The present study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine differences in the temporal dynamics of emotion processing in young and older adults, with a specific focus on the positivity effect, that is, the preferential processing of positive over negative information.To this aim, we used a language paradigm that allowed us to investigate early ERP components as well as later components, namely the N400 and the Late Positive Complex (LPC). Young and older adults were presented with neutral sentence stems with positive, negative or neutral/semantically-incongruent critical word endings while their electrical brain activity was recorded. There were no effects of emotional valence on early ERP components. Instead, a positivity effect was evident in young adults indexed by reduced N400s for positive sentence endings. Perhaps due to reduced semantic processing abilities, older adults did not show any N400 effect. ERP effects in this group were evident at a later processing stage and took the form of larger LPCs for neutral/incongruent information.Overall, there was no effect of emotional valence on either the N400 or the LPC in older adults. Our data suggest that with age more effortful semantic processing may deplete resources for emotional processing.
According to previous research, people influence each other’s emotional states during social interactions via resonance mechanisms and coordinated autonomic rhythms. However, no previous studies tested if the manipulation of the interoceptive focus (focused attention on the breath for a given time interval) in hyperscanning during synchronized tasks may have an impact on autonomic synchrony. Thus, this study aims to assess the psychophysiological synchrony through autonomic measures recording during dyadic linguistic and motor synchronization tasks performed in two distinct interoceptive conditions: the focus and no focus on the breath condition. 26 participants coupled in 13 dyads were recruited. Individuals’ autonomic measures [electrodermal: skin conductance level and response (SCL, SCR); cardiovascular indices: heart rate (HR) and HR variability (HRV)] was continuously monitored during the experiment and correlational coefficients were computed to analyze dyads physiological synchrony. Inter-subject analysis revealed higher synchrony for HR, HRV, SCL, and SCR values in the focus compared to no focus condition during the motor synchronization task and in general more for motor than linguistic task. Higher synchrony was also found for HR, SCL, and SCR values during focus than no focus condition in linguistic task. Overall, evidence suggests that the manipulation of the interoceptive focus has an impact on the autonomic synchrony during distinct synchronization tasks and for different autonomic measures. Such findings encourage the use of hyperscanning paradigms to assess the effect of breath awareness practices on autonomic synchrony in ecological and real-time conditions involving synchronization.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.