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.     

Goal-driven attentional capture by invisible colors: Evidence from event-related potentials

We combined event-related brain potentials (ERPs) and behavioral measures to test whether subliminal visual stimuli can capture attention in a goal-dependent manner. Participants searched for visual targets defined by a specific color. Search displays served as metacontrast masks for preceding cue displays that contained one cue in the target color. Although this target-color cue was spatially uninformative, it produced behavioral spatial cuing effects and triggered an ERP correlate of attentional selection (i.e., the N2pc component). These results demonstrate that target-color cues captured attention, in spite of the fact that cue localization performance assessed in separate blocks was at chance level. We conclude that task-set contingent attentional capture is not restricted to supraliminal stimuli, but is also elicited by visual events that are not consciously perceived.     

Components of attentional biases in contamination fear: Evidence for difficulty in disengagement

Attentional bias for threat has been implicated in the contamination fear (CF) subtype of obsessive-compulsive disorder, but the components of the bias (facilitated attention versus difficulty in disengagement) and the stage of processing during which the bias occurs (early versus late stage of processing) remains unclear. Further, it is unclear whether attentional biases in CF are towards fear or disgust-related stimuli. The present study examined attentional biases in a group of individuals selected to have elevated CF (n = 23) and a control group (n = 28) using the spatial cueing task. Stimuli were neutral, disgusting, or frightening pictures presented for either 100 or 500 ms. Results revealed evidence for delayed disengagement from both fear and disgust stimuli in the CF group, but not in the control group. The effect appeared to be greater at 500 ms stimulus presentation, but did not appear to differ between fear and disgust stimuli. The CF group was associated with delayed disengagement from threat even when controlling for generic response slowing. Theoretical and clinical implications are discussed.     

Components of attentional bias to threat in high trait anxiety: Facilitated engagement, impaired disengagement, and attentional avoidance

There is a wealth of evidence demonstrating enhanced attention to threat in high trait anxious individuals (HTA) compared with low trait anxious individuals (LTA). In two experiments, we investigated whether this attentional bias is related to facilitated attentional engagement to threat or difficulties disengaging attention from threat. HTA and LTA undergraduates performed a modified exogenous cueing task, in which the location of a target was correctly or incorrectly cued by neutral, highly and mildly threatening pictures. Results indicate that at 100 ms picture presentation, HTA individuals more strongly engaged their attention with and showed impaired disengagement from highly threatening pictures than LTA individuals. In addition, HTA individuals showed a stronger tendency to attentional avoidance of threat at the 200 and 500 ms picture presentation. These data provide evidence for differential patterns of anxiety-related biases in attentive processing of threat at early versus later stages of information processing.     

Working memory maintenance contributes to long-term memory formation: Evidence from slow event-related brain potentials

Behavioral research has led to conflicting views regarding the relationship between working memory (WM) maintenance and long-term memory (LTM) formation. We used slow event-related brain potentials to investigate the degree to which neural activity during WM maintenance is associated with successful LTM formation. Participants performed a WM task with objects and letter strings, followed by a surprise LTM test. Slow potentials were found to be more negative over the parietal and occipital cortex for objects and over the left frontal cortex for letter strings during WM maintenance. Within each category, they were enhanced for items that were subsequently successfully remembered. These effects were topographically distinct, with maximum effects at those electrodes that showed the maximum negativity during WM maintenance in general. Together, these results are strongly consistent with the ideas that WM maintenance contributes to LTM formation and that this may occur through strengthening of stimulus-specific cortical memory traces.     

Lexical contribution to nonword-repetition effects: Evidence from event-related potentials

Two experiments investigated the modulation of event-related potentials (ERPs) by the repetition of orthographically legal and illegal nonwords. In Experiment 1, subjects silently counted occasional words against a background of nonwords, a proportion of which were repetitions of an immediately preceding legal or illegal item. ERPs to repeated legal items showed a sustained, topographically diffuse, positive-going shift. In contrast, repeated illegal nonwords gave rise to ERPs showing a smaller and temporally more restricted positive-going modulation. In an attempt to equalize depth of processing across legal and illegal nonwords, subjects in Experiment 2 were required to count items containing a nonalphabetic character against the same background of nonword items. ERPs to repeated legal items showed a modulation similar to, although smaller than, that found in Experiment I, but no effects of repetition were observed in the ERPs to the illegal nonwords. It was concluded that the effects of repeating nonwords, at least as manifested in concurrently recorded ERPs, differ as a consequence of whether items can access lexical memory, and that this is inconsistent with the attribution of such effects solely to the operation of episodic memory processes.     

Testing sociometer theory: Self-esteem and the importance of acceptance for social decision-making

The present study examined the sociometer’s role in guiding social behavior. The authors hypothesized that low self-esteem people (LSEs), but not high self-esteem people (HSEs), base their social decision-making on acceptance. Undergraduate participants were invited to join a social group and were led to believe that acceptance either was guaranteed, or was likely but not guaranteed. HSEs always were eager to join the group, whereas LSEs were keen to join the group only when acceptance was guaranteed. Furthermore, mediation analyses indicated that LSEs’ willingness to join the group was dependent on their anticipated social outcomes, which were contingent on acceptance from the group, whereas acceptance did not affect HSEs’ decision-making. These results support a sociometer account of social decision-making.     

The role of extinction and reinstatement in attentional bias to threat: a conditioning approach

We investigated the effects of extinction and reinstatement on attentional bias to fear-conditioned signals in healthy individuals using an emotional modification of a spatial cueing paradigm. Spatial cues were emotionally modulated using differential conditioning. The CS+ was sometimes followed by an aversive electrocutaneous stimulus (UCS), whereas the CS- was never followed by the UCS. During a subsequent extinction phase no UCS was presented anymore. The reinstatement phase started with one or four unpredicted UCS-only trials for half of the participants (reinstatement group). For the other half there were no additional UCS presentations (control group). We found that attention was biased to threat signals during acquisition. This biased attention largely disappeared during extinction. During the reinstatement phase attentional bias to threat signals re-emerged in the reinstatement group, but not in the control group.     

Social feedback interferes with implicit rule learning: Evidence from event-related brain potentials

The human brain can learn contingencies built into stimulus sequences unconsciously. The quality of such implicit learning has been connected to stimulus social relevance, but results so far are inconsistent. We engaged participants in an implicit-intentional learning task in which they learned to discriminate between legal and illegal card triads on the sole basis of feedback provided within a staircase procedure. Half of the participants received feedback from pictures of faces with a happy or sad expression (social group) and the other half based on traffic light icons (symbolic group). We hypothesised that feedback from faces would have a greater impact on learning than that from traffic lights. Although performance during learning did not differ between groups, the feedback error-related negativity (fERN) was delayed by ~20 ms for social relative to symbolic feedback, and the P3b modulation elicited by infrequent legal card triads within a stream of illegal ones during the test phase was significantly larger in the symbolic than the social feedback group. Furthermore, the P3b mean amplitude recorded at test negatively correlated with the latency of the fERN recorded during learning. These results counterintuitively suggest that, relative to symbolic feedback, socially salient feedback interferes with implicit learning.     

Computer game associating self-concept to images of acceptance can reduce adolescents' aggressiveness in response to social rejection

The experience of social rejection can lead to an aggressive response. However, the ability to maintain a sense of social connection may reduce the likelihood of this type of response. We tested a computer-based intervention designed to use simple learning principles to boost the sense of social connection and acceptance. Adolescents aged 9–15 (n=138) first completed a conditioning game on computer that repeatedly paired their own name with images of social acceptance (versus a control condition with no systematic pairing), and subsequently reported how aggressively they would behave in response to being rejected by a peer. Those completing the self-acceptance conditioning (particularly those low in self-esteem) reported less aggressive feelings and intentions.     

Cognitive biases and alcohol use in adolescence and young adulthood: The moderating role of gender,attentional control and inhibitory control

The present study investigated the cross-sectional associations between cognitive biases (i.e., attentional bias and approach bias) and alcohol use and investigated the moderating role of gender, attentional control and inhibitory control. The sample consisted of 94 adolescents and young adults (52.1% boys) between 15.3 and 20.8 years old (M_age = 18.0, SD = 1.1) who reported drinking alcohol in the past three months. A stronger approach bias was related to higher alcohol use, albeit only among boys. Furthermore, the association between attentional bias and alcohol use was moderated by attentional control; the lowest alcohol use was found in adolescents with low attentional bias and high attentional control, suggesting protective effects of both variables. The present study replicates and extends the results of studies on cognitive biases and addiction in adolescence and young adulthood.     

Adapting to changing memory retrieval demands: Evidence from event-related potentials

This study investigated preparatory processes involved in adapting to changing episodic memory retrieval demands. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants performed a general old/new recognition task and a specific task that also required retrieval of perceptual details. The relevant task remained either constant or changed (predictably or randomly) across trials. Responses were slowed when participants switched from the specific to the general task but not vice versa. Hence, asymmetrical switch costs were observed, suggesting that retrieval preparation is dependent not only on the current retrieval goal but also influenced by recent retrieval attempts. Consistently, over posterior scalp regions ERPs associated with advance preparation were modulated by the preceding task, reflecting increased attentional selection requirements for the general task, and by the foreknowledge about the task sequence. When retrieval demands remained constant, frontal slow-waves elicited by retrieval-cues were more positive going for the specific task, indicating full implementation of a retrieval orientation that allows more efficient retrieval of perceptual details.     

Trait anxiety, defensiveness and selective processing of threat: an investigation using two measures of attentional bias

Attentional biases for threat were examined in a non-clinical sample (N=60), with each participant tested on both the modified Stroop colour-naming and dot probe tasks. Three groups were selected on the basis of trait anxiety and social desirability scale (SDS) scores: “low anxiety” (LA: low trait, low SDS), “repressor” (REP: low trait, high SDS) and “high anxiety” (HA: high trait, low SDS). Results from the colour-naming task suggested that high levels of defensiveness (in combination with low trait anxiety) were associated with greater avoidance of threat. The REP group showed less interference in colour-naming threat than neutral words; whereas the HA group showed increased interference due to threat words. On the dot probe task, there was a general tendency for this non-clinical sample as a whole to show avoidance of social threat relative to neutral words, but there was no bias for physical threat words. Avoidance of social threat was significant only within the REP group. No relationships were found between the measures of cognitive bias from the two tasks, suggesting different underlying mechanisms. Results are discussed in relation to previous findings and theoretical views of the effects of anxiety and defensiveness on the processing of threat.     

Spatiotemporal pattern of appraising social and emotional relevance: Evidence from event-related brain potentials

Social information is particularly relevant for the human species because of its direct link to guiding physiological responses and behavior. Accordingly, extant functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data suggest that social content may form a unique stimulus dimension. It remains largely unknown, however, how neural activity underlying social (versus nonsocial) information processing temporally unfolds, and how such social information appraisal may interact with the processing of other stimulus characteristics, particularly emotional meaning. Here, we presented complex visual scenes differing in both social (vs. nonsocial) and emotional relevance (positive, negative, neutral) intermixed with scrambled versions of these pictures to N = 24 healthy young adults. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to intact pictures were examined for gaining insight to the dynamics of appraisal of both dimensions, implemented within the brain. Our main finding is an early interaction between social and emotional relevance due to enhanced amplitudes of early ERP components to emotionally positive and neutral pictures of social compared to nonsocial content, presumably reflecting rapid allocation of attention and counteracting an overall negativity bias. Importantly, our ERP data show high similarity with previously observed fMRI data using the same stimuli, and source estimations located the ERP effects in overlapping occipitotemporal brain areas. Our novel data suggest that relevance detection may occur already as early as around 100 ms after stimulus onset and may combine relevance checks not only examining intrinsic pleasantness/emotional valence but also social content as a unique, highly relevant stimulus dimension.     

On the locus of the semantic satiation effect: Evidence from event-related brain potentials

The present study sought to determine whether semantic satiation is merely a by-product of adaptation or satiation of upstream, nonsemantic perceptual processes or whether the effect can have a locus in semantic memory. This was done by measuring event-related brain potentials (ERPs) in a semantic word-detection task involving multiple presentations of primes and critical related and unrelated words in three experiments involving visual (Experiment 1) and auditory (Experiments 2A and 2B) stimuli. Primes varied in their type case (Experiment 1) or pitch (Experiment 2B) in order to discourage sensory adaptation. Prime satiation and relatedness of the primes to the critical word had interacting effects on ERP amplitude to critical words, particularly within the time-window of the N400 component. Because numerous studies have indicated a role for the N400 in semantic processing, modulation of the N400 relatedness effect by prime satiation (with little or no contribution from perceptual adaptation) suggests that semantic memory can be directly satiated, rather than the cost to semantic processing necessarily resulting from impoverishment of perceptual inputs.     

Enhanced probing of attentional bias: The independence of anxiety-linked selectivity in attentional engagement with and disengagement from negative information

Cognitive models of anxiety posit that an attentional bias to negative information plays a causal role in elevated anxiety vulnerability and dysfunction. There has been considerable recent interest in determining whether this attentional bias reflects facilitated attentional engagement with and/or impaired attentional disengagement from negative information. We concur with the claim of investigators who have noted that the methodologies previously employed to dissociate engagement and disengagement biases are not optimal for this purpose. In the present study, we employ a novel methodology, the Attentional Response to Distal vs. Proximal Emotional Information (ARDPEI) task, which enables the discrete assessment of these two types of attentional selectivity. The findings demonstrate that facilitated attentional engagement with and impaired attentional disengagement from negative information both characterise elevated anxiety vulnerability. Further, these biases represent distinctive facets of anxiety-linked attentional selectivity. We discuss the potentially differing roles that engagement and disengagement biases may play in the development and/or maintenance of anxiety vulnerability and dysfunction.     

Effects of grammatical categories on children's visual language processing: Evidence from event-related brain potentials

This study examined how school-aged children process different grammatical categories. Event-related brain potentials elicited by words in visually presented sentences were analyzed according to seven grammatical categories with naturally varying characteristics of linguistic functions, semantic features, and quantitative attributes of length and frequency. The categories included nouns, adjectives, verbs, pronouns, conjunctions, prepositions, and articles. The findings indicate that by the age of 9-10 years, children exhibit robust neural indicators differentiating grammatical categories; however, it is also evident that development of language processing is not yet adult-like at this age. The current findings are consistent with the hypothesis that for beginning readers a variety of cues and characteristics interact to affect processing of different grammatical categories and indicate the need to take into account linguistic functions, prosodic salience, and grammatical complexity as they relate to the development of language abilities.     

Contingent attentional capture by top-down control settings: converging evidence from event-related potentials

Theories of attentional control are divided over whether the capture of spatial attention depends primarily on stimulus salience or is contingent on attentional control settings induced by task demands. The authors addressed this issue using the N2-posterior- contralateral (N2pc) effect, a component of the event-related brain potential thought to reflect attentional allocation. They presented a cue display followed by a target display of 4 letters. Each display contained a green item and a red item. Some participants responded to the red letter and others to the green letter. Converging lines of evidence indicated that attention was captured by the cues with the same color as the target. First, these target-color cues produced a cuing validity effect on behavioral measures. Second, distractors appearing in the cued location produced larger compatibility effects. Third, the target-color cue produced a robust N2pc effect, similar in magnitude to the N2pc effect to the target itself. Furthermore, the target-color cue elicited a similar N2pc effect regardless of whether it competed with a simultaneous abrupt onset. The findings provide converging evidence for attentional capture contingent on top-down control settings.     

Self-esteem, dispositional optimism, and health: Evidence from cross-lagged data on employees

The aims of this one-year follow-up study among Finnish employees (n=426) were twofold: first, to investigate the relationship between self-esteem and optimism and, second, to examine the prospective relationships between these two personality constructs, mental distress and physical symptoms. The results of Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) showed that the latent variables of optimism and self-esteem were highly interrelated (Time 1, r=.90, Time 2, r=.87), forming the core construct of personal resilience, which turned out to be stable (stability coefficient .86) over the one-year period. The results of Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) indicated that high personal resilience measured at Time 1 reduced mental distress at Time 2. Furthermore, a high level of physical symptoms at Time 1 seemed to predict a high level of mental distress at Time 2.     

Examining the relationships between self‐efficacy,task‐relevant attentional control,and task performance: Evidence from event‐related brain potentials

Self‐efficacy (SE) is a modifiable psychosocial factor related to individuals’ beliefs in their capabilities to successfully complete courses of action and has been shown to be positively associated with task performance. The authors hypothesized that one means through which SE is related with improved performance is through enhanced task‐relevant attentional control during task execution. To assess this hypothesis, we examined the relationships between SE and behavioural and neural indices of task performance and task‐relevant attentional control for 76 young adults during the completion of a flanker task. Results showed that greater SE was associated with greater response accuracy and P3b amplitude across task conditions, and faster RT under more difficult task conditions. Additionally, P3b amplitude was found to mediate the relationship between SE and task performance in the difficult condition. These findings suggest that greater attentional allocation to task‐relevant processes, including monitoring stimulus‐response relationships and focusing attention on working memory operations, may help explain the association between SE and improved task performance.