Affective visual event-related potentials: arousal, repetition, and time-on-task

Attention to food stimuli in binge eating disorder: Electrophysiological evidence

Attentional biases towards food play an important role in the pathology of binge eating disorder (BED). Later stage electrophysiological potentials (P300, late positive potential) present promising markers of motivated attention with high temporal, albeit low spatial resolution. Complementing this, the N2pc is an earlier-latency component providing the possibility of more directly analyzing visuospatial attention. Therefore, we tested a group with BED (N = 60), as well as an overweight (OW; N = 28) and normal weight (NW; N = 30) group without BED in a Go/No-Go paradigm using food and nonfood distractor images. Only the OW group in exclusively the Go trials displayed a stronger spatial attention allocation towards nonfood distractors as evidenced by an increased N2pc amplitude. In the P300's time window, the OW group displayed no attentional bias towards food and the NW group only did so in the absence of a target. Solely the BED group allocated more motivated attention towards food distractors both in Go and No-Go trials. In the following late positive potential (LPP), the OW group exhibited a general attentional bias towards food distractors, while the BED group only did so in the absence of a target. These results are discussed in light of the incentive sensitization theory and a potential early attentional suppression of potent distractors.

Musical Expertise Influences the Processing of Short and Long Auditory Time Intervals: An Electroencephalography Study

Musical expertise has been proven to be beneficial for time perception abilities, with musicians outperforming nonmusicians in several explicit timing tasks. However, it is unclear how musical expertise impacts implicit time perception. Twenty nonmusicians and 15 expert musicians participated in an EEG recording during a passive auditory oddball paradigm with 0.8- and 1.6-sec standard time intervals and deviant intervals that were either played earlier or delayed relative to the standard interval. We first confirmed that, as was the case for nonmusicians, musicians use different neurofunctional processes to support the perception of short (below 1.2 sec) and long (above 1.2 sec) time intervals: Whereas deviance detection for long intervals elicited a N1 component, P2 was associated with deviance detection for short time intervals. Interestingly, musicians did not elicit a contingent negative variation (CNV) for longer intervals but show additional components of deviance detection such as (i) an attention-related N1 component, even for deviants occurring during short intervals; (ii) a N2 component for above and below 1.2-sec deviance detection, and (iii) a P2 component for above 1.2-sec deviance detection. We propose that the N2 component is a marker of explicit deviance detection and acts as an inhibitory/conflict monitoring of the deviance. This hypothesis was supported by a positive correlation between CNV and N2 amplitudes: The CNV reflects the temporal accumulator and can predict explicit detection of the deviance. In expert musicians, a N2 component is observable without CNV, suggesting that deviance detection is optimized and does not require the temporal accumulator. Overall, this study suggests that musical expertise is associated with optimized implicit time perception.

Verbal Support From a Stranger Reduces the Development of Mechanical Hypersensitivity: Behavioral and Neurophysiological Evidence

Hand-holding reduces experimentally induced acute pain and buffers against the development of mechanical secondary hypersensitivity, an indirect proxy of central sensitization. Here, we tested if verbal support from a stranger, a common occurrence in clinical contexts, exerts the same effects. In this preregistered study, 44 healthy female participants were assigned to an alone or support group whereby a supportive female stranger encouraged them through the painful procedure leading to secondary mechanical hypersensitivity. Mechanical hypersensitivity was measured via self-reports and by the size of the anteroposterior and mediolateral spread of mechanical hypersensitivity. We investigated the moderating role of attachment style on self-reports and the effects of support on skin conductance level, salivary cortisol, and pinprick-evoked potentials. We also tested whether theta/beta ratio in the resting-state electroencephalogram predicted mechanical hypersensitivity. Self-reported ratings and the late part of the pinprick-evoked potentials were reduced in the support group, but the spread of mechanical hypersensitivity was not. Attachment anxiety and avoidance moderated the self-reported intensity such that individuals with higher attachment anxiety and avoidance scores reported lower intensity ratings in the support group. No significant effect of the verbal support was observed on skin conductance level and salivary cortisol. The theta/beta ratio did not predict the extent of hypersensitivity. Our data indicate that, in women, verbal support during intense pain leading to hypersensitivity is effective on some behavioral outcomes, but altogether the lack of group differences in cortisol, self-reported stress, and skin conductance does not provide strong support for the stress-buffering hypothesis. PERSPECTIVE: Verbal support by a stranger during a painful procedure leading to secondary mechanical hypersensitivity attenuated the development of some measures of mechanical hypersensitivity and associated neural responses in healthy female participants. No evidence was found for the role of stress. DATA AVAILABILITY: The authors will make all data available upon request.

The ineffective emotion regulation of deaf college students: an ERP study

Introduction

Deaf students have more difficulties with emotion regulation due to their hearing loss. They are suffering higher socio-emotional risk than the hearing person. But there are few studies explored the neural mechanisms of impaired emotion regulation in the deaf college students.

Methods

Thirty hearing college students and 27 deaf college students completed the emotion regulation task while recording ERP data and subjective emotion intensity.

Results

Behavioral results found that deaf college students had higher emotional experience intensity compared to healthy controls. The ERP results showed the deaf college students had lower LPP amplitudes both using reappraisal and suppression strategies. Moreover, the LPP of expression suppression was associated with the increase of depression scores among deaf college students.

Discussion

Deaf college students may have impaired emotion regulation so that they are more accustomed to using expression suppression strategies to regulate their negative emotions which lead to high risk to be depression.

How the Degree of Anthropomorphism of Human-like Robots Affects Users' Perceptual and Emotional Processing: Evidence from an EEG Study

Anthropomorphized robots are increasingly integrated into human social life, playing vital roles across various fields. This study aimed to elucidate the neural dynamics underlying users' perceptual and emotional responses to robots with varying levels of anthropomorphism. We investigated event-related potentials (ERPs) and event-related spectral perturbations (ERSPs) elicited while participants viewed, perceived, and rated the affection of robots with low (L-AR), medium (M-AR), and high (H-AR) levels of anthropomorphism. EEG data were recorded from 42 participants. Results revealed that H-AR induced a more negative N1 and increased frontal theta power, but decreased P2 in early time windows. Conversely, M-AR and L-AR elicited larger P2 compared to H-AR. In later time windows, M-AR generated greater late positive potential (LPP) and enhanced parietal-occipital theta oscillations than H-AR and L-AR. These findings suggest distinct neural processing phases: early feature detection and selective attention allocation, followed by later affective appraisal. Early detection of facial form and animacy, with P2 reflecting higher-order visual processing, appeared to correlate with anthropomorphism levels. This research advances the understanding of emotional processing in anthropomorphic robot design and provides valuable insights for robot designers and manufacturers regarding emotional and feature design, evaluation, and promotion of anthropomorphic robots.

Increased sensitivity for negative emotional images in individuals with problematic pornography use

Background

Despite the frequent comorbidity of affective and addictive disorders, the significance of affective dysregulation in problematic pornography use (PPU) is commonly disregarded. The objective of this study is to investigate whether individuals with PPU demonstrate increased sensitivity to negative emotional stimuli in comparison to healthy controls (HCs).

Methods

Electrophysiological responses were captured via event-related potentials (ERPs) from 27 individuals with PPU and 29 HCs. They completed an oddball task involving the presentation of deviant stimuli in the form of highly negative (HN), moderately negative (MN), and neutral images, with a standard stimulus being a neutral kettle image. To evaluate participants' subjective feelings of valence and arousal, the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) was employed.

Results

Regarding subjective evaluations, individuals with PPU indicated diminished valence ratings for HN images as opposed to HCs. Concerning electrophysiological assessments, those with PPU manifested elevated N2 amplitudes in response to both HN and MN images when contrasted against neutral images. Additionally, PPU participants displayed an intensified P3 response to HN images in contrast to MN images, a distinction not evident within the HCs.

Discussion

These outcomes suggest that individuals with PPU exhibited heightened reactivity toward negative stimuli. This increased sensitivity to negative cues could potentially play a role in the propensity of PPU individuals to resort to pornography as a coping mechanism for managing stress regulation.

Blindness influences emotional authenticity perception in voices: Behavioral and ERP evidence

The ability to distinguish spontaneous from volitional emotional expressions is an important social skill. How do blind individuals perceive emotional authenticity? Unlike sighted individuals, they cannot rely on facial and body language cues, relying instead on vocal cues alone. Here, we combined behavioral and ERP measures to investigate authenticity perception in laughter and crying in individuals with early- or late-blindness onset. Early-blind, late-blind, and sighted control participants (n = 17 per group, N = 51) completed authenticity and emotion discrimination tasks while EEG data were recorded. The stimuli consisted of laughs and cries that were either spontaneous or volitional. The ERP analysis focused on the N1, P2, and late positive potential (LPP). Behaviorally, early-blind participants showed intact authenticity perception, but late-blind participants performed worse than controls. There were no group differences in the emotion discrimination task. In brain responses, all groups were sensitive to laughter authenticity at the P2 stage, and to crying authenticity at the early LPP stage. Nevertheless, only early-blind participants were sensitive to crying authenticity at the N1 and middle LPP stages, and to laughter authenticity at the early LPP stage. Furthermore, early-blind and sighted participants were more sensitive than late-blind ones to crying authenticity at the P2 and late LPP stages. Altogether, these findings suggest that early blindness relates to facilitated brain processing of authenticity in voices, both at early sensory and late cognitive-evaluative stages. Late-onset blindness, in contrast, relates to decreased sensitivity to authenticity at behavioral and brain levels.

The impact of fear and psychopathological symptoms on neural responses to naturalistic stimuli in adolescents

The presentation of real-world images can swiftly engage processing mechanisms within specific brain regions and neural pathways. In this study, we explore the effects of fear and psychopathological symptoms on neural processing of realistic stimuli during a free viewing naturalistic task in a sample of adolescents (11-16y). Thirty-one participants performed an experimental task consisting of the visualization of animal pictures according to three conditions - Snakes, Spiders, and Dogs - during EEG recordings. Dimensions of fear and psychopathological symptoms were previously assessed through The Fear Survey Schedule for Children- Revised and the Brief Symptom Inventory. Earlier and later visual processing was analyzed through ERP components' peak amplitudes. The results show a robust effect of psychopathology-related dimensions in the visual processing of naturalistic images, suggesting an increase of neural activity at later stages of visual processing (at the N200 time window) in symptomatic adolescents, corroborating the role of psychopathological symptoms in modulating neural responses to naturalistic images, and also guiding clinicians by providing additional data on how symptomatic adolescents perceive and process reality.

Differential correlates of fear and anxiety in salience perception: A behavioral and ERP study with adolescents

Anxiety disorders are the most common psychopathologies among adolescents. Their diagnostic criteria include both fear and anxiety symptomatology, although according to the literature, we can find evidence for some distinction between these two emotions. The present study contribute to this distinction, exploring the effects of trait fear and trait anxiety on behavioral and neural correlates. Thirty-two participants (aged 11-16 years) performed two experimental tasks of salient target detection, including visual stimuli that were manipulated to become salient, while reaction times and EEG were recorded. Results of both tasks revealed differential effects of trait fear and trait anxiety assessed through the Fear Survey Schedule for Children-Revised and the Youth Anxiety Measure for DSM-5 on reaction times and ERP components amplitudes. Specifically, higher symptoms from Separation Anxiety Disorder increased early neural visual processing and decreased reaction times for more salient stimuli. Also, trait fear reduced later neural visual processing of salient stimuli. These findings may provide a significant contribution to guiding psychological interventions, especially with adolescents presenting higher levels of anxiety-related symptomatology.

Emotional processing deficits in individuals with problematic pornography use: Unpleasant bias and pleasant blunting

Background and aims

A growing body of evidence indicates a connection between emotional processes and the emergence and progression of addiction. However, scant research has examined the involvement of emotional processing within the framework of problematic pornography use (PPU). This study aimed to examine the electrophysiological and subjective differences in emotional processing between male individuals with PPU and healthy controls (HCs) following exposure to everyday affective images.

Methods

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from 42 PPU participants (mean age = 20.14 years, SD = 1.35) and 45 HCs (mean age = 20.04 years, SD = 1.45) during an oddball task, in which unpleasant, pleasant, and neutral images were presented as deviant stimuli, while a neutral kettle image served as the standard stimulus. The Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) was employed to assess participants' subjective experience on the dimensions of valence and arousal.

Results

Regarding subjective measures of emotion, individuals with PPU reported lower valence ratings for unpleasant images compared to HCs. In terms of electrophysiological measures of emotion, PPU participants reported larger P2 amplitudes for unpleasant pictures compared to both pleasant and neutral pictures. Moreover, HCs showed enhanced P3 amplitudes in response to pleasant images compared to neutral images, whereas this effect was not observed in PPU participants.

Discussion and Conclusion

These findings indicate that individuals with PPU may display deficits in emotional processing characterized by enhanced responsiveness to negative stimuli and attenuated responsiveness to positive stimuli. The heightened sensitivity to negative stimuli may contribute to the inclination of individuals with PPU to engage in pornography as a coping mechanism for stress regulation. Conversely, their diminished sensitivity to positive stimuli presents a challenge in seeking alternative natural rewards to counter potentially addictive behaviors.

Motivated attention and task relevance in the processing of cross-modally associated faces: Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence

It has repeatedly been shown that visually presented stimuli can gain additional relevance by their association with affective stimuli. Studies have shown effects of associated affect in event-related potentials (ERP) like the early posterior negativity (EPN), late positive complex (LPC), and even earlier components as the P1 or N170. However, findings are mixed as to the extent associated affect requires directed attention to the emotional quality of a stimulus and which ERP components are sensitive to task instructions during retrieval. In this preregistered study ( https://osf.io/ts4pb ), we tested cross-modal associations of vocal affect-bursts (positive, negative, neutral) to faces displaying neutral expressions in a flash-card-like learning task, in which participants studied face-voice pairs and learned to correctly assign them to each other. In the subsequent EEG test session, we applied both an implicit ("old-new") and explicit ("valence-classification") task to investigate whether the behavior at retrieval and neurophysiological activation of the affect-based associations were dependent on the type of motivated attention. We collected behavioral and neurophysiological data from 40 participants who reached the preregistered learning criterium. Results showed EPN effects of associated negative valence after learning and independent of the task. In contrast, modulations of later stages (LPC) by positive and negative associated valence were restricted to the explicit, i.e., valence-classification, task. These findings highlight the importance of the task at different processing stages and show that cross-modal affect can successfully be associated to faces.

Of ugly gains and happy losses: An event-related potential study of interactions of the intrinsic and acquired valence of emotional pictures

During the last decades, event-related potential research on the processing of intrinsic and acquired valence has made great progress, but the two dimensions rarely varied simultaneously. Only that way, however, can we investigate whether the acquisition of extrinsic valence varies with intrinsic valence and whether intrinsic and acquired valence share the same brain mechanisms. Forty-five participants performed associative learning of gains and losses, using pictures varying on intrinsic valence (positive, negative) and outcome (90 % gain, 50 %/50 %, 90 % loss). 64-channel EEG was recorded. During acquisition, one picture from each valence/outcome combination was repeatedly presented, followed by abstract outcome information (+10 ct, -10 ct) at the predefined probability. In the test phase, participants pressed buttons to earn the real gains and avoid the real losses associated with the pictures. Here, effects of outcome and/or its congruence with intrinsic valence were observed for RT, error rate, frontal theta power, posterior P2, P300, and LPP. Moreover, outcome systematically affected post-test valence and arousal ratings. During acquisition, a contingency effect (90 % > 50 %) on amplitude of a frontal negative slow wave accompanied the progress of learning, independently of outcome, valence, and congruence. The relative absence of outcome effects during acquisition suggests "cold" semantic rather than genuinely affective processing of gains and losses. However, with real gains and losses in the test phase, "hot" affective processing took place, and outcome and its congruence with intrinsic valence influenced behavior and neural processing. Finally, the data suggest both shared and distinct brain mechanisms of intrinsic and acquired valence.

Reward History Modulates the Processing of Task-Irrelevant Emotional Faces in a Demanding Task

The aim of the current study was to examine how reward-associated emotional facial distractors could capture attentional resources in a demanding visual task using event-related potentials (ERPs). In the learning phase, a high- or low-reward probability was paired with angry, happy, or neutral faces. Then, in the test phase, participants performed a face-irrelevant task with no reward at stake, in which they needed to discriminate the length of two lines presented in the center of the screen while faces that were taken from the learning phase were used as distractors presented in the periphery. The behavioral results revealed no effect of distractor emotional valence since the emotional information was task-irrelevant. The ERP results in the test phase revealed a significant main effect of distractor emotional valence for the parieto-occipital P200 (170-230 ms); the mean amplitudes in both the angry- and happy-face conditions were more positive than the neutral-face condition. Moreover, we found that the high-reward association enhanced both the N170 (140-180 ms) and EPN (260-330 ms) relative to the low-reward association condition. Finally, the N2pc (270-320 ms) also exhibited enhanced neural activity in the high-reward condition compared to the low-reward condition. The absence of emotional effects indicated that task-irrelevant emotional facial stimuli did not impact behavioral or neural responses in this highly demanding task. However, reward-associated information was processed when attention was directed elsewhere, suggesting that the processing of reward-associated information worked more in an automatic way, irrespective of the top-down task demand.

Brain potentials related to violent video clips

The aim of the present study was to investigate whether affective video can elicit ERPs related to emotional processing. Compared with neutral video clips, violent video clips elicited delayed but amplitude-similar N1 component. The most conspicuous finding was enhanced EPN and LPP components for violent than neutral video clips. These data indicate the possibility of using affective video as stimulus to elicit ERPs and provide new evidence for processing affective stimuli, using real-life video clips with better ecological validity.

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

Introduction

Therapists’ responses to patients play a crucial role in psychotherapy and are considered a key component of the patient–clinician relationship, which promotes successful treatment outcomes. To date, no empirical research has ever investigated therapist response patterns to patients with different personality disorders from a neuroscience perspective.

Methods

In the present study, psychodynamic therapists (N = 14) were asked to complete a battery of instruments (including the Therapist Response Questionnaire) after watching three videos showing clinical interactions between a therapist and three patients with narcissistic, histrionic/borderline, and depressive personality disorders, respectively. Subsequently, participants’ high-density electroencephalography (hdEEG) was recorded as they passively viewed pictures of the patients’ faces, which were selected from the still images of the previously shown videos. Supervised machine learning (ML) was used to evaluate whether: (1) therapists’ responses predicted which patient they observed during the EEG task and whether specific clinician reactions were involved in distinguishing between patients with different personality disorders (using pairwise comparisons); and (2) therapists’ event-related potentials (ERPs) predicted which patient they observed during the laboratory experiment and whether distinct ERP components allowed this forecast.

Results

The results indicated that therapists showed distinct patterns of criticized/devalued and sexualized reactions to visual depictions of patients with different personality disorders, at statistically systematic and clinically meaningful levels. Moreover, therapists’ late positive potentials (LPPs) in the hippocampus were able to determine which patient they observed during the EEG task, with high accuracy.

Discussion

These results, albeit preliminary, shed light on the role played by therapists’ memory processes in psychotherapy. Clinical and neuroscience implications of the empirical investigation of therapist responses are discussed.

Late positive potential as a candidate biomarker of motivational relevance in substance use: Evidence from a meta-analysis

The objective of the current meta-analysis was to assess the effect size of the Late Positive Potential (LPP) to drug and emotional cues in substance users compared to controls. The secondary objective was to test for moderation by: age, gender, years of use, use status, and substance type. Search was performed in August 2021 using PubMed. Inclusion criteria were: substance use disorder/dependence or validated self-report, LPP means, healthy control comparison, non-acute drug study, data available, peer-reviewed journal, English, and human participants. Selection bias was tested through modified Egger's regression and exploratory 3-parameter selection model tests. Results (k = 11) indicated LPP to drug cues was larger in substance use compared to control group, with a large effect size (Hedges' g=1.66, 95%CI [0.64,2.67], p = 0.005). There were no overall differences for emotional cues. Though threats of selection bias were not severe, inclusion of more studies with larger sample sizes in future meta-analyses will allow more robust tests of publication bias and more accurate measures of effect size.

Sensorimotor inhibition during emotional processing

Visual processing of emotional stimuli has been shown to engage complex cortical and subcortical networks, but it is still unclear how it affects sensorimotor integration processes. To fill this gap, here, we used a TMS protocol named short-latency afferent inhibition (SAI), capturing sensorimotor interactions, while healthy participants were observing emotional body language (EBL) and International Affective Picture System (IAPS) stimuli. Participants were presented with emotional (fear- and happiness-related) or non-emotional (neutral) EBL and IAPS stimuli while SAI was tested at 120 ms and 300 ms after pictures presentation. At the earlier time point (120 ms), we found that fear-related EBL and IAPS stimuli selectively enhanced SAI as indexed by the greater inhibitory effect of somatosensory afferents on motor excitability. Larger early SAI enhancement was associated with lower scores at the Behavioural Inhibition Scale (BIS). At the later time point (300 ms), we found a generalized SAI decrease for all kind of stimuli (fear, happiness or neutral). Because the SAI index reflects integrative activity of cholinergic sensorimotor circuits, our findings suggest greater sensitivity of such circuits during early (120 ms) processing of threat-related information. Moreover, the correlation with BIS score may suggest increased attention and sensory vigilance in participants with greater anxiety-related dispositions. In conclusion, the results of this study show that sensorimotor inhibition is rapidly enhanced while processing threatening stimuli and that SAI protocol might be a valuable option in evaluating emotional-motor interactions in physiological and pathological conditions.

Differences in dogs' event-related potentials in response to human and dog vocal stimuli; a non-invasive study

Recent advances in the field of canine neuro-cognition allow for the non-invasive research of brain mechanisms in family dogs. Considering the striking similarities between dog's and human (infant)'s socio-cognition at the behavioural level, both similarities and differences in neural background can be of particular relevance. The current study investigates brain responses of n = 17 family dogs to human and conspecific emotional vocalizations using a fully non-invasive event-related potential (ERP) paradigm. We found that similarly to humans, dogs show a differential ERP response depending on the species of the caller, demonstrated by a more positive ERP response to human vocalizations compared to dog vocalizations in a time window between 250 and 650 ms after stimulus onset. A later time window between 800 and 900 ms also revealed a valence-sensitive ERP response in interaction with the species of the caller. Our results are, to our knowledge, the first ERP evidence to show the species sensitivity of vocal neural processing in dogs along with indications of valence sensitive processes in later post-stimulus time periods.

Suicidal thoughts, behaviors, and event-related potentials: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Suicidal thoughts and behaviors (STBs) are thought to result from, at least in part, abnormalities in various neural systems. Event-related potentials (ERPs) are a useful method for studying neural activity and can be leveraged to study neural deficits related to STBs; however, it is unknown how effective ERPs are at differentiating various STB groups. The present meta-analysis examined how well ERPs can differentiate (a) those with and without suicidal ideation, (b) those with and without suicide attempts, (c) those with different levels of suicide risk, and (d) differences between those with suicide attempts versus those with suicidal ideation only. This meta-analysis included 208 effect sizes from 2,517 participants from 27 studies. We used a random-effects meta-analysis using a restricted maximum likelihood estimator with robust variance estimation. We meta-analyzed ERP-STB combinations that had at least three effect sizes across two or more studies. A qualitative review found that for each ERP and STB combination, the literature is highly mixed. Our meta-analyses largely did not find significant relationships between STBs and ERPs. We also found that the literature is likely severely underpowered, with most studies only being sufficiently powered to detect unrealistically large effect sizes. Our results provided little-to-no support for a reliable relationship between the ERPs assessed and STBs. However, the current literature is severely underpowered, and there are many methodological weaknesses that must be resolved before making this determination. We recommend large-scale collaboration and improvements in measurement practices to combat the issues in this literature.

Insular Cortex Response to Static Visual Sexual Stimuli

Abstract. According to previous research, the insula is important for processing salient and emotional stimuli, but its precise role remains elusive. By combining high spatial and temporal resolution, intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) might contribute to filling this gap. Four drug-resistant epileptic patients with intracranial electrodes in the insula were instructed to watch and rate pictures with sexual content and neutral pictures. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were computed separately for both types of stimuli. Ninety-three percent of the anterior insula (AI) and 85% of the posterior insula (PI) contacts showed differences between ERPs. AI-positive deflections tended to have an earlier onset than PI-positive deflections. The results suggest that the AI generates a P300-like response and contributes to the early phase of the late positive potential, both components found enhanced while viewing emotional stimuli in the ERP literature. The present findings are interpreted as congruent with the role of the AI in maintaining attention to salient stimuli.

The emotion-elicited late positive potential is stable across five testing sessions

Many studies have examined associations between neural and behavioral markers of attention to emotion and individual differences in affective functioning. However, the majority of these studies are cross-sectional, and examine associations between brain, behavior, and individual differences at one or two time-points, limiting our understanding of the extent to which these neural responses reflect trait-like patterns of attention. The present study used the Emotional Interrupt paradigm, and examined the stability and trajectory of behavioral (i.e., reaction time to targets following task-irrelevant appetitive, neutral, and aversive images), and neural responses to images (i.e., the late positive potential or LPP), across five sessions separated by one week in 86 individuals. Additionally, we examined the extent to which the LPP and behavioral measures were sensitive to naturally occurring daily fluctuations in positive and negative affect. Results indicate that, though the magnitude of the conditional LPP waveforms decreased over time, the degree of emotional modulation (i.e., differentiation of emotional from neutral) did not; in fact, differentiation of appetitive from neutral increased over time. Behavioral responses were similarly stable across sessions. Additionally, we largely did not observe significant effects of state positive and negative affect on the LPP or behavior over time. Finally, the LPP elicited by appetitive images significantly predicted reaction time to targets following these images. These data suggest that neural and behavioral markers of attention to motivationally salient cues may be trait-like in nature, and may be helpful in future studies seeking to identify markers of vulnerability for diverse forms of psychopathology.

Temporal Fluctuation of Mood in Gaming Task Modulates Feedback Negativity: EEG Study With Virtual Reality

Feedback outcomes are generally classified into positive and negative feedback. People often predict a feedback outcome with information that is based on both objective facts and uncertain subjective information, such as a mood. For example, if an action leads to good results consecutively, people performing the action overestimate the behavioral result of the next action. In electroencephalogram measurements, negative feedback evokes negative potential, called feedback negativity, and positive feedback evokes positive potential, called reward positivity. The present study investigated the relationship between the degree of the mood caused by the feedback outcome and the error-related brain potentials. We measured the electroencephalogram activity while the participants played a virtual reality shooting game. The experimental task was to shoot down a cannonball flying toward the player using a handgun. The task difficulty was determined from the size and curve of the flying cannonball. These gaming parameters affected the outcome probability of shooting the target in the game. We also implemented configurations in the game, such as the player’s life points and play times. These configurations affected the outcome magnitude of shooting the target in the game. Moreover, we used the temporal accuracy of shooting in the game as the parameter of the mood. We investigated the relationship between these experimental features and the event-related potentials using the single-trial-based linear mixed-effects model analysis. The feedback negativity was observed at an error trial, and its amplitude was modulated with the outcome probability and the mood. Conversely, reward positivity was observed at hit trials, but its amplitude was modulated with the outcome probability and outcome magnitude. This result suggests that feedback negativity is enhanced according to not only the feedback probability but also the mood that was changed depending on the temporal gaming outcome.

Realistic (3D) looming of emotional visual stimuli: Attentional effects at neural and behavioral levels

Previous research shows that endogenous attention (the controlled selection of certain aspects of our environment) is enhanced toward emotional stimuli due to its biological relevance. Although looming affective stimuli such as threat seem even more critical for survival, little is known about their effect on endogenous attention. Here, we recorded neural (event-related potentials, ERPs) and behavioral responses (errors and reaction times) to explore the combined effect of emotion and looming motion. 3D-recreated static and moving animals assessed as emotionally positive, negative, and neutral, were presented to participants (n = 71), who performed an indirect categorization task (vertebrate vs. invertebrate). Behavioral results showed better task performance, as reflected by lower number of errors and reaction times, in response to threatening stimuli. Neural indices revealed significant early (P1p, 150 milliseconds), intermediate (P2p, 240), and late (LPP, 450) effects, the latter being more intensely associated with behavior, as revealed by regression analyses. In general, neural indexes of attention to both static and dynamic stimuli showed a positivity offset in early stages and a negativity bias in subsequent phases. However, and importantly, the progressive inclusion of negative stimuli in the attentional focus is produced earlier in the case of dynamic (at P2p latency) than in static versions (at LPP). These results point to an enhancement of attention, particularly in temporal terms, toward stimuli combining motion and biological significance.

Feigning memory impairment in a forced-choice task: Evidence from event-related potentials

Strategies of malingering detection have brought about a wealth of neuropsychological studies in the last decades. However, the investigation of physiological measures to reliably differentiate between authentic and manipulated symptom presentations is still in its infancy. The present study examined event-related potentials (ERP) to identify feigned memory impairment. We tested instructed malingerers (n = 25) and control participants (n = 22) with a recognition task similar to the Test of Memory Malingering. No differences between groups were found for P1 (70-110 ms) but for N1 (120-170 ms) and P300 components, with lower amplitudes for instructed malingerers. Behavioral data showed a typical pattern of unrealistically high errors in a forced-choice recognition task and less overall recalled stimuli in instructed malingerers. We also found study-phase repetition and old/new effects in the P300, but no interactions with groups (control vs. malingering). Post-hoc analyses revealed that the P300 effect is greater when participants reported an attention-based faking strategy, as opposed to response-based malingerers and controls. The employment of physiological measures can yield additional information on the validity of test data without the need to perform additional tests.

Attentional conditions differentially affect early, intermediate and late neural responses to fearful and neutral faces

The processing of fearful facial expressions is prioritized by the human brain. This priority is maintained across various information processing stages as evident in early, intermediate and late components of event-related potentials (ERPs). However, emotional modulations are inconsistently reported for these different processing stages. In this pre-registered study, we investigated how feature-based attention differentially affects ERPs to fearful and neutral faces in 40 participants. The tasks required the participants to discriminate either the orientation of lines overlaid onto the face, the sex of the face or the face's emotional expression, increasing attention to emotion-related features. We found main effects of emotion for the N170, early posterior negativity (EPN) and late positive potential (LPP). While N170 emotional modulations were task-independent, interactions of emotion and task were observed for the EPN and LPP. While EPN emotion effects were found in the sex and emotion tasks, the LPP emotion effect was mainly driven by the emotion task. This study shows that early responses to fearful faces are task-independent (N170) and likely based on low-level and configural information while during later processing stages, attention to the face (EPN) or-more specifically-to the face's emotional expression (LPP) is crucial for reliable amplified processing of emotional faces.

Contributions of Arousal, Attention, Distinctiveness, and Semantic Relatedness to Enhanced Emotional Memory: An Event-Related Potential and Electrocardiogram Study

Enhanced emotional memory (EEM) describes memory benefits for emotional items, traditionally attributed to impacts of arousal at encoding; however, attention, semantic relatedness, and distinctiveness likely also contribute in various ways. The current study manipulated arousal, semantic relatedness, and distinctiveness while recording changes in event-related potentials and heart rate during memory encoding. Trials were classified as remembered or forgotten by immediate recall performance. Negative images were remembered significantly better than neutral, and related neutral images were remembered significantly better than unrelated neutral images. Higher P300 and late positive potential (LPP) amplitudes were associated with memory for negative images as compared with related neutral images, suggesting that negative images received additional attentional processing at encoding, and that this cannot be accounted for only by the inherent relatedness of negative stimuli. No encoding benefits were found for related neutral images though they were better remembered than unrelated neutral images, indicating retrieval dynamics impacted memory. When image types were intermixed, greater heart rate changes occurred, and negative and unrelated neutral images received increased elaborative processing as compared with related neutral images, perhaps due to the prioritization of encoding resources. These results suggest encoding and retrieval processes contribute to EEM, with emotional items benefiting additively.

Outcome saliency modulates behavioral decision switching

Goal-directed decision making often requires evaluating the outcomes of our decisions, assessing any gains or losses, learning from performance-related feedback, and deciding whether to alter our future decisions. However, it is unclear how these processes can be influenced by the saliency of an outcome (e.g., when one aspect of the outcome is accentuated more than another). Here we investigated whether decision strategies changed when certain aspects of the task outcome (win/loss or correct/incorrect) became more salient and how our brain encoded such saliency signals. We employed a simple two-alternative forced choice gambling task and quantified the frequency at which participants switched decisions to an alternative option in the subsequent trial after receiving feedback on their current selection. We conducted three experiments. In Experiment 1, we established the baseline decision switching behavior: participants switched more frequently following incorrect trials than correct trials, but there was no significant difference between win and loss trials. In Experiment 2, we highlighted the utility (win or loss) or performance (correct or incorrect) dimension of the chosen outcome and we found that the difference in switching frequency was enlarged along the highlighted dimension. However, Experiment 3 showed that when using non-specific saliency emphasis of the outcome, the saliency effect was abolished. We further conducted simultaneous EEG recordings using specific saliency emphasis and found that the feedback-related negativity, P300, and late positive potential could collectively encode saliency modulation of behavioral switching. Lastly, both the frontal and parietal theta-band power encoded the outcome when it was made more salient. Together, our findings suggest that specific outcome saliency can modulate behavioral decision switching between choices and our results have further revealed the neural signatures underlying such saliency modulation. Altering the saliency of an outcome may change how information is weighed during outcome evaluation and thus influence future decisions.

Effect of brightness of visual stimuli on EEG signals

The aim of this study was to examine brightness effect, which is the perceptual property of visual stimuli, on brain responses obtained during visual processing of these stimuli. For this purpose, brain responses of the brain to changes in brightness were explored comparatively using different emotional images (pleasant, unpleasant and neutral) with different luminance levels. In the study, electroencephalography recordings from 12 different electrode sites of 31 healthy participants were used. The power spectra obtained from the analysis of the recordings using short time Fourier transform were analyzed, and a statistical analysis was performed on features extracted from these power spectra. Statistical findings were compared with those obtained from behavioral data. The results showed that the brightness of visual stimuli affected the power of brain responses depending on frequency, time and location. According to the statistically verified findings, the increase in the brightness of pleasant and neutral images increased the average power of responses in the parietal and occipital regions whereas the increase in the brightness of unpleasant images decreased the average power of responses in these regions. Moreover, the statistical results obtained for unpleasant images were found to be in accordance with the behavioral data. The results revealed that the brightness of visual stimuli could be represented by changing the activity power of the brain cortex. The findings emphasized that the brightness of visual stimuli should be viewed as an important parameter in studies using emotional image techniques such as image classification, emotion evaluation and neuro-marketing.

Sleep quality and its effect on event related potential P300 in adolescents with and without sleep disturbances

OBJECTIVES

The present study aimed: (i) to investigate the sleep quality and cortical arousal (ERP P300) in adolescents with and without sleep disturbances, and (ii) to examine whether P300 vary as a function of quality of the previous night's sleep in sleep disturbed adolescents and to compare the findings with healthy controls.

METHODS

Fifteen sleep disturbed adolescents and 15 age-matched controls were recruited. Participants filled 10 days of sleep logs to identify their good (GN) and bad nights (BN). GN and BN were scored as a measure of sleep efficiency (SE), with nights having greater SE defined as GN and nights with lower SE scores labelled as BN. Afterwards, subjects were summoned to the lab for recording ERP P300 once after a night of good sleep (GN) and once after a night of bad sleep (BN).

RESULTS

The findings demonstrate that sleep disturbed adolescents exhibited poorer quality of sleep than controls. The ERP P300 also revealed significant difference in participants with and without sleep disturbance. Moreover, the P300 amplitude was higher and the latency was shorter after a GN in sleep disturbed as well as in controls, however, the values were better for adolescents without disturbed sleep. Similarly, amplitude and latency of P300 was lower and longer, respectively, after a BN in both the groups, however, participants with sleep disturbance demonstrated very penurious scores for amplitude and latency than the controls.

CONCLUSION

Adolescents with sleep disturbance have poorer sleep quality and ERP characteristics than their healthy counterparts. Moreover, the quality of the previous night sleep determines cortical arousal in both sleep disturbed and healthy controls.

The neural chronometry of threat-related attentional bias: Event-related potential (ERP) evidence for early and late stages of selective attentional processing

Rapid and accurate detection of threat is adaptive. Yet, threat-related attentional biases, including hypervigilance, avoidance, and attentional disengagement delays, may contribute to the etiology and maintenance of anxiety disorders. Behavioral measures of attentional bias generally indicate that threat demands more attentional resources; however, indices exploring differential allocation of attention using reaction time fail to clarify the time course by which attention is deployed under threatening circumstances in healthy and anxious populations. In this review, we conduct an interpretive synthesis of 28 attentional bias studies focusing on event-related potentials (ERPs) as a primary outcome to inform an ERP model of the neural chronometry of attentional bias in healthy and anxious populations. The model posits that both healthy and anxious populations display modulations of early ERP components, including the P1, N170, P2, and N2pc, in response to threatening and emotional stimuli, suggesting that both typical and abnormal patterns of attentional bias are characterized by enhanced allocation of attention to threat and emotion at earlier stages of processing. Compared to anxious populations, healthy populations more clearly demonstrate modulations of later components, such as the P3, indexing conscious and evaluative processing of threat and emotion and disengagement difficulties at later stages of processing. Findings from the interpretive synthesis, existing bias models, and extant neural literature on attentional systems are then integrated to inform a conceptual model of the processes and substrates underlying threat appraisal and resource allocation in healthy and anxious populations. To conclude, we discuss therapeutic interventions for attentional bias and future directions.

Mild Effect of Nalmefene on Alcoholic Cue-Induced Response Invigoration in Alcohol Use Disorder Without Accompanying Changes in Electrophysiological Signatures of Early Visual Processing and Executive Control

Nalmefene is approved for as-needed pharmacological treatment in alcohol use disorder (AUD) by the European Medicines Agency. While the cellular effects of nalmefene have been thoroughly investigated, data are very limited on how this agent influences neural signals associated with inhibitory control and the visual analysis of environmental cues. This double-blind crossover study assessed the behavioral and neural effects of acute nalmefene administration in patients diagnosed with AUD. In experiment 1, we validated our experimental paradigm (electroencephalography combined with a modified Go/NoGo task using images of alcoholic and nonalcoholic drinks as prime stimuli) in 20 healthy adults to ensure that our protocol is suitable for assessing the behavioral and neural aspects of executive control. In experiment 2, we recruited 19 patients with AUD, and in a double-blind crossover design, we investigated the effects of nalmefene versus placebo on task performance (response accuracy, the sensitivity index, and reaction times), visual responses to appetitive cues (occipital P1, N1, and P2 components), and electrophysiological markers of conflict detection and response inhibition (frontal N2 and P3 waveforms). Under placebo, patients produced faster reaction times to alcohol-primed Go stimuli, an effect that was weak despite being statistically significant. However, the effect of alcoholic cues on the speed of response initiation disappeared after receiving nalmefene. We found no placebo versus nalmefene difference regarding our patients’ ability to accurately inhibit responses to NoGo stimuli or for occipital and frontal event-related potentials. Our results suggest that nalmefene might be potent in reducing the vigor to act upon alcoholic cues in AUD patients, but this effect is most probably mediated via subcortical (rather than cortical) neural circuits.

Emotional bias varies with stimulus type, arousal and task setting: Meta-analytic evidences

Emotional bias, which describes human's asymmetric processing of emotional stimuli, consists of negativity bias (Increased response to negative over positive stimuli) and positivity offset (the reversed phenomenon). Previous studies suggest that stimulus arousal (high/low), stimulus type (scenic/verbal), cultural background (Eastern/Western), and task setting (explicit/implicit) may modulate emotional bias, but with inconclusive findings. To address how the profile of emotional bias varies with these factors, a meta-analysis of emotional P3 event-related potential amplitudes was performed. Forty-nine effect sizes from 38 studies involving 1263 subjects were calculated using Hedges'g. The results highlight significant moderators of arousal, stimulus type, and task setting. Specifically, high-arousal stimuli enhance negativity bias relative to low-arousal stimuli; scenic stimulus leads to a negativity bias while verbal stimulus is linked with a positivity offset; explicit emotion tasks lead to negativity bias, whereas implicit emotion tasks do not exhibit emotional bias. These results indicate that emotional bias is labile depending on stimulus arousal, stimulus type and task setting. The implication of these findings for emotion regulation is discussed.

Conducting Event-Related Potential (ERP) Research with Young Children: A Review of Components, Special Considerations and Recommendations for Research on Cognition and Emotion

There has been an unprecedented increase in the number of research studies employing event-related potential (ERP) techniques to examine dynamic and rapidly-occurring neural processes with children during the preschool and early childhood years. Despite this, there has been little discussion of the methodological and procedural differences that exist for studies of young children versus older children and adults. That is, reviewers, editors, and consumers of this work often expect developmental studies to simply apply adult techniques and procedures to younger samples. Procedurally, this creates unrealistic expectations for research paradigms, data collection, and data reduction and analyses. Scientifically, this leads to inappropriate measures and methods that hinder drawing conclusions and advancing theory. Based on ERP work with preschoolers and young children from 10 laboratories across North America, we present a summary of the most common ERP components under study in the area of emotion and cognition in young children along with 13 realistic expectations for data collection and loss, laboratory procedures and paradigms, data processing, ERP averaging, and typical challenges for conducting this type of work. This work is intended to supplement previous guidelines for work with adults and offer insights to aid researchers, reviewers, and editors in the design and evaluation of developmental research using ERPs. Here we make recommendations for researchers who plan to conduct or who are conducting ERP studies in children between ages 2 and 12, focusing on studies of toddlers and preschoolers. Recommendations are based on both data and our cumulative experience and include guidelines for laboratory setup, equipment and recording settings, task design, and data processing.

Effects of valence and arousal on affective priming vary with the degree of affective experience denoted by words

We investigated whether the effect of the valence and arousal of less or more affective experiential words on affective priming using event-related potentials (ERPs). The stimuli included less affective experiential (LE) words (Experiment 1) and more affective experiential (ME) words (Experiment 2) that were organized in an orthogonal design, with valence (positive and negative) and arousal (low and high) as factors in a lexical decision task. In Experiment 1, the results revealed no obvious effect of affective priming on response times (RTs) or ERPs for LE words. In Experiment 2, affective priming effects of ME words were influenced interactively by valence and arousal. Specifically, for positive ME words with high- and low-arousal, affectively incongruent trials were associated with longer RTs and enhanced late positive components (LPCs, 430-700 ms) compared with congruent trials (a positive effect). For negative ME words with low-arousal, no significant differences in RTs or LPC amplitudes were found between affectively congruent and incongruent trials (a null effect), whereas for negative ME words with high-arousal, the processing of congruent trials was associated with longer RTs and enhanced LPC amplitudes over that of incongruent trials (a reversal effect). On the one hand, our findings suggest that LE and ME words as primes produce different effects on the processing of subsequently presented targets. On the other hand, our findings further indicate that there seems to have a continuous transition from the spreading activation of ME words to an inhibition process in semantic memory along with their valence and arousal, which is involved in decision-making processes and memory-related stages.

Gender differences in empathic responses to others' economic payoffs: an event-related potentials study

Although gender differences in empathy have been well established through measuring subjective outcomes, some studies of the neural mechanisms of pain empathy have not found gender differences. This inconsistent evidence may be caused by different research methods or different paradigms. The present study adopted a different approach from the pain empathy paradigm to examine gender differences in empathic responses to others' economic payoffs using event-related potentials. The results showed that the N2 amplitudes in female participants were more negative than those in male participants, indicating a greater female than male susceptibility to facial expressions at the early stage of empathy. The LPP amplitudes for male participants were found to be more positive in the observation condition (involving no self-interest) than in the participation condition (involving self-interest), but there was no significant difference in the LPP amplitudes for the female participants between the two conditions. The results suggest that females' empathic responses are more likely to be elicited automatically by the perception of others' emotional states. In contrast, males' empathic responses are more likely to be mediated by self-interest, which subsequently reduces their empathic responses.

A double-blind HD-tDCS/EEG study examining right temporoparietal junction involvement in facial emotion processing

Prior studies have demonstrated that aspects of social cognition can be modulated via temporoparietal junction (TPJ) transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). However, this technique lacks focality and electrophysiological effects or correlates are rarely examined. The present study investigated whether anodal and/or cathodal high-definition tDCS (HD-tDCS) would influence facial emotion processing performance relative to sham stimulation, and whether task performance changes were related to neurophysiological changes. Participants completed a facial emotion attribution tasks before and after rTPJ HD-tDCS, with event-related potentials (ERP) recorded during task performance. Anodal rTPJ HD-tDCS improved facial emotion processing performance for static depictions of fear (but not surprise). Stimulation condition influenced P300 latency, and also influenced the relationship between behavioural and electrophysiological (ERP) outcomes in several circumstances, findings which both support and challenge anodal-excitation/cathodal-inhibition accounts of tDCS effects. Results suggest that rTPJ anodal HD-tDCS can influence facial emotion recognition (i.e., affective mentalizing), and elucidate the nature and distribution of underlying neurophysiological processes. Stimulation effects, however, might depend on the intensity and salience/valence (negativity/threat) of the emotion, and these behavioural effects may not relate directly or simply to the ERPs assessed here.

Event-Related Potentials Reveal Evidence for Late Integration of Emotional Prosody and Facial Expression in Dynamic Stimuli: An ERP Study

The aim of the present study was to test whether multisensory interactions of emotional signals are modulated by intermodal attention and emotional valence. Faces, voices and bimodal emotionally congruent or incongruent face–voice pairs were randomly presented. The EEG was recorded while participants were instructed to detect sad emotional expressions in either faces or voices while ignoring all stimuli with another emotional expression and sad stimuli of the task irrelevant modality. Participants processed congruent sad face–voice pairs more efficiently than sad stimuli paired with an incongruent emotion and performance was higher in congruent bimodal compared to unimodal trials, irrespective of which modality was task-relevant. Event-related potentials (ERPs) to congruent emotional face–voice pairs started to differ from ERPs to incongruent emotional face–voice pairs at 180 ms after stimulus onset: Irrespectively of which modality was task-relevant, ERPs revealed a more pronounced positivity (180 ms post-stimulus) to emotionally congruent trials compared to emotionally incongruent trials if the angry emotion was presented in the attended modality. A larger negativity to incongruent compared to congruent trials was observed in the time range of 400–550 ms (N400) for all emotions (happy, neutral, angry), irrespectively of whether faces or voices were task relevant. These results suggest an automatic interaction of emotion related information.

How the Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex Controls Affective Processing in Absence of Visual Awareness - Insights From a Combined EEG-rTMS Study

The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) plays a key role in the modulation of affective processing. However, its specific role in the regulation of neurocognitive processes underlying the interplay of affective perception and visual awareness has remained largely unclear. Using a mixed factorial design, this study investigated effects of inhibitory continuous theta-burst stimulation (cTBS) of the right DLPFC (rDLPFC) compared to an Active Control condition on behavioral (N = 48) and electroencephalographic (N = 38) correlates of affective processing in healthy Chinese participants. Event-related potentials (ERPs) in response to passively viewed subliminal and supraliminal negative and neutral natural scenes were recorded before and after cTBS application. We applied minimum-norm approaches to estimate the corresponding neuronal sources. On a behavioral level, we found evidence for reduced emotional interference by, and less negative and aroused ratings of negative supraliminal stimuli following rDLPFC inhibition. We found no evidence for stimulation effects on self-reported mood or the behavioral discrimination of subliminal stimuli. On a neurophysiological level, rDLPFC inhibition relatively enhanced occipito-parietal brain activity for both subliminal and supraliminal negative compared to neutral images (112–268 ms; 320–380 ms). The early onset and localization of these effects suggests that rDLPFC inhibition boosts automatic processes of “emotional attention” independently of visual awareness. Further, our study reveals the first available evidence for a differential influence of rDLPFC inhibition on subliminal versus supraliminal neural emotion processing. Explicitly, our findings indicate that rDLPFC inhibition selectively enhances late (292–360 ms) activity in response to supraliminal negative images. We tentatively suggest that this differential frontal activity likely reflects enhanced awareness-dependent down-regulation of negative scene processing, eventually leading to facilitated disengagement from and less negative and aroused evaluations of negative supraliminal stimuli.

Fronto-central P3a to distracting sounds: An index of their arousing properties

The P3a observed after novel events is an event-related potential comprising an early fronto-central phase and a late fronto-parietal phase. It has classically been considered to reflect the attention processing of distracting stimuli. However, novel sounds can lead to behavioral facilitation as much as behavioral distraction. This illustrates the duality of the orienting response which includes both an attentional and an arousal component. Using a paradigm with visual or auditory targets to detect and irrelevant unexpected distracting sounds to ignore, we showed that the facilitation effect by distracting sounds is independent of the target modality and endures more than 1500 ms. These results confirm that the behavioral facilitation observed after distracting sounds is related to an increase in unspecific phasic arousal on top of the attentional capture. Moreover, the amplitude of the early phase of the P3a to distracting sounds positively correlated with subjective arousal ratings, contrary to other event-related potentials. We propose that the fronto-central early phase of the P3a would index the arousing properties of distracting sounds and would be linked to the arousal component of the orienting response. Finally, we discuss the relevance of the P3a as a marker of distraction.

"You Win, You Buy"-How Continuous Win Effect Influence Consumers' Price Perception: An ERP Study

Price played an important role in most purchases. Buying behavior was strongly determined by consumers' price expectations. Emotion as a research hotspot was demonstrated to be ubiquitous in marketing and influenced purchase processing as well. This study addressed interests upon whether emotion arousal would influence consumers' price perceptions and their willingness to purchase. Compared to such emotion researches which normally adopted emotional pictures as priming stimuli, we creatively employed a two-player "Finger Play" (FP) game without monetary gains or losses to arouse subjects' emotion in the experiment. A 2 (FP Game Results: Continuous Win vs. Continuous Lose) by 2 (Price Conditions: High Price vs. Low Price) Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) experiment was designed to investigate whether game results would arouse different emotions and influence subjects' perception of product price. Both behavioral and ERP results indicated that subjects' price perception was deeply impacted by emotions induced from continuous win/lose experiences.