Emotion and Attention Interaction Studied through Event-Related Potentials

Abstract

Several studies on hemodynamic brain activity indicate that emotional visual stimuli elicit greater activation than neutral stimuli in attention-related areas such as the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and the visual association cortex (VAC). In order to explore the temporo-spatial characteristics of the interaction between attention and emotion, two processes characterized by involving short and rapid phases, event-related potentials (ERPs) were measured in 29 subjects using a 60-electrode array and the LORETA source localization software. A cue/target paradigm was employed in order to investigate both expectancy-related and input processing-related attention. Four categories of stimuli were presented to subjects: positive arousing, negative arousing, relaxing, and neutral. Three attention-related components were finally analyzed: N280pre (from pretarget ERPs), P200post and P340post (both from posttarget ERPs). N280pre had a prefrontal focus (ACC and/or medial prefrontal cortex) and presented significantly lower amplitudes in response to cues announcing negative targets. This result suggests a greater capacity of nonaversive stimuli to generate expectancy-related attention. P200post and P340post were both elicited in the VAC, and showed their highest amplitudes in response to negative- and to positive-arousing stimuli, respectively. The origin of P200post appears to be located dorsally with respect to the clear ventral-stream origin of P340post. The conjunction of temporal and spatial characteristics of P200post and P340post leads to the deduction that input processing-related attention associated with emotional visual stimulation involves an initial, rapid, and brief "early" attentional response oriented to rapid motor action, being more prominent towards negative stimulation. This is followed by a slower but longer "late" attentional response oriented to deeper processing, elicited to a greater extent by appetitive stimulation.

Electrophysiological differences in the processing of affective information in words and pictures

“…Similar findings have been also reported in previous studies Delplanque, Lavoie, Hot, Silvert, & Sequeira, 2004;Olofsson & Polich, 2007). These differences have been interpreted as reflecting the engagement of the attentional system in a more complete processing of affective stimuli (Carretié, Martín-Loeches, Hinojosa, & Mercado, 2001;Cuthbert et al, 2000;Schupp et al, 2007). Consequently, it seems that the processing of high-arousing emotional pictures is able to attract top-down modulated attention that reflects the activation of motivational systems in the brain even when they are embedded in a stream of nonrecognizable stimuli.…”

Affective visual event-related potentials: Arousal, valence, and repetition effects for normal and distorted pictures

“…Successively repeated emotional stimuli used as targets in an oddball task produced similar amplitude increases from the first to second repetition . The current results corroborate previous findings and extend the repetition effect to non-successive and unpredictable stimulus sequences (Aftanas et al, 2001;Carretie et al, 2001aCarretie et al, , 2003Carretie et al, , 2004aIto et al, 1998;Keil et al, 2001;Schupp et al, , 2004. Moreover, the lack of interaction with the arousal or valence factors indicates that the modulation of rapid brain responses to affective images is stable over repetitions, so that ERP modulations from reoccurring affective picture stimuli are unlikely to be confounded by repeated stimulus presentations.…”

Affective picture processing: An integrative review of ERP findings

“…Studies have used reoccurring affective pictures to increase the number of stimuli, thereby effectively obtaining a high signal/noise ratio in the ERP recording (Carretie et al, 2001a(Carretie et al, , 2001bSchupp et al, 2000). However, a limited number of picture motifs restricts the generalizability of any obtained findings.…”

“…Differences in direction and magnitude of ERP effects from affective pictures as a function of reference type have to date attracted little empirical interest. However, standard ERP recording methods find that the P2 component and adjacent N2 component are sensitive to the onset of pleasant-going arousal-related amplitude modulation that persists until stimulus offset (Amrhein et al, 2004;Carretie et al, 2001aCarretie et al, , 2001bCuthbert et al, 2000;Olofsson and Polich, 2007).Theoretically, the underlying factor determining middle latency amplitude modulations is selective attention to objects within the affective image that are assumed to be of intrinsic relevance . This interpretation has received indirect support from studies demonstrating non-affect perceptual and category-related ERP modulations in the middle latency range that were attributed to selective attention mechanisms .…”