Emotional face prediction in rejection sensitive individuals: Evidence from event-related potentials

Human beings live in an uncertain world, but they continuously generate top-down predictions about emotional face information of other people around them. Although the prediction processing has repeatedly been investigated in the literature of prediction, little is known about the impact of rejection sensitive (RS) on individuals’ emotional face prediction. To this end, high and low RS participants were asked to perform an identification task of emotional faces in which target faces were shown in either an angry or happy expression while their brain responses were recorded using an event-related potential (ERP) technique. The behavioral results suggested an effect of emotional face prediction. For the P100 component, low RS participants showed longer P100 peak latencies in the left than right hemisphere when they viewed predictable emotional faces. In addition, low RS participants showed larger N170 mean amplitudes for angry compared to happy faces when they perceived unpredictable faces, but not when these faces were predictable. This presumably reflected a sensibility to angry faces in the unpredictable trails. Interestingly, high RS participants did not demonstrate such a N170 difference, suggesting that high RS participants showed a reduced sensitivity to unpredictable angry faces. Furthermore, angry faces triggered increased LPP mean amplitudes compared to happy faces, which was consistent with the results of other ERP studies examining the processing of emotional faces. Finally, we observed significant negative correlations between behavioral and ERP prediction effect, indicating one consistency between the behavioral and electrophysiological data.     

知觉负载对负性分心面孔的知觉加工和记忆的影响

本研究采用视觉搜索和意外再认记忆任务,结合事件相关电位技术,考察知觉负载对负性分心面孔的知觉加工和记忆的影响。在视觉搜索任务中,行为上恐惧分心面孔在高负载下干扰任务。ERP结果上,恐惧比中性分心面孔诱发更大的N170和N250;在低负载下恐惧比中性分心面孔诱发更大的N700,在高负载下没有差异。在意外再认记忆中,个体对低负载下的恐惧分心面孔表现出记忆。这些结果说明负性分心物在早期是自动化加工;晚期加工受知觉负载的调节,负载越低对负性分心物的过滤越少,存在对负性分心物的记忆偏向。     

Vigilance for threat: effects of anxiety and defensiveness

Eysenck’s (1997) theory that attentional biases for threat vary as an interactive function of trait anxiety and defensiveness was tested using a visual probe task. Two stimulus exposure conditions were used to explore a secondary issue concerning attentional allocation over time. Results indicated that, among high trait anxious participants, only those with low levels of defensiveness showed vigilance for threatening faces presented for 500 ms. They also showed an attentional preference for neutral faces, relative to happy faces, irrespective of exposure condition. This pattern was reversed in high trait anxious participants with high levels of defensiveness, who showed an attentional bias towards happy faces (relative to neutral faces) under both exposure conditions. The findings are discussed in relation to their implications for (a) the significance of measures of defensiveness for the conceptualization of high trait anxious individuals, and (b) the status of anxiety-related biases at different stages of information processing.     

情绪对认知加工的影响：事件相关脑电位系列研究

为探讨情绪与认知的相互作用关系及其脑机制,建立了情境图片、面孔、汉字和声音四个系列组成的中国情感刺激材料库,并通过ERP实验对情绪与注意、工作记忆的关系以及特质焦虑者的认知特点进行了研究。结果发现：⑴ 负性情绪刺激在信息加工过程中至少在注意、评价及反应准备这几个阶段具有某种优先权,注意偏向也可在内隐任务下发生,负性刺激对注意资源不足具有某种补偿作用;⑵ 威胁性视觉提示对其后的视觉加工具有调节作用,高焦虑个体对这类性刺激投入了更多的视觉加工资源,而且威胁性刺激对注意的影响可以跨通道进行,威胁性的视觉刺激可以影响触觉注意;⑶ 在情绪对工作记忆的影响方面,负性情绪下空间工作记忆任务引起的P300波幅减小,这种效应可能是基于情绪对顶叶注意系统的调节作用,而在词语工作记忆任务中这种效应消失     

Electrophysiological evidence for greater attention to threat when cognitive control resources are depleted

In this study, we investigated the time course of attentional bias for threat-related (angry) facial expressions under conditions of high versus low cognitive (working memory) load. Event-related potential (ERP) and reaction time (RT) data were recorded while participants viewed pairs of faces (angry paired with neutral face) displayed for 500 ms and followed by a probe. Participants were required to respond to the probe while performing a concurrent task of holding in working memory a sequence of digits that were either in the same order (low memory load) or in a random mixed order (high memory load). The ERP results revealed that higher working memory load resulted in enhanced lateralized neural responses to threatening relative to neutral faces, consistent with greater initial orienting of attention to threatening faces (early N2pc: 180–252 ms) and enhanced maintenance of processing representations of threat (late N2pc, 252–320 ms; SPCN, 320–500 ms). The ERP indices showed significant positive relationships with each other, and also with the behavioral index of attentional bias to threat (reflected by faster RTs to probes replacing angry than neutral faces at 500 ms), although the latter index was not significantly influenced by memory load. Overall, the findings indicate that depletion of cognitive control resources, using a working memory manipulation, increases the capacity of task-irrelevant threat cues to capture and hold attention.     

Effects of anxiety and attention control on processing pictorial and linguistic emotional information

This study investigated the role of executive attention control in modulating selective processing of emotional information in anxiety. It was hypothesized that the combination of high anxiety and poor attention control would be associated with greater difficulty in ignoring task-irrelevant threat-related information. The study included both faces and words as stimuli. Cognitive interference effects were assessed using two emotional Stroop tasks: one with angry, fearful, happy and neutral faces, and one with threat-related, positive, and neutral words. An objective measure of attention control was obtained from the Attention network task. There were four participant groups with high/low trait anxiety and high/low attention control. Results indicated that the combination of high anxiety and poor attention control was associated with greater cognitive interference by emotional faces (including angry faces), compared to neutral faces. This interference effect was not evident in participants with high anxiety and high attentional control, or in low-anxious individuals. There was no evidence of associations between anxiety, attention control, and the interference effect of emotional words. Results indicate that high anxiety and poor attention control together predict enhanced processing of emotionally salient information, such as angry facial expressions. Implications for models of emotion processing are discussed.     

厌恶与恐惧面孔的记忆编码、保持、提取

情绪记忆增强效应在负性情绪记忆研究中被反复证实。尽管厌恶和恐惧同属负性情绪, 提示威胁的存在, 但由于它们的进化意义和生理功能不同, 可能导致它们对记忆的编码、保持、提取三个阶段不同的调节方向或调节强度。本文采用延迟再认任务, 采用事件相关电位考察健康成年被试对唤醒度和效价相当的恐惧和厌恶面孔的记忆编码、保持和提取。结果显示, 1)在记忆编码的早期, 被试主要加强了对恐惧面孔的注意(P1)和结构编码(N170), 而厌恶信息的加工受到了抑制; 2)从记忆编码晚期到记忆保持的整个阶段, 被试对厌恶信息的精细评估(编码阶段P3)和复述保持(保持阶段的负走向慢波)均强于恐惧信息; 3)相比于恐惧面孔, 厌恶面孔可能在工作记忆系统形成了更强的表征, 从而使被试在记忆提取时可回忆起更多的细节, 对记忆提取的信心更足(提取阶段P3)。这后两条发现是导致行为层面上厌恶情绪记忆优于恐惧情绪记忆的原因。本研究为“厌恶比恐惧具有更强的记忆增强效应”提供了高时间分辨率的脑活动层面的证据, 从而进一步揭示了负性情绪增强记忆的认知机制。     

Attentional bias towards angry faces in trait-reappraisal

Emotion regulation (ER) strategies differ in when and how they influence emotion experience, expression, and concomitant cognition. However, no study to date has directly compared cognition in individuals who have a clear disposition for either cognitive or behavioural ER strategies. The present study compared selective attention to angry faces in groups of high trait-suppressors (people who are hiding emotional reactions in response to emotional challenge) and high trait-reappraisers (people who cognitively reinterpret emotional events). Since reappraisers are also low trait-anxious and suppressors are high trait-anxious, high and low anxious control groups, both being low in trait-ER, were also included. Attention to angry faces was assessed using an emotional dot-probe task. Trait-reappraisers and high-anxious individuals both showed attentional biases towards angry faces. Trait-reappraisers’ vigilance for angry faces was significantly more pronounced compared to both trait-suppressors and low anxious controls. We suggest that threat prioritization in high trait-reappraisal may allow deeper cognitive processing of threat information without being associated with psychological maladjustment.     

The repressor personality and avoidant information processing: A dichotic listening study

The present research was designed to investigate the proposition that repressors, operationally defined by the conjunction of low anxiety and high defensiveness, are particularly adept at avoiding the processing of information when motivated to do so. Four groups of participants (nondefensive-low anxious, high anxious, repressors, and defensive-high anxious) were administered a dichotic listening task involving neutral or negative affective words presented in the unattended ear. Participants shadowed the material presented to the attended ear and simultaneously responded to a probe task presented on a video monitor. Results revealed that repressors made significantly fewer shadowing errors than high anxious and defensive-high anxious participants and marginally significantly fewer shadowing errors than low anxious participants for both neutral and negative words. High anxious participants, however, were later able to recognize the negative words that had been presented to the unattended ear at well above chance levels, whereas the recognition memory of repressors for such negative unattended words was at chance levels. In addition, repressors' responses to a postexperiment questionnaire indicated a significantly greater number of distracting thoughts during the experiment relative to other participants. Repressors, it seems, are indeed skillful at avoidant information processing and this capacity may well be related to the emotional memory deficits they have displayed in previous research.     

Attentional capture by emotional faces is contingent on attentional control settings

Attentional capture by schematic emotional faces was investigated in two experiments using the flanker task devised by Eriksen and Eriksen (1974). In Experiment 1, participants were presented with a central target (a schematic face that was either positive or negative) flanked by two identical distractors, one on either side (schematic faces that were positive, negative, or neutral). The objective was to identify the central target as quickly as possible. The impact of the flankers depended on their emotional expression. Consistent with a threat advantage hypothesis (negative faces are processed faster and attract more processing resources), responses to positive faces were slower when these were flanked by (response incompatible) negative faces as compared with positive or neutral faces, whereas responses to negative faces were unaffected by the identity of the flankers. Experiment 2 was a standard flanker task with letter stimuli except that the task-neutral flankers were schematic faces that were either positive, negative, or emotionally neutral. In this case, in which faces and emotional expressions were to be ignored, performance seemed entirely unaffected by the faces. This result suggests that attentional capture by emotional faces is contingent on attentional control settings.     

Attentional capture by emotional faces is contingent on attentional control settings

Attentional capture by schematic emotional faces was investigated in two experiments using the flanker task devised by Eriksen and Eriksen (1974). In Experiment 1, participants were presented with a central target (a schematic face that was either positive or negative) flanked by two identical distractors, one on either side (schematic faces that were positive, negative, or neutral). The objective was to identify the central target as quickly as possible. The impact of the flankers depended on their emotional expression. Consistent with a threat advantage hypothesis (negative faces are processed faster and attract more processing resources), responses to positive faces were slower when these were flanked by (response incompatible) negative faces as compared with positive or neutral faces, whereas responses to negative faces were unaffected by the identity of the flankers. Experiment 2 was a standard flanker task with letter stimuli except that the task-neutral flankers were schematic faces that were either positive, negative, or emotionally neutral. In this case, in which faces and emotional expressions were to be ignored, performance seemed entirely unaffected by the faces. This result suggests that attentional capture by emotional faces is contingent on attentional control settings.     

Attention to Positive and Negative Social-Evaluative Words: Investigating the Effects of Social Anxiety,Trait Anxiety and Social Threat

The study investigated how attention to negative (threatening) and positive social-evaluative words is affected by social anxiety, trait anxiety and the expectation of social threat. High and low socially anxious individuals carried out a modified dot-probe task either while expecting to give a speech or under non-threatening conditions. High socially anxious individuals showed no significant attentional bias towards or away from social-evaluative words. This result significantly contrasted with an identical design that showed avoidance of emotional faces in high socially anxious participants drawn from the same population (Mansell et al ., 1999). Participants who expected to give a speech showed less attentional avoidance of negative and positive social-evaluative words. High trait anxiety was associated with selective attention to negative relative to positive social-evaluative words, consistent with earlier findings of attention to threat cues in high trait-anxious individuals. Implications for designing attention tasks and attentional bias across different dimensions of anxiety are discussed.     

The appraisal of facial beauty is rapid but not mandatory

Facial attractiveness is an important source of social affective information. Here, we studied the time course and task dependence of evaluating attractive faces from a viewer’s perspective. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants classified color portraits of unfamiliar persons according to gender and facial attractiveness. During attractiveness classification, enhanced ERP amplitudes for attractive and nonattractive faces relative to faces of intermediate attractiveness were found for an early component around 150 msec and for the late positive complex (LPC). Whereas LPC enhancement conforms to previous studies employing various types of affective stimuli, the finding of an early effect extends earlier research on rapid emotion processing to the dimension of facial attractiveness. Dipole source localization of this early ERP effect revealed a scalp distribution suggesting activation of posterior extrastriate areas. Importantly, attractiveness-related modulations of brain responses were only marginal during the gender decision task, arguing against the automaticity of attractiveness appraisal.     

The influence of anxiety on the initial selection of emotional faces presented in binocular rivalry

Neurocognitive theories of anxiety predict that threat-related information can be evaluated before attentional selection, and can influence behaviour differentially in high anxious compared to low anxious individuals. We investigate this further by presenting emotional and neutral faces in an adapted binocular rivalry paradigm. We show that the initial selection of emotional faces presented in binocular rivalry is highly influenced by self-reported state and trait anxiety-level. Heightened anxiety was correlated with increased perception of angry and fearful faces, and decreased perception of happy expressions. These results are consistent with recent evidence of involuntary selection of threat in anxiety.     

The time-course of visual threat processing: High trait anxious individuals eventually avert their gaze from angry faces

Several experiments have shown that anxious individuals have an attentional bias towards threat cues. It is also known, however, that exposure to a subjectively threatening but relatively harmless stimulus tends to lead to a reduction in fear. Accordingly, some authors have hypothesised that high trait anxious individuals have a vigilant-avoidant pattern of visual attention to threatening stimuli. In the present study, 52 high trait anxious and 48 low trait anxious subjects were shown pairs of emotional faces, while their direction of gaze was continuously monitored. For 0-1000 ms, both groups were found to view angry faces more than happy faces. For 2000-3000 ms, however, only high trait anxious subjects averted their gaze from angry faces more than they did from happy faces.     

Anxiety and repression in attention and retention

High- and low-anxious college students (as determined by scores on the Taylor Manifest Anxiety Scale; A. W. Bendig, 1956) and repressors (low anxiety and high scores on the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale; D. P. Crowne & D. Marlowe, 1964) were compared on 3 cognitive tasks. High-anxious participants more often spelled the negative emotional meaning of ambiguous homophones (e.g., pane/pain) and forgot more of their free associations to emotional cue words than did the low-anxious participants. The repressors also detected the emotional meaning of the homophones but unlike the anxious, the repressors did recall their associations to the emotional words. In a working memory task using nonemotional items, the moderately anxious participants recalled fewer words than did the low- and high-anxious participants. The results confirm that both trait anxiety and repression affect information processing at a variety of stages but not in the same way. Repressors were sensitive to, and retentive of, negative emotional stimuli.     

Affective primes suppress attention bias to threat in socially anxious individuals

Anxious individuals show an attention bias towards threatening information. However, under conditions of sustained environmental threat this otherwise-present attention bias disappears. It remains unclear whether this suppression of attention bias can be caused by a transient activation of the fear system. In the present experiment, high socially anxious and low socially anxious individuals (HSA group, n=12; LSA group, n=12) performed a modified dot-probe task in which they were shown either a neutral or socially threatening prime word prior to each trial. EEG was collected and ERP components to the prime and faces displays were computed. HSA individuals showed an attention bias to threat after a neutral prime, but no attention bias after a threatening prime, demonstrating that suppression of attention bias can occur after a transient activation of the fear system. LSA individuals showed an opposite pattern: no evidence of a bias to threat with neutral primes but induction of an attention bias to threat following threatening primes. ERP results suggested differential processing of the prime and faces displays by HSA and LSA individuals. However, no group by prime interaction was found for any of ERP components.     

Fear-relevant selective associations and social anxiety: absence of a positive bias

An illusory correlation paradigm was used to compare high and low socially anxious individuals' initial, on-line and a posteriori covariation estimates between emotional faces and aversive, pleasant and neutral outcomes. Overall, participants demonstrated an initial expectancy bias for aversive outcomes following angry faces, and pleasant outcomes following happy faces. On-line expectancy biases indicated that initial biases were extinguished during the task, with the exception of low socially anxious individuals who continued to over-associate positive social cues with pleasant outcomes. In addition to lacking this protective positive on-line bias, the high social anxiety group reported retrospectively more negative social cues than the low socially anxious group. Findings are discussed in relation to similar evidence from recent interpretive and memory paradigms.     

Anxiety and Repression in Attention and Retention

High- and low-anxious college students (as determined by scores on the Taylor Manifest Anxiety Scale; A. W. Bendig, 1956) and repressors (low anxiety and high scores on the Marlowe–Crowne Social Desirability Scale; D. P. Crowne & D. Marlowe, 1964) were compared on 3 cognitive tasks. High-anxious participants more often spelled the negative emotional meaning of ambiguous homophones (e.g., pane/pain) and forgot more of their free associations to emotional cue words than did the low-anxious participants. The repressors also detected the emotional meaning of the homophones but unlike the anxious, the repressors did recall their associations to the emotional words. In a working memory task using nonemotional items, the moderately anxious participants recalled fewer words than did the low- and high-anxious participants. The results confirm that both trait anxiety and repression affect information processing at a variety of stages but not in the same way. Repressors were sensitive to, and retentive of, negative emotional stimuli.