Here Comes Trouble: Prestimulus Brain Activity Predicts Enhanced Perception of Threat

Abstract

Research on the perceptual prioritization of threatening stimuli has focused primarily on the physical characteristics and evolutionary salience of these stimuli. However, perceptual decision-making is strongly influenced by prestimulus factors such as goals, expectations, and prior knowledge. Using both event-related potentials and functional magnetic resonance imaging, we test the hypothesis that prior threat-related information and related increases in prestimulus brain activity play a key role in subsequent threat-related perceptual decision-making. After viewing threatening and neutral cues, participants detected perceptually degraded threatening and neutral faces presented at individually predetermined perceptual thresholds in a perceptual decision-making task. Compared with neutral cues, threat cues resulted in (1) improved perceptual sensitivity and faster detection of target stimuli; (2) increased late positive potential (LPP) and superior temporal sulcus (STS) activity, both of which are measures of emotional face processing; and (3) increased amygdala activity for subsequently presented threatening versus and neutral faces. Importantly, threat cue-related LPP and STS activity predicted subsequent improvement in the speed and precision of perceptual decisions specifically for threatening faces. Present findings establish the importance of top-down factors and prestimulus neural processing in understanding how the perceptual system prioritizes threatening information.

Endogenous testosterone is associated with lower amygdala reactivity to angry faces and reduced aggressive behavior in healthy young women

“…Hence, whereas the amygdala might rapidly code for emotional salience6869, STG activity could more slowly subserve conscious threat perception. Supporting this account, it has been recently shown that threatening faces increase both STG and amygdala activation, but only STG reactivity correlates with emotion recognition accuracy70.…”

Cue Valence Influences the Effects of Cue Uncertainty on ERP Responses to Emotional Events

“…Theories regarding expectancy bias have suggested that cues indicating an emotional event, particularly a negative event, alter emotional states and thus attention towards the event (Tomarken et al, 1989;de Jong et al, 1995;Davey and Dixon, 1996;Lin et al, 2012Lin et al, , 2014bSussman et al, 2017). Consistent with these theories, a behavioral study by Aue et al (2013) reported slower response times in identifying neutral stimuli when participants had expected the occurrences of negative stimuli than those of neutral stimuli.…”

“…When the cues indicate upcoming emotional consequences, the cues might pre-activate the attentional mechanisms before the consequences and enhance vigilance attention afterward (e.g., Tomarken et al, 1989;de Jong et al, 1995;Davey and Dixon, 1996;Lin et al, 2012Lin et al, , 2014bAue et al, 2013;Sussman et al, 2017). While uncertain cues also enhance attention to upcoming events (e.g., Nitschke, 2011, 2013;Dieterich et al, 2016Dieterich et al, , 2017; for a review, Anselme, 2010), the enhanced attention elicited by certain cues is thought to be stronger than that elicited by uncertain cues in the context of implicit expectations (Lin et al, 2018).…”

“…Some of these emotional and non-emotional cues signify upcoming events with certainty (i.e., they are certain cues), whereas others do not (i.e., they are uncertain cues). The different categories of cues might critically influence the perception of emotional consequences and even guide decision-making associated with those consequences (e.g., Onoda et al, 2006Onoda et al, , 2007Onoda et al, , 2008Sarinopoulos et al, 2010;Grupe and Nitschke, 2011;Gole et al, 2012;Lin et al, 2012Lin et al, , 2014aLin et al, ,b, 2015aLin et al, ,d, 2017bLin et al, , 2018Yang et al, 2012;Aue et al, 2013;Dieterich et al, 2016Dieterich et al, , 2017Sussman et al, 2017;Qiao et al, 2018).…”

“…Theories and related empirical studies on expectancy bias have suggested that cues indicating emotional consequences pre-activate the emotion corresponding to the consequence (e.g., Tomarken et al, 1989;de Jong et al, 1995;Davey and Dixon, 1996;Sussman et al, 2017), which influences attention to the upcoming consequence. When the processing of cues (e.g., positive cues) does not require large attentional resources, this pre-activation might help in enhancing vigilance and attention towards emotional events.…”