Attentional bias during emotional processing: Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence from an Emotional Flanker Task

Threatening stimuli seem to capture attention more swiftly than neutral stimuli. This attention bias has been observed under different experimental conditions and with different types of stimuli. It remains unclear whether this adaptive behaviour reflects the function of automatic or controlled attention mechanisms. Additionally, the spatiotemporal dynamics of its neural correlates are largely unknown. The present study investigates these issues using an Emotional Flanker Task synchronized with EEG recordings. A group of 32 healthy participants saw response-relevant images (emotional scenes from IAPS or line drawings of objects) flanked by response-irrelevant distracters (i.e., emotional scenes flanked by line drawings or vice versa). We assessed behavioural and ERP responses drawn from four task conditions (Threat-Central, Neutral-Central, Threat-Peripheral, and Neutral-Peripheral) and subjected these responses to repeated-measures ANOVA models. When presented as response-relevant targets, threatening images attracted faster and more accurate responses. They did not affect response accuracy to targets when presented as response-irrelevant flankers. However, response times were significantly slower when threatening images flanked objects than when neutral images were shown as flankers. This result replicated the well-known Emotional Flanker Effect. Behavioural responses to response-relevant threatening targets were accompanied by significant modulations of ERP activity across all time-windows and regions of interest and displayed some meaningful correlations. The Emotional Flanker Effect was accompanied by a modulation over parietal and central-parietal regions within a time-window between 550-690ms. Such a modulation suggests that the attentional disruption to targets caused by response-irrelevant threatening flankers appears to reflect less neural resources available, which are seemingly drawn away by distracting threatening flankers. The observed spatiotemporal dynamics seem to concur with understanding of the important adaptive role attributed to threat-related attention bias.

Differences in the emotional conflict task between individuals with high and low social adjustment: An ERP study

To investigate the emotional conflict processing during the processing of emotional stimuli in individuals with different levels of social adjustment through developing an event-related potential (ERP) method, the study used positive words (happy), negative words (disgusted), positive faces and negative faces as experimental materials for a face-word Stroop emotional conflict task, which was completed by 34 participants. For the N2 component, there was a significant difference between the high and low social adjustment groups for the congruent condition; the low social adjustment group evoked more negative amplitude under the congruent condition. Under the incongruent condition, there was a marginally significant difference between the high and low social adjustment groups; the low social adjustment group evoked more negative amplitude under the incongruent condition. For the SP component, there were no significant differences for both the high and low social adjustment group between the congruent and incongruent conditions of emotional conflict. However, within the low social adjustment group, the incongruent evoked more positive amplitude. Our findings indicate that the difference in the emotional conflict process between individuals with high and low social adjustment mainly lies in the early processing stages of emotional information. That is, for both congruent and incongruent emotional stimuli, individuals with high social adjustment showed better emotional conflict monitoring, used less cognitive resources, and had a higher degree of automated processing than those with low social adjustment. During the later stages of emotional conflict processing, individuals with low social adjustment showed poorer conflict processing.