Test–Retest Reliability of Mismatch Negativity (MMN) to Emotional Voices

Abstract

A voice from kin species conveys indispensable social and affective signals with uniquely phylogenetic and ontogenetic standpoints. However, the neural underpinning of emotional voices, beyond low-level acoustic features, activates a processing chain that proceeds from the auditory pathway to the brain structures implicated in cognition and emotion. By using a passive auditory oddball paradigm, which employs emotional voices, this study investigates the test–retest reliability of emotional mismatch negativity (MMN), indicating that the deviants of positively (happily)- and negatively (angrily)-spoken syllables, as compared to neutral standards, can trigger MMN as a response to an automatic discrimination of emotional salience. The neurophysiological estimates of MMN to positive and negative deviants appear to be highly reproducible, irrespective of the subject’s attentional disposition: whether the subjects are set to a condition that involves watching a silent movie or do a working memory task. Specifically, negativity bias is evinced as threatening, relative to positive vocalizations, consistently inducing larger MMN amplitudes, regardless of the day and the time of a day. The present findings provide evidence to support the fact that emotional MMN offers a stable platform to detect subtle changes in current emotional shifts.

Reliability of mismatch negativity event-related potentials in a multisite, traveling subjects study

“…A better measure of such agreement is the intra-class correlation (ICC) coefficient [37]. Eight studies [23,18,22,24,3,33,9,25] have reported ICCs of MMN. In general, these studies have found that MMN reponses are stable over time, further highlighting the potential for the component to be used a biomarker in high risk populations [26].…”

An integrative analysis of 5HTT-mediated mechanism of hyperactivity to non-threatening voices

“…Emotional syllables that were consistently identified as the extremely fearful and angry, as well as the most emotionless were selected as the fearful, angry and neutral stimuli, respectively. The ratings on the Likert-scale (mean ± SD) for the fearful, angry, and neutral syllables were 4.34 ± 0.65, 4.26 ± 0.85, and 2.47 ± 0.87, respectively (see for validation [31][32][33][36][37][38]57,[61][62][63]70 ).…”

“…The participants underwent the same EEG recording and eMMN protocol as those previously mentioned. To minimize the effect of circadian rhythm and maximize the test-retest reliability 32 , both sessions were recorded in the mid-afternoon (around 15:30 PM). The STAI and Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI) were administered to these subjects to determine their self-reported anxiety levels 1.5 h after receiving either the placebo or lorazepam, and right before the EEG recording.…”

“…This is due to MMN being able to index the biological mechanisms that sit in the border between automatic and attention-dependent processes, which control the gateways to conscious perception and higher orders of memory 29 . Consequently, because of this ability to tap on to attentional processes and memory, it has been argued that emotional MMN (eMMN)-which is a MMN subtype that makes use of emotionally spoken syllables embedded in the auditory oddball paradigm as the deviant stimuli triggering the MMN 30 -can assess the automatic neural processing of emotional voices in as early as the pre-attentive stage 31,32 . Furthermore, a processing chain that proceeds from the primary auditory pathway to brain structures implicated in cognition and emotion-e.g., the, orbitofrontal cortex, amygdala, superior temporal gyrus and sulcus-as well as in the saliency network (insula), has been revealed 31,[33][34][35] .…”

Mismatch Negativity (MMN): Komponen Event-Related Potentials (ERP) sebagai Penanda Aktivitas Otomatis Otak dalam Mendeteksi Perubahan

“…MMN telah digunakan pada ranah penelitian kognisi sosial. Beberapa contoh: terhadap perubahan ekspresi suara orang lain dibandingkan suara diri sendiri (Rachman et al, 2019), respons terhadap suara emosional (C. Chen et al, 2018) pada bayi (Kostilainen et al, 2018), dan individu dengan spektrum autisme (Lindström et al, 2018), suara dari lawan jenis (Casado & Brunellière, 2016;Thornton et al, 2019). Sebuah penelitian cukup menarik dari Petrosino et al (2021) membandingkan tiga suara yang memiliki konotasi sosial: mengendus, batuk, dan kentut.…”