Neural Substrate of the Late Positive Potential in Emotional Processing

Abstract

The late positive potential (LPP) is a reliable electrophysiological index of emotional perception in humans. Despite years of research the brain structures that contribute to the generation and modulation of LPP are not well understood. Recording EEG and fMRI simultaneously, and applying a recently proposed single-trial ERP analysis method, we addressed the problem by correlating the single-trial LPP amplitude evoked by affective pictures with the blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) activity. Three results were found. First, relative to neutral pictures, pleasant and unpleasant pictures elicited enhanced LPP, as well as heightened BOLD activity in both visual cortices and emotion-processing structures such as amygdala and prefrontal cortex, consistent with previous findings. Second, the LPP amplitude across three picture categories was significantly correlated with BOLD activity in visual cortices, temporal cortices, amygdala, orbitofrontal cortex, and insula. Third, within each picture category, LPP-BOLD coupling revealed category-specific differences. For pleasant pictures, the LPP amplitude was coupled with BOLD in occipitotemporal junction, medial prefrontal cortex, amygdala, and precuneus, whereas for unpleasant pictures, significant LPP-BOLD correlation was observed in ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, insula, and posterior cingulate cortex. These results suggest that LPP is generated and modulated by an extensive brain network comprised of both cortical and subcortical structures associated with visual and emotional processing and the degree of contribution by each of these structures to the LPP modulation is valence-specific.

Neural modulation of directed forgetting by valence and arousal: An event-related potential study

“…Moreover, the neural substrate of the LPC is thought to consist of a network of cortical and subcortical structures, such as the visual cortices, prefrontal cortex, parietal cortex, and deep emotion-processing structures (e.g., insula, amygdala; Liu, Huang, McGinnis-Deweese, Keil, & Ding, 2012). The involvement of these regions supports the notion that motivated attention may therefore lead to preferential processing of emotional information.…”

Fairness influences early signatures of reward-related neural processing

“…The basal ganglia and the ventral prefrontal cortex have been implicated in the processing of social inequality (Tricomi et al, 2010), and are hypothesized to underlie the FRN (Foti et al, 2011) and LPP (Liu et al, 2012), respectively. Thus, the present study offers a temporal characterization of social outcome evaluation that is distributed throughout the brain.…”

Cross multivariate correlation coefficients as screening tool for analysis of concurrent EEG‐fMRI recordings

“…Specific aspects of the correlation between EEG and fMRI signals may reflect responses to experimental events seen in both modalities, mixing trivial effects of joint reactivity of EEG and fMRI to salient external events with correlations of interest such as condition-specific covariation, or covariation with various cognitive states (Liu, Huang, McGinnis-Deweese, Keil, & Ding, 2012a). In addition, and of relevance in the absence of experimental stimulation, specific portions of the covariance between modalities may reflect neural-hemodynamic dependencies in spontaneous, ongoing brain activity.…”