Is processing superiority a universal trait for all threats? Divergent impacts of fearful, angry, and disgusted faces on attentional capture

Fearful, angry, and disgusted facial expressions are evolutionarily salient and convey different types of threat signals. However, it remains unclear whether these three expressions impact sensory perception and attention in the same way. The present ERP study investigated the temporal dynamics underlying the processing of different types of threatening faces and the impact of attentional resources employed during a perceptual load task. Participants were asked to judge the length of bars superimposed over faces presented in the center of the screen. A mass univariate statistical approach was used to analyze the EEG data. Behaviorally, task accuracy was significantly reduced following exposure to fearful faces relative to neutral distractors, independent of perceptual load. The ERP results revealed that the P1 amplitude over the right hemisphere was found to be enhanced for fearful relative to disgusted faces, reflecting the rapid and coarse detection of fearful cues. The N170 responses elicited by fearful, angry, and disgusted faces were larger than those elicited by neutral faces, suggesting the largely automatic and preferential processing of threats. Furthermore, the early posterior negativity (EPN) component yielded increased responses to fearful and angry faces, indicating prioritized attention to stimuli representing acute threats. Additionally, perceptual load exerted a pronounced influence on the EPN and late positive potential (LPP), with larger responses observed in the low perceptual load condition, indicating goal-directed cognitive processing. Overall, the early sensory processing of fearful, angry, and disgusted faces is characterized by differential sensitivity in capturing attention automatically, despite the importance of these facial signals for survival. Fearful faces produce a strong interference effect and are processed with higher priority than angry and disgusted ones.

Sensing fear: fast and precise threat evaluation in human sensory cortex

Animal models of threat processing have evolved beyond the amygdala to incorporate a distributed neural network. In human research, evidence has intensified in recent years to challenge the canonical threat circuitry centered on the amygdala, urging revision of threat conceptualization. A strong surge of research into threat processing in the sensory cortex in the past decade has generated particularly useful insights to inform the reconceptualization. Here, synthesizing findings from both animal and human research, we highlight sensitive, specific, and adaptable threat representations in the sensory cortex, arising from experience-based sculpting of sensory coding networks. We thus propose that the human sensory cortex can drive smart (fast and precise) threat evaluation, producing threat-imbued sensory afferents to elicit network-wide threat responses.

The Role of the Valence, Arousing Properties and Subjective Significance of Subliminally Presented Words in Affective Priming

In the verbal affective priming paradigm, the properties of a subliminally presented stimulus alter the interpretation of neutral target stimulus. In the experiment reported here, we tested the role of four factors (valence, origin, arousing properties and subjective significance) that determine the emotional reactions to words in affective priming. Subliminal masked presentation of words preceded the explicit task, which was assessment of neutral Quick Response code (QR code) stimuli. The QRs were codes for words representing personality traits. The results showed the effect of assimilation (negative words caused a negative interpretation, positive caused a positive interpretation) for words' emotional valence and no effects for origin. Concerning arousal, we found a weak negative trend. In the case of subjective significance, a moderate positive trend was found. These results suggest that affective priming effects are susceptible not only to the valence of priming stimuli but also to activation factors.

Trait Anxiety Influences Negative Affect-modulated Distribution of Visuospatial Attention

Visuospatial attention allows humans to selectively gate and prioritize visual (including salient, emotional) information for efficiently navigating natural visual environments. As emotions have been known to influence attentional performance, we asked if emotions also modulate the spatial distribution of visual attention and whether any such effect was further associated with individual differences in anxiety. Participants (n = 28) discriminated the orientation of target Gabor patches co-presented with distractors, speedily and accurately. The key manipulation was randomly presenting a task-irrelevant face emotion prime briefly (50 ms), conveying Neutral/Disgust/Scrambled (Null) emotion signal 150 ms preceding the target patches. We calculated attention gradient (change in negative inverse attentional efficiency with unit change in distance from the source of emotion signal) as a metric to answer our questions. Specifically, the Disgust signal modulated the direction of attention gradients differentially in individuals with varying degrees of trait - anxiety, such that the gradients correlated negatively with individual trait-anxiety scores. This implies spatial shifts in Disgust-signalled visual attention with varying trait - anxiety levels. Neutral yielded attention gradients comparable to Scrambled, implying no specific effect of this signal and there was no association with anxiety levels in both. No correlation was observed between state - anxiety and the emotion-cued attention gradients. In sum, the results suggest that individual trait - anxiety levels influence the effect of negative and physiologically arousing emotion signals (e.g., Disgust) on the spatial distribution of visual attention. The findings could be of relevance for understanding biases in visual behaviour underlying affective states and disorders.

Successful emotion regulation via cognitive reappraisal in authentic pride: Behavioral and event-related potential evidence

The present study explored whether authentic pride (AP) and hubristic pride (HP) were differently associated with cognitive reappraisal strategy. In study 1, undergraduates (n = 235) completed a battery of self-report questionnaires, including the Authentic and Hubristic Pride-Proneness Scale (AHPPS), Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ), and emotion regulation questionnaire (ERP-R). The results showed that AP significantly predicted successful down-regulation of negative emotions via a spontaneous cognitive reappraisal strategy. However, hubristic pride (HP) was negatively associated with spontaneous cognitive reappraisal. In study 2, participants with trait AP (n = 31) and trait HP (n = 29) undergoing continuous electroencephalogram (EEG) recording were required to reinterpret emotional pictures to down-regulate/up-regulate their negative/positive emotional reactions. The results showed that individuals with AP reported lower levels of emotional arousal and lower amplitudes of late positive potentials (LPPs) than did individuals with HP in response to negative pictures during the down-regulation of negative emotions, but not during passive viewing or up-regulation of positive emotions. Across two studies, these findings showed that individuals with AP could utilize the cognitive reappraisal strategy (spontaneously in daily life and under experimental instructions) to down-regulate negative emotions more successfully relative to individuals with HP.

Utilization of passive visual perception task indetecting patients with major depressive disorder for active health

Depression is a common emotional and mental disease. At present, doctors' diagnosis mainly depends on the existing evaluation scales and their accumulated experience, lack of objective electrophysiological quantitative evaluation indicators. This study explores the difference in event-related potential (ERP) between patients with depression and healthy controls under the stimulation of multi-dimensional tasks, extracts the characteristic data, and uses a t-test for statistical analysis to provide an objective evaluation index for the clinical diagnosis of depression. Ninety-nine patients in the major depression group (MDD) and thirty patients in the healthy control group (HC) were used to compare the responses to positive, negative, and neutral stimulation, the results showed that there were significant differences between the left and right occipital lobes and one frontal lobe, and the frontal lobe showed lateralization; There were significant differences between the depression group and the healthy control group under multi-dimensional stimulation (P < 0.01), and the depression patients were significantly lower than the healthy patients. The results showed that emotional information was processed differently in patients with depression in the early stages of visual face processing. Therefore, EEG indices could be used as an objective index for the early detection of depression. Moreover, according to the instructions before the test, the subject is only asked to recognize visual pictures instead report emotional feelings. Stigma about psychiatric disorders could thus be reduced in this way. The explorations above facilitate designing more accurate and implicit active mental health techniques.

Does acute exercise benefit emotion regulation? Electrophysiological evidence from affective ratings and implicit emotional effects on cognition

Negative affect impacts cognition, and sometimes may interfere with cognitive function. Furthermore, emotion regulation is thought to play an important role in easing the suffering from negative affect. However, whether acute exercise could ease the emotional interference caused by unconscious affect on cognitive control, remains to be investigated. To test this, we used behavioral measures combined with event-related potentials (ERPs) to specifically investigate (i) the impacts of negative affect evoked by implicit cues on conflict inhibition (Flanker task), and (ii) whether acute exercise could mitigate these effects. Furthermore, we examined (iii) the impact of acute exercise on frontal alpha asymmetry as an index of cognitive emotional down-regulation to emotional stressors. Forty young women (age range from 18 to 26) were randomly assigned to either a control group (n = 20) or an exercise group (n = 20), and a repeated-measures design with a space of one week between measures was conducted. Results demonstrated that negative Flanker trials produced larger N1 amplitude but smaller N200 amplitude than neutral trials; furthermore, acute exercise could mitigate emotional effects on N1. However, significant effects of acute exercise on the resting and responding frontal alpha asymmetry were not found. The distinct direction of the impacts of negative affect on cognition are discussed together with implications about the effects of attention allocation on exercise-enhanced emotion regulation.

Can't fight seeing sadness in tears: Measuring the implicit association between tears and sadness

Visible tears have been shown to enhance the perception of sadness. Whether the sadness perception from visible tears can occur automatically, which is essential for the rapid identification of emotional cues in real-life social interactions, is still unclear. We employed the reaction-time-based Implicit Association Test (IAT) to assess the implicit association of tears and sadness in two studies. Study 1 (N = 58) used sadness/non-sadness or negative/positive affect words as attribute pairs and images of tearless or tearful neutral expressions as targeted concepts. In Study 2 (N = 54), the neutral expressions were replaced with anger, disgust, fear, surprise, and happiness expressions with or without tears. Both studies revealed a strong tendency among participants to implicitly associate tears with sadness and negative affect. The results complemented findings from self-report measures by showing that the perception of sadness from visible tears can occur efficiently with little control.

Frozen in (e)motion: How reactive motor inhibition is influenced by the emotional content of stimuli in healthy and psychiatric populations

Efficient inhibitory control is vital. However, environmental cues can influence motor control especially in an emotional context. One common task to measure inhibitory control is the stop-signal task (SST), which asks participants to respond to go stimuli knowing that on some trials a stop signal will be presented, requiring them to inhibit their response. This paradigm estimates the ability to inhibit already-initiated responses by calculating participants' stop-signal reaction times (SSRT), an index of inhibitory control. Here, we aim to review the existing, often contradictory, evidence on the influence of emotional stimuli on the inhibitory process. We aim to discuss which factors may reveal an interference as well as an advantage of emotional stimuli on action inhibition performance. Finally, we review the existing evidence that has investigated the effect of such stimuli on action inhibition in the psychiatric population. Important factors are the relevance, the intensity and the valence of the emotional stimulus, as well as the affected component of the motor control. From all this evidence, it is clear that understand precisely how emotion is integrated into core executive functions, such as inhibitory control, is essential not only for cognitive neuroscience, but also for refining neurocognitive models of psychopathology.

Implicit happy and fear experience contributes to computational estimation strategy execution: Behavioral and neurophysiological evidence

Previous study have explored the influence of explicit emotion priming on computational estimation strategy execution, but the corresponding influence of implicit emotion priming still remains unknown. The present study aimed to solve this problem. Participants were asked to complete two-digit multiplication computational estimation task, under different implicit emotion priming conditions (gender judgment task). In the two-digit multiplication computational estimation task, the computational estimation question was presented in the middle of the screen, meanwhile, two alternative answers were presented side by side at the bottom of the screen, participants were required to select which answer is correct, by using the down-up strategy (e.g., doing 30 × 50 = 1500 for 34 × 46). Behavioral results showed that the response speed under implicit happy and fear (vs. neutral and angry) priming conditions was quicker, and the accuracy under different priming conditions showed no significant difference. The ERP results showed that the influence of implicit emotion priming on computational estimation strategy execution consisted of two phases: in the first phase, the N1 amplitudes elicited by completing the multiplication computational estimation task were smaller under implicit fear (vs. angry) priming condition; in the second phase, the corresponding P2 amplitudes under implicit happy (vs. fear) priming condition were smaller. The present study indicated that implicit happy and fear experience contributed to complete computational estimation tasks, suggesting that implicit negative emotional (e.g., fear) experience was not always detrimental to computational estimation strategy execution.

Degree and Complexity of Non-conscious Emotional Information Processing - A Review of Masked Priming Studies

Whether and to what degree information can be processed non-consciously has been a matter of debate since the emergence of psychology as a science. Emotional information, in particular, has often been assumed to have a privileged status because of its relevance for well-being and survival (e.g., to detect a threat). Indeed, many studies have explored non-conscious processing of evaluative (i.e., "emotional" in a broad sense) or emotional (e.g., facial expressions) features using the "silver bullet" of non-consciousness research - the masked sequential priming paradigm. In its prototypical form, this paradigm involves the categorization of target stimuli according to valence (e.g., is the target positive or negative?). Each target is preceded by a briefly presented prime that is followed by a mask to constrain awareness. Non-conscious processing is inferred from subtle influences of the prime on target processing, that is, whether responses are faster if prime and target are valence-congruent or not. We will review this research with a focus on three questions: first, which methods are used in this area to establish non-conscious processing? Second, is there evidence for non-conscious extraction of evaluative information? Third, is there evidence for non-conscious processing beyond a simple valence (positive/negative) discrimination, for example, processing of emotion-specific information? We will highlight important current debates and potential directions in which the field will move in the future.

Gender differences in subliminal affective face priming: A high-density ERP study

INTRODUCTION

Subliminal affective priming effects (SAPEs) refer to the phenomenon by which the presentation of an affective prime stimulus influences the subsequent affective evaluation of a target stimulus. Previous studies have reported that unconsciously processed stimuli affect behavioral performance more than consciously processed stimuli. However, the impact of SAPEs on the face-specific N170 component is unclear. We studied how SAPEs for fearful faces affected the N170 for subsequent supraliminal target faces using event-related potentials (ERPs).

METHODS

Japanese adults (n = 44, 20 females) participated in this study. Subliminal prime faces (neutral or fearful) were presented for 17 ms, followed by a backward mask for 283 ms and 800 ms target faces (neutral, emotionally ambiguous, or fearful). 128-channel ERPs were recorded while participants judged the expression of target faces as neutral or fearful. Response rates and response times were also measured for assessing behavioral alterations.

RESULTS

Although the behavioral results revealed no evidence of SAPEs, we found gender-related SAPEs in right N170 amplitude. Specifically, female participants exhibited enhanced right N170 amplitude for emotionally neutral faces primed by fearful faces, while male participants exhibited decreased N170 amplitude in fearful prime trials with fearful target faces. Male participants exhibited significant correlations between N170 amplitude and behavioral response time in the fearful prime-neutral target condition.

CONCLUSIONS

Our ERP results suggest the existence of a gender difference in target-face processing preceded by subliminally presented face stimuli in the right occipito-temporal region.

Differential Neurobehavioral Effects of Cross-Modal Selective Priming on Phonetic and Emotional Prosodic Information in Late Second Language Learners

Purpose Spoken language is inherently multimodal and multidimensional in natural settings, but very little is known about how second language (L2) learners undertake multilayered speech signals with both phonetic and affective cues. This study investigated how late L2 learners undertake parallel processing of linguistic and affective information in the speech signal at behavioral and neurophysiological levels. Method Behavioral and event-related potential measures were taken in a selective cross-modal priming paradigm to examine how late L2 learners (N = 24, M _age = 25.54 years) assessed the congruency of phonetic (target vowel: /a/ or /i/) and emotional (target affect: happy or angry) information between the visual primes of facial pictures and the auditory targets of spoken syllables. Results Behavioral accuracy data showed a significant congruency effect in affective (but not phonetic) priming. Unlike a previous report on monolingual first language (L1) users, the L2 users showed no facilitation in reaction time for congruency detection in either selective priming task. The neurophysiological results revealed a robust N400 response that was stronger in the phonetic condition but without clear lateralization and that the N400 effect was weaker in late L2 listeners than in monolingual L1 listeners. Following the N400, late L2 learners showed a weaker late positive response than the monolingual L1 users, particularly in the left central to posterior electrode regions. Conclusions The results demonstrate distinct patterns of behavioral and neural processing of phonetic and affective information in L2 speech with reduced neural representations in both the N400 and the later processing stage, and they provide an impetus for further research on similarities and differences in L1 and L2 multisensory speech perception in bilingualism.

Attention please: ERP evidence for prime-target resource competition in the neutral-target variant of affective priming

Using event-related potentials we examined the mechanisms that underlie the influence of affective context information on evaluative judgments in affective priming (AP). Participants (N = 44) evaluated a priori neutral target ideographs that were preceded by 800-ms negative, neutral or positive prime pictures. We observed a significant AP effect (APE), with more positive target ratings for targets following positive versus negative primes, with neutral primes lying in between. A greater individual APE was associated with increased attention for the primes, indicated by larger amplitudes of parietal positive slow wave (PSW) and more pronounced prime affect discrimination mirrored in affect-specific variations of parieto-occipital prime P1 and parietal prime P2, P300, and PSW amplitudes. This confirms previous theoretical and empirical work suggesting that the size of the APE critically depends on the extent of prime-elicited affective activation. Furthermore, a greater individual APE was related to generally reduced depth of target processing as mirrored in smaller overall amplitudes of attention-sensitive target-related P1, P2, P300, and PSW. In addition, in the total sample P2, P300, and PSW were smaller for targets following AP eliciting, attention-capturing emotional, as compared to neutral primes. Based on the observed coincidence of increased processing of affective versus neutral primes, and specifically reduced processing of those targets that followed affective primes, we propose prime-target resource competition as an additional, not yet described process contributing to AP in the neutral-target paradigm.

Observing third-party ostracism enhances facial mimicry in 30-month-olds

Mimicry is suggested to be one of the strategies via which we enhance social affiliation. Although recent studies have shown that, like adults, young children selectively mimic the facial actions of in-group over out-group members, it is unknown whether this early mimicry behavior is driven by affiliative motivations. Here we investigated the functional role of facial mimicry in early childhood by testing whether observing third-party ostracism, which has previously been shown to enhance children's affiliative behaviors, enhances facial mimicry in 30-month-olds. Toddlers were presented with videos in which one shape was ostracized by other shapes or with control videos that did not show any ostracism. Before and after this, the toddlers observed videos of models performing facial actions (e.g., eyebrow raising, mouth opening) while we measured activation over their corresponding facial muscles using electromyography (EMG) to obtain an index of facial mimicry. We also coded the videos of the sessions for overt imitation. We found that toddlers in the ostracism condition showed greater facial mimicry at posttest than toddlers in the control condition, as indicated by both EMG and behavioral coding measures. Although the exact mechanism underlying this result needs to be investigated in future studies, this finding is consistent with social affiliation accounts of mimicry and suggests that mimicry may play a key role in maintaining affiliative bonds when toddlers perceive the risk of social exclusion.

Emotionally valenced stimuli impact response inhibition in those with substance use disorder and co-occurring anxiety and depression symptoms

BACKGROUND

Substance use disorder (SUD) is associated with impaired response inhibition. Given the deficits in emotion regulation associated with SUD, it is unclear if this impairment is exacerbated by emotionally valenced stimuli. Co-occurring conditions may further exacerbate these impairments as many co-occurring conditions further impact emotion regulation. It was hypothesized that negative stimuli may further impact response inhibition for this population.

METHODS

The current study used the stop-signal task to examine response inhibition to negative, neutral and positive stimuli in a sample of those with a history of SUD and co-occurring depression and anxiety symptoms.

RESULTS

Response inhibition was poorer for negative stimuli relative to neutral stimuli. There was no difference between negative and positive stimuli. Depression severity moderated the difference between response inhibition for negative and neutral stimuli. At elevated depression, response inhibition was worse and there was no difference across emotional stimuli. At low depression, there was a significant difference between negative and neutral stimuli. This effect was not found for anxiety symptoms.

LIMITATIONS

Study participants presented with polysubstance use of varying duration and amount. It is unclear whether findings are attributed to specific substances, or substance use broadly. Additionally, happy, angry, and calm facial emotions were used to represent positive, negative, and neutral valences respectively. It is unclear whether these findings are generalizable to other emotional expressions.

CONCLUSION

Results suggested that emotionally valenced stimuli affected response inhibition among those with low symptom severity. At elevated symptom severity, response inhibition to all stimuli were impaired.

Emotional face prediction in rejection sensitive individuals: Evidence from event-related potentials

Human beings live in an uncertain world, but they continuously generate top-down predictions about emotional face information of other people around them. Although the prediction processing has repeatedly been investigated in the literature of prediction, little is known about the impact of rejection sensitive (RS) on individuals' emotional face prediction. To this end, high and low RS participants were asked to perform an identification task of emotional faces in which target faces were shown in either an angry or happy expression while their brain responses were recorded using an event-related potential (ERP) technique. The behavioral results suggested an effect of emotional face prediction. For the P100 component, low RS participants showed longer P100 peak latencies in the left than right hemisphere when they viewed predictable emotional faces. In addition, low RS participants showed larger N170 mean amplitudes for angry compared to happy faces when they perceived unpredictable faces, but not when these faces were predictable. This presumably reflected a sensibility to angry faces in the unpredictable trails. Interestingly, high RS participants did not demonstrate such a N170 difference, suggesting that high RS participants showed a reduced sensitivity to unpredictable angry faces. Furthermore, angry faces triggered increased LPP mean amplitudes compared to happy faces, which was consistent with the results of other ERP studies examining the processing of emotional faces. Finally, we observed significant negative correlations between behavioral and ERP prediction effect, indicating one consistency between the behavioral and electrophysiological data.

Cognitive conflict could facilitate negative stimulus processing: evidence from trait anxiety in the flanker paradigm

The present study used event-related potentials to investigate the affective priming effect of cognitive conflict and the influence of trait anxiety during the early stage of conflict processing. Participants with relatively high-trait or low-trait anxiety were tested using a combination of flanker task (congruent or incongruent arrows) as primes presented 200 ms before positive or negative words as targets. Behavioral results showed that response times were shorter for negative targets following incongruent primes relative to congruent primes, and vice versa, suggesting that conflicts facilitated the processing of negative targets. Event-related potential results revealed that the N2 amplitudes (280-320 ms) for incongruent stimuli were significantly more negative than those for congruent stimuli, indicating a significant conflict effect. Moreover, the N400 amplitudes (580-680 ms) for positive targets after congruent primes were significantly more negative than those after incongruent primes, but no significant difference was found in the N400 amplitudes after congruent primes and incongruent primes for negative targets, indicating that conflicts had a negative effect on the subsequent processing. In addition, in the high-trait anxiety, the N400 amplitudes for negative targets after incongruent primes were significantly more negative than those after incongruent primes, and vice versa, indicating that conflicts facilitated the processing of negative targets. These findings showed that conflicts could facilitate the processing of negative targets and be viewed as aversive signals during the early stage of conflict processing and that high-trait anxiety promoted the negative effect induced by conflicts.

Impaired early visual categorization of fear in social anxiety

Social anxiety is associated with biased social perception, especially of ambiguous cues. While aberrations in high-level processes (e.g., cognitive appraisal and interpretation) have been implicated in such biases, contributions of early, low-level stimulus processing remain unclear. Categorical perception represents an efficient process to resolve signal ambiguity, and categorical emotion perception can swiftly classify sensory input, "tagging" biologically important stimuli at early stages of processing to facilitate ecological response. However, early threat categorization could be disrupted by exaggerated (or disinhibited) threat processing in anxiety, resulting in biased perception of ambiguous signals. We tested this hypothesis among individuals with low and high trait social anxiety (LSA/HSA; defined relative to the current sample), who performed a two-alternative forced-choice (fear or neutral) task on facial expressions parametrically varied along a neutral-fear continuum. The groups diverged in the reaction time (RT) profile along the neutral-fear continuum, which was characteristic of categorical perception in the LSA (vs. HSA) group with drastically increased RT from neutral to intermediate (boundary) fear intensities, contrasting monotonic, nonsignificant RT changes in the HSA group. Neurometric analysis along the continuum identified an early neutral-fear categorization operation (arising in the P1, an early visual ERP at 100 ms), which was nonetheless impaired in the HSA group (due to disinhibited response at the neutral-fear boundary). Absent group differences in higher-level cognitive operations (identified by later ERPs), current findings highlight a dispositional cognitive vulnerability in early visual categorization of social threat, which could precipitate further cognitive aberrations and, eventually, the onset of social anxiety disorder.

Peripersonal space is diversely sensitive to a temporary vs permanent state of anxiety

Peripersonal Space (PPS) is the multisensory space immediately surrounding our body. Visual and tactile stimuli here are promptly processed, since their interaction gradually strengthens as the distance between visual stimulus and the body decreases. Recently, a modified version of the Temporal Order Judgment (TOJ) task was proposed to assess PPS based on the spatial congruence between somatosensory and visual stimuli. Here, we used this paradigm to explore how a temporary vs a permanent state of anxiety can alter PPS. Indeed, previous research showed that PPS boundaries are not fixed, but they can be enlarged by contingent factors (i.e. emotional features). Participants performed the TOJ paradigm twice, just before and after completing an anxiety-inducing task (experimental breathing condition) or a neutral one (control breathing condition), while their trait and state anxiety levels were repeatedly measured. We found that the pattern of visuo-tactile integration in PPS changes in the very opposite way following the two breathing tasks for participants with high levels of temporary anxiety, by strengthening and weakening its power after the experimental and control conditions, respectively. On the contrary, both the breathing tasks are capable of reducing the cross-modal interplay as compared to baseline for high trait-anxious participants, who show an overall stronger visuo-tactile integration inside the PPS than low trait anxious individuals. These results are discussed in the light of the double dissociation between orienting and alerting attentional network over-functioning, reported in state anxiety participants, and impoverished prefrontal attentional control shown by trait anxiety individuals.

The asynchronous influence of facial expressions on bodily expressions

The ability to extract correct emotional information from facial and bodily expressions is fundamental for the development of social skills. Previous studies have shown that bodily expressions affect the recognition of basic facial expressions dramatically. However, few studies have considered the view that facial expressions may influence the recognition of bodily expressions. Further, previous studies have failed to consider a comprehensive set of emotional categories. The present study sought to examine whether facial expressions would impact the recognition of bodily expressions asynchronously, using four basic emotions. Participants performed an affective priming task, in which the priming stimuli included four facial expressions (happy, sad, fearful, and angry), and the target stimuli were bodily expressions matching the same emotions. The results indicated that the perception of affective facial expressions significantly influenced the accuracy and reaction time for body-based emotion categorization, particularly for bodily expression of happiness. The recognition accuracy of congruent expressions was higher, relative to that of incongruent expressions. The findings show that facial expressions influence the recognition of bodily expressions, despite the asynchrony.

The effect of emotional and self-referential contexts on ERP responses towards surprised faces

The perception of surprised faces is demonstrably modulated by emotional context. However, the influence of self-relevance and its interaction with emotional context have not been explored. The present study investigated the effects of contextual valence and self-reference on the perception of surprised faces. Our results revealed that faces in a negative context elicited a larger N170 than those in a neutral context. The EPN was affected by the interaction between contextual valence and self-reference, with larger amplitudes for faces in self-related positive contexts and sender-related negative contexts. Additionally, LPP amplitudes were enhanced for faces in negative contexts relative to neutral and positive contexts, as well as for self-related contexts in comparison to sender-related contexts. Together, these findings help to elucidate the psychophysiological mechanisms underlying the effects of emotional and self-referential contexts on the perception of surprised faces, which are characterized by distinctive ERPs.

Selective facial mimicry of native over foreign speakers in preverbal infants

Mimicry, the spontaneous copying of others' behaviors, plays an important role in social affiliation, with adults selectively mimicking in-group members over out-group members. Despite infants' early documented sensitivity to cues to group membership, previous work suggests that it is not until 4 years of age that spontaneous mimicry is modulated by group status. Here we demonstrate that mimicry is sensitive to cues to group membership at a much earlier age if the cues presented are more relevant to infants. 11-month-old infants observed videos of facial actions (e.g., mouth opening, eyebrow raising) performed by models who either spoke the infants' native language or an unfamiliar foreign language while we measured activation of the infants' mouth and eyebrow muscle regions using electromyography to obtain an index of mimicry. We simultaneously used functional near-infrared spectroscopy to investigate the neural mechanisms underlying differential mimicry responses. We found that infants showed greater facial mimicry of the native speaker compared to the foreign speaker and that the left temporal parietal cortex was activated more strongly during the observation of facial actions performed by the native speaker compared to the foreign speaker. Although the exact mechanisms underlying this selective mimicry response will need to be investigated in future research, these findings provide the first demonstration of the modulation of facial mimicry by cues to group status in preverbal infants and suggest that the foundations for the role that mimicry plays in facilitating social bonds seem to be present during the first year of life.

Subliminal emotional pictures are capable of modulating early cerebral responses to pain in fibromyalgia

Pain experience involves a complex relationship between sensory and both emotional and cognitive factors, which appear to be mediated by different neural pathways. Previous evidence has shown that whereas conscious processing of unpleasant stimuli enhances pain perception, the influence of emotions on pain under unaware conditions is much less known. The need to better characterise the relationship between pain processing and emotional factors is crucial for dealing with chronic pain conditions. Therefore, the present study aimed to explore the neural correlates relating to the influence of visual masking emotional stimulation on the processing of painful stimuli in chronic pain patients suffering from fibromyalgia (FM). Twenty FM and 22 healthy control (HC) women participated in the study. The experimental masking paradigm consisted of a rapid succession of two types of stimuli, where a masked picture (neutral, negative or pain-related) was followed by a laser stimulus (painful or not painful). LEP activity was recorded at sixty scalp electrodes. An LEP-amplitude approach was used to quantify the main cerebral waves linked to pain response. ANOVAs indicated that the posterior regions of the P1 component were sensitive to experimental manipulation (p<0.05). Specifically, FM patients showed higher amplitudes to painful stimuli preceded by pain-related pictures compared with painful trials preceded by other emotional pictures. The FM group also showed greater amplitudes than those in the HC group in P2a and P2b waves. In addition to the scalp data, at the neural level the posterior cingulate cortex, lingual gyrus and insular cortex showed higher activation in the FM group than in the HC group. Our findings show an early cerebral modulation of pain (as reflected by the P1) in FM patients, suggesting that only pain-related information, even when it is unconsciously perceived, is capable to enhance exogenous (automatic) attention, increasing the neural activity involved in processing painful stimulation. Further research is needed to fully understand unconscious emotional influences on pain in fibromyalgia.

When Neutral is Not Neutral: Neurophysiological Evidence for Reduced Discrimination between Aversive and Non-Aversive Information in Generalized Anxiety Disorder

Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) is characterized by a range of cognitive and affective disruptions, such as pathological worry. There is debate, however, about whether such disruptions are specifically linked to heightened responses to aversive stimuli, or due to overgeneralized threat monitoring leading to deficits in the ability to discriminate between aversive and non-aversive affective information. The present study capitalized on the temporal and functional specificity of scalp-recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine this question by exploring two targeted neurocognitive responses in a group of adults diagnosed with GAD: 1) visual processing of angry (aversive) versus neutral (non-aversive) faces; and 2) response monitoring of incorrect (aversive) versus correct (non-aversive) responses. Electroencephalography was recorded while 15 adults with GAD and 15 age-matched controls viewed angry and neutral faces prior to individual trials of a flanker task. ERPs to faces were the P1, reflecting attention allocation, the early posterior negativity (EPN), reflecting early affective discrimination, and the N170, reflecting face-sensitive visual discrimination. The error-related negativity (ERN) and positivity (Pe) were generated to incorrect and correct responses. Results showed reduced discrimination between aversive and non-aversive faces and responses in the GAD relative to the control group during visual discrimination (N170) and later-emerging error monitoring (Pe). These effects were driven by exaggerated processing of non-aversive faces and responses, suggesting over-generalized threat monitoring. Implications for cognitive-affective models of GAD are discussed.

The effects of social exclusion on processing of social information - A cognitive psychology perspective

In this article, we review the research investigating the effects of social exclusion on processing of social information. We look into this topic from the point of view of cognitive psychology aiming to provide a systematic description of the effects of exclusion on workings of different cognitive mechanisms involved in social information processing. We focus on four lines of inquiry. First, we present the research on the effects of exclusion on memory for social information. Second, we review studies, which have investigated how exclusion changes the way people view and evaluate their social environment. Third, we look into the research which has investigated whether exclusion modulates early social information processing at the perceptual level. Finally, we discuss the research on the effects of exclusion on attentional processes. Importantly, we also present gaps in our understanding on these issues and provide suggestions as to how future research could provide a more detailed view on how exclusion modulates social information processing.

Conscious awareness is necessary for affective faces to influence social judgments

A growing body of research claims that stimuli presented outside conscious awareness can influence affect, speech perception, decision-making, eating behavior, and social judgments. However, research has shown that conscious awareness is a continuous phenomenon. Using a continuous flash suppression (CFS) paradigm to suppress awareness of affective faces (smiling and scowling), we demonstrate that some awareness of suppressed stimuli is required for the stimuli to influence social judgments. We discovered this using a rigorous within-participants psychophysics method that allowed us to assess awareness at very low levels, which is difficult using traditional methods. Our findings place boundary conditions on claims (made previously by us and others) that stimuli presented completely outside conscious awareness influence judgments. This work contributes to the literature highlighting the need to study conscious awareness as a continuous phenomenon and provides a framework for researchers to ask and answer questions regarding conscious awareness and its relation to judgment and behavior.

Unconscious influence over executive control: Absence of conflict detection and adaptation

Executive control and its modulation of attentional mechanisms allow us to detect and adapt to conflicting information. According to recent studies, executive control functions may be modulated by unconsciously perceived information, although the available evidence is not consistent. In this study, we used a Flanker Task and employed Chromatic Flicker Fusion, a suppression technique that has been proposed as more adequate to elicit executive control functions, to assess conflict and conflict adaptation effects. Our results showed that, when suppressed, flankers did not evoke conflict related effects on performance. However, in trials where most flankers were incongruent, longer response times in congruent trials were observed, consistent with orienting responses. Our results help to support earlier theories regarding the inherent limitations of unconsciously perceived information, though future studies should further investigate why and under which conditions is the executive control system modulated by unconscious information.

Subliminal Priming-State of the Art and Future Perspectives

The influence of subliminal priming (behavior outside of awareness) in humans is an interesting phenomenon and its understanding is crucial as it can impact behavior, choices, and actions. Given this, research about the impact of priming continues to be an area of investigative interest, and this paper provides a technical overview of research design strengths and issues in subliminal priming research. Efficient experiments and protocols, as well as associated electroencephalographic and eye movement data analyses, are discussed in detail. We highlight the strengths and weaknesses of different priming experiments that have measured affective (emotional) and cognitive responses. Finally, very recent approaches and findings are described to summarize and emphasize state-of-the-art methods and potential future directions in research marketing and other commercial applications.

Midfrontal Theta and Posterior Parietal Alpha Band Oscillations Support Conflict Resolution in a Masked Affective Priming Task

Past attempts to characterize the neural mechanisms of affective priming have conceptualized it in terms of classic cognitive conflict, but have not examined the neural oscillatory mechanisms of subliminal affective priming. Using behavioral and electroencephalogram (EEG) time frequency (TF) analysis, the current study examines the oscillatory dynamics of unconsciously triggered conflict in an emotional facial expressions version of the masked affective priming task. The results demonstrate that the power dynamics of conflict are characterized by increased midfrontal theta activity and suppressed parieto-occipital alpha activity. Across-subject and within-trial correlation analyses further confirmed this pattern. Phase synchrony and Granger causality analyses (GCAs) revealed that the fronto-parietal network was involved in unconscious conflict detection and resolution. Our findings support a response conflict account of affective priming, and reveal the role of the fronto-parietal network in unconscious conflict control.

Mechanisms of attentional selection bias for threatening emotions of anger and disgust in individuals with high-trait anxiety

There are still some controversies that attentional bias to negative emotions in individuals with high-trait anxiety (HTA), as compare with those with low-trait anxiety (LTA), occurs in the engagement or disengagement facet of attentional selectivity and whether this attentional bias is affected by negative emotional types. In this study, we explored the different attentional selectivity mechanisms for threatening emotions of anger and disgust between individuals with HTA and LTA using the variant attentional-probe paradigm. The results showed that under the engagement condition, the HTA group's attentional bias index of the anger mood was negative and was significantly less than the disgusting mood (positive) and that the P1 was smaller with angry faces as compared with neutral faces, which was separate from the results of the disgusted faces, having a significant difference with neutral faces on P1 component. In the LTA group, under the disengagement condition, the attentional bias index of the disgusting mood was significantly bigger than the attentional bias index of the anger mood. Moreover, the P1 of the disgusted faces was significantly bigger than the P1 of the angry faces. The topographical maps were also made to reveal the different neural underpinnings. The results suggested that there were different mechanisms of selective attentional bias for threatening emotions of anger and disgust in individuals with HTA. HTA individuals were characterized by facilitated attentional engagement with angry faces and impaired attentional engagement with disgusted faces. LTA individuals had different neural underpinnings and had impaired attentional disengagement with disgusted faces.

Neural correlates of facial expression processing during a detection task: An ERP study

Given finite attentional resources, how emotional aspects of stimuli are processed automatically is controversial. Present study examined the time-course for automatic processing of facial expression by assessing N170, and late positive potentials (LPPs) of event-related potentials (ERPs) using a modified rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) paradigm. Observers were required to confirm a certain house image and to detect whether a face image was presented at the end of a series of pictures. There were no significant main effects on emotional type for P1 amplitudes, whereas happy and fearful expressions elicited larger N170 amplitudes than neutral expressions. Significantly different LPP amplitudes were elicited depending on the type of emotional facial expressions (fear > happy > neutral). These results indicated that threatening priority was absent but discrimination of expressive vs. neutral faces occurred in implicit emotional tasks, at approximately 250 ms post-stimulus. Moreover, the three types of expressions were discriminated during the later stages of processing. Encoding emotional information of faces can be automated to a relatively higher degree, when attentional resources are mostly allocated to superficial analyzing.

Unconscious Processing of Facial Emotional Valence Relation: Behavioral Evidence of Integration between Subliminally Perceived Stimuli

Although a few studies have investigated the integration between some types of unconscious stimuli, no research has yet explored the integration between unconscious emotional stimuli. This study was designed to provide behavioral evidence for the integration between unconsciously perceived emotional faces (same or different valence relation) using a modified priming paradigm. In two experiments, participants were asked to decide whether two faces in the target, which followed two subliminally presented faces of same or different emotional expressions, were of the same or different emotional valence. The interstimulus interval (ISI) between the prime and the target was manipulated (0, 53, 163 ms). In Experiment 1, prime visibility was assessed post-experiment. In Experiment 2, it was assessed on each trial. Interestingly, in both experiments, unconsciously processed valence relation of the two faces in the prime generated a negative priming effect in the response to the supraliminally presented target, independent of the length of ISI. Further analyses suggested that the negative priming was probably caused by a motor response incongruent relation between the subliminally perceived prime and the supraliminally perceived target. The visual feature incongruent relation across the prime and target was not found to play a role in the negative priming. Because the negative priming was found at short ISI, an attention mechanism as well as a motor inhibition mechanism were proposed in the generation of the negative priming effect. Overall, this study indicated that the subliminal valence relation was processed, and that integration between different unconsciously perceived stimuli could occur.

Enhanced Early Neuronal Processing of Food Pictures in Anorexia Nervosa: A Magnetoencephalography Study

Neuroimaging studies in Anorexia Nervosa (AN) have shown increased activation in reward and cognitive control regions in response to food, and a behavioral attentional bias (AB) towards food stimuli is reported. This study aimed to further investigate the neural processing of food using magnetoencephalography (MEG). Participants were 13 females with restricting-type AN, 14 females recovered from restricting-type AN, and 15 female healthy controls. MEG data was acquired whilst participants viewed high- and low-calorie food pictures. Attention was assessed with a reaction time task and eye tracking. Time-series analysis suggested increased neural activity in response to both calorie conditions in the AN groups, consistent with an early AB. Increased activity was observed at 150 ms in the current AN group. Neuronal activity at this latency was at normal level in the recovered group; however, this group exhibited enhanced activity at 320 ms after stimulus. Consistent with previous studies, analysis in source space and behavioral data suggested enhanced attention and cognitive control processes in response to food stimuli in AN. This may enable avoidance of salient food stimuli and maintenance of dietary restraint in AN. A later latency of increased activity in the recovered group may reflect a reversal of this avoidance, with source space and behavioral data indicating increased visual and cognitive processing of food stimuli.

Deficits of unconscious emotional processing in patients with major depression: An ERP study

BACKGROUND

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is associated with behavioral and neurobiological evidences of negative bias in unconscious emotional processing. However, little is known about the time course of this deficit. The current study aimed to explore the unconscious processing of emotional facial expressions in MDD patients by means of event-related potentials (ERPs).

METHODS

The ERP responses to subliminally presented happy/neutral/sad faces were recorded in 26 medication-free patients and 26 healthy controls in a backward masking task. Three ERP components were compared between patients and controls.

RESULTS

Detection accuracy was at chance level for both groups, suggesting that the process was performed in the absence of conscious awareness of the emotional stimuli. Robust emotion×group interactions were observed in P1, N170 and P3. Compared with the neutral faces, 1) the patients showed larger P1 for sad and smaller P1 for happy faces; however, the controls showed a completely inverse P1 pattern; 2) the controls exhibited larger N170 in the happy but not in the sad trials, whereas patients had comparable larger N170 amplitudes in sad and happy trials; 3) although both groups exhibited larger P3 for emotional faces, the patients showed a priority for sad trials while the controls showed a priority for happy trials.

CONCLUSION

Our data suggested that negative processing bias exists on the unconscious level in individuals with MDD. The ERP measures indicated that the unconscious emotional processing in MDD patients has a time course of three-stage deflection.

Neural Processing of Familiar and Unfamiliar Children's Faces: Effects of Experienced Love Withdrawal, but No Effects of Neutral and Threatening Priming

In the face of a potential threat to his or her child, a parent's caregiving system becomes activated, motivating the parent to protect and care for the child. However, the neural correlates of these responses are not yet well understood. The current study was a pilot study to investigate the processing of subliminally presented threatening primes and their effects on neural responses to familiar and unfamiliar children's faces. In addition, we studied potential moderating effects of empathy and childhood experiences of love-withdrawal. A total of 45 students participated in an fMRI experiment in which they were shown pictures of familiar children (pictures morphed to resemble the participant like an own child would) and unfamiliar children preceded by neutral and threatening primes. Participants completed a modified version of the Children's Report of Parental Behavior Inventory to measure parental love withdrawal, and the Empathic Concern scale of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index to measure affective empathy. Contrary to our expectations, we did not find evidence for subliminal priming effects. However, we did find enhanced activity in the right inferior frontal gyrus (IFG; involved in self-referential processing) and in face processing areas (infero-lateral occipital cortex and fusiform areas) in response to the familiar child, indicating preferential processing of these faces. Effects of familiarity in face processing areas were larger for participants reporting more love withdrawal, suggesting enhanced attention to and processing of these highly attachment relevant stimuli. Unfamiliar faces elicited enhanced activity in bilateral superior temporal gyrus (STG) and other regions associated with theory of mind (ToM), which may indicate more effortful ToM processing of these faces. We discuss the potential difference between a familiarity and a caregiving effect triggered by the morphed faces, and emphasize the need for replication in parents with pictures of their "real" own child.

From Memory to Attitude: The Neurocognitive Process beyond Euthanasia Acceptance

Numerous questionnaire studies on attitudes towards euthanasia produced conflicting results, precluding any general conclusion. This might be due to the fact that human behavior can be influenced by automatically triggered attitudes, which represent ingrained associations in memory and cannot be assessed by standard questionnaires, but require indirect measures such as reaction times (RT) or electroencephalographic recording (EEG). Event related potentials (ERPs) of the EEG and RT during an affective priming task were assessed to investigate the impact of automatically triggered attitudes and were compared to results of an explicit questionnaire. Explicit attitudes were ambivalent. Reaction time data showed neither positive nor negative associations towards euthanasia. ERP analyses revealed an N400 priming effect with lower mean amplitudes when euthanasia was associated with negative words. The euthanasia-related modulation of the N400 component shows an integration of the euthanasia object in negatively valenced associative neural networks. The integration of all measures suggests a bottom-up process of attitude activation, where automatically triggered negative euthanasia-relevant associations can become more ambiguous with increasing time in order to regulate the bias arising from automatic processes. These data suggest that implicit measures may make an important contribution to the understanding of euthanasia-related attitudes.

Non-Conscious Perception of Emotions in Psychiatric Disorders: The Unsolved Puzzle of Psychopathology

Psychophysiological and functional neuroimaging studies have frequently and consistently shown that emotional information can be processed outside of the conscious awareness. Non-conscious processing comprises automatic, uncontrolled, and fast processing that occurs without subjective awareness. However, how such non-conscious emotional processing occurs in patients with various psychiatric disorders requires further examination. In this article, we reviewed and discussed previous studies on the non-conscious emotional processing in patients diagnosed with anxiety disorder, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression, to further understand how non-conscious emotional processing varies across these psychiatric disorders. Although the symptom profile of each disorder does not often overlap with one another, these patients commonly show abnormal emotional processing based on the pathology of their mood and cognitive function. This indicates that the observed abnormalities of emotional processing in certain social interactions may derive from a biased mood or cognition process that precedes consciously controlled and voluntary processes. Since preconscious forms of emotional processing appear to have a major effect on behaviour and cognition in patients with these disorders, further investigation is required to understand these processes and their impact on patient pathology.

Cortical processing of phonetic and emotional information in speech: A cross-modal priming study

The current study employed behavioral and electrophysiological measures to investigate the timing, localization, and neural oscillation characteristics of cortical activities associated with phonetic and emotional information processing of speech. The experimental design used a cross-modal priming paradigm in which the normal adult participants were presented a visual prime followed by an auditory target. Primes were facial expressions that systematically varied in emotional content (happy or angry) and mouth shape (corresponding to /a/ or /i/ vowels). Targets were spoken words that varied by emotional prosody (happy or angry) and vowel (/a/ or /i/). In both the phonetic and prosodic conditions, participants were asked to judge congruency status of the visual prime and the auditory target. Behavioral results showed a congruency effect for both percent correct and reaction time. Two ERP responses, the N400 and late positive response (LPR), were identified in both conditions. Source localization and inter-trial phase coherence of the N400 and LPR components further revealed different cortical contributions and neural oscillation patterns for selective processing of phonetic and emotional information in speech. The results provide corroborating evidence for the necessity of differentiating brain mechanisms underlying the representation and processing of co-existing linguistic and paralinguistic information in spoken language, which has important implications for theoretical models of speech recognition as well as clinical studies on the neural bases of language and social communication deficits.

When Feelings Arise with Meanings: How Emotion and Meaning of a Native Language Affect Second Language Processing in Adult Learners

To determine when and how L2 learners start to process L2 words affectively and semantically, we conducted a longitudinal study on their interaction in adult L2 learners. In four test sessions, spanning half a year of L2 learning, we monitored behavioral and ERP learning-related changes for one and the same set of words by means of a primed lexical-decision paradigm with L1 primes and L2 targets. Sensitivity rates, accuracy rates, RTs, and N400 amplitude to L2 words and pseudowords improved significantly across sessions. A semantic priming effect (e.g, prime "driver"facilitating response to target "street") was found in accuracy rates and RTs when collapsing Sessions 1 to 4, while this effect modulated ERP amplitudes within the first 300 ms of L2 target processing. An overall affective priming effect (e.g., "sweet" facilitating"taste") was also found in RTs and ERPs (posterior P1). Importantly, the ERPs showed an L2 valence effect across sessions (e.g., positive words were easier to process than neutral words), indicating that L2 learners were sensitive to L2 affective meaning. Semantic and affective priming interacted in the N400 time-window only in Session 4, implying that they affected meaning integration during L2 immersion together. The results suggest that L1 and L2 are initially processed semantically and affectively via relatively separate channels that are more and more linked contingent on L2 exposure.