ArticlePsychophysiology2016
When anger dominates the mind: Increased motor corticospinal excitability in the face of threat.
Article in Psychophysiology, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed, 43 citations in OpenAlex.
- The Effect of Violent Virtual Avatar Experience on Players' Response Inhibition to Angry Expressions and Its Cognitive Neural Mechanisms.Experimental psychology · 2025Article
- Social threat avoidance depends on action-outcome predictability.Communications psychology · 2024Article
- Article
- Volition and control in law and in brain science: neurolegal translation of a foundational concept.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2024Review
- The Impact of the Perception of Primary Facial Emotions on Corticospinal Excitability.Brain sciences · 2023Article
- Indignation for moral violations suppresses the tongue motor cortex: preliminary TMS evidence.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2022Article
- Non-invasive Brain Stimulation of the Cerebellum in Emotion.Advances in experimental medicine and biology · 2022Article
- The cognitive neural mechanism of response inhibition and error processing to fearful expressions in adolescents with high reactive aggression.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Early Right Motor Cortex Response to Happy and Fearful Facial Expressions: A TMS Motor-Evoked Potential Study.Brain sciences · 2021Article
- Right Hemisphere Dominance for Unconscious Emotionally Salient Stimuli.Brain sciences · 2021Review
- How do you perceive threat? It's all in your pattern of brain activity.Brain imaging and behavior · 2020Article
- The spatial effect of fearful faces in the autonomic response.Experimental brain research · 2020Article
- Happy faces selectively increase the excitability of cortical neurons innervating frowning muscles of the mouth.Experimental brain research · 2020Article
- Angry and Fearful Face Conflict Effects in Post-traumatic Stress Disorder.Frontiers in psychology · 2019Article
- Neural Responses to Consciously and Unconsciously Perceived Emotional Faces: A Spinal fMRI Study.Brain sciences · 2018Article
- Perception of Threatening Intention Modulates Brain Processes to Body Actions: Evidence From Event-Related Potentials.Frontiers in psychology · 2018Article
- The Influence of Conscious and Unconscious Body Threat Expressions on Motor Evoked Potentials Studied With Continuous Flash Suppression.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2018Article
- Mind matters: A narrative review on affective state-dependency in non-invasive brain stimulation.International journal of clinical and health psychology : IJCHPArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Threat demands fast and adaptive reactions that are manifested at the physiological, behavioral, and phenomenological level and are responsive to the direction of threat and its severity for the individual. Here, we investigated the effects of threat directed toward or away from the observer on motor corticospinal excitability and explicit recognition. Sixteen healthy right-handed volunteers completed a transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) task and a separate three-alternative forced-choice emotion recognition task. Single-pulse TMS to the left primary motor cortex was applied to measure motor evoked potentials from the right abductor pollicis brevis in response to dynamic angry, fearful, and neutral bodily expressions with blurred faces directed toward or away from the observer. Results showed that motor corticospinal excitability increased independent of direction of anger compared with fear and neutral. In contrast, anger was better recognized when directed toward the observer compared with when directed away from the observer, while the opposite pattern was found for fear. The present results provide evidence for the differential effects of threat direction on explicit recognition and motor corticospinal excitability. In the face of threat, motor corticospinal excitability increases independently of the direction of anger, indicative of the importance of more automatic reactions to threat.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.