Brain's alpha activity and alpha responses belong to major electrical signals that are related to sensory/cognitive signal processing. The present study aims to analyze the spontaneous alpha activity and visual evoked alpha response in drug free euthymic bipolar patients. Eighteen DSM-IV euthymic bipolar patients (bipolar I n = 15, bipolar II n = 3) and 18 healthy controls were enrolled in the study. Patients needed to be euthymic at least for 4 weeks and psychotrop free for at least 2 weeks. Spontaneous EEG (4 min eyes closed, 4 min eyes open) and evoked alpha response upon application of simple visual stimuli were analyzed. EEG was recorded at 30 positions. The digital FFT-based power spectrum analysis was performed for spontaneous eyes closed and eyes open conditions and the response power spectrum was also analyzed for simple visual stimuli. In the analysis of spontaneous EEG, the ANOVA on alpha responses revealed significant results for groups (F(1,34) = 8.703; P < 0.007). Post-hoc comparisons showed that spontaneous EEG alpha power of healthy subjects was significantly higher than the spontaneous EEG alpha power of euthymic patients. Furthermore, visual evoked alpha power of healthy subjects was significantly higher than visual evoked alpha power of euthymic patients (F(1,34) = 4.981; P < 0.04). Decreased alpha activity in spontaneous EEG is an important pathological EEG finding in euthymic bipolar patients. Together with an evident decrease in evoked alpha responses, the findings may lead to a new pathway in search of biological correlates of cognitive impairment in bipolar disorder.

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Analysis of affective picture processing by means of EEG has invaded the literature. The methodology of event-related EEG coherence is one of the essential methods used to analyze functional connectivity. The aims of the present study are to find out the long range EEG connectivity changes in perception of different affective pictures and analyze gender differences in these long range connected networks. EEGs of 28 healthy subjects (14 female) were recorded at 32 locations. The participants passively viewed emotional pictures (IAPS, unpleasant, pleasant, neutral). The long-distance intra-hemispheric event-related coherence was analyzed for delta (1-3.5 Hz), theta (4-7.5 Hz), and alpha (8-13 Hz) frequency ranges for F-T, F-T, F-TP, F-TP, F-P, F-P, F-O, F-O, C-O, C-O electrode pairs. Unpleasant pictures elicited significantly higher delta coherence values than neutral pictures ( < 0.05), over fronto-parietal, fronto-occipital, and centro-occipital electrode pairs. Furthermore, unpleasant pictures elicited higher theta coherence values than pleasant ( < 0.05) and neutral pictures ( < 0.05). The present study showed that female subjects had higher delta ( < 0.05) and theta ( < 0.05) coherence values than male subjects. This difference was observed more for emotional pictures than for neutral pictures. This study showed that the brain connectivity was higher during emotional pictures than neutral pictures. Females had higher connectivity between different parts of the brain than males during emotional processes. According to these results, we may comment that increased and caused increased brain activity. It seems that not just single sources but functional networks were also activated during perception of emotional pictures.

The research related to brain oscillations and their connectivity is in a new take-off trend including the applications in neuropsychiatric diseases. What is the best strategy to learn about functional correlation of oscillations? In this report, we emphasize combined application of several analytical methods as power spectra, adaptive filtering of Event Related Potentials, inter-trial coherence and spatial coherence. These combined analysis procedure gives the most profound approach to understanding of EEG responses. Examples from healthy subjects, Alzheimer's Diseases, schizophrenia, and Bipolar Disorder are described.

The present research aims to show that the occurrence of alpha blocking or event-related desynchronization (ERD) strongly depends on the amplitude and also on the phase angle of alpha activity at the stimulus onset. Simple visual stimulation was presented to 17 healthy subjects during EEG recording. An O 2 electrode was used for analysis with a 32 channel EEG sampling system. We used a segmentation of raw data in order to obtain the evoked potential. Prestimulus and poststimulus activities were filtered in the alpha (8-13 Hz) frequency band. Later, four different events (blocked, time-locked, phase-locked, and eliminated) were separately averaged. Phase-locked sweeps were determined by application of inter-trial coherence analysis. The evaluation of the data shows that ''time-locked and phase-locked sweeps'' were the dominating pattern and not ''the blocked pattern'', which occurred only when the prestimulus alpha was high. In the analyses of EEG-EP sweeps, only 22 % of epochs showed (ERD). The ANOVA revealed significant differences between four different alpha responses (F(3,48) = 11.175; p \ 0.001). Furthermore, alpha oscillations in time-locked responses were significantly higher than blocked (p \ 0.0001). The analyses clearly demonstrate that important precaution is needed when using the ERD as a cognitive or pathological marker.