PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - Constantin Winker AU - Maimu A. Rehbein AU - Dean Sabatinelli AU - Markus Junghofer TI - Repeated noninvasive stimulation of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex reveals cumulative amplification of pleasant compared to unpleasant scene processing: a single subject pilot study AID - 10.1101/744987 DP - 2019 Jan 01 TA - bioRxiv PG - 744987 4099 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/08/22/744987.short 4100 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/08/22/744987.full AB - The ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) is a major hub of the reward system and has been shown to activate specifically in response to pleasant / rewarding stimuli. Previous studies demonstrate enhanced pleasant cue reactivity after single applications of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to the vmPFC. Here we present a pilot case study in which we assess the cumulative impact of multiple consecutive vmPFC-tDCS sessions on the processing of visual emotional stimuli in an event-related MEG recording design. The results point to stable modulation of increased positivity biases (pleasant > unpleasant stimulus signal strength) after excitatory vmPFC stimulation and a reversed pattern (pleasant < unpleasant) after inhibitory stimulation across five consecutive tDCS sessions. Moreover, cumulative effects of these emotional bias modulations were observable for several source-localized spatio-temporal clusters, suggesting an increase in modulatory efficiency by repeated tDCS sessions. This pilot study provides evidence for improvements in the effectiveness and utility of a novel tDCS paradigm in the context of emotional processing.