Biomedical subjects

Heiner Ellgring

Publications and source records attributed to Heiner Ellgring.

11 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Stress affects hedonic responses but not reaching-grasping in Parkinson's disease.

Stress can transiently increase motor symptoms of Parkinson's disease (PD), but it is unclear whether other behavioural changes associated with PD are also affected. We found that reaching-grasping was impaired in 19 PD patients compared with 19 matched controls, but these impairments were not amplified by stress. However, patients showed a stress-induced reduction of hedonic responses. Stress may amplify those impairments in PD that are not accessible to cognitive control.

Aged↗

PubMed2006

Patient education in Parkinson's disease: Formative evaluation of a standardized programme in seven European countries.

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate a newly developed education programme for Parkinson's disease (PD) patients. METHODS: The programme consisted of eight sessions and aimed at improving knowledge and skills related to self-monitoring, health promotion, stress management, depression, anxiety, social competence, and social support, all with special reference to PD. The programme was formatively evaluated in seven European countries (Spain, Finland, Italy, The Netherlands, United Kingdom, Estonia, Germany) with 151 patients diagnosed with idiopathic PD. The evaluation included patients' ratings of the comprehensibility and feasibility of the programme as well as mood ratings before and after each session. Patients also completed questionnaires at the beginning and end of the programme to explore possible changes in disease-related psychosocial problems, quality of life, and depression. RESULTS: The programme was feasible to run, and patients were able to understand its elements. Patients reported mood elevations following individual sessions and reduced disease-related psychosocial problems after completing the programme. There were no substantial differences in results between cultures. CONCLUSION: Patient education appears to have potential as a useful and feasible intervention, complementing medical treatment in PD. PRACTICE IMPLICATIONS: The present programme will soon be available in seven European languages and can be tested in different health care systems.

Adult↗

PubMed2006

Facial and affective reactions to tastes and their modulation by sadness and joy.

This study examined adults' affective and facial reactions to tastes which differ in quality and valence, and the impact of sadness and joy on these reactions. Thirty-six male and female subjects participated voluntarily. Subjects each tasted 6 ml of a sweet chocolate drink, a bitter quinine solution (0.0015 M) and a bitter-sweet soft drink. Following a baseline period, either joy or sadness was induced using film clips before the same taste stimuli were presented for a second time. Subjects rated the drinks' pleasantness and intensity of taste immediately after each stimulus presentation. Facial reactions were videotaped and analysed using the Facial Action Coding System (FACS [P. Ekman, W.V. Friesen, Facial Action Coding System: Manual. Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press; 1978., P. Ekman, W. Friesen, J. Hager, Facial Action Coding System. Salt Lake City, Utah: Research Nexus; 2002.]). The results strongly indicated that the tastes produced specific facial reactions that bear strong similarities to the facial reactivity patterns found in human newborns. The data also suggest that some adults' facial reactions serve additional communicative functions. Emotions modulated taste ratings, but not facial reactions to tastes. In particular, ratings of the sweet stimulus were modulated in congruence with emotion quality, such that joy increased and sadness decreased the pleasantness and sweetness of the sweet stimulus. No emotion-congruent modulation was found for the pleasantness and intensity ratings of the bitter or the bitter-sweet stimulus. This 'robustness' of bitter taste ratings may reflect a biologically meaningful mechanism.

Adult↗

PubMed2005

Emotion processing in Parkinson's disease: dissociation between early neuronal processing and explicit ratings.

OBJECTIVE: Patients suffering from Parkinson's disease (PD) have a diminished ability to discriminate facial expressions of emotion. We investigated early emotion discrimination deficits in PD by means of event-related potentials (ERPs). METHODS: Emotional pictures were presented to 14 PD patients and 14 healthy controls in a rapid serial visual presentation paradigm (three frames per second) while EEG was recorded. In addition, valence and arousal ratings were obtained for a representative subsample of 54 pictures. RESULTS: PD patients rated pictures of highly arousing content as less exciting than did healthy controls. Pictures of high compared to low emotional arousal were associated with a pronounced relative negative shift in the ERP waveform over parietal and occipital sites developing about 220 ms after picture onset. This early posterior negativity (EPN) did not differ between PD and control group. CONCLUSIONS: This dissociation of affective ratings and early ERP components supports the view that PD is associated with blunted emotional responses, but there is no evidence for a deteriorated early visual processing of emotional stimuli. SIGNIFICANCE: Frequently reported deficits in emotion discrimination are likely not due to deficits in early emotion processing.

Aged↗

PubMed2005

The perceived function of eating is changed during examination stress: a field study.

Changes of eating in response to a real life stressor were examined in field study using a control group design with pre- and posttest. Students (n=22) awaiting an exam and control subjects (n=20) were assessed 3-4 weeks and 3-4 days before the exam. They were given a pager, which beeped ten times a day at random intervals. Upon each signal, participants rated their emotional state and motivations to eat. If they had eaten since the last signal they reported the perceived function of their actual eating behavior. Compared to control subjects, students awaiting an exam reported higher emotional stress and an increased tendency to eat in order to distract themselves from stress. Results indicate that emotion regulation through eating is experienced in a student population during stress under real life conditions with distraction as a possible mediating mechanism.

Affect↗

PubMed2004

Face and facial expression memory in temporal lobe epilepsy patients: preliminary results.

Right temporal lobe structures are involved in face and facial expression processing and in mnestic functions. Face and facial expression memory was investigated in 15 patients with left (LTLE) and 18 patients with right (RTLE) temporal lobe epilepsy as well as 13 healthy controls. Pairs of pictures combining four faces and four emotions had to be matched according to face identity or facial expression. In the memory tasks, the two pictures of a pair were divided by a memory interval of 2000 milliseconds, whereas in the perception tasks (control condition) both pictures were presented simultaneously. RTLE patients had significantly lower scores than healthy controls in face memory. LTLE patients had significantly lower scores than healthy controls in face and facial expression memory. The data confirm impaired face memory in RTLE patients and show that LTLE patients display deficits in face as well as in facial expression memory. Results are discussed according to functional reorganization, memory strategies, perception performance, naming problems, and group characteristics.

Adult↗

PubMed2004

Early-stage face processing dysfunction in patients with schizophrenia.

OBJECTIVE: Deficits in emotional processing are evident in patients with schizophrenia. Since recent studies have indicated dysfunctions in cortical areas involved in face processing, this study investigated the early processing of faces in schizophrenia patients through the use of event-related potentials. METHOD: Event-related potential responses were obtained from 24 schizophrenia patients and 28 healthy comparison subjects who were presented with pictures of faces and pictures of buildings (control stimuli). RESULTS: Schizophrenia patients displayed significantly lower differences in the face-specific N170 component between the face and building pictures than did the healthy comparison subjects. CONCLUSIONS: This finding suggests a dysfunction of early-stage visual processing of faces in patients with schizophrenia.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2003

Emotions in overweight and normal-weight women immediately after eating foods differing in energy.

Immediate effects of low-, medium-, and high-energy foods on the emotional state of normal-weight and overweight women were studied experimentally. Nineteen normal-weight (body mass index [BMI]: 19-25 kg/m2) and 19 overweight women (BMI: 26-40 kg/m2) aged 18-40 years received samples of food that differed in energy content (low vs. medium vs. high energy) and rated their emotional state immediately after eating. Perceived characteristics of the foods and associations elicited by the foods were also obtained. Negative emotions (anger, fear, shame, and sadness) and sleepiness increased, while happiness decreased with energy of foods. Emotionally negative associations were more frequent, while positive emotions were less frequent the higher the energy content of the foods. Sadness, shame, fear, and sleepiness after eating high-energy food tended to be more intense in overweight women. Additional analyses demonstrated influences of eating habits, e.g., disinhibition. The higher the energy content of a food stimulus, the more it was viewed as "unhealthy" and "dangerous." It is suggested that immediate food-induced changes of emotions can be explained by activation of associative emotion networks.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2003

Is there a reliable factorial structure in the 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale? A comparison of factor models in clinical and normal adult samples.

OBJECTIVES: The 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20) is the most widely used instrument for measuring alexithymia. However, different studies did not always yield identical factor structures of this scale. The present study aims at clarifying some discrepant results. METHODS: Maximum likelihood confirmatory factor analyses of a German version of the TAS-20 were conducted on data from a clinical sample (N=204) and a sample of normal adults (N=224). Five different models with one to four factors were compared. RESULTS: A four-factor model with factors (F1) "Difficulty identifying feelings" (F2), "Difficulty describing feelings" (F3), "Low importance of emotion" and (F4) "Pragmatic thinking" and a three-factor model with the combined factor "Difficulties in identifying and describing feelings" described the data best. Factors related to "externally oriented thinking" provided no acceptable level of reliability. CONCLUSIONS: Results from the present and other studies indicate that the factorial structure of the TAS-20 may vary across samples. Whether factor structures different from the common three-factor structure are an exception in some mainly clinical populations or a common phenomenon outside student populations has still to be determined. For a further exploration of the factor structure of the TAS-20 in different populations, it would be important not only to test the fit of the common three-factor model, but also to consider other competing solutions like the models of the present study.

Adult↗

PubMed2002

Face-specific event-related potential in humans is independent from facial expression.

A face-specific brain EEG potential at approximately 160 ms after stimulus presentation has recently been described by various research groups. Most of these studies analysed this face-specific brain potential using smiling faces as stimuli. In electrophysiological studies, however, differences in amplitude due to the emotional valence of the stimuli were described as early as 100 ms after stimulus presentation. In order to investigate the effect of facial expressions with different emotional content on face-specific brain EEG potentials, event-related potentials (ERPs) to faces with sad, happy and neutral expressions were compared to ERPs elicited with buildings in 16 healthy subjects. A face-specific potential at vertex approximately 160 ms after stimulus presentation has been verified in the present study. No significant differences in latency or amplitude of this component were found for different facial expressions.

Adult↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Relationship and differential validity of alexithymia and depression: a comparison of the Toronto Alexithymia and Self-Rating Depression Scales.

Theoretically, the constructs of alexithymia and depression share many common characteristics. Empirically moderate correlations between measures of alexithymia and depression have been found, hence it has been argued that the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS) may be, at least in some part, just another measure for depression. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the construct validity of alexithymia and to analyze the relationship between alexithymia and depression. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were conducted on the combined items of the TAS-20 and the Self-Rating Depression Scale (SDS) in a psychosomatic and alcoholic inpatient sample (n = 199) and a sample of normal adults (controls, n = 174). The exploratory factor analysis in the patient sample yielded a 4-factor structure. Within each factor there was no overlap between the items of the TAS-20 and the SDS. Two factors were comprised of items of the TAS-20 and two factors consisted of items of the SDS. This 4-factor model also showed an acceptable fit for the data of the normal sample in a confirmatory factor analysis. Moderate correlations between the TAS- 20 and SDS total scores and some factors were found. Both instruments, the TAS-20 and the SDS, seem to measure distinct constructs and are not just different measures for the same underlying construct. This provides support for the differential validity of the alexithymia and depression constructs and is in accordance with previous findings.

Adult↗