Effects of implicit power motive on the processing of anger faces: An event-related potential study

Implicit motives are one form of motivation that regulates cognitive and emotional processing. In this study, we investigated the impact of implicit power motive (nPower) on the processing of anger faces. Event-related potentials were recorded while high- and low-nPower individuals performed a face version of an emotion Stroop task comprised of anger and neutral faces. It was found that nPower does not modify early perceptual and attentional components (P2 and N2), but a later component is affected. Indeed, power-motivated participants showed enhanced P3/LPPs (Late positive potentials) amplitude compared to low-nPower subjects, in response to anger stimuli. These findings demonstrate that anger faces have greater salience for high-nPower individuals and are subject to a more salient, conscious processing.     

Women in the midluteal phase of the menstrual cycle have difficulty suppressing the processing of negative emotional stimuli: An event-related potential study

Emotion regulation deficits have been implicated in anxiety and depressive disorders, and these internalising disorders are more prevalent in women than men. Few electrophysiological studies have investigated sex differences in emotional reactivity and emotion regulation controlling for menstrual phase. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from 28 early follicular women, 29 midluteal women, and 27 men who completed an emotion regulation task. A novel finding of increased N2 amplitude during suppression was found for midluteal women compared with men. These findings suggest midluteal women may be significantly less able to suppress cortical processing of negative stimuli compared to men. This ERP finding was complemented by behavioral ratings data which revealed that while both early follicular and midluteal women reported more distress than men, midluteal women also reported greater effort when suppressing their responses than men. P1 and N1 components were increased in midluteal women compared to men regardless of instructional set, suggesting greater early attentional processing. No sex or menstrual phase differences were apparent in P3 or LPP. This study underscores the importance of considering menstrual phase when examining sex differences in the cortical processing of emotion regulation and demonstrates that midluteal women may have deficits in down-regulating their neural and behavioural responses.     

Early processing of emotional faces in children with autism: An event-related potential study

Social deficits are one of the most striking manifestations of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). Among these social deficits, the recognition and understanding of emotional facial expressions has been widely reported to be affected in ASDs. We investigated emotional face processing in children with and without autism using event-related potentials (ERPs). High-functioning children with autism (n = 15, mean age = 10.5 ± 3.3 years) completed an implicit emotional task while visual ERPs were recorded. Two groups of typically developing children (chronological age-matched and verbal equivalent age-matched [both ns = 15, mean age = 7.7 ± 3.8 years]) also participated in this study. The early ERP responses to faces (P1 and N170) were delayed, and the P1 was smaller in children with autism than in typically developing children of the same chronological age, revealing that the first stages of emotional face processing are affected in autism. However, when matched by verbal equivalent age, only P1 amplitude remained affected in autism. Our results suggest that the emotional and facial processing difficulties in autism could start from atypicalities in visual perceptual processes involving rapid feedback to primary visual areas and subsequent holistic processing.     

An event-related potential study of the revelation effect

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded during a verbal recognition memory task in order to investigate whether changes in familiarity are part of the explanation for the revelation effect. For half of the test words, participants solved an anagram prior to making the old/new recognition judgment. A revelation effect was obtained: When test words were preceded by the anagram task, a higher probability of an old response was associated with the items than was otherwise the case. The ERPs recorded time-locked to the onset of the test words were separated according to old/new status andthe presence/absence of the anagram task. The ERP index of familiarity was of lower amplitude for both old and new items that were preceded by the anagram task. These findings are consistent with the view that part of the explanation for the revelation effect is a reduction in the familiarity of the critical test items.     

Interplay of emotional valence and concreteness in word processing: An event-related potential study with verbs

The functional locus of emotional valence in word processing remains an open question. In event-related potentials, emotion has been found to elicit an early posterior negativity (EPN), which is assumed to reflect attention catching by the words’ meaning. Previously, the EPN was modulated by word category with verbs exhibiting longer EPN latencies compared with other word categories. Here we examined whether concreteness, a semantic variable, influences emotion processing. Within a lexical decision task for verbs, emotional valence (positive, negative, and neutral) was orthogonally combined with concreteness (concrete and abstract). EPN onset was found already at 250 ms post-stimulus for concrete verbs, whereas it started 50 ms later for abstract verbs. Concreteness effects occurred after the start of main effects of emotion. Thus, the elicitation of the EPN seems to be based on semantic processes, with emotional valence being accessed before other semantic aspects such as concreteness of verbs.     

The P300 component of the event-related brain potential as an indicator in the study of information processing

Event-related bioelectrical brain activity plays an important role in psychophysiological investigations of mental processes. One of the so-called endogenous components of ERP, the P300, occurring in the time range from 300 ms to 800 ms after stimulus presentation accompanies the selective call on cognitive processing of stimulus information. An overview of some influencing factors and of hypotheses according functional significance of P300 is given. Although functional significance of P300 is only partly known there are interesting possibilities of application, e.g. in Neurology, Psychiatry and Occupational medicine.     

Multisensory processing in the redundant-target effect: a behavioral and event-related potential study

Participants respond more quickly to two simultaneously presented target stimuli of two different modalities (redundant targets) than would be predicted from their reaction times to the unimodal targets. To examine the neural correlates of this redundant-target effect, event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded to auditory, visual, and bimodal standard and target stimuli presented at two locations (left and right of central fixation). Bimodal stimuli were combinations of two standards, two targets, or a standard and a target, presented either from the same or from different locations. Responses generally were faster for bimodal stimuli than for unimodal stimuli and were faster for spatially congruent than for spatially incongruent bimodal events. ERPs to spatially congruent and spatially incongruent bimodal stimuli started to differ over the parietal cortex as early as 160 msec after stimulus onset. The present study suggests that hearing and seeing interact at sensory-processing stages by matching spatial information across modalities.     

Non-target language processing in Chinese-English bilinguals: a study of event-related potential

The event-related brain potential (ERP) technique was used to investigate the neural mechanism of non-target language processing in Chinese-English bilinguals. Participants were presented with a mixed list of Chinese and English words and required to make conceptual decisions for words in one language and ignore words in the other non-target language. Regardless of whether the nontarget word was in Chinese or English, the ERPs they elicited were modulated by word frequency, suggesting that their meaning had been accessed. The N400 peak was delayed in the English as the non-target language condition, probably because participants were less proficient in English. The results suggest that the non-target language can be processed during conceptual tasks with participants' proficiency in this language being a critical factor.     

How brooding minds inhibit negative material: An event-related fMRI study

Depressive brooding – a passive ruminative focus on one’s problems, negative mood and their consequences – is a thinking style that places individuals at a greater risk to develop future psychopathology. In this study, we investigated whether inter-individual differences in depressive brooding are related to neural differences underlying the inhibition of a dominant response towards negative information in favor of the concurrent (positive) response. To exclude the possibility that information processes would be confounded by sustained negative mood or enhanced stress responses, a sample of thirty never-depressed healthy individuals was selected. The Cued Emotional Control Task (CECT) was used to index the ability to enhance cognitive control when encountering a negative stimulus associated with an incompatible stimulus–response mapping. Individual brooding scores were not related to behavioral performances on the CECT. On the other hand, whole brain analyses demonstrated that trait depressive brooding scores were positively associated with activation in the posterior parts of the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (pdACC) while successfully inhibiting a response to negative relative to positive information. These findings demonstrate that brooding minds need to recruit more pdACC activation when inhibiting a dominant response towards negative information (in favor of a response towards positive), although they are performing similarly as low brooders at the behavioral level. Future research should investigate whether and how these brooding related neural adjustments in healthy volunteers are related to future psychopathology.     

An event-related potential study on the observation of erroneous everyday actions

Recent experiments have demonstrated that error-related negativity (ERN) is not only elicited when people commit errors, but also when they observe others committing errors. The present study investigates whether this observed ERN is also present when participants observe execution errors in an everyday context. Participants observed short sequences of pictures showing steps of everyday actions ending either erroneously or correctly. Participants were instructed to indicate by a delayed response whether the observed action was correctly executed or not. The results showed a large P300 for execution errors compared with the observation of correct sequences, but no ERN activity was found. The present experiment indicates that the detection of execution errors in observation does not rely on the error processing mechanism responsible for generating the ERN. The increased P300 amplitudes suggest a more general monitoring process that signals that the occurrence of unexpected events is involved in the detection of execution errors.     

Auditory language comprehension: an event-related fMRI study on the processing of syntactic and lexical information

The functional specificity of different brain areas recruited in auditory language processing was investigated by means of event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while subjects listened to speech input varying in the presence or absence of semantic and syntactic information. There were two sentence conditions containing syntactic structure, i.e., normal speech (consisting of function and content words), syntactic speech (consisting of function words and pseudowords), and two word-list conditions, i.e., real words and pseudowords. The processing of auditory language, in general, correlates with significant activation in the primary auditory cortices and in adjacent compartments of the superior temporal gyrus bilaterally. Processing of normal speech appeared to have a special status, as no frontal activation was observed in this case but was seen in the three other conditions. This difference may point toward a certain automaticity of the linguistic processes used during normal speech comprehension. When considering the three other conditions, we found that these were correlated with activation in both left and right frontal cortices. An increase of activation in the planum polare bilaterally and in the deep portion of the left frontal operculum was found exclusively when syntactic processes were in focus. Thus, the present data may be taken to suggest an involvement of the left frontal and bilateral temporal cortex when processing syntactic information during comprehension.     

Auditory language comprehension: an event-related fMRI study on the processing of syntactic and lexical information

The functional specificity of different brain regions recruited in auditory language processing was investigated by means of event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while subjects listened to speech input varying in the presence or absence of semantic and syntactic information. There were two sentence conditions containing syntactic structure, i.e., normal speech (consisting of function and content words), syntactic speech (consisting of function words and pseudowords), and two word-list conditions, i.e., real words and pseudowords. The processing of auditory language, in general, correlates with significant activation in the primary auditory cortices and in adjacent compartments of the superior temporal gyrus bilaterally. Processing of normal speech appeared to have a special status, as no frontal activation was observed in this case but was seen in the other three conditions. This difference may point toward a certain automaticity of the linguistic processes used during normal speech comprehension. When considering the three other conditions, we found that these were correlated with activation in both left and right frontal cortices. An increase of activation in the planum polare bilaterally and in the deep portion of the left frontal operculum was found exclusively when syntactic processes were in focus. Thus, the present data may be taken to suggest an involvement of the left frontal and bilateral temporal cortex when processing syntactic information during comprehension.     

Updating of context in working memory: An event-related potential study

Flexible control of behavior depends on the representation, maintenance, and updating of context information in working memory, which is thought to rely on the prefrontal cortex (PFC). However, in contrast to maintenance, the dynamics of context activation and updating have not been well studied. To identify neural signals associated with context updating, we compared event-related potentials associated with cues that did or did not provide task-relevant context information. The earliest effect of context was detected 200 msec following cue onset and had a scalp topography consistent with a generator in the PFC. Subsequent effects of context were detected at 400-700 msec following cue onset (P3b), with a broad scalp distribution spanning posterior areas, and during the final 300 msec preceding the target, with a probable generator in the medial frontal cortex. We propose that the effect of context on P2 is consistent with the onset of context updating in the PFC. Subsequent components may be indicative of activation of task-relevant posterior regions and context maintenance.     

网球运动专长对深度运动知觉影响的ERP研究

结合专家-新手范式与ERP技术,研究网球运动专长对个体深度运动知觉产生的影响。通过记录网球专家和新手各19名进行深度运动模式判断时的行为和ERP数据,比较两组个体深度运动知觉的行为反应差异和脑电特征。结果显示,网球专家组深度运动知觉的判断准确率高于新手组;新手组在球体靠近时P1(PO7点)的潜伏期比球体远离时的潜伏期长,专家组无显著性差异;专家组在球体靠近时的P2(Oz点)成分潜伏期长于球体远离时的潜伏期。结果表明,网球运动专家的深度运动知觉能力在准确性上较新手高;运动专长效应与选择性注意资源的调用以及模式识别有关;枕区P2成分可作为深度运动知觉的评价指标。     

The influence of spatial representation on valence judgements: An event-related potential study

The present study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to explore the nature of space-valence congruency effects. We presented participants with up or down arrows at the centre of the screen and then asked participants to identify whether the following target words had the emotional valence. The target words included positive emotional words (e.g., “happy” and “delight”), negative emotional words (e.g., “sad” and “depressive”) and neutral words (e.g., “history” and “country”). Behavioural data showed that the positive targets were identified faster when they are primed by up arrows than when primed by down arrows, whereas the negative targets were identified faster when they are primed by down arrows than when primed by up arrows. The ERP analysis showed larger P2 amplitudes were found in the congruent condition (i.e., the positive targets following up arrows or the negative targets following down arrows) than in the incongruent condition (i.e., the positive targets following down arrows or the negative targets following up arrows). Furthermore, larger N400 amplitudes were found in the incongruent condition compared with the congruent condition. Moreover, larger LPC amplitudes were found in the congruent condition compared with the incongruent condition. Therefore, in addition to replicating the space-valence congruency effects in a neutral/emotional judgement task, our study also extended previous studies by showing that spatial information modulates the processing of the emotional words at multiple stages.     

An event-related brain potential study of inhibition of return

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded during two spatial-cuing experiments using nonpredictive cues. Our primary goal was to determine the electrophysiological consequences of inhibition of return (IOR). At long (> 500 msec) cue-target intervals, subjects responded more slowly to targets that appeared at or near the cued location, relative to targets that appeared on the opposite side of fixation from the cue. This behavioral IOR effect was associated with cue-validity effects on several components of the target-elicited ERP waveforms. The earliest such effect was a smaller occipital P1 on valid-cue trials, which we interpret as a P1 reduction. The P2 component was also smaller on valid-cue trials, indicating that nonpredictive spatial cues influence multiple stages of information processing at long cue-target intervals. Both of these effects were observed when sensory interactions between cue and target were likely to be negligible, indicating that they were not caused by sensory refractoriness. A different effect of cue validity, the posterior negative difference, was found when sensory interactions were likely to be greatest, indicating that it could arise from sensory refractoriness.     

Tell me sweet little lies: An event-related potentials study on the processing of social lies

In reading tasks, words that convey a false statement elicit an enhanced N400 brainwave response, relative to words that convey a true statement. N400 amplitude reductions are generally linked to the online expectancy of upcoming words in discourse. White lies, contrary to false statements, may not be unexpected in social scenarios. We used the event-related potential (ERP) technique to determine whether there is an impact of social context on sentence processing. We measured ERP responses to target words that either conveyed a social “white” lie or a socially impolite blunt truth, relative to semantic violations. Word expectancy was controlled for by equating the cloze probabilities of white lying and blunt true targets, as measured in previous paper-and-pencil tests. We obtained a classic semantic violation effect (a larger N400 for semantic incongruities relative to sense making statements). White lies, in contrast to false statements, did not enhance the amplitude of the N400 component. Interestingly, blunt true statements yielded both a late frontal positivity and an N400 response in those scenarios particularly biased to white lying. Thus, white lies do not interfere with online semantic processing, and they do not engage further reanalysis processes, which are typically indexed by subsequent late positivity ERP effects. Instead, an N400 and a late frontal positivity obtained in response to blunt true statements indicate that they were treated as unexpected events. In conclusion, unwritten rules of social communicative behavior influence the electrical brain response to locally coherent but socially inappropriate statements.     

Early perception of written syllables in French: An event-related potential study

The present study examined whether written syllable units are perceived in first steps of letter string processing. An illusory conjunction experiment was conducted while event-related potentials were recorded. Colored pseudowords were presented such that there was a match or mismatch between the syllable boundaries and the color boundaries. The results showed that congruent stimuli for which the syllable and color boundaries coincided produced a greater positive-going waveform than incongruent stimuli for which the syllable and color boundaries did not coincide. This syllable–color congruency effect was observed to occur both prior to 100 ms, and in a time window commencing at 150 ms. This finding suggests that syllable units are perceived in the initial steps of French visual word processing. Moreover, this study underlines the specificity of the illusory conjunction paradigm as a relevant and powerful tool of investigation of sublexical units that are automatically evoked from word perception.     

Multiple sources of positive- and negative-priming effects: An event-related potential study

Event-related potential correlates of positive priming (PP) and negative priming (NP) were investigated in order to further elucidate the cognitive mechanisms involved. Thirty-six participants performed both an identity- and a location-based priming task. Repeating the target stimulus/location from the immediately preceding display produced behavioral PP. With localization, but not with identification, behavioral NP was observed when the target stimulus/location matched the preceding distractor stimulus/location. Smaller P300 amplitude accompanied identity-based PP, suggesting persisting target-specific activation. The lateralized readiness potential, an index of correct/incorrect response activation, indicated persisting central motor activation as another source of PP. Both location-based PP and NP were accompanied by reduced P1/N1 and P300 amplitudes, pointing to the involvement of inhibition of return in location-based priming. The results support the view that multiple brain processes underlie behavioral priming.