Trial reportSocial cognitive and affective neuroscience2017
Prefrontal cortex stimulation does not affect emotional bias, but may slow emotion identification.
Trial report in Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- Aging, sex and cognitive Theory of Mind: a transcranial direct current stimulation study.Scientific reports · 2019Trial
- Neural predictors of treatment response to brain stimulation and psychological therapy in depression: a double-blind randomized controlled trial.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2019Trial
- Phase-specific alpha tACS over the dlPFC does not enhance cognitive reappraisal or autonomic responses: A sham-controlled crossover study.AIMS neuroscience · 2026Article
- Risk-Taking Behavior Among Male Adolescents: The Role of Observer Presence and Individual Self-Control.Journal of youth and adolescence · 2022Article
- Transcranial electric stimulation as a neural interface to gain insight on human brain functions: current knowledge and future perspective.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2022Review
- Predicting Response to Brain Stimulation in Depression: a Roadmap for Biomarker Discovery.Current behavioral neuroscience reports · 2021Review
- The neural basis of hot and cold cognition in depressed patients, unaffected relatives, and low-risk healthy controls: An fMRI investigation.Journal of affective disorders · 2020Article
- Theory of Mind Performance Predicts tDCS-Mediated Effects on the Medial Prefrontal Cortex: A Pilot Study to Investigate the Role of Sex and Age.Brain sciences · 2020Article
- The effect of frontoparietal paired associative stimulation on decision-making and working memory.Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior · 2019Article
- Affective Processing in Non-invasive Brain Stimulation Over Prefrontal Cortex.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2017Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) has recently garnered attention as a putative depression treatment. However, the cognitive mechanisms by which it exerts an antidepressant effect are unclear: tDCS may directly alter 'hot' emotional processing biases, or alleviate depression through changes in 'cold' (non-emotional) cognitive function. Here, 75 healthy participants performed a facial emotion identification task during 20 minutes of anodal or sham tDCS over the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) in a double-blind, within-subject crossover design. A subset of 31 participants additionally completed a task measuring attentional distraction during stimulation. Compared to sham stimulation, anodal tDCS of the left DLPFC resulted in an increase in response latency across all emotional conditions. Bayesian analysis showed definitively that tDCS exerted no emotion-dependent effect on behaviour. Thus, we demonstrate that anodal tDCS produces a general, rather than an emotion-specific, effect. We also report a preliminary finding in the subset of participants who completed the distractibility task: increased distractibility during active stimulation correlated significantly with the degree to which tDCS slowed emotion identification. Our results provide insight into the possible mechanisms by which DLPFC tDCS may treat symptoms of depression, suggesting that it may not alter emotional biases, but instead may affect 'cold' cognitive processes.
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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.