The substantial body of research employing subjective measures indicates that burnout syndrome is associated with cognitive and emotional dysfunctions. The growing amount of neurophysiological and neuroimaging research helps in broadening existing knowledge of the neural mechanisms underlying core burnout components (emotional exhaustion and depersonalization/cynicism) that are inextricably ass...

The human startle eyeblink reflex is reliably modified by both cognitive and emotional processes. This review provides a comprehensive survey of the current literature on human startle modification and its psychological significance. Issues raised for short lead interval startle inhibition include its interpretation as a measure of protection of processing, sensorimotor gating and early attenti...

People remember emotional and taboo words better than neutral words. It is well known that words that are processed at a deep (i.e., semantic) level are recalled better than words processed at a shallow (i.e., purely visual) level. To determine how depth of processing influences recall of emotional and taboo words, a levels of processing paradigm was used. Whether this effect holds for emotiona...

A current view proposes that the right inferior frontal cortex (IFC) is particularly responsible for attentive decoding and cognitive evaluation of emotional cues in human vocalizations. Although some studies seem to support this view, an exhaustive review of all recent imaging studies points to an important functional role of both the right and the left IFC in processing vocal emotions. Second...

In human social interactions, facial emotional expressions are a crucial source of information. Repeatedly presented information typically leads to an adaptation of neural responses. However, processing seems sustained with emotional facial expressions. Therefore, we tested whether sustained processing of emotional expressions, especially threat-related expressions, would attenuate neural adapt...

Neuroimaging research offers a powerful and noninvasive means to understand healthy as well as dysregulated emotional processing in healthy subjects and PTSD patients. Functional neuroimaging findings suggest specific roles for subregions of the medial prefrontal (mPFC), orbito frontal (OFC), anterior cingulate (ACC), and insular cortices as well as the sublenticular extended amygdala (SLEA) an...

Heavy cannabis use is associated with interpersonal problems that may arise in part from the inaccurate perception of emotional faces. Only one study reports impairments in emotional facial affect processing in heavy cannabis users; however, it is not clear whether these findings were attributable to differences between cannabis users and controls in schizotypy or gender, rather than from canna...

Emotional face processing is critically modulated by the serotonergic system, and serotonin (5-HT) receptor agonists impair emotional face processing. However, the specific contribution of the 5-HT1A receptor remains poorly understood. Here we investigated the spatiotemporal brain mechanisms underpinning the modulation of emotional face processing induced by buspirone, a partial 5-HT1A receptor...