Prefrontal-Occipitoparietal Coupling Underlies Late Latency Human Neuronal Responses to Emotion

Abstract

Enhanced late positive potentials (LPPs) evoked by highly arousing unpleasant and pleasant stimuli have been consistently observed in event-related potential experiments in humans. Although the psychological factors modulating the LPP have been studied in detail, the neurobiological underpinnings of this response remain poorly understood. Current models suggest that the LPP is a product of both an automatic facilitation of perceptual activity, as well as postperceptual processing under cognitive control. Here we applied magnetoencephalography (MEG) and beamformer analysis combined with Granger causality measures to provide a mechanistic account for LPP generation that reconciles these two models. We demonstrate that the magnetic homolog of the LPP, mLPP, is localized within bilateral occipitoparietal and right prefrontal cortex. Critically, directed functional connectivity analysis between these brain regions, indexed by Granger causality, demonstrates stronger bidirectional influences between frontal and occipitoparietal cortex for high arousing emotional relative to low arousing neutral pictures. Thus, both bottom-up and top-down accounts of the late latency response to emotion derived from psychological studies can be explained by a reciprocal codependency between activity in prefrontal and occipitoparietal cortex.

Cognitive emotion regulation in children: Reappraisal of emotional faces modulates neural source activity in a frontoparietal network

“…This is in line with prior MEG and combined EEG/fMRI source localizations using emotional scenes (Liu et al, 2012;Moratti et al, 2011;Sabatinelli et al, 2013) and faces (Wessing et al, 2013). The observed right lateralization is consistent with a right-hemispheric advantage for face processing in general (Rossion et al, 2003), albeit regarding a lateralization of facial emotion processing results are rather mixed Hung et al, 2010).…”

Neural Reactivity to Emotional Stimuli Prospectively Predicts the Impact of a Natural Disaster on Psychiatric Symptoms in Children

“…Consistent with interpretations of the LPP as reflecting attention towards emotional information, the LPP has been linked to activation in the visual cortex, as well as increased bidirectional coupling between occipitoparietal and frontal cortex in response to emotional stimuli (64–66). In combined fMRI-ERP studies, the LPP has also been correlated with activation in subcortical regions, including amygdala and insula (67; 68).…”

Age‐related changes in emotional face processing across childhood and into young adulthood: Evidence from event‐related potentials

“…Of note, both unpleasant and pleasant stimuli can cause behavioral interference (Beall & Herbert, 2008; Ihssen, Heim, & Keil, 2007); therefore, increased cognitive control over the processing of both these types of stimuli might be expected among older children. The LPP is believed to depend on activation in fronto-parietal attention networks (Moratti, Saugar, & Strange, 2011), with contributions from subcortical regions, such as the amygdala (Liu, Huang, McGinnis-Deweese, Keil, & Ding, 2012). Therefore, a reduction across development in the LPP might signify increasing involvement of the PFC, which could result in reductions in subcortically-driven processing of affective stimuli as children age.…”