ReviewFrontiers in human neuroscience2016
A Brief Review of Research Using Near-Infrared Spectroscopy to Measure Activation of the Prefrontal Cortex during Emotional Processing: The Importance of Experimental Design.
Review in Frontiers in human neuroscience, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 40 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
40 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- A systematic review of studies that used NIRS to measure neural activation during emotion processing in healthy individuals.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2021Pooled it
- A Systematic Review of the Application of Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy to the Study of Cerebral Hemodynamics in Healthy Aging.Neuropsychology review · 2021Pooled it
- Behavioral intervention with task repetition compared to pharmacological intervention with SSRI for enhancement of cognitive control in emotional and non-emotional settings.Psychopharmacology · 2025Trial
- Emotional interference and right prefrontal hemodynamic responses in adult cannabis users: a pilot fNIRS study.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Near-infrared time-resolved spectroscopy reveals task-induced emotions by measuring cerebral blood oxygenation changes in the frontal pole during creative activity using a real object.IBRO neuroscience reports · 2025Article
- Affective prosody and cortical activation in dementia of the Alzheimer's type: an exploratory acoustic and fNIRS study.Frontiers in dementia · 2025Article
- Categorization and discrimination of human and non-human primate affective vocalizations: Investigation of frontal cortex activity through fNIRS.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Neuronal Mechanisms of Reading Informational Texts in People with Different Levels of Mental Resilience.Brain sciences · 2024Article
- Gender Differences in Prefrontal Cortex Response to Negative Emotional Stimuli in Drivers.Brain sciences · 2024Article
- Capture of emotional responses under a simulated earthquake experience using near-infrared spectroscopy and virtual reality.PloS one · 2024Article
- Brief Myofascial Intervention Modulates Visual Event-Related Potential Response to Emotional Photographic Contents: A Pilot Study.Vision (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- fNIRS Assessment during Cognitive Tasks in Elderly Patients with Depressive Symptoms.Brain sciences · 2023Article
- Similarities and differences in the induction and regulation of the negative emotions fear and disgust: A functional near infrared spectroscopy study.Scandinavian journal of psychology · 2022Article
- The influence of stimuli valence, extraversion, and emotion regulation on visual search within real-world scenes.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- A pediatric near-infrared spectroscopy brain-computer interface based on the detection of emotional valence.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2022Article
- Characteristics of prefrontal activity during emotional and cognitive processing in patients with bipolar disorder: A multi-channel functional near-infrared spectroscopy study.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2022Article
- Behavioral, cortical and autonomic effects of single-dose escitalopram on the induction and regulation of fear and disgust: Comparison with single-session psychological emotion regulation with reappraisal.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2022Article
- The scalability of common paradigms for assessment of cognitive function: A functional transcranial Doppler study.PloS one · 2022Article
- Interactive influences of emotion and extraversion on visual attention.Brain and behavior · 2021Article
- Optical brain imaging and its application to neurofeedback.NeuroImage. Clinical · 2021Review
Corrections and comments
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3 authors.
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Abstract
During the past two decades there has been a pronounced increase in the number of published research studies that have employed near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) to measure neural activation. The technique is now an accepted neuroimaging tool adopted by cognitive neuroscientists to investigate a number of fields, one of which is the study of emotional processing. Crucially, one brain region that is important to the processing of emotional information is the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and NIRS is ideally suited to measuring activity in this region. Compared to other methods used to record neural activation, NIRS reduces the discomfort to participants, makes data collection from larger sample sizes more achievable, and allows measurement of activation during tasks involving physical movement. However, the use of NIRS to investigate the links between emotion and cognition has revealed mixed findings. For instance, whilst some studies report increased PFC activity associated with the processing of negative information, others show increased activity in relation to positive information. Research shows differences in PFC activity between different cognitive tasks, yet findings also vary within similar tasks. This work reviews a selection of recent studies that have adopted NIRS to study PFC activity during emotional processing in both healthy individuals and patient populations. It highlights the key differences between research findings and argues that variations in experimental design could be a contributing factor to the mixed results. Guidance is provided for future work in this area in order to improve consistency within this growing field.
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