Neural mechanisms of subliminal priming for traumatic episodic memory: An ERP study

Yun, Xuyan; Li, Wei; Qiu, Jiang; Jou, Jerwen; Wei, Dongtao; Tu, Shen

doi:10.1016/j.neulet.2011.04.040

Cited by 24 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 22 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…In one of these studies, the slope was correlated with re-experience symptoms cluster but not the other symptom cluster scores. Yun and colleagues [34] found increased P2 amplitude in response to subliminal visual presentation of TR stimuli in PTSD patients. Two studies failed to detect a difference between the PTSD patients and healthy controls in P200 amplitudes or latencies [35,36].…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Event-related potential studies of post-traumatic stress disorder: a critical review and synthesis

Javanbakht

Liberzon

Amirsadri

et al. 2011

Biol Mood Anxiety Disord

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Despite the sparseness of the currently available data, there is accumulating evidence of information processing impairment in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Studies of event-related potentials (ERPs) are the main tool in real time examination of information processing. In this paper, we sought to critically review the ERP evidence of information processing abnormalities in patients with PTSD. We also examined the evidence supporting the existence of a relationship between ERP abnormalities and symptom profiles or severity in PTSD patients. An extensive Medline search was performed. Keywords included PTSD or post-traumatic stress disorder, electrophysiology or EEG, electrophysiology, P50, P100, N100, P2, P200, P3, P300, sensory gating, CNV (contingent negative variation) and MMN (mismatch negativity). We limited the review to ERP adult human studies with control groups which were reported in the English language. After applying our inclusion-exclusion review criteria, 36 studies were included. Subjects exposed to wide ranges of military and civilian traumas were studied in these reports. Presented stimuli were both auditory and visual. The most widely studied components included P300, P50 gating, N100 and P200. Most of the studies reported increased P300 response to trauma-related stimuli in PTSD patients. A smaller group of studies reported dampening of responses or no change in responses to trauma-related and/or unrelated stimuli. P50 studies were strongly suggestive of impaired gating in patients with PTSD. In conclusion, the majority of reports support evidence of information processing abnormalities in patients with PTSD diagnosis. The predominance of evidence suggests presence of mid-latency and late ERP components differences in PTSD patients in comparison to healthy controls. Heterogeneity of assessment methods used contributes to difficulties in reaching firm conclusions regarding the nature of these differences. We suggest that future ERP-PTSD studies utilize standardized assessment scales that provide detailed information regarding the symptom clusters and the degree of symptom severity. This would allow assessment of electrophysiological indices-clinical symptoms relationships. Based on the available data, we suggest that ERP abnormalities in PTSD are possibly affected by the level of illness severity. If supported by future research, ERP studies may be used for both initial assessment and treatment follow-up.

show abstract

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Event-related potential studies of post-traumatic stress disorder: a critical review and synthesis

Javanbakht

Liberzon

Amirsadri

et al. 2011

Biol Mood Anxiety Disord

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…For example, Bernat et al (2001) found that in the supraliminal condition, no significant differences in the P2 component were exhibited between unpleasant and pleasant words, while in the subliminal condition, unpleasant words evoked larger P2 amplitudes than pleasant words. Moreover, Yun et al (2011) also found that the masked threat words elicited a larger P250 amplitude than the neutral words in PTSD (posttraumatic stress disorder) patients. Thus, the P2 component was sensitive to emotional processing in the unconscious (invisible) condition, but not in the visible condition.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…We defined a mid-line ROI to test the P2 component (from five mid-line electrode sites: Fz, FCz, Cz, CPz, and Pz; Yun et al, 2011). Two-way repeated measures ANOVA was used to analyze the ERPs with awareness states and word types as within-subject factors.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Automatic Processing of Emotional Words in the Absence of Awareness: The Critical Role of P2

et al. 2017

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

It has been long debated to what extent emotional words can be processed in the absence of awareness. Behavioral studies have shown that the meaning of emotional words can be accessed even without any awareness. However, functional magnetic resonance imaging studies have revealed that emotional words that are unconsciously presented do not activate the brain regions involved in semantic or emotional processing. To clarify this point, we used continuous flash suppression (CFS) and event-related potential (ERP) techniques to distinguish between semantic and emotional processing. In CFS, we successively flashed some Mondrian-style images into one participant's eye steadily, which suppressed the images projected to the other eye. Negative, neutral, and scrambled words were presented to 16 healthy participants for 500 ms. Whenever the participants saw the stimuli—in both visible and invisible conditions—they pressed specific keyboard buttons. Behavioral data revealed that there was no difference in reaction time to negative words and to neutral words in the invisible condition, although negative words were processed faster than neutral words in the visible condition. The ERP results showed that negative words elicited a larger P2 amplitude in the invisible condition than in the visible condition. The P2 component was enhanced for the neutral words compared with the scrambled words in the visible condition; however, the scrambled words elicited larger P2 amplitudes than the neutral words in the invisible condition. These results suggest that the emotional processing of words is more sensitive than semantic processing in the conscious condition. Semantic processing was found to be attenuated in the absence of awareness. Our findings indicate that P2 plays an important role in the unconscious processing of emotional words, which highlights the fact that emotional processing may be automatic and prioritized compared with semantic processing in the absence of awareness.

show abstract

“…Yun et al [44] found that PTSD participants who had experienced an earthquake disaster elicited an enhanced P200 amplitude when exposed to earthquake-related words. The enhanced P200 might reflect extra attentional resource allocation to earthquake-related words.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Mechanism of Valence-Space Metaphors: ERP Evidence for Affective Word Processing

2014

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Embodied cognition contends that the representation and processing of concepts involve perceptual, somatosensory, motoric, and other physical re-experiencing information. In this view, affective concepts are also grounded in physical information. For instance, people often say “feeling down” or “cheer up” in daily life. These phrases use spatial information to understand affective concepts. This process is referred to as valence-space metaphor. Valence-space metaphors refer to the employment of spatial information (lower/higher space) to elaborate affective concepts (negative/positive concepts). Previous studies have demonstrated that processing affective words affects performance on a spatial detection task. However, the mechanism(s) behind this effect remain unclear. In the current study, we hypothesized that processing affective words might produce spatial information. Consequently, spatial information would affect the following spatial cue detection/discrimination task. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to remember an affective word. Then, they completed a spatial cue detection task while event-related potentials were recorded. The results indicated that the top cues induced enhanced amplitude of P200 component while participants kept positive words relative to negative words in mind. On the contrary, the bottom cues induced enhanced P200 amplitudes while participants kept negative words relative to positive words in mind. In Experiment 2, we conducted a behavioral experiment that employed a similar paradigm to Experiment 1, but used arrows instead of dots to test the attentional nature of the valence-space metaphor. We found a similar facilitation effect as found in Experiment 1. Positive words facilitated the discrimination of upper arrows, whereas negative words facilitated the discrimination of lower arrows. In summary, affective words might activate spatial information and cause participants to allocate their attention to corresponding locations. Valence-space metaphors might be grounded in attention allocation.

show abstract

Neural mechanisms of subliminal priming for traumatic episodic memory: An ERP study

Cited by 24 publications

References 22 publications

Event-related potential studies of post-traumatic stress disorder: a critical review and synthesis

Event-related potential studies of post-traumatic stress disorder: a critical review and synthesis

Automatic Processing of Emotional Words in the Absence of Awareness: The Critical Role of P2

The Mechanism of Valence-Space Metaphors: ERP Evidence for Affective Word Processing

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About