Elisa Vuoriainen

• Doctor of Psychology
• PostDoc Position at Tampere University

Depression is a heterogeneous syndrome that impacts an individual's emotional, social, cognitive and bodily functioning. Depression is associated with biases in emotional processing, but alterations in basic sensory processing have received less attention in depression research. Here, we measured event‐related potentials (ERPs) in response to chang...

Previous studies have shown that task-irrelevant threatening faces (e.g., fearful faces) are difficult to filter from visual working memory (VWM). Depressive symptoms could also potentially affect the ability to filter different emotional faces. What is not known, however, is whether non-threatening negative faces (e.g., sad faces) are also difficu...

It has been shown that the perceiver's mood affects the perception of emotional faces, but it is not known how mood affects preattentive brain responses to emotional facial expressions. To examine the question, we experimentally induced sad and neutral mood in healthy adults before presenting them with task-irrelevant pictures of faces while an ele...

Task-irrelevant threatening faces (e.g., fearful) are difficult to filter from visual working memory (VWM), but the difficulty in filtering non-threatening negative faces (e.g., sad) is not known. Depressive symptoms could also potentially affect the ability to filter different emotional faces. We tested the filtering of task-irrelevant sad and fea...

Previous studies have shown that task-irrelevant threatening faces (e.g., fearful faces) are difficult to filter from visual working memory (VWM). What is not known, however, is whether non-threatening negative faces (e.g., sad faces) are also difficult to filter and whether depressive symptoms affect the ability to filter different emotional faces...

This narrative review brings together the findings regarding the differences in the auditory event-related potentials (ERPs) between patients with depressive disorder and non-depressed control subjects. These studies' results can inform us of the possible alterations in sensory-cognitive processing in depressive disorders and the potential of using...

Event-related potentials (ERPs) are an excellent tool for investigating parental neural responses to child stimuli. Using meta-analysis, we quantified the results of available studies reporting N170 or LPP/P3 ERP responses to children’s faces, targeting three questions: 1) Do parents and non-parents differ in ERP responses to child faces? 2) Are pa...

Automatic deviance detection has been widely explored in terms of mismatch responses (mismatch negativity or mismatch response) and P3a components of event-related potentials (ERPs) under a predictive coding framework; however, the somatosensory mismatch response has been investigated less often regarding the different types of changes than its aud...

Emotional reactions to movies are typically similar between people. However, depressive symptoms decrease synchrony in brain responses. Less is known about the effect of depressive symptoms on intersubject synchrony in conscious stimulus-related processing. In this study, we presented amusing, sad and fearful movie clips to dysphoric individuals (t...

Mismatch brain responses to unpredicted rare stimuli are suggested to be a neural indicator of prediction error, but this has rarely been studied in the somatosensory modality. Here, we investigated how the brain responds to unpredictable and predictable rare events. Magnetoencephalography responses were measured in adults frequently presented with...

Previous studies conducted in healthy humans by applying event-related potentials have shown that task-irrelevant fearful faces are difficult to filter from visual working memory (VWM), and anxiety symptoms increase this difficulty. It is not known, however, whether non-threatening faces are also difficult to be filtered and whether depression symp...

Measures of the brain's automatic electrophysiological responses to sounds represent a potential tool for identifying age-and depression-related neural markers. However, these markers have rarely been studied related to aging and depression within one study. Here, we investigated auditory event-related potentials (ERPs) in the brain that may show d...

Negative bias in face processing has been demonstrated in depression, but there are no longitudinal investigations of negative bias in symptom reduction. We recorded event-related potentials (P1 and N170) to task-irrelevant facial expressions in depressed participants who were later provided with a psychological intervention and in never depressed...

It is not known to what extent the automatic encoding and change detection of peripherally presented facial emotion is altered in dysphoria. The negative bias in automatic face processing in particular has rarely been studied. We used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to record automatic brain responses to happy and sad faces in dysphoric (Beck’s Depres...

Depression is associated with bias in emotional information processing, but less is known about the processing of neutral sensory stimuli. Of particular interest is processing of sound intensity which is suggested to indicate central serotonergic function. We tested weather event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to occasional changes in sound intens...