Attentional negativity bias moderated by positive mood arousal

Abstract

That individuals focus on emotionally negative events more than to neutral or positive events, which is designated as emotional negativity bias, has been demonstrated by many behavioral studies. For example, snakes and spiders were detected more rapidly than flowers and mushrooms in a visual search task, suggesting that threat-relevant stimuli in the environment are preferentially perceived [1]. Researchers assumed this privileged access to negative stimulation may be driven by the pre-attentive analysis of stimuli as being threat-related (e.g., snakes, spiders), and that the underlying mechanism may consequently lead to an automatic shift of attention resources to the location of the threatening object [2,3]. Similarly, the attention bias towards negative stimuli is reflected by impaired reaction time (RT) in an emotional Stroop task which requires participants to name the color ink of words varying in emotional value (e.g., neutral versus threat-related words), wherein the RTs between word types are compared [4]. Typically, the longer the RTs, the more psychological resources are put into the processing of negative information. Because participants are presumably distracted by the nature of the words, the RTs of the color-naming task are correspondingly prolonged.RT studies establish the presence of an attention bias. ERPs provided a better examination than RTs of the time course to information processing during sensory and cognitive stages [5]. Negativity bias in earlier ERP components has also been documented by some literature. One of ERP's components, the P2 which appeared approximately at 200 -250 ms poststimulus onset, would be a good index to mirror attention bias. Thomas et al. [6] reported that the amplitude of P2 was specific to stimulus valence and larger P2 amplitudes were required for threat words than for neutral words. Likewise, Huang and Luo [7] found that enlarged P2 amplitudes are solely observed for negative rather than for positive and neutral stimuli. Carretie et al.[8] explored the ERPs for positive, negative and neutral pictorial stimuli in normal participants. They found that the P2 post-target component had the highest amplitudes for negative stimuli. It remains uncertain whether or not enhanced P2 verifies negative stimuli receive more attention than positive stimuli. Chen et al. [9] reported participants who experienced either positive or negative moods elicited smaller P2 amplitudes from negative pictures compared to positive pictures. A smaller P2 elicited by negative but not neutral stimuli was also observed in anxious and female participants [10,11]. Another possible candidate for this effect is the late positive

The Perception of Facial Emotional Change in Social Anxiety: An ERP Study

“…The present result found smaller LPP amplitudes in the neutral-angry facial emotional change trial than those in the neutral-neutral case. This is similar to the previous ERP studies ( Yuan et al, 2007 ; Chen and Luo, 2010 ), which demonstrated that reduced LPP (or P3) amplitudes were elicited by static negative stimuli. However, some other studies found that negative pictures evoked enhanced LPP amplitudes ( Moser et al, 2008 ; Wieser and Moscovitch, 2015 ).…”

Influences of Emotional Information on Response Inhibition in Gaming Disorder: Behavioral and ERP Evidence from Go/Nogo Task

“…The effect of emotional valence was also one of the findings of this study. Studies have reported that the human brain has a processing bias towards negative events compared with neutral and positive stimuli and that threat-related stimuli can more effectively capture attention [ 63 , 64 , 65 , 66 , 67 , 68 , 69 ]. However, the more quickly one focuses on negative stimuli, the more difficult it is to disengage from them [ 70 , 71 ], especially for people with high levels of negative emotions.…”

Differentiating electrophysiological response to decrease and increase negative emotion regulation

“…Moreover, the baseline maintain condition may involve a greater workload than a passive view condition, and this should minimize the workload difference between the maintain and regulation conditions. Furthermore, considering the induced emotion may affect the followed negative emotion processing [60], the negative-maintain condition may partly affected by the prior emotion regulation block.…”