ERP responses to facial affect in low-anxious, high-anxious, repressors and defensive high-anxious individuals

Neural evidence of face processing in social anxiety disorder: A systematic review with meta-analysis

Numerous previous studies have used event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine facial processing deficits in individuals with social anxiety disorder (SAD). However, researchers still need to determine whether the deficits are general or specific and what the dominant factors are behind different cognitive stages. Meta-analysis was performed to quantitatively identify face processing deficits in individuals with SAD. Ninety-seven results in 27 publications involving 1032 subjects were calculated using Hedges' g. The results suggest that the face itself elicits enlarged P1 amplitudes, threat-related facial expressions induce larger P2 amplitudes, and negative facial expressions lead to enhanced P3/LPP amplitudes in SAD individuals compared with controls. That is, there is face perception attentional bias in the early phase (P1), threat attentional bias in the mid-term phase (P2), and negative emotion attentional bias in the late phase (P3/LPP), which can be summarized into a three-phase SAD face processing deficit model. These findings provide an essential theoretical basis for cognitive behavioral therapy and have significant application value for the initial screening, intervention, and treatment of social anxiety.

Examining the impact of schizotypal personality traits on event-related potential (ERP) indexes of sensory gating in a healthy population

The aim of this study was to better understand the relation of schizotypy traits with sensory gating ability in a sample of community-dwelling individuals with high and low schizotypy traits. Sensory gating was assessed through the paired click paradigm and mid-latency evoked responses (i.e., P50, N100, P200), while schizotypy traits were assessed through the SPQ-BR which was used to classify participants into "high" and "low" schizotypy groups. Based on prior work, we hypothesized that those with the highest schizotypy scores would have reduced sensory gating ability. While this study does not show differences between relatively low and high schizotypy groups on sensory gating ability, it does suggest that our participants may have been experiencing deficits in attention allocation, a downstream cognitive processing measure. Scores on the SPQ-BR suggest that our sample was not close to the high end of the schizotypy traits which may help explain why no differences were found. This research shows the importance of including all levels of schizotypy ratings in clinical research as we can gain a clearer view of the impact of schizotypy on the brain and cognitive functioning in those with "high" levels of schizotypy. Additionally, this work highlights the importance of including measures of important factors such as impulsivity and sensation-seeking to better understand what aspects of schizotypy may be driving these sensory gating alterations reported in the literature.

Influence of repressive coping style on cortical activation during encoding of angry faces

BACKGROUND

Coping plays an important role for emotion regulation in threatening situations. The model of coping modes designates repression and sensitization as two independent coping styles. Repression consists of strategies that shield the individual from arousal. Sensitization indicates increased analysis of the environment in order to reduce uncertainty. According to the discontinuity hypothesis, repressors are sensitive to threat in the early stages of information processing. While repressors do not exhibit memory disturbances early on, they manifest weak memory for these stimuli later. This study investigates the discontinuity hypothesis using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

METHODS

Healthy volunteers (20 repressors and 20 sensitizers) were selected from a sample of 150 students on the basis of the Mainz Coping Inventory. During the fMRI experiment, subjects evaluated and memorized emotional and neutral faces. Subjects performed two sessions of face recognition: immediately after the fMRI session and three days later.

RESULTS

Repressors exhibited greater activation of frontal, parietal and temporal areas during encoding of angry faces compared to sensitizers. There were no differences in recognition of facial emotions between groups neither immediately after exposure nor after three days.

CONCLUSIONS

The fMRI findings suggest that repressors manifest an enhanced neural processing of directly threatening facial expression which confirms the assumption of hyper-responsivity to threatening information in repression in an early processing stage. A discrepancy was observed between high neural activation in encoding-relevant brain areas in response to angry faces in repressors and no advantage in subsequent memory for these faces compared to sensitizers.

ERP Responses to Facial Affect and Temperament Types in Eysenckian and Strelauvian Theories

Eysenck’s PEN and Strelau’s RTT theories are considered interrelated on the level of traits and translatable on the level of four ancient temperament types. However, they refer to different ways of regulation stimulation, by content (emotional and social) and by the formal (energetic and temporal) characteristics of activity, respectively. Thus, by indexing behavioral and cortical patterns of response, it was predicted that PEN- and RTT-relevant pairs of temperaments would be associated with specific attentional mechanisms. One week after administration of the FCB-TI and EPQ-R, subjects (260) performed the Emotional Go/No Go task while a 32-channel EEG was being recorded. They were instructed to respond to threatening, sad, or friendly faces, respectively, but not to any other facial expression. A range of ERP components responsive to facial stimuli were investigated. According to behavioral and cortical patterns of response, it was shown that PEN- and RTT-related pairs of temperament types were connected with effective functioning of the anterior and posterior attentional system, respectively. On the behavioral level, significant differences in attentional processing of facial affect were registered in PEN sanguines versus RTT sanguines and PEN melancholics versus RTT melancholics, while on the cortical level significant differences were registered in PEN melancholics versus RTT melancholics and PEN phlegmatics versus RTT phlegmatics. Given these results, the theoretical relations between the PEN and RTT – with particular respect to cognitive and cortical mechanisms underlying temperament types – are discussed.