Emotion and attention: event-related brain potential studies

Abstract

Emotional pictures guide selective visual attention. A series of event-related brain potential (ERP) studies is reviewed demonstrating the consistent and robust modulation of specific ERP components by emotional images. Specifically, pictures depicting natural pleasant and unpleasant scenes are associated with an increased early posterior negativity, late positive potential, and sustained positive slow wave compared with neutral contents. These modulations are considered to index different stages of stimulus processing including perceptual encoding, stimulus representation in working memory, and elaborate stimulus evaluation. Furthermore, the review includes a discussion of studies exploring the interaction of motivated attention with passive and active forms of attentional control. Recent research is reviewed exploring the selective processing of emotional cues as a function of stimulus novelty, emotional prime pictures, learned stimulus significance, and in the context of explicit attention tasks. It is concluded that ERP measures are useful to assess the emotion-attention interface at the level of distinct processing stages. Results are discussed within the context of two-stage models of stimulus perception brought out by studies of attention, orienting, and learning.

Neural processing of fearful and happy facial expressions during emotion-relevant and emotion-irrelevant tasks: A fixation-to-feature approach

“…The EPN is enhanced for emotional relative to neutral stimuli, for both verbal and non-verbal material including faces (Schacht & Sommer, 2009;Schupp Markus, Weike, & Hamm, 2003;Schupp et al, 2004;Rellecke et al, 2013). Like the N170, the EPN is commonly reported to be most pronounced for threatrelated expressions (i.e., fearful and angry) compared to neutral and happy expressions (e.g., Schupp et al, 2004;Rellecke, Palazova, Sommer, & Schacht, 2011), although there are reports of a general emotion effect with more negative amplitudes for both threatening and happy expressions compared to neutral expressions (Sato et al, 2001;Schupp, Flaisch, Stockburger, & Junghöfer, 2006). Therefore this effect has been suggested to reflect enhanced processing of emotionally salient faces in general or of threatening faces in particular (i.e., fearful and angry) in temporo-occipital areas possibly including occipital gyrus, fusiform gyrus and Superior Temporal Sulcus regions (Schupp et al, 2004).…”

Affective Prime and Target Picture Processing: An ERP Analysis of Early and Late Interference Effects

“…Specifically, behavioral research demonstrated that explicit target picture recognition is hindered when these stimuli are preceded by emotional compared to neutral picture materials. Considered from this perspective, it is important to determine whether sequential interference effects are specific for early processing stages or extend to later processing stages, which are important for explicit stimulus recognition [9,10] The present study was designed to explore the emotional modulation of the LPP as a function of the valence of the current ('target') and the preceding ('prime') picture. 1 Accordingly, participants viewed a continuous stream of pleasant, neutral, and unpleasant pictures (300 pictures 9 10 repetitions, 660 ms stimulus presentation) in which the hedonic content of the current and preceding pictures varied over the course of the experiment.…”

CLINICAL STUDY: Cocaine craving is associated with electrophysiological brain responses to cocaine‐related stimuli

“…From the field of emotion research it has been theorized that slow positive waves such as the P3 and related LPPs are an index of motivational relevance (Ito et al 1998;Schupp et al 2000Schupp et al , 2006. Stimulus-related late positive peaks in the ERP reflect perceptual processing of the stimulus, which is strongly driven by motivational relevance of the stimulus (Junghöfer et al 2006).…”