Harm avoidance in adolescents modulates late positive potentials during affective picture processing

Abstract

Research in adults has shown that individual differences in harm avoidance (HA) modulate electrophysiological responses to affective stimuli. To determine whether HA in adolescents modulates affective information processing, we collected event-related potentials from 70 adolescents while they viewed 90 pictures from the Chinese affective picture system. Multiple regressions revealed that HA negatively predicted late positive potential (LPP) for positive pictures and positively predicted for negative pictures; however, HA did not correlate with LPP for neutral pictures. The results suggest that at the late evaluative stage, high-HA adolescents display attentional bias to negative pictures while low-HA adolescents display attentional bias to negative pictures. Moreover, these dissociable attentional patterns imply that individual differences in adolescents' HA modulate the late selective attention mechanism of affective information.

Social proof in the human brain: Electrophysiological signatures of agreement and disagreement with the majority

“…The LPC most likely reflects the late recruitment of attentional resources in order to selectively process incoming stimulation and facilitate encoding, decision making, and response selection (Johnston & Oliver‐Rodriguez, ; Nieuwenhuis, Aston‐Jones, & Cohen, ; Sutton & Ruchkin, ; Wei & Zhang, ; W. Zhang et al, ). The effect of feedback valence on the amplitude of LPC‐like deflections is well in line with the assumption that attention closely follows the relevance and value of incoming sensory stimulation (Potts, ).…”

“…This difference is, however, most likely due to the differential attentional demands of processing emotional stimuli versus feedback signals. Across domains and tasks, it has been suggested that LPC enhancements reflect late selective attention to currently salient and relevant stimuli (Weinberg, Hilgard, Bartholow, & Hajcak, ; W. Zhang et al, ). Interestingly, in several previous ERP studies, LPC amplitude appeared to be larger for agreement (no conflict) as compared to deviance from the group (Huang et al, ; Kim et al, ; Schnuerch et al, ).…”

“…This difference is, however, most likely due to the differential attentional demands of processing emotional stimuli versus feedback signals. Across domains and tasks, it has been suggested that LPC enhancements reflect late selective attention to currently salient and relevant stimuli (Weinberg, Hilgard, Bartholow, & Hajcak, 2012;W. Zhang et al, 2013).…”

“…The LPC most likely reflects the late recruitment of attentional resources in order to selectively process incoming stimulation and facilitate encoding, decision making, and response selection (Johnston & Oliver-Rodriguez, 1997;Nieuwenhuis, Aston-Jones, & Cohen, 2005;Sutton & Ruchkin, 1984;Wei & Zhang, 2012;W. Zhang et al, 2013).…”

Is reappraisal always effective in modifying emotional reactions in females? The role of regulatory timing and goals

“…LPP is a broad positive component sensitive to the motivational relevance of visual stimuli (Cuthbert, Schupp, Bradley, Birbaumer, & Lang, 2000;Schupp, Junghofer, Weike, & Hamm, 2004;Schupp et al, 2000). The previous studies Gao et al, 2017;Moser et al, 2009;Zhang et al, 2012Zhang et al, , 2013 suggested that the central-parietal and parietal LPP in general was associated with emotional significance of stimuli, the more positive parietal LPP indicating the enhancement in emotional intensity and the more negative parietal LPP indicating the decrease in emotional intensity. However, several recent studies found higher frontal LPP under reappraisal relative to the viewing condition and argued that enhanced frontal LPP may index increased cognitive effort associated with reappraisal (Bernat, Cadwallader, Seo, Vizueta, & Patrick, 2011;Moser, Hartwig, Moran, Jendrusina, & Kross, 2014;Shafir, Schwartz, Blechert, & Sheppes, 2015).…”