Age-Related Differences in the Late Positive Potential during Emotion Regulation between Adolescents and Adults

Impaired inhibitory control when processing real but not cartoon emotional faces in autistic children: Evidence from an event-related potential study

Impaired socioemotional functioning characterizes autistic children, but does weak inhibition control underlie their socioemotional difficulty? This study addressed this question by examining whether and, if so, how inhibition control is affected by face realism and emotional valence in school-age autistic and neurotypical children. Fifty-two autistic and 52 age-matched neurotypical controls aged 10-12 years completed real and cartoon emotional face Go/Nogo tasks while event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. The analyses of inhibition-emotion components (i.e., N2, P3, and LPP) and a face-specific N170 revealed that autistic children elicited greater N2 while inhibiting Nogo trials and greater P3/LPP and late LPP for real but not cartoon emotional faces. Moreover, autistic children exhibited a reduced N170 to real face emotions only. Furthermore, correlation results showed that better behavioral inhibition and emotion recognition in autistic children were associated with a reduced N170. These findings suggest that neural mechanisms of inhibitory control in autistic children are less efficient and more disrupted during real face processing, which may affect their age-appropriate socio-emotional development.

Emotional regulation and self-perceived quality of life in high-performance mountain sports athletes

Emotional regulation is an indispensable capacity for human beings, so that alterations in it can lead to the appearance of psychological, social and/or cognitive disorders. Therefore, possessing adequate emotional strategies is intimately related to the quality of life that a person presents. In this sense, high-level athletes suffer constant setbacks and frustrations due to the performance of their sporting activity, in addition to continuous modifications of their daily life activities. Thus, the objective of this research is to explore the emotional regulation and self-perceived quality of life of high-level athletes in mountain sports, analyzing the possible influences of gender, demographic location, body mass index and age. Fifty-four athletes belonging to the High Performance Technification Center of Cáceres (Extremadura, Spain) completed a sociodemographic questionnaire, as well as the Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire and the WHOQOL-BREF. The Shapiro-Wilkins test was used to analyze the normality of the variables collected and nonparametric statistics were used since the assumption was not met. Both gender and demographic location showed significant differences in the dimensions of the two questionnaires. Likewise, age was associated with the dimensions of both scales, but not body mass index, which was only associated with self-perceived quality of life. In addition, the stepwise linear regression model predicted self-perceived quality of life with a value of 60% across self-culpability, gender body mass index and planning. Therefore, it appears that gender, demographic location, age and body mass index could exert modifications on the levels of emotional regulation and self-perceived quality of life of high-level mountain athletes.

Association of mental health-related patient reported outcomes with blood pressure in adults and children with primary proteinuric glomerulopathies

INTRODUCTION

The prevalence of mental health disorders including anxiety and depression is increasing and is linked to hypertension in healthy individuals. However, the relationship of psychosocial patient-reported outcomes on blood pressure (BP) in primary proteinuric glomerulopathies is not well characterized. This study explored longitudinal relationships between psychosocial patient-reported outcomes and BP status among individuals with proteinuric glomerulopathies.

METHODS

An observational cohort study was performed using data from 745 adults and children enrolled in the Nephrotic Syndrome Study Network (NEPTUNE). General Estimating Equations for linear regression and binary logistic analysis for odds ratios were performed to analyze relationships between the exposures, longitudinal Patient-Reported Outcome Measurement Information System (PROMIS) measures and BP and hypertension status as outcomes.

RESULTS

In adults, more anxiety was longitudinally associated with higher systolic and hypertensive BP. In children, fatigue was longitudinally associated with increased odds of hypertensive BP regardless of the PROMIS report method. More stress, anxiety, and depression were longitudinally associated with higher systolic BP index, higher diastolic BP index, and increased odds of hypertensive BP index in children with parent-proxy patient-reported outcomes.

DISCUSSION/CONCLUSION

Chronically poor psychosocial patient-reported outcomes may be significantly associated with higher BP and hypertension in adults and children with primary proteinuric glomerulopathies. This interaction appears strong in children but should be interpreted with caution, as multiple confounders related to glomerular disease may influence both mental health and BP independently. That said, access to mental health resources may help control BP, and proper disease and BP management may improve overall mental health.

Emotion regulation in adolescents with major depression - Evidence from a combined EEG and eye-tracking study

BACKGROUND

Adolescent major depression (MD) is characterized by deficits in emotion regulation (ER). Little is known about the neurophysiological correlates that are associated with these deficits. Moreover, the additional examination of visual attention during ER would allow a more in-depth understanding of ER deficits but has not yet been applied simultaneously.

METHODS

N = 33 adolescents with MD and n = 35 healthy controls (HCs) aged 12-18 years performed an ER task during which they either a) down-regulated their negative affective response to negative images via cognitive reappraisal or b) attended the images without changing their affective response. During the task, the Late Positive Potential (LPP), gaze fixations on emotional image aspects, and self-reported affective responses were collected simultaneously.

RESULTS

Compared to HCs, adolescents with MD demonstrated reduced ER success based on self-report but did not differ in LPP amplitudes. Participants in both groups showed increased amplitudes in the middle LPP window when they reappraised negative pictures compared to when they attended them. Only in the HC group, increased LPP amplitudes during reappraisal were paralleled by more positive affective responses.

LIMITATION

The applied stimuli were part of picture databases and might therefore have limited self-relevance.

CONCLUSIONS

Increased LPP amplitude during ER in both groups might be specific to adolescence and might suggest that ER at this age is challenging and requires a high amount of cognitive resources. These findings provide an important starting point for future interventional studies in youth MD.

The late positive potential during affective picture processing: Associations with daily life emotional functioning among adolescents with anxiety disorders

Pediatric anxiety disorders are characterized by potentiated threat responses and maladaptive emotion regulation (ER). The Late Positive Potential (LPP) is a neural index of heightened attention to emotional stimuli. Anxious individuals typically exhibit a larger LPP to unpleasant stimuli, but the LPP may also be blunted to unpleasant and pleasant stimuli for those with co-morbid depression. While a larger LPP is thought to reflect greater emotional reactivity, it is unknown to what extent variation in the LPP to laboratory stimuli corresponds to daily emotional functioning. We assessed the LPP in the laboratory in response to unpleasant, pleasant, and neutral images in combination with ecological momentary assessment of emotional reactivity and regulation in daily life among youth (9-14 years old; 55 % female) with anxiety disorders (ANX, N = 130) and no psychiatric diagnoses (ND, N = 47). We tested whether LPP amplitudes to unpleasant and pleasant stimuli (vs. neutral) are greater in ANX (vs. ND) youth and whether LPP amplitudes inversely correlate with co-morbid depression symptoms. We also examined associations between the LPP and daily life emotional functioning among ANX and ND youth. We found no group-by-valence effects on LPP amplitudes. Within ANX youth, higher depression symptoms were associated with smaller LPP amplitudes to unpleasant, but not pleasant, stimuli relative to neutral stimuli. Larger LPP amplitudes to emotional (relative to neutral) stimuli were correlated with use of specific ER strategies among ANX and ND youth but not emotional reactivity. While the LPP may reflect initial emotional reactivity to laboratory stimuli, it is associated with ER behaviors, and not emotional reactivity, in daily life.

The modulation of attentional deployment on emotional sensitivity to missed opportunity in depressive individuals: An event-related potential study

BACKGROUND

Depression affects individuals' physical and mental health seriously. It's important to explore the pathological mechanisms underlying depression. However, the emotional sensitivity to missed opportunity in depressive individuals and whether attentional deployment influences it remain unclear. The exploration of these questions could help to find novel approaches for the treatment of depression.

METHODS

Experiment 1 investigated the emotional sensitivity to missed opportunity in depressive participants during a sequential risk-taking task relative to healthy participants. Experiment 2 added attentional deployment manipulation to the task, i.e., inducing participants to focus on the positive or negative part of decision outcome, and investigated the modulation of attentional deployment on depressive participants' emotional sensitivity to missed opportunity and the neural mechanisms underlying this process by using EEG.

RESULTS

Depressive participants showed stronger emotional sensitivity to missed opportunity and LPP was a biomarker of this sensitivity. Moreover, focusing on the positive part of outcome reduced depressive participants' emotional sensitivity to missed opportunity effectively, and alpha power in the parietal area played a key role in this process.

CONCLUSIONS

The current study primarily revealed that depressive individuals were more sensitive to missed opportunity and attentional deployment was an effective way to modulate this sensitivity.

Emotion regulation and the late positive potential (LPP) in older adults

Emotion regulation (ER) processes in older adults may be important for successful aging. Neural correlates of ER processes have been examined using event-related brain potentials (ERPs), such as the late-positive potential (LPP) during cognitive reappraisal paradigms. The current study sought to extend this research by examining the LPP from an ER task in a sample of 47 community-dwelling older adults between the ages of 60 and 84 years, scoring either high on emotional well-being (as measured by habitual ER use and resiliency; high WB group, n = 20) or low on emotional well-being (as measured by habitual ER use, resiliency, and depression; low WB group, n = 27). Participants viewed unpleasant and neutral images and were instructed to simply react to the images or reappraise their emotional response. Both pre- and post-instruction LPP amplitudes were scored, in addition to self-reported ratings of negative emotion collected during the task. We found greater LPP amplitude to emotionally salient compared to neutral stimuli, reduced LPP amplitude following instructions to reappraise emotional response to stimuli across groups, and a blunted LPP overall for individuals with higher depressive symptoms. Additionally, we demonstrated that older adults with low emotional well-being were less successful at reappraisal according to self-reported ratings of negative emotion, although this was not reflected in the LPP. Collectively, these data suggest that laboratory-based ER tasks might be used to understand abnormal ER use-though the LPP may be more sensitive to depression than individual differences in ER ability.

Trait boldness and emotion regulation: An event-related potential investigation

The present study sought to extend knowledge of the role of boldness, a transdiagnostic bipolar trait dimension involving low sensitivity to threat, in emotional reactivity and regulation using physiological and report-based measures. One prior study found that boldness was associated with reduced late positive potential (LPP) while passively viewing aversive images, but not during emotion regulation; a disconnect between LPP and self-reported reactivity was also observed. Here, participants (N = 63) completed an emotion regulation task in which they either passively viewed or effortfully up- or downregulated their emotional reactivity to pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral pictures while EEG activity was recorded; they later retrospectively rated the success of their regulation efforts. ANOVAs examining the interactive effects of regulation instruction and boldness on LPP amplitude revealed that lower boldness (higher trait fearfulness) was associated with paradoxical increases in LPP to threat photos during instructed downregulation, relative to passive viewing, along with lower reported regulation success on these trials. Unexpectedly, similar LPP effects were observed for affective images overall, and especially nurturance photos. Although subject to certain limitations, these results suggest that individual differences in boldness play a role not only in general reactivity to aversive stimuli, as evidenced by prior work, but in the ability to effortfully downregulate emotional response.

Facial emotion processing and language during early-to-middle childhood development: An event related potential study

Facial emotion processing (FEP) is critical to social cognitive ability. Developmentally, FEP rapidly improves in early childhood and continues to be fine-tuned throughout middle childhood and into adolescence. Previous research has suggested that language plays a role in the development of social cognitive skills, including non-verbal emotion recognition tasks. Here we investigated whether language is associated with specific neurophysiological indicators of FEP. One hundred and fourteen children (4-12 years) completed a language assessment and a FEP task including stimuli depicting anger, happiness, fear, and neutrality. EEG was used to record key event related potentials (ERPs; P100, N170, LPP at occipital and parietal sites separately) previously shown to be sensitive to faces and facial emotion. While there were no main effects of language, the P100 latency to negative expressions appeared to increase with language, while LPP amplitude increased with language for negative and neutral expressions. These findings suggest that language is linked to some early physiological indicators of FEP, but this is dependent on the facial expression. Future studies should explore the role of language in later stages of neural processing, with a focus on processes localised to ventromedial prefrontal regions.

The relationship between habitual use and real-time emotion regulation strategies in adolescents: Evidence from frontal EEG asymmetry

Past research on emotion regulation has shown that cognitive reappraisal is a healthier and more effective emotion regulation strategy than expressive suppression. However, there are few studies in this field that combine real-time emotion regulation with the use of habitual emotion regulation strategies to observe the patterns of brain activity, and fewer studies focusing on adolescents. Frontal electroencephalography (EEG) asymmetry reflects the difference between brain activation in left and right frontal areas and is widely viewed as an effective biomarker of emotional reactivity and regulation. The present study investigated the asymmetry of the frontal EEG activity during adolescents' emotional regulation, and explored its relationship with adolescents' habitual use of emotional regulation strategies. Habitual use of cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression was measured with the emotion regulation questionnaire (ERQ). EEG was recorded from 54 adolescents (24 boys & 30 girls, M_age = 12.59), during the Reactivity and Regulation-Image Task. Results showed that adolescents who used cognitive reappraisal strategies more habitually exhibited greater left frontal asymmetry during real-time enhancement or reduction of negative emotions. In contrast, no significant correlation was found between habitual use of suppression and frontal alpha asymmetry. The results provide neurological evidence that, for adolescents, the use of habitual emotion regulation strategies may affect real-time emotion regulation, adolescents who use cognitive reappraisal more frequently are more capable or more prone to recruit appropriate brain regions in situations that need to regulate negative emotions. This reinforces the importance of the formation and use of correct emotion regulation habits for adolescents.

Development of emotion processing and regulation: Insights from event-related potentials and implications for internalizing disorders

Emotionally-salient stimuli receive selective attention and elicit complex neural responses that evolve considerably across development. Event-related potentials (ERPs) optimally capture the dynamics of emotion processing and regulation, with sensitivity to detect changes in magnitude, latency, and maximal location across development. In this selective qualitative review, we summarize evidence of developmental changes in neural reactivity to emotional stimuli and modulation of neural responses during emotion regulation indexed by ERPs across infancy, childhood, and adolescence. The cumulative ERP literature suggests the transition from childhood to adulthood is characterized by a gradual decrease in neural reactivity to emotional stimuli and increased efficiency in attentional allocation towards emotional stimuli. Some studies show sensitivity to emotional stimuli peaks in adolescence, but the evidence is mixed. While both early (<300 ms) and late (>300 ms) ERPs demonstrate sensitivity to emotional stimuli, emotional modulation is more consistently observed in relatively later ERPs across development. The literature additionally shows improvements in regulation abilities across development, though ERP research on developmental changes in emotion regulation is still relatively limited, highlighting a critical direction for future research. Finally, we briefly discuss changes in emotion-related ERPs relevant to the emergence of depression and anxiety. Findings from this review indicate that ERPs provide abundant information about the development of emotion processing and regulation, with potential clinical utility for detecting early-emerging vulnerabilities for internalizing forms of psychopathology.

The Immediate and Lasting Effect of Emotion Regulation in Adolescents: An ERP Study

The immediate effect is an important index of the outcomes of emotion regulation. However, in daily life, whether the effect of emotion regulation lasts and the lasting mechanism have been examined less. The present research focused on the relationships between the immediate and lasting effect of the emotion regulation of adolescents. Electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded from 51 adolescents (31 boys and 20 girls, Mage = 12.82) during online emotion regulation using the Reactivity and Regulation-Image Task (phase 1) and re-presentation of emotional stimuli after a period of time (phase 2). Event-related potentials (ERPs) related to emotion regulation, such as N2, P3, and the late positive potential (LPP), were examined in the two phases. The results showed that: (1) In both of the two phases, in negative emotion conditions, the amplitudes of P3 and LPP 300-600 of no-regulation conditions were significantly higher than those in reappraisal conditions. However, there was no significant difference under neutral conditions; (2) The amplitudes of P3, N2, and LPP 300-600 during emotion regulation in phase 1 positively predicted the amplitudes of P3, N2, and LPP300-600 in phase 2 in different experimental conditions. Results from the regression analysis implied that the immediate effect of online emotion regulation may predict the lasting effect when adolescents face the same emotions again. In addition, our findings provide neurological evidence that the use of cognitive reappraisal could effectively help adolescents to reduce the recruitment of cognitive resources when they regulate negative emotions and when they face those negative emotions again.

Differences in frontal EEG asymmetry during emotion regulation between high and low mindfulness adolescents

The present study examined the differences in frontal EEG asymmetry during emotion regulation between participants who had different levels of trait mindfulness. EEG recordings were taken from 23 high mindfulness adolescents (M_age = 12.34) and 22 low mindfulness adolescents (M_age = 12.53) during the Reactivity and Regulation-Image Task. The results showed that (1) high mindfulness adolescents had greater left (relative to right) asymmetry than low mindfulness adolescents in down-regulation and up-regulation conditions; however, there was no significant difference in the non-regulation condition; (2) In the up-regulating condition, adolescents showed greater right (relative to left) asymmetry for negative stimuli compared to neutral stimuli; however, there was no significant difference in down-regulation and non-regulation conditions. The results provide neurological evidence that trait mindfulness was highly related to the regulation of emotions and affects how emotions are processed.

Distraction and expressive suppression strategies in down-regulation of high- and low-intensity positive emotions

Emotion intensity is important for emotional regulation process. The studies in this literature, however, have generally focused on the down-regulation of negative emotions. Few studies have examined the down-regulation of positive emotions. Distraction and expressive suppression belong to disengagement strategies, which direct coping efforts away from emotions. Participants are more likely to select distraction and expressive suppression when motivated to down-regulate their emotions. Therefore, this study aimed to assess the impact of emotional intensity on down-regulating positive emotions via distraction and expressive suppression. The event-related potentials (ERPs) of college students were recorded while they were instructed to down-regulate positive emotions using expressive suppression or distraction versus free viewing when exposed to high- and low-intensity pleasant stimuli. Subsequently, participants were instructed to rate their positive experience using a 9-point scale. Supporting our predictions, behavioral results showed that both strategies could dramatically reduce high-intensity positive experience relative to viewing, and distraction led to a larger reduction of high-intensity positive experience than expressive suppression. Both strategies could not decrease low-intensity positive experience relative to viewing. ERP results showed that distraction successfully attenuated the early (500-700 ms) and late (700-1500 ms) stage of late positive potential (LPP) in high-intensity, and in low-intensity it modulated the early (but not late) LPP relative to viewing. Unexpectedly, expressive suppression effectively attenuated the early and late LPP in high- and low-intensity relative to viewing. The findings suggest that expressive suppression and distraction can effectively down-regulate positive emotions; however, distraction is more susceptible to emotional intensity and time.

Teachers' interpersonal styles and fear of failure from the perspective of physical education students

A growing body of research-based knowledge has been generated for the purpose of better understanding the reciprocal and dynamic relationship between teachers’ instructional characteristics and students’ psychosocial and learning outcomes. This study specifically examined the relationship between teachers’ interpersonal styles and fear of failure outcomes in physical education students. Five hundred sixty-two middle school and high school students in Physical Education classes (PE) participated in the study. Students completed questionnaires that assessed instructors’ autonomy-supportive and controlling teaching styles and students’ own fear of failure. A person-centered analysis was used to test the hypotheses. The results revealed that higher teacher autonomy support was associated with lower student fear of failure. To the contrary, a controlling teaching style was associated with fear of failure in these students. Two profiles emerged in which moderate fear of failure was associated with a stronger perception of a controlling teacher style and lower levels of fear of failure were associated with greater perceived instructor support for autonomy.