Attention shifting in the context of emotional faces: Disentangling neural mechanisms of irritability from anxiety

In everyday life, faces with emotional expressions quickly attract attention and eye-movements. To study the neural mechanisms of such emotion-driven attention by means of event-related brain potentials (ERPs), tasks that employ covert shifts of attention are commonly used, in which participants need to inhibit natural eye-movements towards stimuli. It remains, however, unclear how shifts of attention to emotional faces with and without eye-movements differ from each other. The current preregistered study aimed to investigate neural differences between covert and overt emotion-driven attention. We combined eye-tracking with measurements of ERPs to compare shifts of attention to faces with happy, angry or neutral expressions when eye-movements were either executed (Go conditions) or withheld (No-go conditions). Happy and angry faces led to larger EPN amplitudes, shorter latencies of the P1 component and faster saccades, suggesting that emotional expressions significantly affected shifts of attention. Several ERPs (N170, EPN, LPC), were augmented in amplitude when attention was shifted with an eye-movement, indicating an enhanced neural processing of faces if eye-movements had to be executed together with a reallocation of attention. However, the modulation of ERPs by facial expressions did not differ between the Go and No-go conditions, suggesting that emotional content enhances both covert and overt shifts of attention. In summary, our results indicate that overt and covert attention shifts differ but are comparably affected by emotional content.

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Neural mechanisms of overt attention shifts to emotional faces

10.31234/osf.io/ajsxq ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

Louisa Kulke

Keyword(s):

Eye Movements ◽

Eye Tracking ◽

Everyday Life ◽

Visual Saliency ◽

Neural Mechanisms ◽

Top Down ◽

Emotional Faces ◽

Overt Attention ◽

Early Posterior Negativity ◽

Attention Shifts

Emotional faces draw attention and eye-movements towards them. However, the neural mechanisms of attention have mainly been investigated during fixation, which is uncommon in everyday life where people move their eyes to shift attention to faces. Therefore, the current study combined eye-tracking and Electroencephalography (EEG) to measure neural mechanisms of overt attention shifts to faces with happy, neutral and angry expressions, allowing participants to move their eyes freely towards the stimuli. Saccade latencies towards peripheral faces did not differ depending on expression and early neural response (P1) amplitudes and latencies were unaffected. However, the later occurring Early Posterior Negativity (EPN) was significantly larger for emotional than for neutral faces. This response occurs after saccades towards the faces. Therefore, emotion modulations only occurred after an overt shift of gaze towards the stimulus had already been completed. Visual saliency rather than emotional content may therefore drive early saccades, while later top-down processes reflect emotion processing.

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Neural mechanisms of encoding and maintenance of emotional faces in social anxiety disorder : An ERP study with an N-back task

Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience ◽

10.3389/conf.fnagi.2016.03.00027 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 8 ◽

Author(s):

Blekic Wivine ◽

Kandana Arachchige Kendra ◽

Wauthia Erika ◽

Maurage Pierre ◽

Rossignol Mandy

Keyword(s):

Anxiety Disorder ◽

Social Anxiety ◽

Social Anxiety Disorder ◽

Neural Mechanisms ◽

Emotional Faces ◽

Back Task

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Inagaki & Ross (in press): Giving targeted versus untargeted support

10.31234/osf.io/eudqf ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Tristen Inagaki ◽

Lauren Ross

Keyword(s):

Parental Care ◽

Social Factors ◽

Social Ties ◽

Septal Area ◽

Neural Mechanisms ◽

Social Connection ◽

Emotional Faces ◽

Self Reports ◽

Amygdala Activity ◽

Theoretical Test

Objective. Giving support contributes to the link between social ties and health, however, the neural mechanisms are not known. Giving support in humans may rely on neural regions implicated in parental care in animals. The current studies, therefore, assess the contribution of parental care-related neural regions to giving support in humans and, as a further theoretical test, examine whether the benefits of giving targeted support to single, identifiable individuals in need extends to giving untargeted support to larger societal causes. Methods. For Study 1 (n = 45, M age = 21.98 (3.29), 69% females), participants completed a giving support task followed by an emotional faces task in the fMRI scanner. For Study 2 (n = 382, M age=43.03 (7.28), 52% females), participants self-reported on their giving support behavior and completed an emotional faces task in the fMRI scanner. Results. In Study 1, giving targeted (vs. untargeted) support resulted in greater feelings of social connection and support effectiveness. Further, greater septal area (SA) activity, a region centrally involved in parental care in animals, to giving targeted support was associated with less right amygdala activity to an emotional faces task (r=-.297, 95% CI=[-.547, -.043]). Study 2 replicated and extended this association to show that self-reports of giving targeted support were associated with less amygdala activity to a different emotional faces task, even when adjusting for other social factors (r=-.105, 95% CI=[-.200, -.011]). Giving untargeted support was not related to amygdala activity in either study.

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Neural Mechanisms of Overt Attention Shifts to Emotional Faces

Neuroscience ◽

10.1016/j.neuroscience.2019.08.023 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 418 ◽

pp. 59-68 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Louisa Kulke

Keyword(s):

Neural Mechanisms ◽

Emotional Faces ◽

Overt Attention ◽

Attention Shifts

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John Ludbrook APPS Symposium Neural Mechanisms In The Cardiovascular Responses To Acute Central Hypovolaemia

Clinical and Experimental Pharmacology and Physiology ◽

10.1046/j.1440-1681.2001.3473.x ◽

2001 ◽

Vol 28 (5-6) ◽

pp. 479-487

Author(s):

Roger G Evans ◽

Sabatino Ventura ◽

Roger Al Dampney ◽

John Ludbrook

Keyword(s):

Cardiovascular Responses ◽

Neural Mechanisms ◽

Central Hypovolaemia

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The Flip Side of the Auditory Spatial Selection Benefit

Experimental Psychology (formerly Zeitschrift für Experimentelle Psychologie) ◽

10.1027/1618-3169/a000274 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 62 (1) ◽

pp. 66-74 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Iring Koch ◽

Vera Lawo

Keyword(s):

Task Switching ◽

Auditory Task ◽

Numerical Magnitude ◽

Attention Shifting ◽

Gender Selection ◽

Spatial Selection ◽

Number Words ◽

Switch Costs ◽

Mixing Costs ◽

Experimental Group

In cued auditory task switching, one of two dichotically presented number words, spoken by a female and a male, had to be judged according to its numerical magnitude. One experimental group selected targets by speaker gender and another group by ear of presentation. In mixed-task blocks, the target-defining feature (male/female vs. left/right) was cued prior to each trial, but in pure blocks it remained constant. Compared to selection by gender, selection by ear led to better performance in pure blocks than in mixed blocks, resulting in larger “global” mixing costs for ear-based selection. Selection by ear also led to larger “local” switch costs in mixed blocks, but this finding was partially mediated by differential cue-repetition benefits. Together, the data suggest that requirements of attention shifting diminish the auditory spatial selection benefit.

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