Seeing emotions, reading emotions: behavioral and ERPs evidence of the effect of strategy and of regulation for pictures and words.

Abstract

¶ These authors contributed equally to this work. AbstractBackground: Whilst there has been extensive study of the mechanisms underlying the effect of regulation for the emotions elicited by pictures, the ability and the mechanisms beyond the regulation of words remains to be clarified. Similarly, the effect of strategy when applying a regulatory process is still poorly explored. The present study seeks to elucidate these issues comparing the effect of regulation and of strategy to both neutral and emotional words and pictures. Methodology/Principal Findings: Thirty young adults observed and took the distance from unpleasant and neutral pictures and words while their subjective ratings and ERPs were recorded. At a behavioral level, participants successfully regulated the arousal and the valence of both pictures and words. At a neural level, unpleasant pictures produced an increase in the late positive potential modulated during the regulate condition. Unpleasant linguistic stimuli elicited a posteriornegativity as compared to neutral stimuli, but no effect of regulation on ERP was detectable. More importantly, the effect of strategy independently of stimulus type, produced a significant larger Emotion regulation and ERP Stimulus Preceding Negativity. Dipole reconstruction localized this effect in the middle frontal areas of the brain. Conclusions:As such, these new psychophysiological findings might help to understand how pictures and words can be regulated by distancing in daily life and clinical contexts, and the neural bases of the effect of strategy for which we suggest an integrative model.

Frontiers in psychodynamic neuroscience

“…The subsequent broad centro-parietal positive deflection (i.e., P3) occurs between 300 and 600 ms after stimulus onset (Roche et al, 2004;Polich, 2007), and is thought to be generated by a more distributed network of cortical regions, relative to N2 (Polich, 2007;Foti and Hajcak, 2008;Hajcak, 2009, 2010). P3 amplitude is sensitive to motivationally salient stimuli, as it is modulated by both pleasant and unpleasant cues, regardless of whether the salience is defined in terms of the task demand or stimulus content (Olofsson et al, 2008;Hajcak et al, 2010;Weinberg and Hajcak, 2010); similar results have been reported for emotional words (Naumann et al, 1992) and faces (Allison et al, 1999;Grecucci et al, 2018;Sulpizio et al, 2019). Finally, the late positive potential (LPP) is a sustained positive deflection in the ERP waveform with centroparietal distribution, which emerges at approximately 300 ms following stimulus onset and persists for the duration of the stimulus (Schupp et al, 2000(Schupp et al, , 2004aFoti et al, 2009) and beyond (for as long as 1,000 ms) (Hajcak and Olvet, 2008;Hajcak et al, 2010).…”

Therapist reactions to patient personality: A pilot study of clinicians’ emotional and neural responses using three clinical vignettes from in treatment series

“…The subsequent broad centro-parietal positive deflection (i.e., P3) occurs between 300 and 600 ms after stimulus onset (Roche et al, 2004;Polich, 2007), and is thought to be generated by a more distributed network of cortical regions, relative to N2 (Polich, 2007;Foti and Hajcak, 2008;Hajcak, 2009, 2010). P3 amplitude is sensitive to motivationally salient stimuli, as it is modulated by both pleasant and unpleasant cues, regardless of whether the salience is defined in terms of the task demand or stimulus content (Olofsson et al, 2008;Hajcak et al, 2010;Weinberg and Hajcak, 2010); similar results have been reported for emotional words (Naumann et al, 1992) and faces (Allison et al, 1999;Grecucci et al, 2018;Sulpizio et al, 2019). Finally, the late positive potential (LPP) is a sustained positive deflection in the ERP waveform with centroparietal distribution, which emerges at approximately 300 ms following stimulus onset and persists for the duration of the stimulus (Schupp et al, 2000(Schupp et al, , 2004aFoti et al, 2009) and beyond (for as long as 1,000 ms) (Hajcak and Olvet, 2008;Hajcak et al, 2010).…”