Negative bias of processing ambiguously cued emotional stimuli

Abstract

Daily we cope with upcoming potentially disadvantageous events. Therefore, it makes sense to be prepared for the worst case. Such a 'pessimistic' bias is reflected in brain activation during emotion processing. Healthy individuals underwent functional neuroimaging while viewing emotional stimuli that were earlier cued ambiguously or unambiguously concerning their emotional valence. Presentation of ambiguously announced pleasant pictures compared with unambiguously announced pleasant pictures resulted in increased activity in the ventrolateral prefrontal, premotor and temporal cortex, and in the caudate nucleus. This was not the case for the respective negative conditions. This indicates that pleasant stimuli after ambiguous cueing provided 'unexpected' emotional input, resulting in the adaptation of brain activity. It strengthens the hypothesis of a 'pessimistic' bias of brain activation toward ambiguous emotional events. AbstractWe daily cope with upcoming potentially disadvantageous events. Therefore, it makes sense to be prepared for the worst case. Such 'pessimistic' bias should be reflected in brain activation during emotion processing. Healthy subjects underwent functional neuroimaging while viewing emotional stimuli that prior were cued ambiguously or unambiguously concerning their emotional valence.Presentation of ambiguously announced pleasant pictures compared to unambiguously announced pleasant pictures resulted in increased activity in ventrolateral prefrontal, premotor and temporal cortex, and in caudate nucleus. This was not the case for the respective negative conditions. This indicates that pleasant stimuli after ambiguous cueing provided 'unexpected' emotional input, resulting in adaptation of brain activity. It strengthens the hypothesis of a `pessimistic` bias of brain activation towards ambiguous emotional events.

Individual differences in valence bias: fMRI evidence of the initial negativity hypothesis

“…Also, a pattern similarity analysis revealed that individuals with a negative valence bias showed amygdala responses to surprised faces that were similar to maintaining negative affect towards negatively valence IAPS scenes during an emotion regulation task. Taken together, this study supports the prevailing hypothesis that positive interpretations of ambiguous stimuli involve mechanisms common to reappraisal during explicit emotion regulation (Neta and Tong, 2016), and is consistent with the notion that negative interpretations tend to be the initial response (Kim et al , 2003; Kaffenberger et al , 2010; Neta and Whalen, 2010; Neta et al , 2011). …”

“…Despite individual differences in ratings of emotional ambiguity, initial responses toward ambiguous stimuli tend to be more negative compared with delayed responses (Kim et al , 2003; Kaffenberger et al , 2010; Neta and Whalen, 2010; Neta et al , 2011; Neta and Tong, 2016). For example, reaction times are longer when rating ambiguous cues as positive compared with negative (Neta and Tong, 2016), and surprised faces are detected more quickly as an oddball among positive (happy) compared to among negative (angry) faces (Neta et al , 2011).…”

Collection Development and the Psychology of Bias

“…When positive information was presented in an ambiguous manner, brain activity was evident, showing that the subject's brain regarded the positive information as unexpected and was trying to adapt. This suggests that the psychophysiological disposition of an individual is naturally negative, perhaps as a result of having to cope with a large amount of negative events in the normal course of everyday living [38]. To the selector, this means that there is the possibility that one will enter into the selection process with an overly negative or critical bias, expecting to find nothing that is suitable.…”

Emotion Interaction with Virtual Reality Using Hybrid Emotion Classification Technique toward Brain Signals

“…Then the computed value for each channel will compared in order to check which brain hemisphere is more active. Based on previous researches that have been done by [58] [59] [56] [57] and [60], the high computed Mean value positively correlated with the more active hemisphere. After computing the mean value for each T7 & T8 pair channel, the difference between each Mean is computed.…”

“…The orange and yellow colors illustrate the activity region of the brain meanwhile the white blue color illustrates the Inactive region. According to [58] [59] [60] and [61] each induced emotion directly linked of both right and left hemispheres that result emotion. A negative evoked emotion comes when more active on right frontal lobe meanwhile a positive evoked emotion produces when more active left frontal lobe.…”