Dear experts,

It's my immense pleasure to invite you or your colleagues to submit to the Research Topic titled "Affective Processing and Non-invasive Brain Stimulation" for Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. More details of the Research Topic please see the URL (http://journal.frontiersin.org/researchtopic/5965/affective-processing-and-non-invasive-brain-stimulation#overview). I am looking forward to your excellent manuscripts. Thank you very much for the cooperation.

Frontiers in Human Neuroscience is an open-access journal devoted to understanding the brain mechanisms supporting cognitive and social behavior in humans, and how these mechanisms might be altered in disease states. It is the #1 most cited journal in Psychology and the #1 most cited open-access neuroscience journal. Now, its impact factor is 3.634.

About this Research Topic
Affective processing (AP) plays a crucial role in normal human life. Almost all types of human behaviors are conducted in some emotional context. Disturbance of AP is tightly associated with psychiatric disorders such as addiction, depression, anxiety, etc. Plenty of previous studies have tried to understand the neural underpinnings of AP and the associated behavioral outputs. However, the causal roles of brain areas in AP and the effects of intervention on AP through outer stimuli are not well-known. Non-invasive brain stimulation (NBS) methodologies such as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and transcranial direct/alternating current stimulation (tDCS/tACS) can transiently "close" the processing of target brain areas, and thus can be used to understand the causal relationship between brain and behavior. Furthermore, NBS has also been reported to have the long-term effect of enhancing or diminishing some brain function under special conditions. NBS thus has a large potential to contribute to improving the studies and applications of AP and its related disorders.
The core purpose of this topic is to identify the neural correlates of AP, how these neural correlates are modulated by short/long-term NBS, and how these modulations contribute to the improvement of AP in either healthy or clinical patients. By addressing the aforementioned questions, our Research Topic may help to delineate the influences of NBS on AP, and may help to propose potentially empirical interventions for clinical AP disorders.
To achieve these goals, we encourage submissions that are broadly related to the following themes to expand current knowledge. We welcome original research papers as well as meta-analyses papers and review papers.
-- What are the neural correlates (spatial, temporal or frequency domains) of affective processing with and without NBS? What are the differences in neural correlates between different types of AP or its related disorders?
-- How does long/short-term NBS modulate the neural processing and behavioral outputs of AP? What are the differences between long-term and short-term NBS? Does some NBS method specifically influence subtypes of AP?-
- How does NBS contribute to the treatment of clinical patients with AP disorders? Do combined NBS and traditional interventions do better than individually applying NBS or traditional intervention?
-- The safety and ethic concerns of NBS in the studies of AP in both healthy subjects and clinical patients.

Keywords: affective processing, non-invasive brain stimulationImportant 

Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be in line with the scope of the specialty and field to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Manuscripts discovered during any stage of peer review to be outside of the scope may be transferred to a suitable section or field, or withdrawn from review.



Bests,
Delin Sun, PhD
Topic Editor
Duke-UNC Brain Imaging and Analysis Center
Duke University