Event-related potential (ERP) asymmetries to emotional stimuli in a visual half-field paradigm

BackgroundThe late positive potential (LPP) is an event-related potential component that is sensitive to the motivational salience of stimuli. Children with a parental history of depression, an indicator of risk, have been found to exhibit an attenuated LPP to emotional stimuli. Research on depressive and anxiety disorders has organized these conditions into two empirical classes: distress and fear disorders. The present study examined whether parental history of distress and fear disorders was associated with the LPP to emotional stimuli in a large sample of adolescent girls.MethodThe sample of 550 girls (ages 13.5–15.5 years) with no lifetime history of depression completed an emotional picture-viewing task and the LPP was measured in response to neutral, pleasant and unpleasant pictures. Parental lifetime history of psychopathology was determined via a semi-structured diagnostic interview with a biological parent, and confirmatory factor analysis was used to model distress and fear dimensions.ResultsParental distress risk was associated with an attenuated LPP to all stimuli. In contrast, parental fear risk was associated with an enhanced LPP to unpleasant pictures but was unrelated to the LPP to neutral and pleasant pictures. Furthermore, these results were independent of the adolescent girls’ current depression and anxiety symptoms and pubertal status.ConclusionsThe present study demonstrates that familial risk for distress and fear disorders may have unique profiles in terms of electrocortical measures of emotional information processing. This study is also one of the first to investigate emotional/motivational processes underlying the distress and fear disorder dimensions.

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Intact Differentiation of Responses to Socially-Relevant Emotional Stimuli Across Psychotic Disorders: An Event-Related Potential (ERP) Study

10.31234/osf.io/4gdb6 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Peter E Clayson ◽

Jonathan Wynn ◽

Amy M. Jimenez ◽

ERIC A REAVIS ◽

Junghee Lee ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Psychotic Disorders ◽

Event Related Potential ◽

Similar Degree ◽

Social Anhedonia ◽

Emotional Stimuli ◽

Affective Psychosis ◽

Motivated Attention ◽

Social Images ◽

Socially Relevant ◽

Valence Effect

Event-related potential (ERP) studies of motivated attention in schizophrenia typically show intact sensitivity to affective vs. non-affective images depicting diverse types of content. However, it is not known whether this ERP pattern: 1) extends to images that solely depict social content, (2) applies across a broad sample with diverse psychotic disorders, and (3) relates to self-reported trait social anhedonia. We examined late positive potential (LPP) amplitudes to images involving people that were normatively pleasant (affiliative), unpleasant (threatening), or neutral in 97 stable outpatients with various psychotic disorders and 38 healthy controls. Both groups showed enhanced LPP to pleasant and unpleasant vs. neutral images to a similar degree, despite lower overall LPP in patients. Within the patients, there were no significant LPP differences among subgroups (schizophrenia vs. other psychotic disorders; affective vs. non-affective psychosis) for the valence effect (pleasant/unpleasant vs. neutral). Higher social anhedonia showed a small, significant relation to lower LPP to pleasant images across all groups. These findings suggest intact motivated attention to social images extends across psychotic disorder subgroups. Dimensional transdiagnostic analyses revealed a modest association between self-reported trait social anhedonia and an LPP index of neural sensitivity to pleasant affiliative images.

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Aberrant reward prediction error during Pavlovian appetitive learning in alexithymia

Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience ◽

10.1093/scan/nsz089 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 14 (10) ◽

pp. 1119-1129

Author(s):

Francesca Starita ◽

Mattia Pietrelli ◽

Caterina Bertini ◽

Giuseppe di Pellegrino

Keyword(s):

Prediction Error ◽

Event Related Potential ◽

Extensive Literature ◽

Prediction Errors ◽

Appetitive Conditioning ◽

Emotional Stimuli ◽

Internal Representations ◽

Reward Prediction ◽

Underlying Mechanisms ◽

Emotional Value

Abstract Extensive literature shows that alexithymia, a subclinical trait defined by difficulties in identifying and describing feelings, is characterized by multifaceted impairments in processing emotional stimuli. Nevertheless, its underlying mechanisms remain elusive. Here, we hypothesize that alexithymia may be characterized by an alteration in learning the emotional value of encountered stimuli and test this by assessing differences between individuals with low (LA) and high (HA) levels of alexithymia in the computation of reward prediction errors (RPEs) during Pavlovian appetitive conditioning. As a marker of RPE, the amplitude of the feedback-related negativity (FRN) event-related potential was assessed while participants were presented with two conditioned stimuli (CS) associated with expected or unexpected feedback, indicating delivery of reward or no-reward. No-reward (vs reward) feedback elicited the FRN both in LA and HA. However, unexpected (vs expected) feedback enhanced the FRN in LA but not in HA, indicating impaired computation of RPE in HA. Thus, although HA show preserved sensitivity to rewards, they cannot use this response to update the value of CS that predict them. This impairment may hinder the construction of internal representations of emotional stimuli, leaving individuals with alexithymia unable to effectively recognize, respond and regulate their response to emotional stimuli.

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Alterations in attention capture to auditory emotional stimuli in job burnout: An event-related potential study

International Journal of Psychophysiology ◽

10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2014.11.001 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 94 (3) ◽

pp. 427-436 ◽

Cited By ~ 23

Author(s):

Laura Sokka ◽

Minna Huotilainen ◽

Marianne Leinikka ◽

Jussi Korpela ◽

Andreas Henelius ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Job Burnout ◽

Event Related Potential ◽

Attention Capture ◽

Emotional Stimuli ◽

Potential Study

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Abnormalities of the late positive potential during emotional processing in individuals with psychopathic traits: a meta-analysis

Psychological Medicine ◽

10.1017/s0033291719002216 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 50 (12) ◽

pp. 2085-2095

Author(s):

William Vallet ◽

Antoine Hone-Blanchet ◽

Jerome Brunelin

Keyword(s):

Effect Size ◽

Emotional Processing ◽

Meta Analysis ◽

Late Positive Potential ◽

Psychopathic Traits ◽

Event Related Potential ◽

Healthy Controls ◽

Emotional Stimuli ◽

Positive Potential ◽

Negative Stimuli

AbstractBackgroundIndividuals with psychopathic traits display deficits in emotional processing. A key event-related potential component involved in emotional processing is the late positive potential (LPP). In healthy controls, LPP amplitude is greater in response to negative stimuli than to positive or neutral stimuli. In the current study, we aimed to compare LPP amplitudes between individuals with psychopathic traits and control subjects when presented with negative, positive or neutral stimuli. We hypothesized that LPP amplitude evoked by emotional stimuli would be reduced in individuals with psychopathic traits compared to healthy controls.MethodsAfter a systematic review of the literature, we conducted a meta-analysis to compare LPP amplitude elicited by emotional stimuli in individuals with psychopathic traits and healthy controls.ResultsIndividuals with psychopathic traits showed significantly reduced LPP amplitude evoked by negative stimuli (mean effect size = −0.47; 95% CI −0.60 to −0.33; p < 0.005) compared to healthy controls. No significant differences between groups were observed for the processing of positive (mean effect size = −0.15; 95% CI −0.42 to 0.12; p = 0.28) and neutral stimuli (mean effect size = −0.12; 95% CI 0.31 to 0.07; p = 0.21).ConclusionsMeasured by LPP amplitude, individuals with psychopathic traits displayed abnormalities in the processing of emotional stimuli with negative valence whereas processing of stimuli with positive and neutral valence was unchanged as compared with healthy controls.

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Post-Decision Wagering Affects Metacognitive Awareness of Emotional Stimuli: An Event Related Potential Study

PLoS ONE ◽

10.1371/journal.pone.0159516 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 11 (8) ◽

pp. e0159516 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Michał Wierzchoń ◽

Eligiusz Wronka ◽

Borysław Paulewicz ◽

Remigiusz Szczepanowski

Keyword(s):

Event Related Potential ◽

Metacognitive Awareness ◽

Emotional Stimuli ◽

Potential Study

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Updating Emotional Stimuli in Heroin Abstainers’ Working Memory: An Event-Related Potential Investigation

Substance Use & Misuse ◽

10.1080/10826084.2021.1899223 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 1-7

Author(s):

Jianxun Zhang ◽

Ling Yang ◽

Yang Zhang ◽

Hongting Su ◽

Yinyan Zhang ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Working Memory ◽

Event Related Potential ◽

Emotional Stimuli

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Towards a refined mindfulness model related to consciousness and based on ERP

10.31234/osf.io/d5s7w ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Charles VERDONK ◽

Marion TROUSSELARD ◽

Frédéric CANINI ◽

François VIALATTE ◽

Ramdani

Keyword(s):

Self Regulation ◽

Main Idea ◽

Body Awareness ◽

Event Related Potential ◽

The Self ◽

Self Report ◽

Cognitive Mechanisms ◽

Emotional Stimuli ◽

Electrophysiological Findings ◽

Working Hypotheses

Neuroimaging, behavioral and self-report evidence suggests that there are four main cognitive mechanisms that support mindfulness: 1) self-regulation of attention, 2) improved body awareness, 3) improved emotion regulation, and 4) change in perspective on the self. The current paper discusses these mechanisms, based on studies of Event Related Potential (ERP). We review the ERP literature related to mindfulness and examine a dataset of 29 articles. Our findings show that the neural features of mindfulness are consistently associated with the self-regulation of attention and, in most cases, reduced reactivity to emotional stimuli and improved cognitive control. On the other hand, there appear to be no studies of body awareness. We link these electrophysiological findings to models of consciousness, and introduce a unified, mechanistic mindfulness model. The main idea in this refined model is that mindfulness decreases the threshold of conscious access. We end with several working hypotheses that could direct future mindfulness research, and clarify our results.

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