N400 and LPP in spontaneous trait inferences

The effect of congruent emotional context on semantic memory during discourse comprehension

This study examined the effect of emotional context on the semantic memory of subsequent emotional words during discourse comprehension in two eye-tracking experiments. Four-sentence discourses were used as experimental materials. The first three sentences established an emotional or neutral context, while the fourth contained an emotional target word consistent with the preceding emotional context's valence. The discourses were presented twice using the text change paradigm, where the target words were replaced with strongly - or weakly-related words during the second presentation. Thus, four conditions were included in the present study: Emotional-strongly-related, Emotional-weakly-related, Neutral-strongly-related and Neutral-weakly-related. In Experiment 1, negative contexts and negative target words were used, whereas in Experiment 2, positive contexts and positive target words were used. The results revealed a semantic relatedness effect, whereby the strongly-related words have lower change detection accuracy, longer reading times and more fixations in both Experiments 1 and 2. Furthermore, across both experiments, the magnitude of the semantic relatedness effect was greater in the emotionally congruent contexts than in the neutral contexts. These results suggest that emotional context could increase efforts to change the discrimination of subsequent words and demonstrate an important role of emotional context on semantic memory during discourse processing.

Sequential and domain-specific processing mechanisms for dual cognitive-emotional conflict

This study aimed to investigate how the cognitive control system resolves conflicts when cognitive and emotional conflicts occur simultaneously, and how it performs. To achieve this, a factorial task-crossing design was employed, combining the spatial Simon task and the face-word emotional interference task, allowing cognitive and emotional conflicts to occur concurrently within a single trial. The results revealed that the Simon cognitive conflict was only associated with N2 and early SP, while it did not affect the amplitude of N450 and late SP. Conversely, the face-word emotional conflict affected the amplitude of N450 and late SP, but had no impact on N2 and early SP. These findings demonstrate the adaptive sequencing organization and domain specificity in cognitive-emotional dual conflict processing, which reflects the precise and flexible orchestration and strategic adjustments of the cognitive control system. The results contribute to a better understanding of the dynamic and temporal processes involved in the cognitive control of multiple conflicts.

How clinical decision tasks modulate emotional related EEG responses in nursing students

Healthcare professionals play a vital role in conveying sensitive information as patients undergo stressful, demanding situations. However, the underlying neurocognitive dynamics in routine clinical tasks remain underexplored, creating gaps in healthcare research and social cognition models. Here, we examined whether the type of clinical task may differentially affect the emotional processing of nursing students in response to the emotional reactions of patients. In a within-subjects design, 40 nursing students read clinical cases prompting them to make procedural decisions or to respond to a patient with a proper communicative decision. Afterward, participants read sentences about patients' emotional states; some semantically consistent and others inconsistent along with filler sentences. EEG recordings toward critical words (emotional stimuli) were used to capture ERP indices of emotional salience (EPN), attentional engagement (LPP) and semantic integration (N400). Results showed that the procedural decision task elicited larger EPN amplitudes, reflecting pre-attentive categorization of emotional stimuli. The communicative decision task elicited larger LPP components associated with later elaborative processing. Additionally, the classical N400 effect elicited by semantically inconsistent sentences was found. The psychophysiological measures were tied by self-report measures indexing the difficulty of the task. These results suggest that the requirements of clinical tasks modulate emotional-related EEG responses.

The effect of cognitive reappraisal on food craving and consumption: Does working memory capacity influence reappraisal ability? An event-related potential study

Regulating cravings for unhealthy foods in favour of healthier options is essential for weight management. Cognitive reappraisal, which involves changing the meaning of a stimulus to modify its emotional impact, has shown promise for regulating food craving and consumption. Eighty participants were presented with high-calorie (HC) and low-calorie (LC) food pictures preceded by cues signalling instructions to naturally view the food (i.e., passive viewing; LOOK) or to imagine the future consequences of consuming that food (i.e., cognitive reappraisal; REGULATE). Participants' subjective craving and event-related potentials (ERPs) were measured, and food consumption after the task was assessed. Participants' working memory capacity (WMC) was measured with the automated Operation Span task. During cognitive reappraisal, cravings for HC foods decreased, whereas cravings for LC foods increased, compared to passive viewing. Cravings for LC and HC foods were correlated with consumptions of LC and HC foods, respectively. Occipital N1 (100-200ms) amplitudes were more negative for LC than for HC pictures, but were not modulated by strategy (LOOK or REGULATE), whereas early posterior negativity (EPN; 200-300ms) was not sensitive to food type (HC or LC) or strategy. Late positive potential (LPP; 400-1000ms) ERPs were largest in the HC-REGULATE condition, possibly due to cognitive processes induced by focusing on the consequences of unhealthy foods. Late LPP (1000-3000ms) was not affected by food type or strategy. LPP amplitudes were not correlated with cravings. WMC was weakly correlated with cravings for LC following reappraisal, suggesting that WMC may influence reappraisal ability. In sum, focusing on future consequences of eating may promote healthier food choices through craving regulation. Further research is needed to examine how regulatory effects evolve over time and how they relate to WMC and brain activity.

Effects of cognitive reappraisal on directed forgetting of negative emotional memory: an ERP study

This study aimed to adopt the item-method directed forgetting (DF) paradigm to explore the effects of cognitive reappraisal on intentional forgetting of negative emotional pictures. Behavioral results showed that the recognition of to-be-forgotten but remembered (TBF-r) was significantly greater than that of to-be-remembered and remembered (TBR-r) in the recognition test, which was the opposite result to the DF effect. Event-related potential (ERP) results showed that in the 450-660 ms (ms) of cue presentation, the F-cue of the cognitive reappraisal condition (imagining the upcoming pictures to be "fake or performed by actors" to avoid or reduce the intensity of negative emotions caused by the pictures) elicited more positive late positive potential (LPP) than passive viewing (participants watched freely and paid attention to the characters, scenes, and other details in the picture). This indicated that cognitive reappraisal required stronger inhibition than passive viewing for the to-be- forgotten (TBF) items. In the test phase, both the TBR-r and TBF-r items in the cognitive reappraisal condition evoked more positive ERP than correctly rejected (CR) unseen items in the study phase, which induced the frontal old/new effect (P200, 160-240 ms). In addition, this study also found that the LPP amplitudes of 450-660 ms in the frontal area induced by F-cues in cognitive reappraisal were significantly negatively correlated with the LPP amplitudes of 300-3500 ms induced by cognitive reappraisal instructions, and positive waves in the frontal area were significantly positively correlated with the TBF-r behavioral results. However, these results were not observed in the passive viewing group. The above results show that cognitive reappraisal enhances the retrieval ability for TBR and TBF items, and TBF-r is associated with cognitive reappraisal in the study phase and inhibitory control of F-cues.

Extremely negative emotion interferes with cognition: Evidence from ERPs and time-varying brain network

In recent years, the relationship between emotion and cognition was a hot topic. However, it remains unclear which specific emotions can significantly interfere with cognition and how they do so. In this study, we designed a novel Affective Stroop experiment paradigm to investigate these issues. The extremely negative (EN), moderately negative (MN), moderately positive (MP), extremely positive (EP) and neutral pictures were displayed before Stroop tasks. The behavioral results revealed that EN emotion significantly interfered with cognitive performance compared to other types of emotions, with a significant increase in reaction time under the EN emotion condition (P < 0.05). Furthermore, the dynamic brain mechanisms were analyzed from both Event-Related Potential (ERP) and time-varying brain network perspectives. Results showed that EN emotion evoked larger N2, P3, and LPP amplitudes in the frontal, parietal, and occipital brain regions. In contrast, the Stroop task under EN condition led to smaller N2, P3, and LPP amplitudes compared to neutral condition. This indicates that EN emotion was prioritized and consumed more cognitive resources relative to neutral emotion. During the P3 and LPP stages, we observed enhanced bottom-up connections between the parietal and frontal regions while the processing of EN emotion. Additionally, there were stronger top-down cognitive control connections from the frontal to the occipital regions while processing the Stroop task under EN condition. These findings consistently suggest that EN emotion interferes with cognition by consuming more cognitive resources, and the brain needs to enhance cognitive control to support Stroop task execution.

The effect of contextual arousal on the integration of emotional words during discourse comprehension

This event-related potential (ERP) study examined the effect of contextual arousal on emotional word integration during discourse comprehension. We used two-sentence discourses as experimental materials. The first sentence served as an emotional context and described a high-arousal positive event, a low-arousal positive event, a high-arousal negative event, or a low-arousal negative event. The second sentence contained one negative word as the critical word, which was identical among different conditions. Thus, four conditions were included in the present study: high-arousal inconsistent, low-arousal inconsistent, high-arousal consistent, and low-arousal consistent. The ERP results showed that inconsistent emotional words elicited larger P200 and LPC than consistent words in the high-arousal context. However, only a P200 effect was observed for inconsistent emotional words in the low-arousal context. Our results indicate that a high-arousal context could lead to more elaborated emotional evaluation in the later stage of emotional word integration and suggest an important role of contextual arousal on the processing of emotional words during discourse processing.

How do extrinsic cues influence consumers’ online hotel booking decisions? An event-related potential experiment

Booking decision is a typical decision-making behavior in hospitality, while the neural processing of it is still unclear. To address this issue, with the help of event-related potential (ERP), this work uncovered the neural mechanism of the influence of two extrinsic cues, namely, brand familiarity (familiar vs. unfamiliar) and online reviews (positive vs. negative) on online hotel booking decisions. Behavioral results indicated that the booking rate under the condition of positive reviews was higher than that of negative reviews. In addition, the response time in the case of familiar brands was longer than that of unfamiliar brands. ERP results showed that the P200 amplitude of familiar brands was smaller than that of unfamiliar brands, while for the late positive potential amplitude, the opposite was the case. It is suggested that in the early stage of cognitive processing, unfamiliar brands evoke more automatic and unconscious attention while in the later stage, familiar brands attract more conscious attention. This study also found that the N400 amplitude of negative online reviews was larger than that of positive online reviews, indicating that negative stimuli can result in a larger emotional conflicts than that of positive stimuli. This study provides new insights into the neural mechanism of online booking decisions in the hospitality.

Neurophysiological correlates of automatic integration of voice and gender information during grammatical processing

During verbal communication, interlocutors rely on both linguistic (e.g., words, syntax) and extralinguistic (e.g., voice quality) information. The neural mechanisms of extralinguistic information processing are particularly poorly understood. To address this, we used EEG and recorded event-related brain potentials while participants listened to Russian pronoun-verb phrases presented in either male or female voice. Crucially, we manipulated congruency between the grammatical gender signaled by the verbs' ending and the speakers' apparent gender. To focus on putative automatic integration of extralinguistic information into syntactic processing and avoid confounds arising from secondary top-down processes, we used passive non-attend auditory presentation with visual distraction and no stimulus-related task. Most expressed neural responses were found at both early (150 ms, ELAN-like) and late (400 ms, N400-like) phrase processing stages. Crucially, both of these brain responses exhibited sensitivity to extralinguistic information and were significantly enhanced for phrases whose voice and grammatical gender were incongruent, similar to what is known for ERPs effects related to overt grammatical violations. Our data suggest a high degree of automaticity in processing extralinguistic information during spoken language comprehension which indicates existence of a rapid automatic syntactic integration mechanism sensitive to both linguistic and extralinguistic information.

Anti-Heartbeat-Evoked Potentials Performance in Event-Related Potentials-Based Mental Workload Assessment

The aim of this study was to determine the effect of heartbeat-evoked potentials (HEPs) on the performance of an event-related potential (ERP)-based classification of mental workload (MWL). We produced low- and high-MWLs using a mental arithmetic task and measured the ERP response of 14 participants. ERP trials were divided into three conditions based on the effect of HEPs on ERPs: ERP_HEP, containing the heartbeat in a period of 280–700ms in ERP epochs after the target; ERP_A-HEP, not including the heartbeat within the same period; and ERP_T, all trials including ERP_A-HEP and ERP_HEP. We then compared MWL classification performance using the amplitude and latency of the P600 ERP among the three conditions. The ERP_A-HEP condition achieved an accuracy of 100% using a radial basis function-support vector machine (with 10-fold cross-validation), showing an increase of 14.3 and 28.6% in accuracy compared to ERP_T (85.7%) and ERP_HEP (71.4%), respectively. The results suggest that evoked potentials caused by heartbeat overlapped or interfered with the ERPs and weakened the ERP response to stimuli. This study reveals the effect of the evoked potentials induced by heartbeats on the performance of the MWL classification based on ERPs.

The Prominence of Self-referential Processing across ERP and Memory Consolidation in Children

We examined behavioral and electrophysiological indices of self-referential and valence processing during a Self-Referential Encoding Task in 9- to 12-year-old children, followed by surprise memory tasks for self- and other-referential trait adjectives. Participants endorsed more positive than negative self-referential information but equally endorsed positive and negative information about the other character. Children demonstrated enhanced parietal LPP amplitudes in response to self- compared to other-referential trait adjectives. Positive and negative information was differentially remembered depending on the order of the referent cues presented, suggesting that social information undergoes differential consolidation processes depending on the referent and the order of presentation.

Facing stereotypes: ERP responses to male and female faces after gender-stereotyped statements

Despite gender is a salient feature in face recognition, the question of whether stereotyping modulates face processing remains unexplored. Event-related potentials from 40 participants (20 female) was recorded as male and female faces matched or mismatched previous gender-stereotyped statements and were compared with those elicited by faces preceded by gender-unbiased statements. We conducted linear mixed-effects models to account for possible random effects from both participants and the strength of the gender bias. The amplitude of the N170 to faces was larger following stereotyped relative to gender-unbiased statements in both male and female participants, although the effect was larger for males. This result reveals that stereotyping exerts an early effect in face processing and that the impact is higher in men. In later time windows, male faces after female-stereotyped statements elicited large late positivity potential (LPP) responses in both men and women, indicating that the violation of male stereotypes induces a post-perceptual reevaluation of a salient or conflicting event. Besides, the largest LPP amplitude in women was elicited when they encountered a female face after a female-stereotyped statement. The later result is discussed from the perspective of recent claims on the evolution of women self-identification with traditionally held female roles.

Multimodal neuroimaging in anorexia nervosa

Anorexia nervosa (AN) is a severe and complex psychiatric disorder characterized by intense fear about weight gain and finalized to food-related control behaviors. Growing interest has been demonstrated about neurobiological processes subtend to AN physiopathology. The present review aimed to collect neurostructural and neurofunctional available data from 2010 to 2019. Results have been organized according to the neuroimaging technique employed, also including a specific section on electroencephalographic results, mostly neglected in previous reviews. Diffuse cerebral vulnerability has been demonstrated and the contribution of several structures has been identified. Insula, cingulate cortex, parietal and frontal areas are primarily involved both by structural and functional perspectives. Moreover, consistent alterations in white matter integrity and brain electrical activity have been reported. Neuroimaging findings give a substantial contribution to AN pathophysiological description, also in order to understand altered but reversible processes in the passage from acute illness phase to disorder's remission, useful also for defining therapy.

The neurocognitive basis of metamemory: Using the N400 to study the contribution of fluency to judgments of learning

Metamemory is crucial for monitoring, evaluating, and optimizing memory performance. The basis of metamemory, however, is a matter of considerable debate. In the present study, we examined the contribution of processing fluency-the ease of processing information during learning-to metamemory judgments. We recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) while participants studied related and unrelated word pairs across two study-test cycles in a judgment of learning (JOL) task. In the first study-test cycle, related pairs were associated with better cued recall, higher JOLs, and a reduced N400 amplitude than unrelated pairs. Crucially, between- and within subject correlational analyses indicated that reduced N400 amplitudes, indexing more fluent processing, were associated with higher JOLs. Furthermore, single-trial N400 mediated a small but significant portion of the relatedness effect on JOLs. In the second study-test cycle, relatedness still increased recall and JOLs. However, related and unrelated pairs did not differ in N400 amplitude. Rather, unrelated pairs elicited a parietal positivity in a later time window that partially mediated the relatedness effect on JOLs. Together, these results suggest that processing fluency, indexed by the N400, contributes to the relatedness effect on JOLs when novel word pairs are learned, but not when previously studied pairs are relearned. Our results also imply that aspects of fluency not captured by the N400 and/or explicit beliefs about memory contribute to JOLs. This study demonstrates the utility of ERPs in gaining new insights into the neurocognitive mechanisms of metamemory.

Electrophysiological Correlates of Racial In-group Bias in Observing Nonverbal Social Encounters

Despite evidence identifying the role of group membership in social cognition, the neural mechanisms associated with the perception and evaluation of nonverbal behaviors displayed by in-group versus out-group members remain unclear. Here, 42 white participants underwent electroencephalographic recording while observing social encounters involving dynamic displays of nonverbal behaviors by racial in-group and out-group avatar characters. Dynamic behaviors included approach and avoidance poses and expressions, followed by the participants' ratings of the avatars displaying them. Behaviorally, participants showed longer RTs when evaluating in-group approach behavior compared with other behaviors, possibly suggesting increased interest and attention devoted to processing positive social encounters with their in-group members. Analyses of ERPs revealed differential sensitivity of the N450 and late positivity components to social cues, with the former showing initial sensitivity to the presence of a humanoid avatar character at the beginning of social encounters and the latter showing sensitivity to dynamic nonverbal behaviors displayed by the avatars. Moreover, time-frequency analysis of electroencephalography data also identified suppression of beta-range power linked to the observation of dynamic nonverbal behaviors. Notably, the magnitude of these responses was modulated by the degree of behavioral racial in-group bias. This suggests that differential neural sensitivity to nonverbal cues while observing social encounters is associated with subsequent in-group bias manifested in the evaluation of such encounters. Collectively, these findings shed light on the mechanisms of racial in-group bias in social cognition and have implications for understanding factors related to successful interactions with individuals from diverse racial backgrounds.

Temporal Features of Psychological and Physical Self-Representation: An ERP Study

Psychological and physical-self are two important aspects of self-concept. Although a growing number of behavioral and neuroimaging studies have investigated the cognitive mechanism and neural substrate underlying psychological and physical-self-representation, most of the existing research on psychological and physical-self-representation had been done in isolation. The present study aims to examine the electrophysiological responses to both psychological (one’s own name) and physical (one’s own voice) self-related stimuli in a uniform paradigm. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded for subjects’ own and others’ names uttered by subjects’ own or others’ voice (own voice-own name, own voice-other’s name, other’s voice-own name, other’s voice-other’s name) while subjects performed an auditory passive oddball task. The results showed that one’s own name elicited smaller P2 and larger P3 amplitudes than those of other’s names, irrespective of the voice identity. However, no differences were observed between self and other’s voice during the P2 and P3 stages. Moreover, an obvious interaction effect was observed between voice content and voice identity at the N400 stage that the subject’s own voice elicited a larger parietal N400 amplitude than other’s voice in other name condition but not in own name condition. Taken together, these findings suggested that psychological (one’s own name) and physical (one’s own voice) self-representation induced distinct electrophysiological response patterns in auditory-cognitive processing.

Distinct neural responses to social and semantic violations: An N400 study

We investigated event-related brain potential correlates of encountering context-incongruent social information. Building on evidence that information semantically incongruent with its context elicits an N400 response (a prominent negative-going deflection in the ongoing electroencephalogram; EEG), we hypothesized that statements incongruent (relative to congruent) with basic standards of amicable treatment by others (e.g., "Your friend breaks your computer and then laughs [apologizes]") would elicit larger-amplitude N400 responses. EEG was recorded from N = 20 undergraduates while they viewed 106 semantic-dimension and 106 social-dimension sentences. We obtained the classic N400 effect to semantic violations, but we did not observe greater N400 amplitudes to incongruent than to congruent social-dimension sentences. Our findings of N400 modulation by semantic violations but not social norm violations help clarify potential boundary conditions for eliciting the N400.

Neural correlates of children's emotion understanding

This study aimed to develop an EEG paradigm to identify neural correlates of emotion understanding in children. In Experiment 1, children took part in an emotional story task. In Experiment 2, children completed an emotional task and a physical story task Late Positive Potentials (LPP) were demonstrated in response to emotional content in both studies. Together, The study demonstrates the potential value of the LPP as a flexible probe for studying children's emotion understanding and encourages further work into the specificity versus generality of cognitive processes underpinning the LPP in social information processing.

Effects of mental workload on involuntary attention: A somatosensory ERP study

Previous psychophysiological assessments of mental workload have relied on the addition of visual or auditory stimuli. This study investigated the tactile ERP and EEG spectral power correlates of mental workload by relating limited-capacity involuntary attention allocation to changes in late positive potential (LPP) amplitude, alpha, and theta powers. We examined whether mental workload (high-level cognitive control) can be evaluated using somatosensory stimuli. Sixteen participants all performed three tasks of varying difficulty. Two dual n-back tasks (n = 1 and 2) were used to investigate the degree to which mental workload affected the LPP amplitudes and EEG spectral powers evoked by ignoring salient tactile stimuli. In control trials, tactile vibrations were applied at random without dual n-back tasks. Subjective mental workload of each task was rated using the NASA Task Load Index. LPP amplitudes at Pz were significantly smaller in the dual-2-back trials compared to control and dual-1-back trials. Significantly increased theta power at Fz and reduced alpha power at Pz were found in the dual-2-back condition compared to control and dual-1-back condition. There was no significant difference between control and dual-1-back trials. The same pattern was found for subjective ratings of cognitive workload. These results indicate that the dual-2-back task imposed a significantly greater mental workload, causing impaired cognitive-control functions. Our findings support the notion that selective attention mechanisms necessary for effectively allocating and modulating attentional resources are temporarily impaired during the mentally overloaded state.

Self-enhancement among Westerners and Easterners: a cultural neuroscience approach

We adopted a cultural neuroscience approach to the investigation of self-enhancement. Western and Eastern participants made self-referent judgments on positive and negative traits while we recorded their electroencephalography signals. At the judgmental level, we assessed trait endorsement (judgments of traits self-descriptiveness) and reaction times (speed of such judgments). Participants endorsed more positive traits as self-descriptive and more negative traits as non-self-descriptive, although the magnitude of this effect (level of self-positivity) was higher in the Western than Eastern sample. Moreover, all participants responded faster to positive self-descriptive traits and to negative non-self-descriptive traits, indicating that the self-enhancement motive is equally potent across cultures. At the neurophysiological level, we assessed N170 and LPP. Negative traits elicited larger N170 among Easterners, indicating initial allocation of attentional resources to the processing of negative information. However, negative compared to positive self-descriptive traits elicited a larger LPP, whereas negative and positive non-self-descriptive traits did not differ in the LPP they elicited. This pattern generalized across samples, pointing to a pancultural physiological correlate of the self-enhancement motive.

Who is respectful? Effects of social context and individual empathic ability on ambiguity resolution during utterance comprehension

Verbal communication is often ambiguous. By employing the event-related potential (ERP) technique, this study investigated how a comprehender resolves referential ambiguity by using information concerning the social status of communicators. Participants read a conversational scenario which included a minimal conversational context describing a speaker and two other persons of the same or different social status and a directly quoted utterance. A singular, second-person pronoun in the respectful form (nin/nin-de in Chinese) in the utterance could be ambiguous with respect to which of the two persons was the addressee (the “Ambiguous condition”). Alternatively, the pronoun was not ambiguous either because one of the two persons was of higher social status and hence should be the addressee according to social convention (the “Status condition”) or because a word referring to the status of a person was additionally inserted before the pronoun to help indicate the referent of the pronoun (the “Referent condition”). Results showed that the perceived ambiguity decreased over the Ambiguous, Status, and Referent conditions. Electrophysiologically, the pronoun elicited an increased N400 in the Referent than in the Status and the Ambiguous conditions, reflecting an increased integration demand due to the necessity of linking the pronoun to both its antecedent and the status word. Relative to the Referent condition, a late, sustained positivity was elicited for the Status condition starting from 600 ms, while a more delayed, anterior negativity was elicited for the Ambiguous condition. Moreover, the N400 effect was modulated by individuals' sensitivity to the social status information, while the late positivity effect was modulated by individuals' empathic ability. These findings highlight the neurocognitive flexibility of contextual bias in referential processing during utterance comprehension.

Neuroelectric Correlates of Pragmatic Emotional Incongruence Processing: Empathy Matters

The emotions people feel can be simulated internally based on emotional situational contexts. In the present study, we assessed the behavioral and neuroelectric effects of seeing an unexpected emotional facial expression. We investigated the correct answer rate, response times and Event-Related Potential (ERP) effects during an incongruence paradigm between emotional faces and sentential contexts allowing emotional inferences. Most of the 36 healthy participants were recruited from a larger population (1 463 subjects), based on their scores on the Empathy Questionnaire (EQ). Regression analyses were conducted on these ratings using EQ factors as predictors (cognitive empathy, emotional reactivity and social skills). Recognition of pragmatic emotional incongruence was less accurate (P < .05) and slower (P < .05) than recognition of congruence. The incongruence effect on response times was inversely predicted by social skills. A significant N400 incongruence effect was found at the centro-parietal (P < .001) and centro-posterior midline (P < .01) electrodes. Cognitive empathy predicted the incongruence effect in the left occipital region, in the N400 time window. Finally, incongruence effects were also found on the LPP wave, in frontal midline and dorso-frontal regions, (P < .05), with no modulation by empathy. Processing pragmatic emotional incongruence is more cognitively demanding than congruence (as reflected by both behavioral and ERP data). This processing shows modulation by personality factors at the behavioral (through self-reported social skills) and neuroelectric levels (through self-reported cognitive empathy).

The influence of emotional salience on the integration of person names into context

Previous event-related potentials (ERP) studies on the processing of emotional information in sentence/discourse context have yielded inconsistent findings. An important reason for the discrepancies is the different lexico-semantic properties of the emotional words. The present study controlled for the lexico-semantic meaning of emotional information by endowing the same person names with either positive or negative valence. ERPs were computed for positively and negatively valenced person names that were either congruent or incongruent to previous emotional contexts. We found that positive names elicited an N400 effect while negative names elicited a P600 effect in response to the incongruence. These results suggest that the integration of positive and negative information into emotional context exhibits different time courses, with a relatively delayed integration for negative information. Our study demonstrates that using person names constitutes a new and improved tool for investigating the integration of emotional information into context.

The electrocortical modulation effects of different emotion regulation strategies

The current event-related potential study investigated the modulation effects of different emotion regulation strategies on electrocortical responses. When watching negative or neutral pictures, participants were instructed to perform three tasks: cognitive reappraisal, expressive suppression and passive viewing. We found that negative pictures elicited a larger late positive potential (LPP) than neutral pictures. Moreover, processes involved in strategy also had an effect on LPP amplitude, which was indicated by a larger LPP in reappraisal compared with suppression and viewing tasks when neutral pictures were presented. After the influence of processes on LPP was excluded, results showed that reappraisal effectively decreased the emotion-enhanced LPP than suppression and viewing. The difference in regulatory effect may be determined by the underlying processing mechanism. A larger frontal-central component, N2, was observed in suppression than reappraisal and viewing, which suggested that it involved the processes focusing on behavioral response. While the larger LPP found in reappraisal implicated that it recruited cognitive processes focusing on the picture meaning.

Distinct neural correlates of social categories and personality traits

Does the processing of social category-related versus trait-related information generate a different pattern of brain activation? In this fMRI study, we compared the processing of behaviors performed by a member of a social category versus an individual, both possessing similar personality traits. Based on previous behavioral studies we predicted that the processing of social category-related information would recruit more activation in brain areas related to mentalizing than individual trait-related information. Participants read sentences describing behaviors performed by a member of a social category (of which the stereotype involves a given trait) or by an individual possessing the same trait. These behavioral sentences varied on both valence (positive versus negative) and consistency (consistent versus inconsistent) with regard to the social category or trait. The results revealed that social category-related behavioral information showed more activation in mentalizing areas (medial prefrontal cortex, anterior temporal lobe, bilateral temporo-parietal junction, posterior cingulate cortex) than trait-related information. This increased activation is interpreted in terms of the impact of autobiographical memories, greater variance among members of social categories than individual traits, a higher construal level (i.e., abstractness), and larger perceived group size. Additionally, inconsistent as opposed to consistent information showed more activation in the right temporo-parietal junction and left lingual gyrus.

Involvement of the mentalizing network in social and non-social high construal

The dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) is consistently involved in tasks requiring the processing of mental states, and much rarer so by tasks that do not involve mental state inferences. We hypothesized that the dmPFC might be more generally involved in high construal of stimuli, defined as the formation of concepts or ideas by omitting non-essential features of stimuli, irrespective of their social or non-social nature. In an fMRI study, we presented pictures of a person engaged in everyday activities (social stimuli) or of objects (non-social stimuli) and induced a higher level of construal by instructing participants to generate personality traits of the person or categories to which the objects belonged. This was contrasted against a lower level task where participants had to describe these same pictures visually. As predicted, we found strong involvement of the dmPFC in high construal, with substantial overlap across social and non-social stimuli, including shared activation in the vmPFC/OFC, parahippocampal, fusiform and angular gyrus, precuneus, posterior cingulate and right cerebellum.

Functional significance of the emotion-related late positive potential

The late positive potential (LPP) is an event-related potential (ERP) component over visual cortical areas that is modulated by the emotional intensity of a stimulus. However, the functional significance of this neural modulation remains elusive. We conducted two experiments in which we studied the relation between LPP amplitude, subsequent perceptual sensitivity to a non-emotional stimulus (Experiment 1) and visual cortical excitability, as reflected by P1/N1 components evoked by this stimulus (Experiment 2). During the LPP modulation elicited by unpleasant stimuli, perceptual sensitivity was not affected. In contrast, we found some evidence for a decreased N1 amplitude during the LPP modulation, a decreased P1 amplitude on trials with a relatively large LPP, and consistent negative (but non-significant) across-subject correlations between the magnitudes of the LPP modulation and corresponding changes in d-prime or P1/N1 amplitude. The results provide preliminary evidence that the LPP reflects a global inhibition of activity in visual cortex, resulting in the selective survival of activity associated with the processing of the emotional stimulus.