Danger and disease: Electrocortical responses to threat- and disgust-eliciting images

Social and nonsocial affective processing in schizophrenia — An ERP study

“…The level of arousal elicited by the presented stimuli is the main factor modulating EPN, with a larger reduction of EPN for negative compared to neutral stimuli found across various tasks (Olofsson et al, 2008). However, specific factors, including the type of the presented basic emotion, may also modulate EPN amplitude (Wheaton et al, 2013). Here, we observed decreased modulation of EPN in patients with a specific reduction for negative social stimuli compared to neutral social stimuli in controls, but not in patients.…”

Disgust-specific modulation of early attention processes

“…Hence the fitting subtitle of their study "fear betrays, but disgust you can trust" (p. 810). Finally, direct support for the increased attention interpretation can be found in the ERP literature, showing that compared to fear-evoking images, disgust-evoking ones are characterized by a larger frontal P2 (Carretié et al, 2011) and a larger early posterior negativity (EPN) (Wheaton et al, 2013). Both of these ERP components occur around 200 ms post-stimulus and reflect early attention orienting.…”

Testing the snake-detection hypothesis: larger early posterior negativity in humans to pictures of snakes than to pictures of other reptiles, spiders and slugs

“…It should be noted that the mean disgust rating for slugs was relatively moderate (28.83 out of a maximum of 48) and that disgust as such can modulate the EPN. A recent study (Wheaton et al, 2013) found that, within a broad range of animate and inanimate stimuli, disgusting images (e.g., vomit, excrement, infections, contaminated food) evoked slightly higher EPN amplitudes than fearful images (e.g., angry faces, attacking dogs, weapons).…”