The influence of affective state on exogenous attention to emotional distractors: behavioral and electrophysiological correlates

Abstract

The interplay between exogenous attention to emotional distractors and the baseline affective state has not been well established yet. The present study aimed to explore this issue through behavioral measures and event-related potentials (ERPs). Participants (N = 30) completed a digit categorization task depicted over negative, positive or neutral distractor background pictures, while they experienced negative, positive and neutral affective states elicited by movie scenes. Behavioral results showed higher error rates and longer reaction times for negative distractors than for neutral and positive ones, irrespective of the current emotional state. Neural indices showed that the participants’ affective state modulated N1 amplitudes, irrespective of distractor type, while the emotional charge of distractors modulated N2, irrespective of the emotional state. Importantly, an interaction of state and distractor type was observed in LPP. These results demonstrate that exogenous attention to emotional distractors is independent from modulating effects of the emotional baseline state at early, automatic stages of processing. However, attention to emotional distractors and affective state interact at later latencies.

Menstrual cycle and exogenous attention toward emotional expressions

“…Whereas this anterior distribution it is not the most commonly reported, the results are in line with previous studies that describe N2a modulations as a function of the emotional content of faces (e.g., Kiss & Eimer, 2008;Zhang, 2013bZhang, , 2015 and, particularly in line with studies exploring exogenous attention to emotional scenes (Carboni et al, 2017;Kosonogov et al, 2019) or facial expressions (Balconi & Pozzoli, 2008;Streit et al, 2001;Wynn et al, 2008). Therefore, N2a results confirmed that non-negative distractors (concretely, neutral and positive faces) captured attention to a greater extent than negative in our CDTD task, in line with previous studies reporting enhanced N2a amplitudes toward positive distractors (Carboni et al, 2017). This result could be due to the positivity offset effect (Cacioppo & Gardner, 1999), a processing bias favoring the processing of positive stimuli.…”

Authentic Fear Responses in Virtual Reality: A Mobile EEG Study on Affective, Behavioral and Electrophysiological Correlates of Fear

“…The most salient stimuli that instantly draw attention are biologically relevant stimuli ensuring survival: nutrition, reproduction, and physical dangers (Carretié et al, 2012;Carboni et al, 2017). Among these, threats to physical integrity most inevitably jeopardize survival and immediately trigger complex responses, like the fight-or-flight response (Cannon, 1929).…”

Exploring electrophysiological correlates of social cognition in subclinical schizotypy

“…Face response ERPs were segmented to stimulus onset, beginning 200‐ms prestimulus and continuous for 1 000 ms after. Segments were filtered in EEGlab using a 0.3 to 30 Hz zero‐phase shift FIR bandpass filter, a filtering range selected based on its use in prior emotional face‐processing studies . The Automatic Artefact Removal toolbox was used to remove ocular and electromyographic artefacts via spatial filtering and blind source separation.…”

“…Segments were filtered in EEGlab 69 using a 0.3 to 30 Hz zero-phase shift FIR bandpass filter, a filtering range selected based on its use in prior emotional face-processing studies. [70][71][72] The Automatic Artefact Removal toolbox 73 was used to remove ocular and electromyographic artefacts via spatial filtering and blind source separation. Bad channels were identified and interpolated using the ERP PCA Toolkit.…”