system for tens of minutes. We therefore searched for synaptic traces after such strong stimulation and how they relate to adaptive behavior. We show that starting with the first dose, addictive drugs evoke various forms of synaptic plasticity of glutamate and GABA transmission in the VTA and the nucleus accumbens and causally relate them to adaptjve behavior. We also show that selective, optogenetic self-stimulation of VTA DA neurons is sufficient to cause drug-evoked synaptic plasticity and adaptive behavior. Our observations converge on a unifying hypothesis of addiction as a behavioral disease of pathological synaptic transmission. Christian Lüscher, MD, is full professor of Neuroscience at the University of Geneva, Switzerland and a clinical neurologist at the Geneva University Hospital. His main research topic is the cellular mechanisms that underlie drug reinforcement and addiction. His aim is to establish links of causality between the synaptic changes and adaptive behavior, to design in vivo stimulation protocols to reverse drug-evoked plasticity to abolish drugadapative behavior. 19 Patrik Vuilleumier Neurology, University of Geneva, Brain systems underlying the perception, representation, and control of different types of emotions Tuesday, October 21, 09:30-10:00 Emotions do not only serve to assign a particular value to objects or events forming the content of consciousness, but can directly influence perception and thus shape the content of consciousness and action. The talk will describe brain mechanisms by which positive or negative emotional episodes can differentially influence mental states and cognitive functions in a sustained manner, over prolonged period of time following the emotion eliciting events. In particular, functional neuroimaging studies in healthy people and psychiatric patients demonstrate lasting changes in activity and functional connectivity of brain networks following transient emotions, which are strongly modulated by individual affective traits or personality factors. These findings have implications for better understanding and assessing changes in brain function associated with mood and anxiety disorders. Patrik Vuilleumier, professor at Neurology Service, University Hospitals of Geneva is a neurologist who is using brain imaging techniques (such as functional resonance magnetic imaging, fMRI) to study the cerebral mechanisms of emotion and awareness. He pursued his research in cognitive neurosciences at the University of California in Davis and then at University College London. His current research investigates neural circuits in the human brain enabling emotion signals to influence perception and guide behavior, as well as the effect of brain lesions on emotion processes and consciousness and disturbances associated with psychiatric diseases. Coffee Break 10.00-10.30 Claudio Bassetti Neurology, University of Berne, Berne The neurology of laughter Tuesday, October 21, 10:30-11:00 While the biological significance of laughter and humour remains controversial, the brain structures involved in the production of laughter are relatively well known. The first studies of Duchenne de Boulogne and Darwin investigating the motor correlates and the evolutional aspects of laughter, respectively, were followed in the last 150 years by studies elucidating the neuroanatomy, the neurophysiology and the neurochemistry of the so-called laughter-network in normal subjects. Until recently, however, only few studies analyzed the changes of laughter in neurological patients. The following conditions are known: - Laughing as trigger of cataplexy (geloplexia). - Laughter as cause of syncope (“Lachschlag” or gelastic syncope) - Laughing as an epileptic manifestation (gelastic seizure) - Laughing as a manifestation of REM sleep behaviour disorder (hypnogely) - Abnormal and excessive laughing in the context of a lesion of pyramidal pathways(pseudobulbar affect), sometimes as the first manifestation of stroke (fou rire prodromique) - Excessive laughing as a manifestation of a frontal lobe dysfunction (emotional incontinence) - Excessive laughter in genetic disorders (Angelman’s or “happy puppet” syndrome) - Laughter-like vocalizations in the context to aphasia - Dissociation between voluntary and emotional laughter - Laughter (with and without emotion/mirth) following brain stimulation The study of laughter in brain disorders has clinical implications, expands our knowledge on this behavior and raises new questions about the brain mechanisms for normal laughter. Prof. Claudio Bassetti received his MD degree from the University of Basel in 1984 and was trained in neurology in Bern and Lausanne. He performed two research fellowships in basic neurophysiology (Basel, 1985-1986) and sleep medicine (Ann Arbor-Michigan, USA, 1995-6). In 2000 he was appointed professor of neurology at the university of Zurich and director of the neurological outpatient clinics of the university hospital. In 2009 he founded the neurocenter of Southern Switzerland in Lugano which he directed until 2012. Since 2012 he is full professor of neurology at the university of Bern and director of the neurology department at the university hospital. His topics of interest include general neurology, sleep, stroke, movement disorders, and translational/animal research. René Müri Neurology, University of Berne, Berne, Switzerland The neurology of facial and emotional expression Tuesday, October 21, 11:00-11:20 20’ talk Speech, gestures, and facial expressions play a crucial role in human communication. Facial expressions are produced by the innervation of a set of 17 paired mimetic muscles. They are the result of complex stereotyped movements of facial muscles due to contraction in certain combination. Facial expressions are both under volitional and automatic control. Some facial expressions are 20 believed to represent innate and automatic behavior patterns. Facial expressions are also fundamental to one’s sense of well-being and ability to integrate into a social network. Facial expressions are affected by many neurological disorders ranging from peripheral affection of the facial nerve to affections of the brainstem, basal ganglia, and cortex. Dissociations between volitional and emotional facial expressions after various brain lesions suggest also different cerebral influences which descend onto the final common pathway of facial innervation. Furthermore, there are hemispheric asymmetries in the control of facial expression. As a consequence of reduced or distorted facial expression, patients may have a relevant handicap in their interpersonal communication and social life. In addition, such patients may also have impairment of facial expression recognition and interpretation. In my presentation I will discuss the anatomy and neurophysiology of human facial expression in healthy subjects and the consequences for the patients with neurological disorders affecting facial and emotional expression. René Müri, MD, is associate professor of Neurology at the University of Bern Switzerland. He studied medicine and in 1997 he received the Venia Docendi for neurology. He was research fellow at the Salpêtrière-hospital, Paris, France. As researcher, he is investigating the relationships between normal and deficient attention, perception, memory and language functions after brain lesions. He works on developing new non-invasive brain stimulation methods and techniques to improve neuro-rehabilitation. recorded their EEG activity. Participants were first presented with a cue indicative of wins or loses on upcoming trial, followed by feedback as to whether or not they were successful in the task. An unbiased analysis of the entire dataset of the event-related potentials (ERPs), time-locked to the feedback revealed two distinct time points of group differences. Results: Both patient groups had reduced amplitude of the early ERP component (around 160ms) compared to controls, suggesting blunted, initial response to reward content. Around 250ms, recordings from patients showed a clear ERP which was higher in PD compared to NC independent of reward magnitude and valence, but absent in controls. This second potential corresponds well to the classic feedback-related negativity (FRN) ERP which is thought to reflect reward prediction error signaling due to increased mismatch between reward expectation and outcome in the patients. An increased FRN thus indicate increased mismatch between reward expectation and outcome, predominantly in PD patients. The intermediate FRN response in NC indicates that those patients are able to form better reward expectations than the PD patients despite similar alterations to early reward feedback processing. Conclusion: Increased neural response in NC patients to all feedbacks independently of their valence is consistent with the intriguing clinical observation that cataplexy is triggered by both positive and negative emotions, but rather consistently by mere surprise. We conclude that impairment to dopaminergic function leads directly to false prediction errors while HCRT disruption will lead to the same type of errors, yet to a lesser degree, either by modulating dopaminergic functioning through its direct connections or indirect mesolimbic pathways. Ramin Khatami Clinic Barmelweid, Aaarau, The role of dopamine and hypocretin in cataplexy. Tuesday, October 21, 11:20-11:35 Short talk The roles of dopamine and hypocretin in reward processing: clues to the pathophysiology of cataplexy Background: Positive emotions and surprise are the main triggers for cataplexy, a transient loss of muscle tone in patients with narcolepsy-cataplexy (NC). NC is a chronic sleep wake disorder caused by deficient hypocretin signalling. The proper functioning of the mesolimbic reward system is largely dependent on the interaction of hypocretin (HCRT) and dopamine system. In this experiment we used high-density EEG during anticipation and feedback of reward to better understand the temporal dynamics and the various hypocretinergic and dopaminergic contributions of reward system. Methods: Twelve patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD), dopamine deficient, as well as 12 HCRT deficient narcolepsycataplexy (NC) patients and 12 healthy controls, performed a game-like task while 125 scalp electrodes Jean-Marie Annoni Neurology, University of Fribourg, Fribourg (Switzerland) Decision making in multiple sclerosis Tuesday, October 21, 11:35-11:50 Short talk Decision making (DM) is an important function in everyday behavior. Studies have initially focused on DM under ambiguous conditions (i.e., where the risk associated with a choice is not explicitly given) by using the Iowa Gambling Task. Performances of multiple sclerosis (MS) patients at the Iowa Gambling task (which simulates ecological DM by testing the ability of a subject or a patient to learn to favor long-term gains) are defective in relapsing-remitting and progressive MS. While DM can be preserved in very early patients, we found by means of a two-year follow-up study that these abilities rapidly declined over time, independently of other disease-evolution markers. Recent data concerning the impact of MS on tasks evaluating DM under explicit risk conditions (in which decisions have to be made in the 21 presence of explicit information about the potential consequences of the choice). The quality of DM under explicit risk was modified by MS in both tasks. The reduction in the expression of regret resembles previous results observed after orbitofrontal lesions, but coexisted with an absence of risk taking and an increased risk aversion. We also found that MS patients express or describe less emotions (particularly negative) in such tasks than control. Such results suggest that MS may modify the quality of DM by decreasing implicit and explicit response. Lunch 12.30 – 13.45 Excursion to the three Castles in Bellinzona, typical dinner and Teatro « Dimitri » in Verscio 22 WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 22 Social Neurosciences: Chair T. Singer Tania Singer Max Planck Institute, Leipzig From Empathy to Compassion and their Plasticity Wednesday, October 22, 08:30-09:00 Emerging fields such as the social, affective and cognitive neurosciences have focused on the questions of how people relate to and understand each other. Hereby, the ability for cognitive perspective taking is differentiated from concepts of emotion contagion, empathy, and compassion; the former represents a cognitive route to the understanding of others, the latter a motivational and affective route. Recently, social neurosciences have started to investigate the plasticity of the social brain as well as the trainability of social emotions such as empathy and compassion and its effects on changes in brain functions associated with changes in subjective well-being, pro-social behavior, and health. After a review of recent psychological and neuroscientific findings on the effects of mental training on the brain, subjective experience and behavior, I will provide empirical evidence for socio-affective brain plasticity after mental training of empathy or compassion. While empathy training enhanced negative affect and activation in brain networks associated with suffering, compassion training resulted in an increase of positive affect and activation in brain networks associated to affiliation and care. More importantly, the latter also enhanced prosocial behavior. Finally, I will introduce the ReSource Project, a large-scale multi-disciplinary and methodological one-year secular mental training program with more than 180 participants that aims at the daily cultivation of interoceptive awareness, perspective taking, empathy and compassion as well as prosocial motivation and behavior. First results of this large-scale, multi-method study will be presented and their implication for clinical science and society in general will be discussed. Tania Singer is a neuroscientist and psychologist and director of the department for social neuroscience at the Max Planck Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig and professor at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Her main scientific interests are the investigation of neuronal, behavioral and hormonal processes underlying human social cognition and behavior. She is particularly interested in the neuronal correlates of empathy and compassion and how such social emotions can foster human cooperation. She is presently running a large-scale mental training study to investigate the plasticity of the social brain and its effects on subjective well-being, stress, health and prosocial behavior. Furthermore, she is involved in applying her research to the development of new economic models to move towards a more caring economy. Dean Mobbs Columbia University, N.Y. The neural basis of social motivators Wednesday, October 22, 09:00-09:30 Evolutionary biologists have long known that animals will favor helping those who are genetically-related (kinselection theory) or reciprocate fitness enhancing behaviors (reciprocal altruism). Several studies conducted on humans have supported these universal rules showing that similarity to others can influence how we perceive and interact with them. In my talk, I first discuss the evolutionary importance of group living and propose three core social drives that need to be satisfied for group living to be successful. These three broad social drives which include Mutualism, Affiliation and StatusSeeking (MASS drives) have evolved to preserve or enhance group living: (i) Mutualism involves cooperation, reciprocity, trust, and fairness; (ii) Affiliation includes assimilation and belonging where one aims to fit into the group through adhering to group ideologies, forming group allegiances including group pride and selective bonding where strong ties and loyalty are formed with a small coalition of friends and kin. Orthogonal to these drives is (iii) Status-Seeking where the goal is to essentially build one’s value and control in the group and achieve differential access to mates and other resources. Fitting with this theory, I will discuss several studies showing that the need to affiliate results in vicarious reward when we perceive others to be similar ourselves and how moral behavior is driven by similarity. We also attempt to show that these affiliation drives are underpinned by the selfish motives of status seeking where it is only rewarding to see others be successful, when the rewards are self-relevant (i.e. reflected glory) and that (iv) competition results in a failure to affiliate, resulting in joy at seeing others fail (i.e. schadenfreude). Dean Mobbs is assistant professor at the Columbia University, Department of Psychology. His general area of research is Social and Affective Neuroscience, Neuroecology and Neurophilosophy. Currently he endeavors to understand the central determinants of human emotional experience and employs brain imaging (e.g. fMRI) and behavioural techniques to examine the neurobiological systems that coordinate fear in humans. His theoretical stance rests on the long-standing view that fear is an evolutionarily favorable response, whereby increasingly unambiguous threat leads to a cascade of defensive responses that can be dichotomized as slow 23 thoughtful actions vs. fast instinctive reactions. A second stream of research aims to determine the neural proxies that underlie social cognition. He is currently pursuing questions of how social behavior orchestrates and shapes emotion and how such operations are variably disrupted in psychiatric disorders. Adam Guastella University of Sidney, Sidney, Australia Oxytocin and the social brain Wednesday, October 22, 09:30-10:00 The neuropeptide oxytocin has been shown to have a critical role in social behaviour. Its use has been suggested to potentially awaken the social brain in psychiatric disorders. This talk will provide a series of randomized controlled studies across psychiatric populations conducted by the author’s team to improve social function, including applications in young children with autism as young as 3, into adults with severe addictions. The outcomes of these trials will be presented, with some suggesting support for the potential of oxytocin as a treatment for social impairments. Adam Guastella is a Principle Research Fellow at the Brain & Mind Research Institute at the University of Sydney. His primary interest is in developing novel treatments to improve social functioning in young patients with mental health problems. This research has led him to study social cognition and social anxiety in patients presenting with a range of mental illnesses (anxiety, autism, psychosis, substance dependence). He was one of the first to show that oxytocin enhances emotion understanding in young people with autism. Currently he is evaluating whether oxytocin can be used to treat a range of mental health problems that are primarily associated with a difficulty in developing social-relationships. This research advances our basic understanding for evolutionary and biosocial theories of bonding and attachment in humans and may lead an exciting new treatment approach for mental health problems. Coffee Break 10.00-10.30 Ralph Adolphs California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA Attending to the social world Wednesday, October 22, 10:30-11:00 Social stimuli matter to us: they are salient. Even newborns already attend to faces. What factors make a stimulus socially salient, and how does the brain encode this? I will address this broad issue with two studies that all involve a disorder in which social saliency is not processed typically, autism spectrum disorder. In the first set of studies I will present comparisons between three intriguing clinical populations: autism, neurological patients with bilateral amygdala lesions, and people born without a corpus callosum (the fibers that connect the left and right hemispheres of the brain). Each of these disorders share impairments in social functioning. Amygdala lesions and autism both feature impaired ability to attend to faces. People born without a corpus callosum often meet a diagnosis of autism. Taken together the comparisons across these populations suggest that the amygdala may encode what is socially salient, and that communication between left and right brain hemispheres is essential for higher-order social cognition. The social disabilities in autism may thus arise, in at least in part, through dysfunction of the amygdala, and through abnormal brain connectivity. Ralph Adolphs received his PhD in neurobiology from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), working on the auditory system of owls. He then did a postdoc with Antonio Damasio at the University of Iowa, conducting cognitive neuroscience studies in lesion patients. In 2004 he returned to Caltech, where he now holds the Bren Professorship of Psychology and Neuroscience and directs a Conte Center on the Neurobiology of Social Decision-Making. His research focuses on social neuroscience, and includes studies of lesion patients and people with autism in order to understand how the brain generates social behavior. He lives with his wife and two cats close to Caltech and likes running in the mountains, eating good food, and drinking good beer. Glenn Fox University of Southern California, Los Angeles (USA) Neural correlates of gratitude Wednesday, October 22, 11:00-11:20 20’ talk When we are the beneficiaries of good human conduct, we experience a concert of positive emotions ranging from relief to elation. These emotions can in turn motivate us to expend great sums of energy to reward those near the source of the good conduct. Thus creating a virtuous cycle fueled by the emotion of gratitude. As a topic of philosophical inquiry, gratitude has received volumes of attention, but empirical studies of gratitude are notably rare; gratitude’s neural and physiological correlates are only just beginning to be investigated. In this study, we investigate the neural correlates of gratitude using an interdisciplinary method. We use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) combined with a powerful resource: testimony from survivors of the Holocaust, housed in the Shoah Foundation Institute’s 24 Visual History Archive at the University of Southern California. The archive is comprised of over 50,000 videotaped testimonials from survivors of the Holocaust. We have watched hundreds of these testimonies, from which we have compiled a collection of scenarios in which the survivor receives a gift. In the experiment, participants read these scenarios while we perform fMRI. For each scenario, participants take the perspective of the survivor as they read the story and imagine themselves as the recipient of the gift. The gifts vary by nature. Some are based on stories where the survivor receives an insignificant gift, whereas other stories involve gifts that are lifesaving. For each gift, the participants rate how much gratitude they felt for the gift, along with how much effort it took to provide the gift, and how much they needed the gift. We use multiple regression analyses to correlate these ratings to each participant’s brain activity. The participants report that the experience of going through the experiment increased their understanding of the Holocaust, and that they have a deeper empathy for the tragedy. The concert of brain activity correlating with gratitude encompasses the bilateral ventral medial prefrontal cortex, the bilateral anterior cingulate cortex, and the bilateral frontal pole. These areas of the brain are known for value processing, self-referential processing and mentalizing. Taken in sum, these findings form the neural underpinnings of gratitude and ethical human conduct. Christin Burgdorf*, Constanze Rinn*, Gerhard Stemmler Department of Psychology, Philipps-University, Marburg Attachment style predicts opioidergic modulation of warmth liking Wednesday, October 22, 11:20-11:35 Short talk (* joint first authors) Attachment style predicts opioidergic modulation of warmth-liking Christin Burgdorf*, Constanze Rinn* and Gerhard Stemmler (*joint first authors) The positive interpersonal emotion of warmth-liking is anchored in Panksepp’s oxytocin- and opioidergic mediated CARE system and is regularly activated in close relationships. In Depue’s neurobehavioral model of affiliative bonding, individual differences in personality and attachment style contribute to µ-opiate functioning, which is associated with variations in the magnitude of gratification experienced from affiliation-elicited reward. Forty-eight females in a heterosexual relationship took part in a virtual ball-tossing game with their partners and two confederates. Participants received either the µ-opioid antagonist Naltrexone (25 mg) or a placebo in a randomized double-blind design. Exclusion during the game reduced feelings of warmth and acceptance, and increased feelings of sadness and anger. Participants receiving Naltrexone reported fewer positive feelings of warmth-liking. Further analyses revealed differential effects in self reported feelings as well as in cardiovascular parameters as a function of attachment style. High values in secure bonding ratings predicted higher levels of warmth-liking and physiological quiescence in general and besides less negative feelings even in exclusion condition which can be interpreted in terms of resilience. Philip Gerrans Philosophy and Center for affective Science, Adelaide, Australia and Geneva Depersonalization and the insular cortex. Wednesday, October 22, 11:35-11:50 Short talk Evidence from psychiatric disorders involving the experience of depersonalisation can be used to decompose the causal and cognitive structure of experiences reported as self-awareness. Insights from predictive coding theory and the appraisal theory of emotion explain the association between hypoactivity in the Anterior Insula Cortex and depersonalization. The predictive coding theory (i) explains the fact that reduced affective response in depersonalization is associated with normal interoception and activity in Posterior Insula Cortex. (ii) It also elegantly accounts for the role of anxiety in depersonalisation. Lunch 12.30 – 13.45 Psychiatry: Chair W. Strik and C. Calanchini Ann M. Kring University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley Schizophrenia and the emotional brain Wednesday, October 22, 14:00-14:30 My colleagues and I have argued that the time course of emotional responding is important for understanding more precisely the nature of emotion and motivation deficits in schizophrenia. One of the important findings that has emerged in the last two decades is that people with schizophrenia can and do experience emotion in the presence of evocative stimuli, evident at both the behavioral and neural levels. This suggests somewhat of a paradox – how can people with schizophrenia have negative symptoms like anhedonia or avolition yet still enjoy and participate in pleasurable activities? Deficits underpinning negative symptoms can be identified when considering the time course of emotional response. 25 Drawing from our psychophysiological and fMRI studies that are grounded basic animal and human affective neuroscience, I will illustrate how people with schizophrenia have difficulty in anticipation, goaldirected behavior, and maintenance. Using laboratory and experience sampling studies, our data indicate that people with schizophrenia, exhibit comparable experience and brain activation in the presence of evocative stimuli. Yet, they fail to anticipate and maintain this experience, and these deficits are linked to negative symptoms. These findings have informed the development of the next-generation symptom rating scale, the Clinical Assessment Interview for Negative Symptoms (CAINS) as well as psychosocial treatments for schizophrenia. Genomic and epigenomic mechanism shape the emotional brain Wednesday, October 22, 14:30-15:00 metabolism, the role of epigenetics in the developing brain and in maintaining a proper brain activity throughout the various stages of life, other than having played a critical role in human evolution, is a relatively new knowledge. We are just beginning to understand the complexity of such regulatory genome and of its epigenetic mechanisms. Epigenetics / regulatory mechanisms can work either locally – through promoters, enhancers, insulators and other element controlling for the expression of nearby genes – or distantly – through a variety of other mechanisms, like methylation-silencing gene promoters, transcription factors, short and long non-coding RNAs, transposable elements and chromatin modifiers. In this last case, a single mechanism, like a non-coding microRNA gene for example, can control the coordinated expression of hundreds of protein-coding genes. Widespread epigenetic changes have been proposed to underlie alterations in gene expression associated with complex neuropsychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia and affective disorders. Critical control by chromatin remodeling occurs also in fully differentiated neurons upon pharmacologic and behavioral challenges. However, how defective neuronal circuits impinge on the specificity and extent of epigenetic programs has not been fully elucidated. Using combined in-vivo brain imaging genetics and postmortem brain tissue specific investigations, current research in neuroscience aims at clarifying how our brain and our behavior are shaped both developmentally and evolutionarily. The “emotional” and the “social” brain are privileged targets for these studies, but they represent more difficult objectives than, say, cognitive and executive functions. The brain (and the related genomics and epigenomic) circuits involved in controlling for emotions and social behaviors imply a variety of subcortical areas that require sophisticated experimental approaches to understand how they may work in living humans. Here we present the current state-of-the-art of these studies and our initial findings. Based on our current accumulated knowledge on the developmental trajectories of the ventral stream that characterizes the anatomical foundation of the emotional brain, we speculate how genomics and epigenomic mechanisms can modify and potentially alter our emotional brain and affect our social interactions. Epigenetic programming and reprogramming are at the heart of cellular differentiation and represent developmental and evolutionary mechanisms both in germline and somatic cell lines. Only about 2 % of our genome is composed of protein-coding genes, while the remaining 98 % , once considered “junk” DNA, codes for regulatory (hence, epigenetic) elements that control how genes are expressed in different tissues and across time. While we already know that epigenetic mechanisms are at play in cancer development and in regulating Dr. Fabio Macciardi is Professor of Molecular Psychiatry at the University of California, Irvine and a well-established psychiatric geneticist with years of experience in largescale and international collaborations. He has identified PS1 the first gene for early onset Alzheimer’s Disease (Hyslop et al, 1992) and several genes (DAOA, DAAO, AHI1) for schizophrenia, now definitively confirmed. Most of his work has been on the genetics of complex disorders (including AD, Schizophrenia, Bipolar Disorders, Autism, Depression, Autoimmune Disorders and ALS) and Ann Kring is Professor and incoming Department Chair of Psychology at the University of California, Berkley. Her current research focus is on emotion and psychopathology, with a specific interest in the emotional features of schizophrenia, including the negative symptoms, decision making, and the linkage between cognition and emotion. In addition, she studies emotion in healthy people, with a focus on individual differences in expressive behavior, gender differences, and the linkages between social context and emotion. Ongoing studies seek to answer questions, such as whether anticipating a future emotional event provokes an immediate emotional response, whether the brain responds similarly to the anticipation of social versus monetary reward, how we make decisions in the face of mismatches between behavior and emotional expressions, and how our memory of past emotional events influences our ability to forecast or predict our future emotional responses. Fabio Macciardi and Simona Gaudi Dept of Psychiatry and Human Behavior, University of California, Irvine (UCI), USA and Department of Infectious, Parasitic and Immune-Mediated Diseases, Italian National Institute of Health, Rome, Italy 26 Pharmacogenomics. At present Dr. Macciardi’s lab activities are mostly related to study the function and evolution of genes in complex traits and to nextgeneration sequencing (NGS) of complex traits. His current major research interests are related to studying the fine mechanisms of gene regulation by the noncoding DNA. All across his research, development of genetic epidemiology methods and algorithms remains a major focus of activity. Antonio Andreoli University of Geneva, Geneva Circuits of wellbeing and emotionally unstable personalities Wednesday, October 22, 15:00-15:30 Interest is growing on psychotherapy of patients with emotionally unstable personalities and this is an area with significant relevance to development of integrative mind models and innovative therapy of these disorders. Specifically, psychotherapy is a putative field to further investigate the complex relationships of innate emotions, cognitive-affective schema's and the virtual vicissitudes of the subjective human sentimental life. The present clinical report will focus on dreams and treatment sequences illustrating the exquisite discontinuity of these independent, heterogeneous circuits showing how their disharmonious interaction is an essential feature in the clinical presentation of these patients. Together with a cornerstone of effective treatment of emotional disorder, conflicting interaction of emotion, psychological processes and moral values appears to be an essential ingredient of the well-being/distress balance rooted in the unique phylogenetic pathways of our species. Further study of this cross-way may better integrate recent progress in neurology, cognitive sciences and psychoanalysis leading to better understanding /response to the increasing discontent of contemporary society and its unsuccessful seek for happiness and comfort. Antonio Andreoli was trained in internal medicine, neurology and psychiatry. Psychoanalyst and former Professor and Director of psychiatric services at the Hôpital Cantonal Universitaire de Genève he is actually in private practice. Psychotherapy research on personality disorders and acute psychiatric disorders as well as psychosomatic medicine are from many years his main research interests. Coffee Break 15.30 – 16.00 Emanuela Mundo University of Milano, Italy Brain plasticity and positive emotions: the role of the therapeutic experiences across different dia Wednesday, October 22, 16:00-16:30 The encounter between neuroscience and psychologically-oriented interventions have shed light on the possibility that human experiences (including different attachment stiles, traumatic experiences, and psychotherapeutic interventions) may actually change brain structure and functioning. It is now widely accepted that the individual is not only what he/she is supposed to become according to the genetic background but rather something of more complex and changing throughout the whole life according to the different life events he/she may experience, including the “talking cure”. While the positive effects of cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy have been confirmed since several years, more recently literature is focusing on the effects of psychodynamically-oriented interventions, which imply transference and counter-transference experiences, on brain structure and functioning. The role of brain plasticity enhancement and positive emotions will be discussed considering different clinical diagnoses, including personality disorders, major psychiatric disorders and psychodynamically-oriented therapies aimed to restore positive emotions. Particularly, the discussion and the data presentation will be focused on trauma-related disorders. This choice has been done for several reasons: traumatic experiences have been defined as a sort freezing of brain plasticity, having a significant impact on brain areas and brain circuits that regulate emotions, affects, and memory (i.e., amygdala and hippocampus); the therapeutic experience of the “talking cure” may result in restoring the correct functioning of the brain areas affected by the traumatic experience(s) and of their connections with pre-frontal cortex thus, allowing the “emotional corrective experience” of the treatment to recover from the “frozen” brain plasticity; during the therapeutic process both the patient and the clinician brain circuits for positive and negative emotions are involved, giving a clear example on how transference, counter-transference, and setting may modify brain plasticity in these patients as well as in their therapists. Emanuela Mundo is psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, assistant professor for the residency program in clinical psychology of "Sapienza" University of Rome. Her lectures and clinical research interests include the dialogue between neuroscience and clinical psychology, dynamically-oriented diagnosis and the subjective experience of major psychiatric disorders. 27 George Koob Director, National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, Bethesda, MD Addiction as a window on the neurocircuitry of emotion Wednesday, October 22, 16:30-17:00 (Videoconference from the NIH, Bethesda) Emotions are “feeling” states and classic physiological emotive responses that are interpreted based on the history of the organism and the context. The present thesis is that drugs of abuse elicit powerful emotions that can be interwoven conceptually into this framework. Such emotions range from pronounced euphoria to a devastating negative emotional state that in the extreme can create a break with homeostasis that has been considered key to the etiology and maintenance of the pathophysiology of addiction. The thesis argued here is that the brain has specific neurochemical neurocircuitry that encodes the hedonic extremes of pleasant and unpleasant emotions that have been identified through the study of opponent processes in the domain of addiction. These neurochemical systems need to be considered in the context of the framework that emotions involve the specific brain regions now identified as differentially interpreting emotive physiological expression. Dr. Koob's early research interests were directed at the neurobiology of emotion, with a focus on the theoretical constructs of reward and stress. He has made contributions to our understanding of the anatomical connections of the emotional systems and the neurochemistry of emotional function. Dr. Koob has identified afferent and efferent connections of the basal forebrain in the region of the nucleus accumbens, bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, and central nucleus of the amygdala in motor activation, reinforcement mechanisms, behavioral responses to stress, drug selfadministration, and the neuroadaptation associated with drug dependence. Dr. Koob's work with the neurobiology of stress includes the characterization of behavioral functions in the central nervous system for catecholamines, opioid peptides, and corticotropinreleasing factor. Dr. Koob also is one of the world’s authorities on the neurobiology of drug addiction. He has contributed to our understanding of the neurocircuitry associated with the acute reinforcing effects of drugs of abuse and more recently on the neuroadaptations of these reward circuits associated with the transition to dependence. He has validated key animal models for dependence associated with drugs of abuse and has begun to explore a key role of anti-reward systems in the development of dependence. This year he became director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland. Birgit Derntl Psychiatry, Universit y of Aachen, Aachen, Germany Emotional competencies in schizophrenia: brain and behavior Wednesday, October 22, 17:00-17:20 20’ talk Schizophrenia is a devastating neuropsychiatric disorder, leaving patients to suffer from a range of symptoms including impairments in emotional competencies. Lately it has been argued that social cognition deficits in schizophrenia result in poor social functioning and act as a mediator between neurocognition and real world functioning. One of these critical emotional competencies seems to be empathy, which is a multidimensional construct, consisting of an affective and cognitive component. Recently, several studies showed empathic deficits in schizophrenia patients, which were accompanied by distinct neural dysfunctions. Compared to the plethora of studies addressing socio-emotional processes in schizophrenia, relatively little is known about empathy in people at risk for psychosis. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and presented three paradigms measuring the different empathy components separately to persons clinically at risk for psychosis, healthy controls and a group of schizophrenia patients. In comparison to matched healthy controls and schizophrenia patients, persons clinically at risk showed fronto-temporo-limbic hyperactivation during empathy despite unimpaired behavioral performance. Our results are consistent with findings from previous fMRI studies addressing social cognitive aspects in this group, which also reported neural hyperactivation. Possible mechanisms driving this greater activation besides compensatory overactivation might be hypersensitivity to emotional stimuli, elevated negative affect as well as dysfunctional emotion regulation. Further investigations will have to clarify the role of the described neural alterations for the development and exacerbation of psychotic symptoms. Particularly specificity and prognostic value of these brain activation differences in psychosis-prone subjects need to be examined, thereby gaining information on early diagnosis and treatment possibilities. Regarding schizophrenia, a better understanding of the neuropsychological basis of these impairments will further help to guide more efficient trainings and interventions. One of these might be the investigation of stress reactions and cognitive stress regulation in schizophrenia patients as subjective, behavioral and physiological data show that onset of schizophrenia symptoms, and factors maintaining those symptoms, are 28 associated with stress. Here very recent data from our lab indicate a deactivation problem in schizophrenia, meaning patients have problems to turn down activation in brain regions associated with attention and emotion. These findings together with the results from at risk persons and patients regarding empathy indicate that its mandatory to better characterize the emotional competencies in order to tailor interventions fitting the needs of persons at risk and patients. Luca Passamonti CNR Istituto di Bioimmagini e Fisiologia Molecolare (IBFM), Openess and the dopaminergic neural network Wednesday, October 22, 17:20-17:35 Short talk Openness is a "Big Five" personality factor reflecting absorption in sensory experience, active imagination, preference for novelty, curiosity, and creativity and has been thus considered as a key trait for the progress of humanity. Recently, Openness has also been linked to mania, although the underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. Overall, despite the importance of Openness for human evolution and for some psychopathological conditions, little is known about the brain correlates of this trait. Specifically, it is still unclear which are the neural mechanisms that make Open people particularly "receptive" to new and engaging stimuli. In the present study, we addressed this knowledge gap by studying the functional connectivity within specific neural circuits in people with variable levels of Openness. Brain and behavioural data were gathered from a large and homogeneous sample of healthy volunteers (n=46) while executing 3 different functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments (two of them used respectively pleasant olfactory and visual stimuli while the third one employed resting-state measures). Using state-of-the-art analyses, we provided converging evidence that high Openness scores were linked to increased functional connectivity within mesocortical circuits. Of note, the same connectivity pattern was consistently found across all fMRI experiments (i.e., at rest, and during both the olfactory and visual task). Taken together, our consistent results demonstrate that Openness may depend on enhanced dopaminergic inputs that gate information within the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a key region for encoding, updating, and maintaining relevant stimuli in working memory. This may explain why Open people have increased absorption in sensory experience and elevated "mental permeability" to engaging stimuli that are critical for organism's survival. In conclusion, we found that a complex cognitive-affective style as Openness can be driven by increased functional connectivity within basic dopaminergic neural networks. Future research will establish whether current results are relevant for increasing our understanding of the pathophysiology of mania. Keynote lecture Robert Provine University of Maryland, Baltimore Laughter Wednesday, October 22, 18:15-19:15 Our lives are filled with laughter, a socially potent, species-typical vocalization that has attracted the attention of philosophers and scientists since antiquity. Recent progress in understanding laughter has come from the obvious but neglected approach of observing laughter in daily life focusing on simple questions--what is laughter, when do we do it, and what does it mean? The elemental vocal quantum of laughter provides a novel and effective simple system approach to problems about brain and behavior, ranging from the evolution of speech to the neurological basis of sociality. The neurologically programmed vocal act of laughter consists of short, harmonic blasts of "ha" that last about 1/15 second and recur every 1/5 second. Although laughter is stereotyped, it is not fixed, and can vary with context and between individuals. Conversation is filled with laughter, but laughter is not a voluntary decision to speak "ha"--most people cannot laugh convincingly on command, and attempts to do so sound unnatural. Given the involuntary control of laughter, attempts to provide post hoc rationalizations of the irrational are necessarily flawed, a reason why we should focus to the behavioral facts of laughter. Like breathing, laughter "punctuates" speech, usually occurring during phrase breaks, evidence that language dominates laughter and involves a different brain mechanism. Human laughter is a voiced, parsed exhalation (ha-ha) that evolved from the unvoiced, panting sound of our primate ancestors, in which one sound is produced per inward and outward breath (pant-pant). Laughter is literally the sound of labored breathing of physical play, such that the vocalization came to signal the context that produced it. The contrast between human and chimpanzee laughter indicates the reason why humans can talk and chimpanzees cannot; only humans possess the vocal control necessary to produce a modulated exhalation. This vocal virtuosity may be result of bipedality and the associated freeing of the thorax from its mechanical support function during quadrupedal locomotion. The evidence for laughter as a social vocalization is overwhelming--laughter occurs 30-times more often in social than solitary situations. The necessary stimulus for human laughter is another person, not a joke or other formal attempt at humor. There are huge gender effects 29 in conversational laughter. Males are the most effective laugh-getters, with both males and females laughing more at male than female speakers. Laughter is sexy-females laugh most at males they are attracted to, and males are attracted to females who laugh at their comments. The acting out of such neurologically programmed encounters are especially informative because laughter is an "honest signal" that is under weak voluntary control. These phenomena of conversational laughter have been replicated in studies of emoticon placement in online chat groups, vocal laughter among the congenitally deaf, and in newspaper personal ads. Laughter is contagious, whether in conversation or the laugh-tracks of television situation comedies. Contagious laughter is evidence for neurologically programmed social behavior of a sort associated with "mirror neurons," but can be studied by anyone, an example of what the author calls sidewalk neuroscience, the low-tech approach to problems of brain and behavior based on observations of everyday behavior. Robert R. Provine, a neuroscientist and Professor of Psychology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, uses interdisciplinary methods to study the development and evolution of the nervous system and behavior, including human social behavior. Provine’s research is described in his books, Curious Behavior: Yawning, Laughing, Hiccupping, and Beyond (2012) and Laughter: A Scientific Investigation (2000), and in many research reports, magazine articles and book chapters. He follows the scientific trail wherever it leads, acquiring the necessary research tools along the way, which have included electrophysiology, tissue culture, embryonic microsurgery, neuroanatomy, neurochemistry, psychophysics, and behavioral field studies, and has involved over 40 species. Provine's recent studies of laughter, yawning, and other instincts are an extension of his neuroethological agenda to humans, with the contagiousness of these acts providing an entry to social neuroscience and associated problems, from emotion and empathy to autism. His approach to brain and behavior based on the description of everyday life is termed sidewalk neuroscience. It provides a rigorous, low-tech, simple system approach to complex mechanisms that requires minimal resources and is accessible to anyone. Carlo Calanchini Psychiatry, Lugano Capire le emozioni: un percorso tortuoso. Talk in Italian for the general public Wednesday, October 22, 20:00-21:00 Le emozioni rivestono un’importanza enorme nella vita dell’Uomo come in quella degli animali. Esse ne sono costituenti fondamentali, tanto che – forse – senza emozioni la vita non ci potrebbe essere, se non in forme animali molto rudimentali, e vegetali. L’interesse dei filosofi - che nello studio delle emozioni hanno preceduto di molto la psicologia, scienza giovane - si è rivolto quasi esclusivamente alle emozioni umane, per le loro implicazioni antropologiche ed etiche. Ne sono scaturite posizioni differenti, che vanno dalla loro esaltazione (perlomeno di alcune, in certi casi) alla loro condanna senza appello, passando per la necessità della loro “moderazione”. Se la psichiatria si è interessata alle emozioni sin dai suoi inizi poiché tanto il loro “eccesso” quanto la loro “mancanza” caratterizzano diverse patologie, le neuroscienze, in anni recenti, sembrano fornirci nuove e interessanti informazioni al loro riguardo. Cambieranno qualcosa per la nostra vita? Dr. med. Lic. Phil I Carlo Calanchini. Luganese, dopo la maturità classica ha studiato all’Università di Basilea, prima alla facoltà di scienze naturali, poi in quella di medicina. Si è diplomato nel 1977 e ha conseguito il dottorato nel 1982. Ha lavorato come medico assistente in medicina interna, poi si è specializzato in psichiatria e psicoterapia alla Clinica e al Policlinico psichiatrici universitari di Basilea. Dopo un stage al National Institute of Mental Health a Bethesda, Maryland, ha iniziato l’attività privata in studio a Lugano e come consulente all’ospedale malcantonese di Castelrotto dal 1986. Dal 1986 al 1991 ha perfezionato la formazione alla Scuola di Psicoterapia Psicoanalitica di Milano. Dopo un’intensa attività quale perito forense, è stato accolto nella Società svizzera di Psichiatria forense quale membro ordinario e psichiatra forense certificato nel 2008. Ha portato a termine studi di filosofia a Friborgo e Berna ottenendo la licenza con una tesi sulle emozioni nel 2010. Da alcuni anni è professore incaricato alla Facoltà di Teologia di Lugano, dove tiene un corso di psicologia generale. Dinner 19.30 – 21.00 30 THURSDAY, OCTOBER 23 Psychology: Chair W. Perrig David Sander Psychology, University of Geneva What is the role of the Amygdala in positive emotions? Thursday, October 23, 08:30-09:00 While there is a clear agreement that the amygdala is a key structure involved in emotion, there are major debates with respect to its function. Historically, the amygdala has been considered to be linked to one emotion in particular: fear. The amygdala even came to be known as the « fear center » in the brain. However, various lines of research indicate that the amygdala is involved in other negative emotions as well as in positive emotions. The talk will discuss the function of the amygdala with respect to current theories of emotions, and will suggest an explanation of why the amygdala is indeed involved in positive emotions. We will argue that an appraisal perspective to emotion allows one to test new ideas concerning the emotional brain. We will suggest that the key function of the amygdala is to process stimuli that are relevant for the current concerns of an individual, suggesting that the amygdala is key for the processing of all events that are relevant to the important values, needs and goals of individuals. For instance, in terms of brain imaging, this suggests that stimuli appraised as positive (with respect to any valence dimension) have a similar capacity to activate the amygdala than stimuli appraised as negative as long as they are appraised as affectively relevant. Such mechanism would also explain why positive stimuli do capture attention, and enjoy memory facilitation effects. David Sander is a full professor at Department of Psychology, University of Geneva as well as being a director of the National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) in Affective Sciences, the Centre Interfacultaire in Sciences Affectives, and a Director of the Laboratory for the study of Emotion Elicitation and Expression (E3 Lab), Department of Psychology, University of Geneva. He studied mathematics and psychology and received a PhD in Cognitive Sciences from the University Louis Lumière (Lyon, France). He is mainly interested in the mechanisms involved in emotion elicitation, and how these mechanisms modulate attention, memory, and decision-making. Willibald Ruch Psychology, University of Zürich Mapping the field of humor: Beyond emotion, cognition and virtue Thursday, October 23, 09:00-09:30 Progress in studies on the neural basis of humor is impaired by the lack of a comprehensive and validated model of humor that incorporates all the important dispositional and behavioral/experiential components. About 70 tests of the sense of humor have been proposed in the past decade (Ruch, 2007). A lexical study revealed that there are four key terms in the field of the comic (i.e., humor, wit, mock/ridicule, fun). Studying the etymology of the key terms humor shows that the meaning of humor underwent changes and was referring to different things such as mood, talent, temperament, virtue, attitude, world-view or ability. The presentation will map the existing humor conceptualizations in a broader framework derived from a series of studies aimed at generating a broader model of humor. This included, among others, the study of everyday humorous conduct but also the implementation of comic styles derived from literary studies in psychological instruments. It seems that a hierarchical model, with four domains, seems to fit the data best. Each domain contains a cluster of interrelated concepts and behavioral indicators. The model and an assessment instrument will be presented that might serve as a map for brain studies of humor. Willibald Ruch, MD, is a full professor and Head of the Section of Personality and Assessment at the University of Zurich. He studied in the Conservatory of Klagenfurt (specialist classical guitar), at the Karl-Franzens-University of Graz (Institute of Psychology, Director: Prof. Dr. Erich Mittenecker) and Miami University, Oxford, OH, USA. In the 1980 he got the PhD (Dr. phil.) at the Science Faculty of the University of Graz, Austria. As researcher, he is interested in emotions (humor, laughter, joy) and he is an editor and co-editor of several books and journals. Paul Pauli University of Würzburg, Würzburg The pleasure of relief Thursday, October 23, 09:30-10:00 Most people assume that pleasure is triggered by positive events only. However, any positive and any negative event has a beginning and an end. We examined whether the termination of an aversive event triggers pleasure too, as predicted by the opponent process theory. In this context, I will stress from a basic-research perspective that there are actually two aspects about a negative event that are worth remembering: What made it happen, and what made it cease. I will review findings showing that 31 both aspects induce distinct and oppositely valenced memories: Specifically, our studies indicate that stimuli experienced after an electric shock acquire positive valence because of their association with the relieving cessation of pain. Whether this is pleasure will be discussed on the basis of verbal, behavioural and neuronal data. Finally, consequences of relief-learning for the threat-imminence model of defensive behaviour as well as perspectives for applied psychology in the context of trauma, panic and non-suicidal self-injury will be outlined. Paul Pauli is since 2001 a full professor of Biological Psychology, Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy at the Department of Psychology at the University of Würzburg, Germany. In 1991 he received the PhD in Psychology, and in 1998 he finished his Habilitation, both at the University of Tübingen, Germany. His research is focused on emotions and emotional disorders, e.g. on the contributions of cognitive distortions to the development and / or maintenance of emotional disorder or the impact of emotions on pain perception. In addition, he is interested in conditioning processes, especially context conditioning, and how they contribute to fear and anxiety. Related research examined the process of relief, i.e. the termination of an aversive event, and its relation to the feeling of pleasure. He also examines the cognitive, motivational, and physiological effects of stimuli (cues) associated with drug intake (nicotine). Coffee Break 10.00-10.30 Rainer Schwarting Psychology, University of Marburg, Marburg Rat 50-kHz vocalizations in affective and social neuroscience Thursday, October 23, 10:30-11:00 Currently, rodent ultrasonic vocalizations receive substantial attention in basic and clinically-oriented neuroscientific research, since vocalizations seem to provide a rather unique avenue to study the putative affective state of a laboratory rodent which might not be accessible by conventional behavioral means. In rats, distinct classes of ultrasonic calls can be defined which vary dependent on developmental age, situational factors, and experience. These classes are comprised of complex affective and communicative signals uttered in different social and non-social situations. Out of these, high-frequency calls, i.e. signals ranging around 50-kHz, are normally emitted during or in expectation of naturalistic rewarding situations such as food, mating, and rough-and-tumble play. Also, they can be triggered by non-naturalistic stimuli such as electrical stimulation of the mesolimbic dopamine system, or psycho-stimulant drugs like damphetamine. Here, recent evidence will be presented showing how 50kHz calls can be used to study both sender and receiver, for example by using playback techniques, and that not only 50-kHz call production but also responding to such calls is related to dopamine function in the nucleus accumbens. Rainer Schwarting is a full professor of experimental and biological psychology at the faculty of psychology, Philipps-University of Marburg, Germany. His scientific interests range from basal ganglia to limbic system functions in procedural learning, emotion, and communication, which his research group studies in rats and mice. Barbara Studer Psychology, University of Bern, Bern Emotional stability promotes intelligence Thursday, October 23, 11:00-11:15 Short talk Emotional stability promotes intelligence In the research field of the relationship between intelligence and personality factors, one of the most consistent findings is that intelligence is positively correlated with emotional stability. However, few studies have considered this relationship in children, and very few have differentiated between types of intelligence as well as underlying differences in working memory capacity when explaining the relationship between intelligence scores and emotional stability. In this study, the level of emotional stability and performance in a proxy for fluid and crystallized intelligence as well as in two working memory tasks was assessed in a sample of 397 primary school children. Results reveal that emotional stability is significantly positively related to vocabulary (crystallized intelligence), moderated by high working memory performance, but unrelated to abstract reasoning (fluid intelligence). This was interpreted as indicating that the positive relationship between intelligence and emotional stability is mainly due to learning advantages starting in early age, due to high working memory performance, rather than to higher general intelligence. This bears the important implication that emotionally labile children (high level of neuroticism) should be supported to regulate their negative emotions, intrusive thoughts and anxiety as early as possible to eliminate progressive learning disadvantages. One approach to do so is by specific working memory training targeting the improvement of emotional regulation skills. 32 Eva Pool Campus Biotech, University of Geneva-CISA, Geneva Attention orientation to positive rewarding stimuli Thursday, October 23, 11:15-11:30 Short talk Evidence consistently demonstrates our attention to orient automatically (i.e. attentional bias) toward negative threatening stimuli. However, does the same phenomenon occur for positive rewarding stimuli? The present meta-analysis systematically compared attentional bias for positive compared with neutral stimuli across 100 studies (N = 5,319 healthy participants) that used different types of measures, paradigms and positive stimuli. Factors were tested that, as postulated by the theoretical models of emotion, might modulate this bias. Overall, results showed a significant, albeit modest (Hedges’ g = .305), attentional bias for positive as compared with neutral stimuli. Moderator analyses revealed that this bias was larger for emotional stimuli that are relevant to shared general source concerns (e.g., reproduction, offspring caretaking) or individual-specific surface concerns (e.g., hunger) of the participants compared with other positive stimuli that were less relevant to the participants’ concerns. Moreover, the moderator analyses showed that attentional bias for positive stimuli was larger in paradigms that measure early, rather than late, attentional processing, suggesting that attentional bias for positive stimuli is rapid and involuntary. These findings demonstrate that, like negative threating stimuli, positive rewarding stimuli are also systematically capable of biasing attention very rapidly and at an early stage of information processing. This supports the idea that attentional bias for emotional stimuli is not driven by threat, but rather by a mechanism that is common to negative threats and positive rewards, a key component of which is the importance of the stimulus for the concerns of the observer. Christian Waugh Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, CT, USA Savoring positive emotions Thursday, October 23, 11:30-11:45 Short talk Positive emotions are often fleeting; therefore, to obtain the most benefit from them, people will often savor positive emotions - actively maintaining them after the eliciting stimulus has passed. Although there are mental and physical health benefits to savoring positive emotional states, it is not clear how people do this and which brain regions are responsible. We also do not know whether the same psychological and neural mechanisms are involved in maintaining both positive and negative emotional states. In an fMRI study, we examined whether people maintain emotional states ‘actively,’ with explicit cognitive elaboration of the emotional state, and/or ‘passively’, by extending the naturally generated emotional state. Twenty-four participants completed an emotion maintenance task in which they either maintained the emotional intensity from the first picture of a pair to compare to that of the second picture (‘maintain’ condition), or only rated their emotional response to the second picture (‘non-maintain’ condition). After the task, participants viewed the pictures again and rated them with respect to emotional intensity and self-relevance. One pattern of findings suggests that people can ‘actively’ maintain both positive and negative emotional states. When maintaining vs. not maintaining emotion, participants exhibited increased height and width of activation in the dorsal medial frontal cortex (MFC) and lateral prefrontal cortex, regions associated with explicit emotion generation and manipulation of contents in working memory, respectively. In addition, participants recalled the maintained emotional images as more emotionally intense than they did the nonmaintained images, suggesting that they elaborated on the emotional content in these images when maintaining their emotional states. Another pattern of findings emerged, however, to suggest that participants ‘passively’ maintain their positive emotional states more effectively than they do their negative emotional states. When maintaining (vs. not maintaining) positive emotional states, participants exhibited greater duration of activity in the rostral MFC, a region associated with implicit emotion generation. They exhibited decreased activity in this region, however, when maintaining (vs. not maintaining) negative emotional states. Finally, behavioral evidence suggests that there was less decay of the emotional state and more self-relevant processing when people were maintaining positive emotional states than when they were maintaining negative emotional states. This evidence that savoring positive emotions involves both active cognitive maintenance processes and more passive emotion generation processes is critical in increasing our understanding of individual differences in positive emotion savoring and of how we might leverage savoring to improve mental and physical health. Mario De Caro Institute of Philosophy, University of Rome 3 / Tufts University Boston, Boston The philosophy of emotions Thursday, October 23, 11:45-12:15 The philosophical tradition has very often conceived the emotions, broadly construed, as a burden that we have to take with us, as an obstacle to the full development of rationality and morality (which in themselves could generate human flourishing). Alternatively, the emotions have been interpreted as the authentic source of agency, thought, morality, and personal identity. 33 Even though both these views have been proved inadequate because of their unilaterality, surprisingly they still inspire – if often tacitly – many philosophical and scientific conceptions. A different approach, however, is possible and looks much more promising. This approach accurately distinguishes different kinds of emotions; is programmatically interdisciplinary; and aims at an integrated understanding of emotions and rationality. As an example of the potentialities of this articulate, multidisciplinary, and integrated approach I will discuss the role that emotions can be seen to play in our moral life by looking, from a philosophical point of view, at some recent empirical data that come from cognitive science. Mario De Caro teaches Moral Philosophy at Roma Tre University and since 2000 has also been teaching at Tufts University, where he is a regular Visiting Professor. He has been a Fulbright Fellow at Harvard University and a Visiting Scholar for two years at MIT. He is the vicepresident of the Consulta Nazionale di Filosofia and a past president of the Italian Society for Analytic Philosophy. He is Associate Editor of the Journal of the American Philosophical Association, forthcoming for Cambridge University Press. Besides authoring articles in five languages and three books in Italian, he has edited volumes for Harvard University Press, Columbia University Press, Springer and Kluwer. He has been invited to give talks in more than 100 academic institutions, including Oxford, Princeton, Harvard, Paris IV - Sorbonne, Institute Jean Nicod (École Normale Supérieure, Paris), Bonn, and Genève. He is interested in action theory, moral philosophy, neuroethics, metaphysics, metaphilosophy, philosophy of film, and history of early modern thought. Lunch 12.45 – 13.45 34 POSTERS Alessandro Bilella University of Fribourg Dept. Medicine, Fribourg The PV1-Foxb1-nucleus projects to the PAG A. Bilella, G. Alvarez-Bolado, M. R. Celio The PV1-Foxb1-nucleus projects to the PAG The PV1nucleus is a cord-like structure comprised of parvalbumin-positive neurons lodged within the ventrolateral hypothalamus. Independently, a stream of Foxb1-expressing neurons migrating to the ventrolateral hypothalamus was also described. We have found that parvalbumin-positive cells and Foxb1-expressing neurons intermingle together in the PV1-nucleus which, on the base of this observation, has recently been redesigned as the PV1-Foxb1-nucleus. We mapped the efferent connections of the PV1-Foxb1-nucleus using Credependent viral constructs stereotactically injected in Foxb1-Cre mice and parvalbumin/Foxb1-Cre mice. The PV1-Foxb1-nucleus projects to the periaqueductal gray (PAG) and hindbrain, caudally and, to a lesser extent, in the prefrontal cortex rostrally. The caudal projection divides in two different bundles and reaches the dorsolateral and ventrolateral portion of the PAG. Other terminals are found in the dorsolateral tegmental nucleus (LDTg). Continuing to proceed in the distal direction, the projections contact the raphe nucleus (RN), the dorsomedial tegmental area (DMTg), the locus coeruleus (LC). A small group of axons terminates in the gigantocellular nucleus (Gi), in the midbrain. The connections between the lateral hypothalamic area and the ventrolateral PAG could modulate pain circuits and those with the LDTg could influence REM-sleep. These tracing results, pave the way for further functional investigation to understand the functions of the PV1Foxb1-nucleus. Philip Blue Peking University, Beijing Kissing up but not kissing down How social status affects altruistic punishment The endowment of social status is one of the most pervasive and useful social tools for organizing groups and fostering cooperation. Yet social status is dynamic and ever-changing and its effects are far from being understood. In order to better understand how hierarchy affects fairness processing, participants acted as receivers in the Ultimatum Game (UG), with math contests interleaved between UG blocks to manipulate social status (high, medium, low). As expected, participants accepted more fair than unfair offers and rejected unfair offers more when endowed with high status than with low status. When awarded high status, unfair offers led to increased activity in the left hippocampus, left orbital frontal cortex (lOFC), and caudate when compared with low status endowment. Surprisingly, we found that during low status rounds, participants showed no neural distinction between fair and unfair offers, whereas unfair offers during high status led to increased activity in the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC), precuneus, and occipital/parietal cortex. These results suggest that low status may have blunted fairness processing, while high status increased mentalizing in response to unfair offers, which is in line with participants’ increase in altruistic punishment (rejection) during high status rounds. Yet, the effects of status on fairness processing did not affect all participants equally: the greater the connectivity between the hippocampus and the OFC, the less an individual was affected by status during offer appraisal, which suggests the need to engage higher-order cognitive resources to overcome the additional sting of an unfair offer when in high status. Taken as a whole, these findings provide support for the modulation of social status on fairness processing. In addition, the decrease in altruistic punishment and the failure to neurally encode fairness during low status blocks suggests that intervention to help low status individuals flourish may require a conscious awareness of the effects of social hierarchy on decision-making. By bringing these effects into awareness, we may not only lead to increased flourishing in low status populations, but would also lead to increased prosocial behavior (e.g., altruistic punishment) and a greater overall utility of the group as a whole. Ester Desfilis Fac. Medicina, IRB Lleida, Lleida, Spain Development of medial extended amygdala neurons involved in distinct social-related neural pathways Ester Desfilis*, Alba Vicario, Antonio Abellán, Beatriz Robles-Castro, and Loreta Medina Fac. Medicine, IRBLleida, University of Lleida The extended amygdala is involved in different social behaviors including affiliation as well as aggression or defense. In the rat, two different different neuron subpopulations of the medial amygdala and the medial bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BSTM) appear to mediate odor-induced reproductive or aggressive behavior, the first being GABAergic and expressing the transcription factor Lhx6, and the second being glutamatergic (Choi et al., 2005). Lhx6 neurons are densely concentrated in the posterodorsal subdivision of the medial amygdala and in the principal or posteromedial subdivision of the BSTM, two subnuclei that are extensively interconnected and project to the same hypothalamic targets related to reproduction. Our 35 group is using an evolutionary developmental approach for studying the amygdala, combining expression of region-specific transcription factors, phenotypic markers and migration assays in mouse and sauropsids, which is greatly helping to understand the origin of the neuron subtypes involved in different functional pathways. Our developmental data indicate that neurons of the medial amygdala and BSTM originate in at least five different progenitor domains, which produce either GABAergic or glutamatergic cells. For example, Lhx6 GABAergic neurons of the medial amygdala/BSTM originate in a subdomain of the pallidal progenitor division. Neurons with different origin showed a trend to be segregated in the BSTM of mouse and chicken, and in the posterior part of the medial amygdala of mouse. Additionally, one of the progenitor domains that produces neurons for the medial extended amygdala is the same division that produces the paraventricular hypothalamic nucleus, which suggests that this may be the origin of the neurons expressing vasopressin (AVP)/vasotocin (AVT) or oxytocin found mainly or exclusively in the BSTM in different amniotes. These neurons are sexually dimorphic, and have been involved in affiliative behavior, including pairbonding, maternal care, and social recognition. Thus, our data are useful for understanding the origin of the neural pathways underlying different social-related behaviors. Supported by a grant from the Spanish MINECO (BFU2012-33029). at the center that was surrounded by letters. The emotional distractors were matched on their level of arousal, and to generalise across different material and content we used either faces scenes chosen from IAPS (erotic or mutilated bodies, Experiment 1) (fearful or happy, Experiment 2) or neutral faces that were associated with a negative or positive valence (monetary gain, or loss) in a prior learning phase. Participants were required to search the letter string for a target letter (either X or N) and made a speeded response using the numerical keypad. The current set of experiments consistently demonstrated that interference effect was reduced under high-load condition compared to lowload condition. However, this load modulation was specific to negatively valenced distractor but not positively valenced distractors. These results were observed constantly to different categories of stimuli: IAPS pictures, emotional faces, value-learned faces. It clearly demonstrates that emotional content of the stimulus does matter for attentional capture, which suggests that both stimulus content and the level of attention (low vs high) need to be taken into account by theories of attention. Rashmi Gupta Dispositional gratitude and forgiveness as mediators Genetic studies have shown that a large portion of individual differences in subjective wellbeing can be attributed to genetic variations, and psychological studies have demonstrated that such individual differences can also be predicted by individuals’ positive personalities, such as gratitude and forgiveness. However, little is known about how genes interact with personalities to affect subjective wellbeing. Inspired by the link between negative bias to emotional stimuli and catechol-Omethyltransferase (COMT) gene, which is crucial for the degradations of dopamine and norepinephrine, this study investigated to what extent the functional COMT Val158Met polymorphism modulates subjective wellbeing and to what extent the dispositional gratitude and forgiveness mediates the relationship between the polymorphism and subjective wellbeing. Four hundred and forty-five unrelated Chinese Han senior students (75% female, mean age = 24.3±1.5 years) completed a battery of questionnaires. Cognitive, affective, and psychosocial happiness were measured with the Satisfaction With Life Scale, the Scale of Positive and Negative Experience, and the Flourishing Scale, respectively. These three scale scores were standardized and added together to obtain a single aggregate index of subjective wellbeing. Depression was measured with the Zung Self-rating Depression Scale. Dispositional gratitude University of Geneva, Geneva Distracted by pleasure? Positive versus negative emotional capture across different stimuli and perceptual load Recent studies have claimed that processing of negative emotional information is modulated by attentional demand in the task. It should be noted that this finding is based on studies that compared negative stimuli (eg. fearful faces) with neutral. Hence, difference in results could be attributed to the difference in the arousal level between negative and neutral stimuli. It is essential to compare negative information with positive information that is matched on arousal level in order to comment on valence specific interaction with attention. The present study was an attempt in this direction. In a series of experiments we requested participants to perform a letter search task in which we varied the level of perceptual load to manipulate attention engagement in the task. During task performance participants were presented with a stimulus display. The stimulus display consisted of a distractor at the centre of the screen, surrounded by a letter string. One target letter (X or N) and five non-target letters (‘O’ in the low-load and H’, ‘K’, ‘W’, ‘M’, ‘Z’ on the high-load) were presented in a random order in each trial. Emotional distractors of negative or positive valence Jinting Liu Department of Psychology, Peking University, Beijing COMT Val158Met polymorphism modulates subjective wellbeing 36 and forgiveness were measured with the Gratitude, Resentment and Appreciation Test and the Heartland Forgiveness Scale, respectively. Hair follicle cells were collected for genotyping. The distribution of genotypes (Met/Met = 29, Val/Met = 147, Val/Val = 269) showed no deviation from Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium (χ2 = 2.078, p = .149). The numbers of Met alleles for Met/Met, Val/Met, and Val/Val are 2, 1, and 0, respectively. Results of regression analysis showed that individuals with smaller number of Met alleles reported greater happiness, less depressive symptoms, and greater tendencies in gratitude and forgiveness. These findings is in line with previous studies showing the increased negative bias of Met alleles in emotion processing. As previous studies have evideced the causal links of gratitude and forgiveness to happiness and depressive symptoms, we conducted mediation analysis and found that both dispositional gratitude and forgiveness significantly mediated a substantial portion of the genotype effects on happiness and depressive symptoms. These findings highlight the contribution of COMT Val158Met polymorphism to subjective wellbeing and positive personalities. Moreover, this study evidences the mediating roles of positive personalities in the relationship between gene and subjective wellbeing and provides a neurocognitive explanation for subjective wellbeing. Emilie Meaux LabNIC, Campus BIOTECH, Geneva Facing mixed emotions: Brain representation of analytic and holistic perception of facial expression Although the ability to accurately decode and interpret facial emotions is of primary importance for humans to socially interact, it is still debated how we analyze faces to determine their expression. Several findings suggest that faces recognition relies not on the encoding of individual features (i.e. analytic processing), but on the integration of those features into a global whole (i.e. holistic processing). However, there is no consensus about this when emotions are processed from faces and no neuroimaging study has specifically mapped these neurocognitive mechanisms yet. Happy and angry composite expressions were created in which the top and bottom face halves formed either an incongruent composite (e.g., angry top + happy bottom) or congruent expression (e.g., happy top + happy bottom). To assess pure analytic processing, isolated happy and anger features were also presented. Twenty-six healthy volunteers (13 females) reported the expression in the target top or bottom half of the face while their brain activity was scanned using fMRI. Behavioral results indicated that cognitive mechanisms for happy and anger expression recognition are neither strictly holistic nor analytic. Both routes appeared involved and the respective role of analytic and holistic information varied with the emotion type. Moreover, diagnostic features of happy and anger expressions are differentially distributed across the face. Our fMRI results comparing analytic or incongruent expression versus congruent expressions revealed distributed patterns of brain activity differentiating these conditions. Bilateral fusiform gyrus and amygdala showed greater activity during the congruent expression processing (i.e. pure holistic representation), along with parietal areas and prefrontal association cortex, whereas middle temporal gyrus (midTG), STS and orbitofrontal activity increased for incongruent expression processing (i.e. featural integration). On the other hand, isolated features (i.e. pure analytic processing) evoked stronger activation in low level visual regions compared to congruent expressions, accompanied with midTG and striatum. These effects were not related to differences in task performance, except for activity in right lingual gyrus and inferior frontal gyrus where a partial overlap was observed. These results indicate that the processing of emotional facial features, their integration in a whole and holistic perception are mediated by partially separate networks, demonstrating that emotion recognition processes may operate on an analytic to holistic continuum. Loreta Medina Fac. Medicina, IRB Lleida, Lleida, Spain Developmental and molecular dissection of amygdalar neurons involved in distinct emotionrelated neural pathways Loreta Medina*, Alba Vicario, Antonio Abellán, Beatriz Robles-Castro, and Ester Desfilis Fac. Medicine, IRBLleida, University of Lleida The amygdala plays a critical role in control and/or modulation of emotions, motivation, and social behavior, being involved in many multifaceted and, at times, contradictory functions (for example, reward versus aversion, or anxiolysis versus anxiogenesis). In recent years, our group is using an evolutionary developmental approach for studying the amygdala, combining expression of region-specific transcription factors, phenotypic markers and migration assays in mouse and chicken, which is greatly helping to understand the origin of the neuron subtypes involved in different functional pathways. Here we present some of the results obtained using such approach, focussing in the extended amygdala, which includes the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BST). The lateral BST, implicated in modulation of fear/anxiety together with the central amygdala, has also been involved in motivation by way of its descending projections to the ventral tegmental area (VTA). The BST neurons projecting to the VTA are mostly 37 GABAergic and their activation produce reward and anxiolysis (Jennings et al., 2013). However, a minor subpopulation is glutamatergic and its activation produces the opposite effect: aversion and anxiogenesis (Jennings et al., 2013). One third of the GABAergic neurons projecting to the VTA contain enkephalin (ENK) (Kudo et al., 2014), but the BSTL contains many subtypes of GABAergic neurons, coexpressing different neuropeptides. Our developmental data indicate that neurons of the BSTL originate from at least six different progenitor domains, which helps to explain its extraordinary complexity in terms of neuron subtypes. In particular, the glutamatergic neurons of this nucleus appear to originate in the prethalamic eminence, outside the telencephalon. In contrast, the GABAergic neurons originate in five distinct subpallial domains. Our data in chicken also reveal that the ENK neurons of BSTL can originate in at least three different subdivisions: striatal, pallidal and preoptic. This raises questions on the presence of the same three subtypes in mouse, and the specific connections and function of each newly identified ENK neuron subtype. Thus, our data are useful for understanding the origin of the neural pathways underlying opposing emotion-related behaviors, opening new venues for better-focused anatomical and functional studies, and for trying to understand inter-species differences in behavior. Supported by a grant from the Spanish MINECO (BFU2012-33029). Carmen Morawetz Department of Education and Psychology, Freie Universität, Berlin Changes in effective connectivity between dorsal and ventral prefrontal regions moderate emotion regulation Carmen Morawetz, Stefan Bode, Juergen Baudewig, Evgeniya Kirilina, Hauke R. Heekeren Introduction Reappraisal, the cognitive reevaluation of a potentially emotionally arousing event, has been proposed to be based upon top-down appraisal systems within the prefrontal cortex. It still remains unclear, how different prefrontal regions interact to control and regulate emotional responses. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and dynamic causal modeling (DCM) to characterize the effective connectivity between the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), dorsolateral PFC (DLPFC), and other reappraisal-related regions during emotion regulation (ER). Methods 23 right-handed subjects (mean age=22.95±3.57 years) performed specific reappraisal strategies (Increase, Decrease) while viewing 60 highly arousing extreme sports film clips and 42 neutral film clips in the scanner (3T, Siemens). The experimental design involved four different conditions: ‘Increase’ (engage with the depicted situation), ‘Decrease’ (distance from it), ‘Look Neutral’ and ‘Look Sports’ (no reappraisal). We used an event-related design (2s instruction, 8s picture/film clip, 4s “How do you feel?” rating, 4-8s fixation). Based on previous findings, we used 5 ROIs (IFG, DLPFC, SMA, SMG, V1) as sources and systematically constructed a model space, divided into two model families with two different central nodes (family1: DLPFC; family2: IFG). All competing models within one family had the same architecture with six endogenous connections that modeled the forward and backward connections between regions. Within each of the two families the modulatory effects of ER were modeled. Results The DCM results revealed that family1, with DLPFC as central node, represented the best explanation of the data with a total exceedance probability of 0.997. Within family1, the winning model had an exceedance probability of 0.557. The analysis of the intrinsic connection strength of the winning model showed that most endogenous connectivity parameters were significant. One intrinsic connection (IFG to DLPFC) was negative. The analysis of the modulatory effects of ER revealed significant modulations of connectivity from the DLPFC to the IFG and from the IFG to the DLPFC. Reappraisal reduced the effective connectivity between the DLPFC and IFG in both directions. Conclusion The results of our DCM analyses support the hypothesis that ER is mediated by bidirectional changes of connection strength between the IFG and DLPFC. The findings indicate a feedback mechanism between the DLPFC and IFG during ER, in which the selection process of a reappraisal, most likely involving the IFG, modulates the connectivity between IFG and DLPFC. Edita Navratilova Department of Pharmacology, University of Arizona, Tucson AZ, USA Brain circuits supporting reward from pain relief Edita Navratilova, Diana Meske, Jennifer Yanhua Xie, Chaoling Qu, Alec Okun, Janice Oyarzo, Xu Yue, Dong Lu, Naomi Goshima, and Frank Porreca Department of Pharmacology, Arizona Health Sciences Center, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85724 Pain is multidimensional with sensory and affective (aversive) components. The affective and emotional aspects of pain are important to patients. Relief of pain aversiveness produces a positive hedonic state that is associated with activation of mesolimbic reward pathways in both animals and humans. The brain circuits mediating the emotional qualities of pain, and its relief, are not well understood. We have demonstrated in rat pain models that pain-induced motivational drive to seek relief can be reliably demonstrated behaviorally with place conditioning (conditioned place preference, CPP). Thus, pairing a context with a treatment that relieves pain aversiveness produces negative reinforcement (i.e., CPP) 38 as well as increased dopamine (DA) release in the nucleus accumbens (NAc). In the absence of pain, the same treatments do not produce CPP or NAc DA release confirming that the rewarding effects are due to relief of an aversive pain state and not due to intrinsically rewarding properties of these treatments. Human neuroimaging studies in subjects demonstrated that the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is one of the key brain regions encoding pain aversiveness. The ACC expresses high amounts of opioid receptors and studies in humans suggest that opioid neurotransmission in this cortical area is associated with reduction in pain aversiveness. Based on these findings we hypothesized that reward from relief of pain requires endogenous opioid signaling in the ACC and subsequent downstream activation of the mesolimbic dopamine reward circuits. We tested our hypothesis in rat models of acute post-surgical (nociceptive) and chronic neuropathic pain using CPP to analyze behavioral effects and in vivo microdialysis of NAc DA. Relief from nociceptive or neuropathic pain produced CPP and release of NAc dopamine. Inhibition of opioid signaling in the ACC by microinjection of an opioid receptor antagonist naloxone blocked both pain relief-mediated CPP and NAc dopamine release. Conversely, microinjection of an opioid receptor agonist morphine in the ACC produced CPP and NAc dopamine release selectively in injured rats. The data suggest that activation of the dopamine brain reward circuits following relief of pain may be mediated selectively by release of endogenous opioids in the ACC. This approach may therefore allow preclinical investigation of neural mechanisms whereby relief of pain promotes positive emotions. Zaneta Navratilova Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Nijmegen, The Netherlands Optogenetic stimulation of the basolateral amygdala Noradrenergic projections from the basolateral amygdala (BLA) contact many brain regions, including neocortex, hippocampus, and the striatum, and modulate memory processes in those networks. Pharmacological manipulation of the activity of the BLA in the time period immediately after learning has been shown to impact several different types of memory. Optogenetic manipulation provides an opportunity for specifically timed manipulation of neural activity, which would allow dissection of the specific proceses that underlie the amygdala’s role in memory enhancement. To this end, we injected channelrhodopsin constructs bilaterally in rats’ BLA, and implanted optical fibers for stimulation, with attached tetrodes for electrical recording. In order to determine the optimal stimulation parameters, we stimulated the BLA in one hemisphere, while recording from tetrodes in both hemispheres. Previous studies have stimulated at 20Hz or 40Hz. We observed a response in the local field potential at both of these frequencies, and observed that 20Hz induced a higher firing rate response in the recorded neurons. Further, we stimulated at lower frequencies, hypothesizing that since the natural oscillation frequency in the amygdala is in the theta (510Hz) range, this would be the best stimulation frequency to induce coherence across the two hemispheres. Neuhaus / Bagutti Unit of Neurology, University and Hospital of Fribourg, Fribourg, CH Evaluation of Social Cognition in clinical setting Background: Social cognition and Theory of Mind (ToM), i.e the ability to make inferences about other people’s state of mind and to use them to predict their behaviour, can be impaired in neurological diseases. Although extensive batteries have been developed in order to evaluate ToM in different pathologies, few tests are currently available in German allowing clinicians to efficiently assess ToM deficits in daily practice. The GeSoCS (Geneva social cognition scale) is a test package in French with proven ability to distinguish neurological patients with ToM deficits from controls. Evaluation time is about 30 minutes. Objectives: First, to assess the quality of the interlanguage and intertester reliability by comparing two control populations (French and German) and groups evaluated by different testers. Second, to demonstrate that this scale can distinguish multiple sclerosis (MS) patients from controls and that GeSoCS performances correlate with scores at a behavioural questionnaire. Methods: One team member translated the GeSoCS from French to German. The translation was validated by back-translation to French by another member and comparison with the original by two judges. The results obtained in different studies by healthy controls in French (n=52) and German (n=34) were compared as well as the results obtained by different testers in order to detect a possible tester bias. For the clinical application, 39 patients from Basel University Hospital with MS were tested and compared to 21 sex, age and formation matched healthy controls. The Dysexecutive Questionnaire (DEX), a behavioural questionnaire, was filled by a relative. Results: There was no difference in the performances between French and German patients in global scores (p= 0.37) and all sub scores (Social Cognition, Looks, ToM in pictures, Absurd stories, Induction of temporal laws) except for a mild difference in the subtest “Inferences” (p= 0.03). The second part of the study showed that MS patients performed significantly worse than controls in the total GeSoCS score, more precisely in three different tasks («Social Cognition», «Reading the Mind in the Eyes», «Cartoons»). Moreover, a low GeSoCS score correlates 39 with a high DEX score. Conclusions: The GeSoCS has a good interrater stability and has similar norms in French and German, except for a mild difference in the subtest “Inferences”. These differences found between MS patients and controls converge with previous evidence for ToM deficits in MS. GeSoCS is a valid scale, which could be used to assess social cognition deficits in MS patients. neuropil is rich in astrocytic processes and numerous unmyelinated axons. The morphological phenotype of the VENs may vary in both human and macaque brains, dark (degenerated) neurons, which are especially abundant in human postmortem tissue, reflect a high vulnerability of these neurons. Finally, the ultrastructural similarities of human and macaque VENs in the ACC and AIC confirm that the macaque is a suitable model for studying the hitherto mysterious function of these unique neurons. E. Petrasch-Parwez/M. Von Duering Department of Neuroanatomy and Molecular Brain Research, RUB, Bochum Von Economo neurons in human and macaque brain – an electron microscopic study. Von Economo neurons (VENs) are large bipolar spindleshaped neurons mainly localized in layer V of the anterior insular (AIC) and anterior cingulate (ACC) cortex, both of which brain areas closely associated with social cognition, self-awareness and empathy. The VENs are most numerous in human brains, but are also described in an increasing number of mammals, though much less abundant. They have been extensively studied in the last two decades, as they are obviously related to various neuropsychiatric diseases including autism, schizophrenia and bipolar disorders. Their real function is still obscure. Fine structural analyses are lacking. To elucidate the morphology of these particular neurons further, we analyzed the subcellular composition by semi- and ultrathin section series of the ACC and AIC of human and rhesus monkey brains. All human and macaque VENs are extraordinary rich in free ribosomes dispersed in the somata and extending into the two broad smooth proximal dendrites. The somata show multivesicular bodies, regular Golgi apparatus and abundant mitochondria. Of note are abundant elongated profiles of smooth endoplasmic reticulum closely associated to the cytoplasmic membrane and the rough endoplasmic reticulum indicating a complex local protein machinery. Cilia emerging from the somata are frequently observed in the macaque. The elongated euchromatic nuclei are often deeply indented. The dendrites exhibit multiple microtubuli, filaments are rarely observed. In both, human and macaque VENs, the somata and proximal dendrites are sparsely contacted by small symmetric inhibitory synaptic terminals. The long distal dendrites show asymmetric terminals, which represent excitatory input. Our findings may support the hypothesis that the VENs are involved in the salient network. Axons are identified emerging from the proximal dendrites, clearly assessed in the macaque. VENs are often localized in clusters; small gap junctions may occur between neighbouring somata suggesting electrotonic transmission. Similar to other large projection neurons in the deep cortical layers, perineuronal oligodendroglial cells are often attached to the somata of the VENs, mainly in the area of outgoing dendrites. The adjacent Agnieszka Potasiewicz Department of Behavioral Neuroscience and Drug Development, Institute of Pharmacology, Polish Academ, Kraków The effect of Ketamine on rats performance in the slot machine task Agnieszka Potasiewicz*, Nikiforuk and Piotr Popik Dominik Rafa, Agnieszka Glutamatergic transmission plays essential role in cognition. Ketamine, the noncompetitive glutamate/NMDA receptor antagonist, produces cognitive deficits, affecting attention, memory and decision making in laboratory animals and in humans. In addition, the impairments of inhibitory control (impulsivity, compulsivity) are reported following ketamine exposure. Pathological gambling, a behavioral addiction resembling substance abuse disorder can be modeled in laboratory rats using slot machine task (rSMT). Animals that respond to the cues suggesting, but not warranting food reward (‘near miss’ responses) can be classified as ‘gamblers’. The correct response in this task involves a number of cognitive processes. Animals were trained in rSMT by responding to 3 flashing lights (analogous to the wheels of a slot machine). A winning trial was signaled when all 3 lights were illuminated. At the end of each trial, the rat chose between responding on the 'collect' lever (which, on the ‘win’ trials resulted in reward delivery, and on the ‘loose’ trials in a time penalty), or responding on the ‘roll’ lever that initiated the next trial. We examined the effects of ketamine following acute (10 mg/kg; Experiment 1) and subchronic (30 mg/kg for 10 days; Experiment2) administration on rat’s performance in rSMT. The present studies suggest that neither acute nor sub-chronic administration of ketamine significantly affected the interpretation of flashing light sequences (i.e., the number of collect lever presses). In addition, the latency to ‘collect’ lever response (i.e., the measure of decision making) and the number of trials completed (i.e., the indicator of locomotor activity) were unaltered by ketamine administration. In conclusion, in the present experimental settings, ketamine treatment had no effect on the rats’ rSMT performance in the rats. Supported by 40 the grant NR 72/H/E/13 from the Ministry of Health programme: “Support for scientific research into gambling and other non-substance addictions along with problem solving”, co-financed from the Gambling Problem Solving Fund. representation of the “Boomerang effect” and demonstrate that it can be generated in a prosocial context. Furthermore, these results suggest that anxious individuals might be more vulnerable to negative affect induced by persuasion communication, having potential important implications in real life situations (eg, persuasive health communication). Charlotte Prevost Biotech Campus, Geneva Investigating the neural correlates of the “Boomerang effet” and its relationship to trait anxiety in a prosocial context Charlotte Prevost, Julie Cousin, Gidi Nave, Dean Mobbs, Patrik Vuilleumier When a behavioral freedom is being threatened, a motivational state aimed at restoring this freedom might be induced, a phenomenon known as psychological reactance. Within this theoretical framework, the “Boomerang effect” has been defined as the unintended attitude change induced by persuasive communication. Despite having numerous societal applications (eg, drug initiation, consumer behavior), this effect has received little empirical support and its neural correlates are still unknown. Here, we aimed at providing both behavioral and neural evidence for the “Boomerang effect” in a prosocial context. Given that psychological reactance is considered stress-inducing, we further hypothesized that individuals scoring high on trait anxiety would be more prone to this effect. Using fMRI, we scanned participants while they decided whether making a donation to a number of charity organizations based on a message intended at persuading them in a more or less forceful manner. Participants were endowed with 10 CHF prior to entering the scanner, which they were free to either keep for themselves or use in part for donation to a charity during the experiment. When they decided to make a donation, they were then asked how much they were willing to donate. Conversely, when deciding not to donate, participants were asked how confident they felt about their decision. Trait anxiety was measured in a post-scanning session using the STAI-trait questionnaire. Behaviorally, we found that participants were less willing to make donations when they felt that the message was strongly intended at persuading them. In addition, the propensity to exhibit this effect was predicted by participants’ trait anxiety scores. At the neural level, preliminary fMRI analyses revealed that activity in the insula and lateral inferior frontal gyrus increased when participants decided not to donate and the perceived persuasion level of the message increased. Moreover, activity in the amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex increased as participants felt more confident about not donating. Interestingly, participants with higher trait anxiety also exhibited higher activity in these brain areas. These findings provide new insight into the neural Emilie Qiao-Tasserit University of Geneva, Geneva How do negative and positive moods shape face perception ? Emilie Qiao-Tasserit, Maria Garcia Quesada, Daphné Bavelier, Patrik Vuilleumier, Swann Pichon When you’re afraid, do you see more afraid faces around you? It has long been known that high anxious individuals attribute a more negative meaning to ambiguous information (the so-called negativity bias). But can such biases be induced transiently in a shortterm manner? On the other hand, can positive mood induce the reverse bias? To test this hypothesis, we studied how affect induction and anxiety can affect ambiguous morphed faces interpretation. We used fearful, neutral and happy video clips to induce negative, neutral or positive affective states. After mood induction, participants classified the expression of faces morphed at varying proportions between fearful and happy expressions. Following fearful movies, subjects classified ambiguous faces as expressing fear more often than after neutral or happy movies. After joyful videos, especially the more absorbing ones, we also observed a trend toward classifying ambiguous faces as expressing happiness more often than after neutral or fearful movies. Participants who scored high on depression and anxiety scales classified more often ambiguous faces as fearful, independently of mood, confirming the spontaneous tendency to classify ambiguous information in a more negative manner. Interestingly, highly absorbing happy and neutral movie clips reduced the negative bias toward fearful faces. These results add to the existing cognitive bias literature showing that priming positive and negative cognitions can change the extent to which individuals direct attentional focus (Anderson et al, 2009) or interpret ambiguous semantic information (MacLeod & Mathews 2012). To our knowledge, these are the first results to demonstrate that short-term affect induction changes the emotional meaning we attribute to facial expressions. This knowledge might be useful in the context of cognitive bias modification (CBM) in clinical training interventions which aim at modifying biases which confer vulnerability to anxiety (MacLeod and Mathews 2012, Browning et al 2012). Keywords: mood induction, face expression. 41 Dominik Rafa Department of Behavioral Neuroscience and Drug Development, Institute of Pharmacology, Polish Academ, The effect of ethanol in the rodent slot machine task Dominik Rafa*, Agnieszka Potasiewicz, Nikiforuk and Piotr Popik Keywords: gambling, ethanol, rodent models Agnieszka Gamblers often take irrational decisions under the influence of alcohol. Pathological gambling, a behavioral addiction resembling substance abuse disorder can be modeled in laboratory rats using slot machine task (rSMT). The correct response in this task involves a number of cognitive processes. We investigated whether ethanol could alter rats gambling behavior. Animals were trained in rSMT by responding to a series of three flashing lights (analogous to the wheels of a slot machine). A winning trial was signaled when all three lights were illuminated. At the end of each trial, the rat chose between responding on the 'collect' lever (that on the ‘win’ trials resulted in reward delivery, and on the ‘loose’ trials in a time penalty), or responding on the ‘roll’ lever that initiated the next trial. After reaching stabile baseline the test was performed. Ethanol (10%) was injected IP at the doses of 0.5 and 1 g/kg in the volume of 2 ml/kg, immediately later the performance on rSMT was measured. The experiments were carried out in a fully randomized Latin square design. We found that neither 0.5 nor 1 g/kg of ethanol altered the pattern of responses in rSMT. However, the higher dose of ethanol reduced the number of completed trials. Present data suggest that gambling behavior is not sensitive to ethanol administration. Supported by the grant NR 72/H/E/13 from the Ministry of Health programme: “Support for scientific research into gambling and other non-substance addictions along with problem solving”, co-financed from the Gambling Problem Solving Fund. Daniel Renz ETHZ, Zürich Affective influences on internal evaluations during planning Humans can cognitively control their emotions, but vary in how well they can do this and what kind of strategies they tend to employ. Variations in these cognitive emotion regulation strategies have been linked to variation in the experience of positive emotions. Conversely, emotions can influence cognitions. Theories of psychological wellbeing and mood disorders have often put emphasis more on one or the other, and there is a substantial literature on their interplay. However, there are rather fewer explicit or mechanistic examinations of their interaction, and specifically of how emotions come to influence the contents of cognition. We therefore attempted to develop a method to allow a very detailed examination of how emotional stimuli influence the contents of cognitive processes. Subjects were extensively trained on a sequential, goal-directed affective decision-making task. In this task, participants effectively have to plan paths through mazes to maximise the total rewards and minimise the total losses earned along these paths. In previous work, we have used computational models of choice and found a Pavlovian reflexive inhibition of planning at points of losses, and a hierarchical division of plans at points of rewards. Here, we extended this with eyetracking and used the gaze location to inform the models at very fine resolution about what subjects may have considered during their cognitive planning. Specifically, in order to make a plan, subjects must internally make multiple iterative decisions: after having considered one choice, they must decide what options to think about and consider the next. We extend the previous computational modelling to incorporate the eyetracking information and find that this indeed improves our ability to predict subsequent choices. This suggests that the combination of eyetracking, computational modelling and goal-directed planning reward/loss tasks may prove a useful way to examine in forensic detail what consequences affective stimuli have on the contents and the processes of cognition. Diana Roccaro University of Fribourg, Dept. Medicine, Fribourg Reduced Ultrasonic Vocalizations in Rats after a KainicAcid-Induced Lesion of the PV1-Foxb1 Nucleus We are currently investigating the function of the newly detected PV1-Foxb1 nucleus (as neurons express either parvalbumin [PV] or Foxb1) in the ventrolateral tuberal hypothalamus of rodents. Based on its location within the medial forebrain bundle as well as on its projection to the ventrolateral periaqueductal grey, we hypothesize an involvement of the PV1-Foxb1 nucleus in the regulation of the expression of emotions (vocalizations), amongst others. To test this hypothesis, twelve adolescent Wistar rats were tickled as described before during four weeks and ultrasonic vocalizations (USV) were recorded. It is well known that tickling is a positive reinforcer that can induce positive affect accompanied by the emission of 50-kHz USV in socially isolated rats. After the first two weeks, test animals received a bilateral stereotactic injection of kainic acid into the region of the PV1-Foxb1 nucleus, whereas control animals were injected saline or only received a comparable skin suture. Based on residual numbers of PV-immunoreactive cells in the PV1-Foxb1 nucleus, test animals were classified as successful or mediocre lesions. In the group of successful lesions, 50kHz USV were almost entirely abolished after the treatments, whereas their number remained relatively 42 constant or even increased in the other groups. These results suggest a role of the lesioned structures in the expression of vocalizations. As axons of the medial forebrain bundle, passing through the PV1-Foxb1 nucleus, are not expected to express kainate receptors, the neurons making up the PV1-Foxb1 nucleus are more likely responsible for the effects induced by the lesions. Gottfried R.S. Treviranus (which makes them a prime target for subversion); c) their intimate relations with interfaces, vessels, and especially the neglected “lymphatic cauldron” which –from the nailfold antennas and the various “ALT”s (associated lymphatic tissues) feeds MCs into the extracranial adventitia of cerebral arteries, and which is heavily lateralized to the left; d) their being “in touch” with peripheral neurogenic inflammatory or anti-inflammatory para-parasympathetic nerves, of which they Freudian nasal ganglion offers a basis for the shame reflex, as triggered by biting inhibition, since afferents inhibit its tonic output to the larger brain vessels, where MCs regulate the BBB through a range of healing and disruptive activities; d) their capacity to explain the lateralization, localization and sexual dimorphism of brain signatures of neuro-psychiatric disorders; e) their capacity to allow for long-range cytokine actions through “retard pellets” with junction-cracking and chemokine properties, and f) they can change histones or cause extracellular traps and micro-emboli. MCs gather at the thalamus where the Cortico-Subcortico-Thalamic-Cortical Circuits (CSTCs) are bundled closely together. Besides disturbances at other CSTCs, those to dlPFC, ACC, and OFC disturb the dimensions of THOUGHT, ACTION, and MOOD correspond to the (T)(A)(M)-“bipolar engine” of “dyn4” (below). MCs in the habenula strongly modulate the SEEKING system. MCs activate modules during parenthood and are primable one-cell-hormone-systems. MCs are the prime source of 5-HT in the hippocampus, likely targets of antidepressants and their ability to “switch” mood in BPAD , mood stabilizers, and drugs of abuse. MCs are involved in positive emotions and frenzy! Kraepelin presaged a cycling “appropriation wave” (AW) within a Pinel-Falret (T)(A)(M)-phase space. The “dyn4”model’s AWs are a shorthand for temperaments and anxio-affective disorders. Their syllogistic structure (Axinn 1994), the 8+(7x8) assigned natural language terms, and the prime motivator (Un)certainty orientation disclose a function of emotion: to shape the balance (T) to (A) through the aACC. The manifold roles of mast cell populations for positive emotionality as guardians and migrating instigators of circuits. Jan Wacker, Desirée Schweiger Rafal Rygula Institute of Pharmacology Polish Academy of Sciences, Kraków Optimism: a cognitive construct that relates to motivation In humans, optimism is a cognitive construct that relates to motivation: optimists exert effort while pessimists disengage from effort. In this study, using recently developed ambiguous-cue interpretation (ACI) paradigm we took a unique opportunity to investigate whether trait optimism is correlated with motivation also in animals. In a series of ACI tests (cognitive bias screening), we identified rats displaying ‘pessimistic’ and ‘optimistic’ traits. Subsequently, we investigated the trait differences in motivation of rats to gain reward and to avoid punishment using progressive ratio schedule of reinforcement paradigm. Although ‚optimistic‘ and ‚pessimistic‘ animals did not differ in their motivation to avoid punishment, the ‚optimistic‘ rats were significantly more motivated to gain reward than their ‚pessimistic‘ conspecifics. For the first time, we demonstrated a link between cognitive judgment bias (optimism) and motivation in an animal model. As both investigated processes are closely related to mental health and wellbeing, our results may be of value for preclinical modeling of many psychiatric disorders. Mast cells (MCs) are long-living primable versatile hubs contributing insights to evolution, internal medical, pharmacological, and psychiatry, beyond “fluid” PsychoNeuro-Endocrino-Immunology e.g. for bipolar disorders (BPAD). The potential of MCs for “positive emotions” is disclosed through an inventory of their a) intricate relay faculties , b) their capacity for rapid predetermined kanban-like cerebral migration into brain parenchyma (e.g. social brain, habenula) on the occasion of psychosocial or microbe-triggered events through adventitial spaces into the basal ganglia or directly from the meninges into cortex (determining the Kraepelinian dichotomy); c) their first-line-defendant and adaptivedefense orchestrating role in anti-microbial defense University of Hamburg, and Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany The positive emotion of warmth-liking and interpersonal trust: A pharmacogenetic investigation of opioidergic influences Feelings of affection, acceptance, warmth and liking are regularly activated in close interpersonal relationships and have been theoretically linked to a “warmth-liking” system modulated by brain opioids. However, in this context opioidergic influences have received far less attention than the frequently investigated neuropeptide oxytocin, especially on the human level. In the present study, either a neutral emotional state or warmth-liking 43 was induced in N = 95 female students by film/imagery after double-blind administration of either placebo or the opioid antagonist naltrexone (25 mg). We repeatedly assessed current emotional state via self-report scales and also measured interpersonal trust (TRUST) before and after the emotion induction as a behavioral indicator of warmth-liking. In addition, DNA was extracted from buccal cells, purified, and genotyped for the A118G polymorphism of the mu opioid receptor gene (OPRM1). The results showed that (1) participants reported more warmth-liking in the placebo/warmth-liking group than in the placebo/neutral group and both naltrexone groups, (2), TRUST increased in the warmth-liking group after placebo, but not after naltrexone, and this pattern was reversed in the neutral groups. Although the likewise expected modulatory effect of OPRM1 genotype on these general patterns was not significant in the present sample, the general effects of the opioid blocker naltrexone nonetheless strongly implicate brain opioids in both WL and TRUST and suggest that future research may benefit from simultaneously considering opioidergic and neuropeptidergic influences. Hongbo Yu Peking University Beijing, Beijing Activation in the brain valuation and affiliative systems predicts repayment in a grateful situation Research in social psychology has identified three determinants of gratitude, i.e., “the recipient’s perceptions of the intention of the benefactor, the cost to the benefactor in providing the benefit, and the value of the benefit” (Tesser et al., 1968). We investigated the brain processing of need and cost using fMRI. The participant interacted with an anonymous partner in a dice-rolling game. In each round, the participant and the partner rolled a dice twice in turn (the participant was always leading). Those whose overall point was less than five had to receive a pain stimulation, the strength of which (high vs. low) was randomly determined at the beginning of each round. Critically, after the partner rolled once and the participant rolled twice, the partner could decide whether to help the participant by giving him/her 2 points. In one-third of the Help rounds, the participant received 20 money units to be divided between the partner and the participant with the knowledge that the partner was not informed about the procedure. The amount of allocation was used as an online measure of gratitude. The factor of need was manipulated by the strength of the stimulation (high pain means high need) and the factor of cost was manipulated by the risk the partner faced when deciding whether to help. Specifically, when the partner got less than 5 points, she faced higher risk (of getting less than 5 in the end and being punished) if help. We focused on the Help rounds and had 2 (high vs. low need) *2 (high vs. low cost) conditions. Behaviorally, the participant allocated more to the partner in the high risk conditions, especially in the high need context. Neurally, high cost rounds elicited activations in a salience network, including the dorsal anterior cingulate and the bilateral anterior insula. The activation were primarily driven by the differences between high_need-high_risk and high_need-low_risk conditions. Importantly, in the ventral striatum (vStr) and the posterior orbitofrontal cortex, two structures consistently implicated in value computation, the activation positively correlated with difference in allocation. Moreover, the difference in allocation was also predicted by the functional connectivity between the vStr and the septal area, which was associated with mammalian attachment and close relationship. Our findings highlighted the functions of the valuation and affiliative systems in forming proper response in a grateful situation. Artur Marchewka Nencki Institute, Warsaw, Poland Characterization of the Nencki Affective Picture System by discrete emotional categories (NAPS BE) The Nencki Affective Picture System (NAPS; Marchewka, Żurawski, Jednorog, & Grabowska, 2014) is a standardized set of 1,356 realistic, high-quality photographs divided into five categories (people, faces, animals, objects and landscapes). NAPS has been primarily along the affective dimensions of valence, arousal and approach-avoidance, yet the characteristics of discrete emotions expressed by the images has not been clarified so far. The aim of the present study was to collect normative ratings according to both the dimensional and categorical models of emotions. A subset of 510 images was selected in order to proportionally cover the whole dimensional affective space. Among these, we identified images eliciting distinguishable discrete emotions. Additionally, sex and semantic category differences were examined and the interaction effect of the two variables was found. We introduce the Basic Emotion normative ratings for Nencki Affective Picture System (NAPS BE), which will allow researchers to control and manipulate stimulus properties specifically for their experimental question of interest. The NAPS BE system is freely accessible to the scientific community for noncommercial use by request at: http://naps.nencki.gov.pl. Malgorzata Wierzba. Monika Riegel Nencki Institute, Warsaw, Poland Nencki Affective Word List (NAWL) as a linguistic tool in neuroscience M. Riegel, M. Wierzba* * equal contribution Laboratory of Brain Imaging, 44 Neurobiology Centre, Experimental Biology Nencki Institute of In the behavioural and neuroimaging studies of emotion, the crucial challenge for a researcher is choosing the appropriate and controlled stimuli to evoke emotional states. So far, the standardized databases of verbal stimuli have been created in certain languages, yet not in Polish. Nencki Affective Word List (NAWL) is the cultural adaptation of the German database Berlin Affective Word List-Reloaded (BAWL-R) (Võ et al., 2009). It consists of 2902 emotional and neutral words with the controlled psycholinguistic parameters, such as: frequency of use, number of letters and grammatical form. All the words have been standardized on the dimensions of emotions such as valence and arousal, as well as imageability. The obtained ratings of emotional arousal and emotional valence formed the boomerang-shaped affective space, in which emotionally valenced words are characterized by higher arousal. Additionally, all the words were assigned to the following discrete emotion categories: happiness, anger, sadness, fear, and disgust. There are numerous potential applications of the NAWL dataset, both in behavioral and neuroimaging studies. In order to verify its usefulness to investigate the neural correlates of verbal material processing, we decided to conduct a preliminary fMRI study. We used one of the most popular paradigms in this field of research, namely the Lexical Decision Task. We compared recognizing real words expressing particular basic emotions, neutral words, and pseuowords. We found the basic emotion effects in the reaction times, as well as brain activations consistent with the previous studies. As demonstrated in this experiment, the standardized NAWL database may be useful in studying emotions from both perspectives, dimensional and discrete, both on the Polish population and in the cross-cultural studies. Katarzyna Jednorog Nencki Institute, Warsaw, Poland Directed forgetting of basic emotions – an fMRI study Memory for emotional events is typically better than memory for comparable non-emotional events. Here, for the first time, we investigated whether memory control in the directed forgetting paradigm is influenced by the discrete category of basic negative emotions. 13 Polish female students (mean age =20 years) participated in the study. The experiment was divided into 2 phases. In the study phase, participants during an fMRI session were presented with 240 images taken from the Nencki Affective Picture System. There were 120 neutral pictures: 60 followed by the instruction to-be-remembered (TBR) and 60 followed by the instruction to-be-forgotten (TBF). Additionally there 120 negative images were presented, classified according to 3 basic emotions they evoked: disgust, fear and sadness. Thus there were 20 TBR and 20 TBF pictures evoking specific negative emotion. In the test phase, outside scanner, all stimuli were re-presented and mixed pseudorandomly with new pictures (120 neutral and 120 negative). Subjects had to categorize each picture, irrespective of the F/R instruction, as old (displayed in the study phase) or new. The recognition rate for TBR items was significantly higher than that for TBF items. Further, we found a main effect of emotion and emotion x instruction interaction. For TBR items, all basic emotions had higher recognition rate than neutral stimuli. Disgust and fear emotions were remembered better than sadness. For TBF items, pictures evoking disgust were harder to forget than neutral pictures. An attempt to control memory was associated with frontal regions of the brain whereas forgetting (both intentional and incidental) – with widespread neural network in the two hemispheres. Additionally, we found an effect of basic emotions on activations in amygdala and hippocampus. 45 ALPHABETICAL LIST OF PARTICIPANTS ADOLPHS Ralph ….…………………………14/23 ALBRECHT Urs ……………………….…….….16/17 ALVAREZ-BOLADO Gonzalo …………..10/11 ANDREOLI Antonio …………………………….26 ANNONI Jean-Marie ……………………...20/21 APAZOGLOU Kallia …………………………17 BASSETTI Claudio ………………………………..19 BEHNCKE-IZQUIERDO Isabel ……………07/08 BILELLA Alessandro …………………………….34 BLUE Philip …………………………………………34 BURGDORF Christin …………………………….24 CALANCHINI Carlo ……………………………...29 CAVADA Carmen …………………………………10 CELIO Marco ………………………………….11/12 DE CARO Mario ……………………………..32/33 DERNTL Brigit ……………………………….27/28 DESFILIS Ester ………………………………..34/35 EVRARD Henry …………………………………….13 FOX Glenn ……………………………………..23/24 GARFINKEL Sarah ………………………………..16 GERRANS Philip …………………………………..24 GUASTELLA Adam ………………………………23 GUPTA Rashmi ……………………………………35 HOLSTEGE Gert …………………………………..11 JEDNOROG Katarzyna ………………………….44 KAGAN Igor …………………………………..15/16 KENNERLEY Steve ……………………………….15 KHATAMI Ramin ………………………………….20 KOOB George ……………………..………….27 KRING Ann M. …………………………………24/25 LIU Jinting ……………………………………..35/36 LÜSCHER Christian …………………………..…18 MACCIARDI Fabio ………………………….25/26 MARCHEWKA Artur ……………………….……43 MEAUX Emilie ……………………………………..36 MEDINA Loreta ……………………………...36/37 MIKUTTA Christian ………………………………07 MOBBS Dean …………………………………22/23 MORAWETZ Carmen ……………………………37 MULLIGAN Kevin ………………………………...05 MUNDO Emanuela ……………………………26 MÜRI René …………………………………….19/20 NAVRATILOVA Edita ……………………….37/38 NAVRATILOVA Zaneta ………………………..38 NEUHAUS/BAGUTTI …………………………….38 OMIGIE Diana ……………………………………..07 PANKSEPP Jaak ……………………………..08/09 PASSAMONTI Luca …………….………………28 PAULI Paul …………………………………….30/31 PETRASCH-PARWEZ Elisabeth ………….39 POOL Eva ……………………………………………32 POTASIEWICZ Agnieszka …………….39/40 PREVOST Charlotte …………………………..40 PROVINE Robert …………………………28/29 QIAO-TASSERIT Emilie …………………………40 RAFA Dominik ………………………………….41 REICHLIN Massimo ……………………………...06 RENZ Daniel ………………………………………..41 ROBERTS Angela ……………………………14/15 ROCCARO Diana ……………………………41/42 RUCH Willibald ……………………………………30 RYGULA Rafal …………………………………..42 SANDER David …………………………………….30 SAPER Clif …………………………………………..18 SCHRÖDER Tim ……………………………….05/06 SCHULTZ Wolfram …………………………13/14 SCHWARTING Rainer …………………………..31 SINGER Tania ………………………………………22 STUDER Barbara ………………………………….31 SUBRAMANIAN Hari …………………………..12 TAMIATI Francesco ………………………..06/07 TREVIRANUS Gottfried R.S. …………………42 VON DUERING Monika ………………………..39 VUILLEUMIER Patrik …………………………….19 WACKER Jan ………………………………….42/43 WATTENDORF Elise ………………………….12/13 WAUGH Christian …………………….………….32 WIERZBA Malgorzata ………..……… 43/44 YU Hongbo ……………………………..……...43