Article
Psychology, Clinical
Lauren Mancusi, Dean McKay
Summary: Research supports the role of disgust in contamination OCD, but there is also overlap with fear in motivating avoidance. The "heebie-jeebies" emotion is associated with fear and disgust, aligning with characteristics of contamination OCD. Participants with higher disgust and anxiety were more likely to refuse to complete tasks, indicating a significant interaction effect.
JOURNAL OF ANXIETY DISORDERS
(2021)
Article
Psychology, Developmental
Matti Cervin, Sean Perrin, Elin Olsson, Emma Claesdotter-Knutsson, Magnus Lindvall
Summary: Fear, incompleteness, and disgust were all found to be associated with symptoms of OCD in youth, with incompleteness serving as a differentiating factor between youth with OCD and those with social anxiety disorder and generalized anxiety disorder. An positive association was also identified between feelings of incompleteness and self-reported hoarding behaviors among youth with OCD. Further research on the emotional aspects of pediatric OCD and its implications for etiology and treatment are warranted.
EUROPEAN CHILD & ADOLESCENT PSYCHIATRY
(2021)
Article
Clinical Neurology
Elisa Dal Bo, Claudio Gentili, Andrea Castellani, Carmen Tripodi, Florian Ph S. Fischmeister, Cinzia Cecchetto
Summary: This study found that symptoms of anxiety were associated with higher levels of awareness of common odors, while symptoms of depression and social anxiety were associated with increased awareness of social odors. Assessing meta-cognitive abilities may be a useful tool in preventing and evaluating symptoms of depression, anxiety, and social anxiety.
JOURNAL OF AFFECTIVE DISORDERS
(2022)
Article
Neurosciences
Gursimran Kaur, Rakshita Anand, Mrinmoy Chakrabarty
Summary: Attention can selectively process visual information for efficient navigation. This study investigated whether emotions modulate the spatial distribution of visual attention and whether this effect is associated with individual differences in anxiety. The results showed that anxiety levels influenced the effect of negative emotion signals on the spatial distribution of visual attention. These findings are important for understanding biases in visual behavior related to affective states and disorders.
Article
Psychology, Clinical
Matti Cervin, Sean Perrin
Summary: The study found that higher levels of incompleteness and disgust in baseline OCD symptoms predicted poorer treatment outcomes for youth with OCD, while fear levels did not predict outcomes.
Article
Neurosciences
Marion Rochet, Wissam El-Hage, Lise Dreyfuss, Boriana Atanasova
Summary: The study found that individuals with minor depressive symptoms showed lower scores for positive emotions and weaker attribution of positive personality traits compared to healthy controls in response to pleasant olfactory stimuli. These results may be explained by the affective state of the MDS subjects and further research is needed to validate the findings.
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE
(2021)
Article
Nutrition & Dietetics
Agnieszka Sorokowska, Dominika Chabin, Thomas Hummel, Maciej Karwowski
Summary: This study examines the relationship between food neophobia and olfaction in adolescents, and significant correlations were found between the two. Self-assessed sensitivity and odor awareness were identified as the most influential predictors of food neophobia related to olfaction.
Article
Chemistry, Multidisciplinary
Doris Schicker, Satnam Singh, Jessica Freiherr, Andreas T. T. Grasskamp
Summary: We have developed and implemented a linear classification algorithm called Olfactory Weighted Sum (OWSum) for predicting the odor of molecules. Our approach relies on the structural patterns of the molecules and uses conditional probabilities combined with tf-idf values. In addition to odor prediction, OWSum provides insights into dataset properties and quantitatively assigns structural patterns to odors, allowing chemists to understand underlying interactions. We also introduced descriptor overlap as a metric for quantifying semantic overlap between descriptors, enabling grouping and derivation of higher-level descriptors. This approach significantly enhances our ability to understand and predict molecular features.
JOURNAL OF CHEMINFORMATICS
(2023)
Review
Psychology, Multidisciplinary
Fabrice Damon, Nawel Mezrai, Logan Magnier, Arnaud Leleu, Karine Durand, Benoist Schaal
Summary: Recent research explores the interactions between olfaction and other sensory channels to process social information. Body odors influence face perception, involving both invariant facial information and transient face properties. In infancy, olfactory cues strongly impact face perception, providing key information for social interactions.
FRONTIERS IN PSYCHOLOGY
(2021)
Article
Biology
Sudeshna Das Chakraborty, Hetan Chang, Bill S. Hansson, Silke Sachse, Sonia Sen
Summary: This study investigated the transformation and representation of odor information in higher-order neurons of the lateral horn in Drosophila melanogaster. The researchers found that these neurons exhibited reproducible, stereotypic, and odor-specific response patterns. Importantly, the response amplitude of these neurons was positively correlated with innate odor preferences, suggesting that their activity is valence-specific. The study also revealed that the excitatory input to glutamatergic lateral horn neurons primarily came from uniglomerular projection neurons, while odor-specific inhibition was mediated by inhibitory multiglomerular neurons.
Article
Behavioral Sciences
K. Achyuthanand, Saurabh Prasad, Mrinmoy Chakrabarty
Summary: This study investigated the influence of environmental noise and internal states (such as emotional arousal and anxiety) on the ability to perceive emotions in speech. The results showed that individuals with higher trait-anxiety levels had lower sensitivity in detecting acoustic signals of negative emotions, as well as lower sensitivity to acoustic signals across all emotions. These findings are important for understanding perception anomalies related to affective traits and disorders.
FRONTIERS IN BEHAVIORAL NEUROSCIENCE
(2023)
Article
Psychology, Clinical
Leanne Mulheron, Mairwen K. Jones
Summary: The study found that participants in the high-disgust and high-threat conditions showed higher task avoidance and longer latency to begin each step. However, handwashing duration did not significantly differ between high-disgust and low-disgust conditions or high-threat and low-threat conditions. The shorter handwashing duration and relatively low anxiety levels may account for these results.
Article
Clinical Neurology
Bunmi O. Olatunji
Summary: The study found that emotionally arousing images as distractors significantly reduced accuracy for control participants at lag 2, but not for those with OCD. OCD symptoms were significantly correlated with difficulty disengaging from emotionally arousing images. These findings suggest inefficient engagement and disengagement of attentional networks in OCD.
JOURNAL OF AFFECTIVE DISORDERS
(2021)
Article
Biology
Kevin S. Chen, Rui Wu, Marc H. Gershow, Andrew M. Leifer
Summary: Olfactory navigation plays a crucial role in the survival of animals and is observed across species. This study presents a method to control and measure airborne odor concentration in an arena compatible with an agar substrate, allowing continuous monitoring of odor profile while imaging animal behavior. The researchers successfully measured the odor concentration experienced by C. elegans and D. melanogaster larvae populations as they navigate spatial odor landscapes.
Article
Neurosciences
Harrison Tuckman, Mainak Patel, Hong Lei
Summary: The study reveals that neurons in the moth's antennal lobe exhibit different characteristics in perceiving odor stimuli, with neurons receiving olfactory input adept at encoding the temporal length of pulses, while neurons receiving mechanosensory input are more efficient at tracking the dynamic temporal information of pulse delivery. This suggests a possible functional division within the antennal lobe, where neurons with strong olfactory input exhibit prolonged spiking responses for detailed discrimination of odor features, while neurons with mechanosensory input primarily resolve the temporal dynamics of brief, pulsatile odor encounters.
FRONTIERS IN NEUROSCIENCE
(2021)
