Electrophysiological Correlates of Rapid Spatial Orienting Towards Fearful Faces

Pourtois, Gilles; Grandjean, Didier; Sander, David; Vuilleumier, Patrik

doi:10.1093/cercor/bhh023

Cited by 613 publications

(632 citation statements)

References 86 publications

(133 reference statements)

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“…Focusing on late positive potentials, the present findings demonstrate that emotionally arousing pictures affect the processing of subsequently presented pictures, irrespective of whether these pictures depicted emotional or neutral contents. These findings are consistent with the notion of interference and competition for processing resources suggested by cognitive and neuroscientific studies [23,[32][33][34].…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 92%

Affective Prime and Target Picture Processing: An ERP Analysis of Early and Late Interference Effects

2008

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Viewing emotionally arousing compared to neutral pictures is associated with differential electrophysiological activity in early (''early posterior negativity'', EPN), as well as later time-windows (''late positive potential'', LPP). A previous study revealed that the EPN is reduced when the preceding prime picture was emotional. The present study explored whether sequential interference effects are specific for early processing stages or extend to later processing stages. Dense sensor ERPs were measured while subjects viewed a continuous stream of pleasant, neutral, and unpleasant pictures, presented for 660 ms each. Previous results were replicated in that emotional pictures were associated with enlarged EPN and LPP amplitudes compared to neutral pictures. Furthermore, the EPN to emotional and neutral pictures was reduced when preceded by pleasant prime pictures. The novel finding was that emotional compared to neutral prime pictures were associated with reduced LPP amplitudes to the subsequently presented picture irrespective of its emotional valence (pleasant, neutral, unpleasant). These results demonstrate sustained interference effects in serial picture presentations discussed within a framework of resource competition among successive pictures.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 92%

Affective Prime and Target Picture Processing: An ERP Analysis of Early and Late Interference Effects

2008

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“…More generally, this finding is congruent with our main hypothesis that reward-associated stimuli orient attentional resources because of their affective relevance. Indeed, experiments testing positive and negative emotional stimuli found similar effects as our experiments by showing an attentional orienting appearing after 100 ms (e.g., Brosch et al, 2008;Pourtois, Grandjean, Sander, & Vuilleumier, 2004). Note however that in our attentional paradigm, stimuli used as cues were very briefly exposed, but they were not masked.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 81%

Where is the chocolate? Rapid spatial orienting toward stimuli associated with primary rewards

et al. 2014

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a b s t r a c tSome stimuli can orient attentional resources and access awareness even if they appear outside the focus of voluntary attention. Stimuli with low-level perceptual salience and stimuli with an emotional content can modulate attention independently of voluntary processes. In Experiment 1, we used a spatial cuing task to investigate whether stimuli that are controlled for their perceptual salience can modulate the rapid orienting of attention based exclusively on their affective relevance. Affective relevance was manipulated through a Pavlovian conditioning paradigm in which an arbitrary and affectively neutral perceptual stimulus was associated with a primary reward (i.e., a chocolate odor). Results revealed that, after conditioning, attentional resources were rapidly oriented toward the stimulus that was previously associated with the reward. In Experiment 2, we used the very same conditioning procedure, but we devaluated the reward after conditioning for half of the participants through a sensory-specific satiation procedure. Strikingly, when the reward was devaluated, attention was no longer oriented toward reward-associated stimuli. Our findings therefore suggest that reward associations rapidly modulate visual processing independently of both voluntary processing and the perceptual salience of the stimulus. This supports the notion that stimuli associated with primary rewards modulate rapid attention orienting on the basis of the affective relevance of the stimulus.

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“…It is therefore possible that like the findings of Holmes, et al (2008), high-anxious individuals in the current study showed an enhanced P1 and a reduced N1, a pattern similar to the P1 and EPN findings in the Holmes, et al study. The enhanced P1 seen in high-anxious individuals may be taken as a sign of increased sensory processing of the faces, most likely due to projections from the amygdala or other motivational centers to the visual cortex (Lang, Bradley, et al, 1998;Pourtois, Grandjean, Sander, and Vuilleumier, 2004).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Affective primes suppress attention bias to threat in socially anxious individuals

Helfinstein

White

Bar‐Haim

2008

Behaviour Research and Therapy

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Anxious individuals show an attention bias towards threatening information. However, under conditions of sustained environmental threat this otherwise-present attention bias disappears. It remains unclear whether this suppression of attention bias can be caused by a transient activation of the fear system. In the present experiment, high socially-anxious and low socially-anxious individuals (HSA group, n = 12; LSA group, n = 12) performed a modified dot-probe task in which they were shown either a neutral or socially threatening prime word prior to each trial. EEG was collected and ERP components to the prime and faces displays were computed. The behavioral results indicated that HSA individuals show an attention bias to threat after a neutral prime, but no attention bias after a threatening prime, demonstrating that suppression of attention bias can occur after a transient activation of the fear system. Low Socially Anxious individuals showed an opposite pattern: no evidence of a bias to threat with neutral primes but induction of an attention bias to threat following threat primes. ERP results suggested differential processing of the primes and faces displays by HSA and LSA individuals. However, no group by prime interaction was found for any of ERP components.

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Electrophysiological Correlates of Rapid Spatial Orienting Towards Fearful Faces

Cited by 613 publications

References 86 publications

Affective Prime and Target Picture Processing: An ERP Analysis of Early and Late Interference Effects

Affective Prime and Target Picture Processing: An ERP Analysis of Early and Late Interference Effects

Where is the chocolate? Rapid spatial orienting toward stimuli associated with primary rewards

Affective primes suppress attention bias to threat in socially anxious individuals

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