Early Influence of Affective Context on Emotion Perception: EPN or Early-N400?

Emotional text messages affect the early processing of emoticons depending on their emotional congruence: evidence from the N170 and EPN event related potentials

Emoticons have been considered pragmatic cues that enhance emotional expressivity during computer-mediated communication. Yet, it is unclear how emoticons are processed in ambiguous text-based communication due to incongruences between the emoticon's emotional valence and its context. In this study, we investigated the electrophysiological correlates of contextual influence on the early emotional processing of emoticons, during an emotional congruence judgment task. Participants were instructed to judge the congruence between a text message expressing an emotional situation (positive or negative), and a subsequent emoticon expressing positive or negative emotions. We analyzed early event-related potentials elicited by emoticons related to face processing (N170) and emotional salience in visual perception processing (Early Posterior Negativity, EPN). Our results show that accuracy and Reaction Times depend on the interaction between the emotional valence of the context and the emoticon. Negative emoticons elicited a larger N170, suggesting that the emotional information of the emoticon is integrated at the early stages of the perceptual process. During emoticon processing, a valence effect was observed with enhanced EPN amplitudes in occipital areas for emoticons representing negative valences. Moreover, we observed a congruence effect in parieto-temporal sites within the same time-window, with larger amplitudes for the congruent condition. We conclude that, similar to face processing, emoticons are processed differently according to their emotional content and the context in which they are embedded. A congruent context might enhance the emotional salience of the emoticon (and therefore, its emotional expression) during the early stages of their processing.

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

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

Brain potentials related to violent video clips

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

Listen to my feelings! How prosody and accent drive the empathic relevance of complaining speech

Interpersonal communication often involves sharing our feelings with others; complaining, for example, aims to elicit empathy in listeners by vocally expressing a speaker's suffering. Despite the growing neuroscientific interest in the phenomenon of empathy, few have investigated how it is elicited in real time by vocal signals (prosody), and how this might be affected by interpersonal factors, such as a speaker's cultural background (based on their accent). To investigate the neural processes at play when hearing spoken complaints, twenty-six French participants listened to complaining and neutral utterances produced by in-group French and out-group Québécois (i.e., French-Canadian) speakers. Participants rated how hurt the speaker felt while their cerebral activity was monitored with electroencephalography (EEG). Principal Component Analysis of Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) taken at utterance onset showed culture-dependent time courses of emotive prosody processing. The high motivational relevance of ingroup complaints increased the P200 response compared to all other utterance types; in contrast, outgroup complaints selectively elicited an early posterior negativity in the same time window, followed by an increased N400 (due to ongoing effort to derive affective meaning from outgroup voices). Ingroup neutral utterances evoked a late negativity which may reflect re-analysis of emotively less salient, but culturally relevant ingroup speech. Results highlight the time-course of neurocognitive responses that contribute to emotive speech processing for complaints, establishing the critical role of prosody as well as social-relational factors (i.e., cultural identity) on how listeners are likely to "empathize" with a speaker.

Influence of violent contexts on facial reactions elicited by angry and neutral faces

This study focuses on determining whether violent contexts influence the perception of aggressiveness in faces analysing spontaneous corrugator supercilii activity. Participants viewed pictures of neutral and angry faces preceded by a contextual sentence describing either violent or neutral actions. They were instructed to judge each face according to whether it was aggressive or non-aggressive. Results show a higher level of perceived aggressiveness for neutral faces preceded by violent contexts, accompanied by longer reaction times, and a significant increase of corrugator activity. Angry faces preceded by neutral contexts were judged as less aggressive and elicited less corrugator activity. In conclusion, our results provide evidence that facial reactions and aggressiveness judgment for faces are context-dependent. With this work, we contribute to the view that contextual cues guide the face's emotional meaning, under top-down processing.

Rapid sensory gain with emotional distracters precedes attentional deployment from a foreground task

The steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP), an electrophysiological marker of attentional resource allocation, has recently been demonstrated to serve as a neural signature of emotional content extraction from a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP). SSVEP amplitude was reduced for streams of emotional relative to neutral scenes passively viewed at 6 Hz (~167 ms per image), but it was enhanced for emotional relative to neutral scenes when viewed as 4 Hz RSVP (250 ms per image). Here, we investigated whether these seemingly contradictory observations may be related to different dynamics in the allocation of attentional resources as a consequence of stimulation frequency. To this end, we advanced our distraction paradigm by presenting a visual foreground task consisting of randomly moving squares flickering at 15 Hz superimposed on task-irrelevant RSVP streams shown at 6 or 4 Hz, which could unpredictably switch from neutral to unpleasant content during the trial or remained neutral. Critically, our findings demonstrate that affective distractors captured attentional resources more strongly than their neutral counterparts, irrespective of whether they were presented at 6 or 4 Hz rate. Moreover, the emotion-dependent attentional deployment from the foreground task was temporally preceded by sustained sensory facilitation in response to emotional background images. Together, present findings provide evidence for rapid sustained visual facilitation but a rather slow attentional bias in favor of emotional distractors in early visual areas.