The analysis of the sensitivity measure d’ (shock

vs. unpaired, −0.085 ± 0.72; right vs. left hand, −0.112 ± 0.78) showed that subjects performed at chance level in this task (shock vs. unpaired, t32 = −0.672, P = 0.506; right vs. left hand, t32 = −0.821, P = 0.417). In the pair comparison task, which was supposed to measure contingency awareness on a more implicit level, participants showed a similar performance. Their responses did not differ significantly from guessing rate when asked to identify the tone they found more pleasant in a pair of CS+ and CS− (mean percentage of correct identification of the CS−, 51.06 ± 11.75%; t32 = 0.519, P = 0.608). In the third task, we used affective priming to assess effects of automatic valence activation by the presentation of shock-conditioned or unpaired tones (primes) on response latencies in an evaluative decision task which required Selleck PFT�� the categorisation of subsequently presented adjectives (targets) according to their emotional meaning (positive or negative). The repeated-measures anova on the inverted RTs revealed a significant

main effect of Congruency (F1,32 = 8.159, P = 0.007). However, in contrast to our selleck chemicals hypothesis, congruent priming (inverted RTs, 0.930 1/sec ± 0.11) resulted in significantly slower RTs (i.e. smaller inverted RTs) than did incongruent priming (inverted RTs, 0.944 1/sec ± 0.11). Neither the main effect of Valence (F1,32 = 1.276, P = 0.267) nor the interaction of the two factors (F1,32 = 0.165, P = 0.687) was significant. The use of inverted and not log-transformed reaction times was based on visual inspection of the histograms that suggested a slightly better approximation to the normal distribution for the inverted than

for the log-transformed data. The results for the log-transformed data, however, were qualitatively the same (significant main effect of Congruency, F1,32 = 6.595; P = 0.015, no main effect of Valence, no interaction of Congruency and Valence). In the present study, we asked how emotionally salient auditory stimuli are processed in the human brain. More specifically, Oxymatrine we investigated the spatiotemporal dynamics of auditory emotion processing after cross-modal aversive MultiCS conditioning with time-sensitive whole-head MEG. Consistent with our hypotheses, we obtained evidence for highly resolving differential processing of multiple shock-conditioned tones on initial cortical processing stages under challenging perceptual conditions and after a brief learning history. CS-evoked magnetic fields compared before and after conditioning were affect-specifically modulated in the time-range of the auditory N1m component between 100 and 150 ms after stimulus onset. Inverse source modelling within this time-interval revealed differential neural activity within a distributed network of left parietotemporal and right prefrontal cortex.