Long-term aerobic exercise enhances interoception and reduces symptoms of depression and anxiety in physically inactive young adults: A randomized controlled trial.

Physical exercise offers many health benefits, with substantial evidence supporting its positive impact on affective symptoms. An intriguing yet underexplored mechanism associated with this effect is the enhancement of interoception-the ability to perceive internal bodily sensations. We investigated the effects of long-term aerobic exercise on interoceptive accuracy (IAcc), interoceptive confidence (ICon) and symptoms of depression and anxiety.

Breaking prolonged sitting with high-intensity interval training to improve cognitive and brain health in middle-aged and older adults: a protocol for the pilot feasibility HIIT2SITLess trial.

Introduction: Excessive sedentary time (ST) is linked to dementia risk, poorer attentional control and episodic memory. These cognitive decrements have been associated with decreased functional connectivity (FC) in the frontoparietal network (FPN) and default mode networks (DMN) with ageing. Physical activity (PA) interventions can enhance FC in these networks, but these interventions are not designed to decrease ST among older adults.

Cardiovascular Exercise Improves Inhibitory Control in Sedentary Young Adults: A 12-Week Randomized Controlled Trial.

Purpose: Physical exercise may enhance cognitive functions, including inhibitory control. Despite increasing evidence, there remains a need for robust evidence on long-term interventions targeting inhibition in healthy, sedentary young adults. We investigated the effects of a 12-week cardiovascular exercise program on this population's behavioral and neuroelectric measures of inhibitory control.

Interrupting sitting with moderate-intensity physical activity breaks improves cognitive processing speed in adults with overweight and obesity: Findings from the SITLess pilot randomized crossover trial.

Introduction: Prolonged sitting can acutely reduce working memory (WM) in individuals with overweight and obesity (OW/OB) who show executive function deficits. Interrupting prolonged sitting with brief PA bouts may counter these effects. However, the benefits of such interventions on behavioral and neuroelectric indices of WM and whether neurocognitive responses are associated with postprandial glycemic responses in young and middle-aged adults with OW/OB remain unknown.

Stimulation of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and the perception of affective faces. An effective connectivity analysis.

The ventromedial prefrontal cortex is widely linked with emotional phenomena, including appraisal, modulation, and reward processing. Its perigenual part is suggested to mediate the appetitive value of stimulation. In our previous study, besides changes in evoked MEG responses, we were able to induce an apparent behavioral bias toward more positive valence while interpreting the ambiguous, morphed faces after the effect of excitatory tDCS stimulation of the perigenual ventromedial cortex (pgVM).

Cognitive benefits of higher cardiorespiratory fitness in preadolescent children are associated with increased connectivity within the cingulo-opercular network.

Higher cardiorespiratory fitness has been associated with improved cognitive control in preadolescent children, with various studies highlighting related brain health benefits. This cross-sectional study aimed to provide novel insights into the fitness-cognition relationship by investigating task-related changes in effective connectivity within two brain networks involved in cognitive control: the cingulo-opercular and fronto-parietal networks. Twenty-four higher-fit and twenty-four lower-fit preadolescent children completed a modified flanker task that modulated inhibitory control demand while their EEG and task performance were concurrently recorded.

Effects of reducing sedentary behaviour by increasing physical activity, on cognitive function, brain function and structure across the lifespan: a systematic review and meta-analysis.

Objective: To examine the acute and chronic effects of reducing prolonged sedentary time (ST) with physical activity (PA) on cognitive and brain health.

Design: Systematic review and meta-analysis.

Data Sources: PubMed, Scopus, CINAHL, PsycINFO, SPORTDiscus, Web of Science, and ProQuest Dissertation and Theses.

The Benefits of Acute Exercise for Children's Cognition Are Associated with Trait Anxiety.

Introduction: Children's anxiety is associated with decreased cognitive performance. One well-established behavioral intervention to transiently improve cognitive performance in children is acute aerobic exercise (AAE). Thus far, however, it is unclear whether the benefits of AAE on cognition vary based on individual differences in children's anxiety level.

Inhibition of the dorsolateral cortex reveals specific mechanisms behind emotional control.

Reappraisal is a complex emotional control strategy based on cognitive change. To complete the reappraisal task, one is required to deeply elaborate on the affective stimulus to create its new interpretation. The involvement of the prefrontal cortex in this process was examined in the study, where inhibition of the left or right dorsolateral area was carried out using transcranial magnetic stimulation.

Acute aerobic exercise benefits allocation of neural resources related to selective attention.

A single session of aerobic exercise has been shown to potentially benefit subsequent performance in a wide range of cognitive tasks, but the underlying mechanisms are still not fully understood. In this study, we investigated the effects of exercise on selective attention, a cognitive process that involves prioritized processing of a subset of available inputs over others. Twenty-four healthy participants (12 women) underwent two experimental interventions in a random, crossover, and counterbalanced design: a vigorous-intensity exercise (60-65% HRR) and a seated rest (control) condition.

Offline rTMS inhibition of the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex impairs reappraisal efficacy.

In this study we verified the causal role of the bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) in emotional regulation using a strategy of reappraisal, which involves intentionally changing the meaning of an affective event to reduce its emotional impact. Healthy participants (n = 26; mean age = 25.4) underwent three sessions of inhibitory continuous theta burst stimulation (cTBS) applied on three different days over the left or right DLPFC, or the vertex.

The effects of a single aerobic exercise session on mood and neural emotional reactivity in depressed and healthy young adults: A late positive potential study.

Depression has been characterized by lowered mood and unfavorable changes in neural emotional reactivity (altered brain responses to emotional stimuli). Physical exercise is a well-established strategy to improve the mood of healthy and depressed individuals. Increasing evidence suggests that exercise might also improve emotional reactivity in healthy adults by increasing or decreasing brain responses to positive or negative stimuli, respectively.

On the Role of Bilateral Brain Hypofunction and Abnormal Lateralization of Cortical Information Flow as Neural Underpinnings of Conventional Metaphor Processing Impairment in Schizophrenia: An fMRI and EEG Study.

Figurative language processing (e.g. metaphors) is commonly impaired in schizophrenia.

Acute aerobic exercise enhances cortical connectivity between structures involved in shaping mood and improves self-reported mood: An EEG effective-connectivity study in young male adults.

There seems to be a general consensus among researchers that acute aerobic exercise (exercise hereafter) improves mood, but the neural mechanisms which drive these effects are far from being clear. The current study investigated the cortical connectivity patterns that underlie changes in mood after exercise. Twenty male adults underwent three different experimental protocols that were carefully controlled in terms of underlying metabolism and were administered in a randomized order: moderate-intensity continuous exercise, high-intensity interval exercise, and seated rest condition.

Implicit induction of emotional control-A comparative fMRI investigation of self-control and reappraisal goal pursuit.

Implicit forms of emotion regulation are of growing interest and have been shown to be efficient in controlling emotional responses despite the fact that they operate without conscious awareness of the ongoing regulatory process and deliberate attempts to influence emotional responding. Although such forms of affective modulation are considered natural and crucial for mental health, their brain mechanisms have hardly been studied until now. Here, we employ a novel procedure and compare directly brain responses to emotional stimuli after implicitly inducing either a self-control goal or a reappraisal goal with a scrambled sentence task.

Acute aerobic exercise enhances pleasant compared to unpleasant visual scene processing.

Although acute aerobic exercise benefits different aspects of emotional functioning, it is unclear how exercise influences the processing of emotional stimuli and which brain mechanisms support this relationship. We assessed the influence of acute aerobic exercise on valence biases (preferential processing of negative/positive pictures) by performing source reconstructions of participants' brain activity after they viewed emotional scenes. Twenty-four healthy participants (12 women) were tested in a randomized and counterbalanced design that consisted of three experimental protocols, each lasting 30 min: low-intensity exercise (Low-Int); moderate-intensity exercise (Mod-Int); and a seated rest condition (REST).

The dynamics of pain reappraisal: the joint contribution of cognitive change and mental load.

This study was designed to investigate the neural mechanism of cognitive modulation of pain via a reappraisal strategy with high temporal resolution. The EEG signal was recorded from 29 participants who were instructed to down-regulate, up-regulate, or maintain their pain experience. The L2 minimum norm source reconstruction method was used to localize areas in which a significant effect of the instruction was present.

The influence of mood on visual perception of neutral material.

In the study we investigated how current mood affects spontaneous perceptual processes of neutral stimuli of low‑arousal, unrelated to any specific task. Two separate but similar procedures were carried out: one using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the other using electroencephalography based source localization. In both experiments, sessions of passive viewing of neutral pictures were preceded by either a negative or positive mood induction.

Moderate-intensity exercise boosts the N2 neural inhibition marker: A randomized and counterbalanced ERP study with precisely controlled exercise intensity.

A prior session of moderate intensity continuous exercise (MCE) benefits performance during tasks requiring conflict resolution but the specific cognitive process that underlies this improvement remains unknown. Many studies postulate that MCE increases inhibition, but ERP evidence is ambiguous due to significant differences across past procedures. Most importantly, exercise intensity, which modulates the relationship between acute exercise and cognitive processes, might have varied across past ERP studies.

Top-down and bottom-up competition in visual stimuli processing.

Limited attention capacity results that not all the stimuli present in the visual field are equally processed. While processing of salient stimuli is automatically boosted by bottom‑up attention, processing of task‑relevant stimuli can be boosted volitionally by top‑down attention. Usually, both top‑down and bottom‑up influences are present simultaneously, which creates a competition between these two types of attention.

Cognitive conflict increases processing of negative, task-irrelevant stimuli.

The detection of cognitive conflict is thought to trigger adjustments in executive control. It has been recently shown that cognitive conflict increases processing of stimuli that are relevant to the ongoing task and that these modulations are exerted by the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). However, it is still unclear whether such control influences are unspecific and might also affect the processing of task-irrelevant stimuli.

Is elaboration of affective content sufficient to attenuate emotional responses during reappraisal procedures?

Reappraisal is an emotion regulation strategy which involves changing the interpretation of emotional stimuli. It decreases measures of negative affect together with markers of emotional processing, including late positive potential (LPP). Affective responses can also be attenuated by various cognitive tasks.

Interactions Between the Prefrontal Cortex and Attentional Systems During Volitional Affective Regulation: An Effective Connectivity Reappraisal Study.

Reappraisal is an emotion regulation strategy used to change reactions to emotion-related stimuli by reinterpreting their meaning. During down-regulation of negative emotions, wide areas of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) inhibit emotion-related brain areas such as the amygdala. Little is known, however, about how this control activity influences the earliest stages of affective responses by modulating perceptual and attentional areas.

Towards a constructionist approach to emotions: verification of the three-dimensional model of affect with EEG-independent component analysis.

The locationist model of affect, which assumes separate brain structures devoted to particular discrete emotions, is currently being questioned as it has not received enough convincing experimental support. An alternative, constructionist approach suggests that our emotional states emerge from the interaction between brain functional networks, which are related to more general, continuous affective categories. In the study, we tested whether the three-dimensional model of affect based on valence, arousal, and dominance (VAD) can reflect brain activity in a more coherent way than the traditional locationist approach.

Effective connectivity during visual processing is affected by emotional state.

The limitations of our cognitive resources necessitate the selection of relevant information from the incoming visual stream. This selection and prioritizing of stimuli allows the organism to adapt to the current conditions. However, the characteristics of this process vary with time and depend on numerous external and internal factors.