scholarly journals Event-Related Potentials Related to Anxiety in Emotion-Attention Interaction

2014 ◽  
Vol 2014 ◽  
pp. 1-5
Author(s):  
Ssanghee Seo ◽  
Bonghyun Kim

To identify neurological characteristics in accordance with anxiety under the interaction between emotion and attention, this study examines major ERP components when participants identify a target number by inhibiting task-irrelevant emotional face distractors. Experiments were conducted once per day at the same time for two days with 19 healthy adult men and women as required to study emotion-attention interaction. In this study, a variety of ERP components such as P100, N200, and P300 during experiment are significant. The amplitude and latency of the N200 component reflect both state and trait anxiety at all positions. This characteristic specially is prominently featured at Cz. Also, the latency of the late P300 component reflects the trait anxiety rather than state anxiety. The result of this study can help our understanding of the neurological responses related to anxiety during attentional control.

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vasileios Ioakeimidis ◽  
Nareg Khachatoorian ◽  
Corinna Haenschel ◽  
Thomas A. Papathomas ◽  
Attila Farkas ◽  
...  

Abstract The hollow-mask illusion is an optical illusion where a concave face is perceived as convex. It has been demonstrated that individuals with schizophrenia and anxiety are less susceptible to the illusion than controls. Previous research has shown that the P300 and P600 event-related potentials (ERPs) are affected in individuals with schizophrenia. Here, we examined whether individual differences in neuroticism and anxiety scores, traits that have been suggested to be risk factors for schizophrenia and anxiety disorders, affect ERPs of healthy participants while they view concave faces. Our results confirm that the participants were susceptible to the illusion, misperceiving concave faces as convex. We additionally demonstrate significant interactions of the concave condition with state anxiety in central and parietal electrodes for P300 and parietal areas for P600, but not with neuroticism and trait anxiety. The state anxiety interactions were driven by low-state anxiety participants showing lower amplitudes for concave faces compared to convex. The P300 and P600 amplitudes were smaller when a concave face activated a convex face memory representation, since the stimulus did not match the active representation. The opposite pattern was evident in high-state anxiety participants in regard to state anxiety interaction and the hollow-mask illusion, demonstrating larger P300 and P600 amplitudes to concave faces suggesting impaired late information processing in this group. This could be explained by impaired allocation of attentional resources in high-state anxiety leading to hyperarousal to concave faces that are unexpected mismatches to standard memory representations, as opposed to expected convex faces.


2003 ◽  
Vol 15 (8) ◽  
pp. 1135-1148 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annett Schirmer ◽  
Sonja A. Kotz

The present study investigated the interaction of emotional prosody and word valence during emotional comprehension in men and women. In a prosody-word interference task, participants listened to positive, neutral, and negative words that were spoken with a happy, neutral, and angry prosody. Participants were asked to rate word valence while ignoring emotional prosody, or vice versa. Congruent stimuli were responded faster and more accurately as compared to incongruent emotional stimuli. This behavioral effect was more salient for the word valence task than for the prosodic task and was comparable between men and women. The event-related potentials (ERPs) revealed a smaller N400 amplitude for congruent as compared to emotionally incongruent stimuli. This ERP effect, however, was significant only for the word valence judgment and only for female listeners. The present data suggest that the word valence judgment was more difficult and more easily influenced by task-irrelevant emotional information than the prosodic task in both men and women. Furthermore, although emotional prosody and word valence may have a similar influence on an emotional judgment in both sexes, ERPs indicate sex differences in the underlying processing. Women, but not men, show an interaction between prosody and word valence during a semantic processing stage.


Author(s):  
Timothy J Meeker ◽  
Nichole M. Emerson ◽  
Jui-Hong Chien ◽  
Mark I. Saffer ◽  
Oscar Joseph Bienvenu ◽  
...  

A pathological increase in vigilance, or hypervigilance, may be related to pain intensity in some clinical pain syndromes and may result from attention bias to salient stimuli mediated by anxiety. During a continuous performance task where subjects discriminated painful target stimuli from painful nontargets, we measured detected targets (hits), nondetected targets (misses), nondetected nontargets (correct rejections), and detected nontargets (false alarms). Using signal detection theory, we calculated response bias, the tendency to endorse a stimulus as a target, and discriminability, the ability to discriminate a target from nontarget. Due to the relatively slow rate of stimulus presentation our primary hypothesis was that sustained performance would result in a more conservative response bias reflecting a lower response rate over time on task. We found a more conservative response bias with time on task and no change in discriminability. We predicted that greater state and trait anxiety would lead to a more liberal response bias. A multivariable model provided partial support for our prediction; high trait anxiety related to a more conservative response bias (lower response rate), while high state anxiety related to a more liberal bias. This inverse relationship of state and trait anxiety is consistent with reports of effects of state and trait anxiety on reaction times to threatening stimuli. In sum, we report that sustained attention to painful stimuli was associated with a decrease in the tendency of the subject to respond to any stimulus over time on task, while the ability to discriminate target from nontarget is unchanged.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Salahub ◽  
Stephen Emrich

Individuals with anxiety have attentional biases toward threat-related distractors. This deficit in attentional control has been shown to impact visual working memory (VWM) filtering efficiency, as anxious individuals inappropriately store threatening distractors in VWM. It remains unclear, however, whether this mis-allocation of memory resources is due to inappropriate attentional enhancement of threatening distractors, or to a failure in suppression. Here, we used a systematically lateralized VWM task with fearful and neutral faces to examine event-related potentials related to attentional selection (N2pc), suppression (PD), and working memory maintenance (CDA). We found that state anxiety correlated with attentional enhancement of threat-related distractors, such that more anxious individuals had larger N2pc amplitudes toward fearful distractors than neutral distractors. However, there was no correlation between anxiety and memory storage of fearful distractors (CDA). These findings demonstrate that anxiety biases attention toward fearful distractors, but that this bias does not always guarantee increased memory storage of threat-related distractors.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rémy Masson ◽  
Yohana Lévêque ◽  
Geneviève Demarquay ◽  
Hesham ElShafei ◽  
Lesly Fornoni ◽  
...  

AbstractObjectivesTo evaluate alterations of top-down and/or bottom-up attention in migraine and their cortical underpinnings.Methods19 migraineurs between attacks and 19 matched control participants performed a task evaluating jointly top-down and bottom-up attention, using visually-cued target sounds and unexpected task-irrelevant distracting sounds. Behavioral responses and MEG/EEG were recorded. Event-related potentials and fields (ERPs/ERFs) were processed and source reconstruction was applied to ERFs.ResultsAt the behavioral level, neither top-down nor bottom-up attentional processes appeared to be altered in migraine. However, migraineurs presented heightened evoked responses following distracting sounds (orienting component of the N1 and Re-Orienting Negativity, RON) and following target sounds (orienting component of the N1), concomitant to an increased recruitment of the right temporo-parietal junction. They also displayed an increased effect of the cue informational value on target processing resulting in the elicitation of a negative difference (Nd).ConclusionsMigraineurs appear to display increased bottom-up orienting response to all incoming sounds, and an enhanced recruitment of top-down attention.SignificanceThe interictal state in migraine is characterized by an exacerbation of the orienting response to attended and unattended sounds. These attentional alterations might participate to the peculiar vulnerability of the migraine brain to all incoming stimuli.HighlightsMigraineurs performed as well as healthy participants in an attention task.However, EEG markers of both bottom-up and top-down attention are increased.Migraine is also associated with a facilitated recruitment of the right temporo-parietal junction.


Author(s):  
Michela Balconi

Neuropsychological studies have underlined the significant presence of distinct brain correlates deputed to analyze facial expression of emotion. It was observed that some cerebral circuits were considered as specific for emotional face comprehension as a function of conscious vs. unconscious processing of emotional information. Moreover, the emotional content of faces (i.e. positive vs. negative; more or less arousing) may have an effect in activating specific cortical networks. Between the others, recent studies have explained the contribution of hemispheres in comprehending face, as a function of type of emotions (mainly related to the distinction positive vs. negative) and of specific tasks (comprehending vs. producing facial expressions). Specifically, ERPs (event-related potentials) analysis overview is proposed in order to comprehend how face may be processed by an observer and how he can make face a meaningful construct even in absence of awareness. Finally, brain oscillations is considered in order to explain the synchronization of neural populations in response to emotional faces when a conscious vs. unconscious processing is activated.


2021 ◽  
pp. 000992282110406
Author(s):  
Zeynep Reyhan Onay ◽  
Tugba Ramasli Gursoy ◽  
Tugba Sismanlar Eyuboglu ◽  
Ayse Tana Aslan ◽  
Azime Sebnem Soysal Acar ◽  
...  

We aim to evaluate the anxiety levels of caregivers of children with tracheostomy during the COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) pandemic. Caregivers of 31 children with tracheostomy and 105 healthy children (control group) were included. The State-Trait Anxiety Inventory was administered via teleconference in order to investigate how participants describe how they feel at a particular moment (State) and how they generally feel (Trait). The trait anxiety levels of caregivers of children with tracheostomy were significantly higher ( P = .02). Their state anxiety levels were similar. The state and trait anxiety levels of caregivers of children with tracheostomy correlated ( r = 0.70, P < .001). At the end of the teleconference, caregivers of children with tracheostomy experienced greater anxiety relief than controls ( P < .001). Trait anxiety scores were higher among caregivers of children with tracheostomy, but their state anxiety levels were comparable to those of controls. Caregivers with high trait anxiety also exhibited high state anxiety. Informing caregivers of children with tracheostomy about COVID-19 via teleconference can reduce their anxiety during such stressful times.


2007 ◽  
Vol 19 (10) ◽  
pp. 1595-1608 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leanne M. Williams ◽  
Andrew H. Kemp ◽  
Kim Felmingham ◽  
Belinda J. Liddell ◽  
Donna M. Palmer ◽  
...  

Although biases toward signals of fear may be an evolutionary adaptation necessary for survival, heightened biases may be maladaptive and associated with anxiety or depression. In this study, event-related potentials (ERPs) were used to examine the time course of neural responses to facial fear stimuli (versus neutral) presented overtly (for 500 msec with conscious attention) and covertly (for 10 msec with immediate masking to preclude conscious awareness) in 257 nonclinical subjects. We also examined the impact of trait anxiety and depression, assessed using psychometric ratings, on the time course of ERPs. In the total subject group, controlled biases to overtly processed fear were reflected in an enhancement of ERPs associated with structural encoding (120–220 msec) and sustained evaluation persisting from 250 msec and beyond, following a temporo-occipital to frontal topography. By contrast, covert fear processing elicited automatic biases, reflected in an enhancement of ERPs prior to structural encoding (80–180 msec) and again in the period associated with automatic orienting and emotion encoding (230–330 msec), which followed the reverse frontal to temporo-occipital topography. Higher levels of trait anxiety (in the clinical range) were distinguished by a heightened bias to covert fear (speeding of early ERPs), compared to higher depression which was associated with an opposing bias to overt fear (slowing of later ERPs). Anxiety also heightened early responses to covert fear, and depression to overt fear, with subsequent deficits in emotion encoding in each case. These findings are consistent with neural biases to signals of fear which operate automatically and during controlled processing, feasibly supported by parallel networks. Heightened automatic biases in anxiety may contribute to a cycle of hypervigilance and anxious thoughts, whereas depression may represent a “burnt out” emotional state in which evaluation of fear stimuli is prolonged only when conscious attention is allocated.


2007 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra M. Hogan ◽  
Elinor L. Butterfield ◽  
Luke Phillips ◽  
Julie A. Hadwin

The behavioral inhibition system [Gray, J. A. The neuropsychology of anxiety: An enquiry into the functions of the septo-hippocampal system. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982] proposes that anxiety is associated with the processing of novel stimuli. We aimed to explore this relationship by recording auditory event-related potentials associated with unexpected novel noises in typically developing children. Children aged 10–14 years with low (n = 12) and high (n = 11) self-report trait anxiety were assessed using a novelty oddball task. The N1 associated with novel stimuli, specifically the “N1c” component maximal at temporal lobe sites, was of significantly longer latency (p = .014) and greater amplitude (p = .004) in the high compared with the low anxious group. This group difference was supported by linear correlations between N1c amplitude and trait anxiety scores. There was no effect of anxiety on the later novelty P3. These data suggest a subtle moderating role of trait anxiety on brain response to novelty, and further research with clinically anxious children is indicated.


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