Article

Stability and change in emotional processing across development: A 6‐year longitudinal investigation using event‐related potentials

Authors:
To read the full-text of this research, you can request a copy directly from the authors.

Abstract

ERPs reveal the temporal dynamics of emotional processing and are easily assessed in children. Yet, little longitudinal research has examined ERPs sensitive to emotion across development. We aimed to systematically identify timing and spatial distributions of ERPs sensitive to emotion in a longitudinal sample of youth (N = 62) using principal component analysis (PCA) and evaluate stability and change in emotional responses across development. Participants completed an emotional interrupt paradigm in childhood (Mage = 9.38, SD = 0.42), early adolescence (Mage = 13.03, SD = 0.24), and midadolescence (Mage = 15.16, SD = 0.17). ERPs were recorded to unpleasant, pleasant, and neutral images. Participants were instructed to respond to a target while viewing images. Two components sensitive to emotion emerged across development: P300/early late positive potential (LPP) and late LPP. The P300/early LPP component was characterized by an enhanced positivity for unpleasant compared to pleasant and neutral images. The late LPP was enhanced for both unpleasant and pleasant compared to neutral images, and more positive for unpleasant compared to pleasant images. The components showed moderate to strong stability. Overall LPP magnitude decreased from childhood into adolescence. There was a developmental shift in distributions from occipital sites in childhood to centroparietal sites in midadolescence. Results support use of PCA to inform scoring windows and electrode selection. The shift in distribution may reflect developmental focalization in underlying neural circuitry. Future work is needed using multimodal approaches to further understand the relationship between ERPs and changes in neural circuitry across development.

No full-text available

Request Full-text Paper PDF

To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.

... Electroencephalogram (EEG) methods are economical and accessible neural measures that can be applied to objectively assess emotional responses, and RDoC-informed research has begun to characterize the construct validity of EEG measures for assessing PVS and NVS function in depression (e.g., [20,13,21]). In particular, the reward positivity (RewP) and late positive potential (LPP) event-related potential (ERP) components are reliably elicited in response to reward feedback and salient emotional images, respectively [22,23]. Further, the RewP to rewards and LPP to emotional images correlate with individual differences in other facets of PVS/NVS function, including self-reported and observed affect [20,21,24]. ...
... Social reward task-Participants completed the Island Getaway task ([60]b), which simulates social interactions between peers to measure neural responses to social acceptance and rejection feedback. Previous studies have shown that the task reliably elicits ERPs sensitive to social reward (i.e., peer acceptance feedback; [23,55]). The task code is available at: https://github.com/Kodiologist/Survivor/tree/vanderbilt. ...
... Interpersonal emotional interrupt task-Participants completed a novel interpersonal emotion task [34,54] adapted from an established emotional interrupt paradigm, which has been shown to reliably elicit the LPP in prior research (e.g., [23,67]). ...
Article
Full-text available
Depression is a prevalent, debilitating, and costly disorder that often manifests in adolescence. There is an urgent need to understand core pathophysiological processes for depression to inform more targeted intervention efforts. The Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) Positive Valence Systems (PVS) and Negative Valence Systems (NVS) have both been implicated in depression symptomatology and vulnerability; however, the nature of NVS alterations is unclear across studies, and associations between single neural measures and symptoms are often small in magnitude and inconsistent. The present study advances characterization of depression in adolescence via an innovative data-driven approach to identifying subgroups of PVS and NVS function by integrating multiple neural measures (assessed by electroencephalogram [EEG]) relevant to depression in adolescents oversampled for clinical depression and depression risk based on maternal history (N = 129; 14–17 years old). Results of the k-means cluster analysis supported a two-cluster solution wherein one cluster was characterized by relatively attenuated reward and emotion responsiveness across valences and the other by relatively intact responsiveness. Youth in the attenuated responsiveness cluster reported significantly greater depressive symptoms and were more likely to have major depressive disorder diagnoses than youth in the intact responsiveness cluster. In contrast, associations of individual neural measures with depressive symptoms were non-significant. The present study highlights the importance of innovative neuroscience approaches to characterize emotional processing in depression across domains, which is imperative to advancing the clinical utility of RDoC-informed research.
... In particular, to better understand the EEM, the late positive potential (LPP), thought mainly to index greater attentional engagement toward emotional stimuli, was examined in these studies. The LPP can appear at several latency ranges (often categorized as early, middle, and late) developmental changes seem to occur at the neural level with the scalp distribution of the LPP that shift from the occipital sites in middle childhood to more anterior regions in adolescence [19,34,35], associated with a decrease in amplitude until adulthood during the 400-1000 ms time window [36]. These changes in scalp distribution of the LPP suggest the contribution of different neural resources, and hence, cognitive processes, for the emotion processing across the development. ...
... These discrepancies could be due in part to developmental changes that occur at the neural level for emotion processing, as children in our study were, on average, older than the children in the study by the Ref. [29]. Indeed, some other ERP studies that have investigated the development of emotion-processing, albeit without memory tasks [19,34,35], offer some evidence of a shift in the scalp distribution of the LPP from posterior sites in middle childhood to more centro-parietal regions in adolescence [19,34,35]. In these studies, both negative and positive pictures were associated with a larger LPP compared to neutral pictures, and negative pictures also elicited larger LPP compared to positive pictures, for all groups of age from 8-to 15-year-old children. ...
... These discrepancies could be due in part to developmental changes that occur at the neural level for emotion processing, as children in our study were, on average, older than the children in the study by the Ref. [29]. Indeed, some other ERP studies that have investigated the development of emotion-processing, albeit without memory tasks [19,34,35], offer some evidence of a shift in the scalp distribution of the LPP from posterior sites in middle childhood to more centro-parietal regions in adolescence [19,34,35]. In these studies, both negative and positive pictures were associated with a larger LPP compared to neutral pictures, and negative pictures also elicited larger LPP compared to positive pictures, for all groups of age from 8-to 15-year-old children. ...
Article
Full-text available
The Emotional Enhancement of Memory (EEM) has been well-demonstrated in adults, but less is known about EEM in children. The present study tested the impact of emotional valence of pictures on episodic memory using behavioral and neurophysiological measures. Twenty-six 8-to 11-year-old children were tested and compared to 30 young adults. Both groups participated in pictures' intentional encoding tasks while event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded, followed by immediate free recall tasks. Behavioral results revealed a general EEM in free recall performances in both groups, along with a negativity effect in children. ERP responses revealed a particular sensitivity to negative pictures in children with a late emotion effect at anterior clusters, as well as a greater successful encoding effect for emotional pictures compared to neutral ones. For adults, the emotion effect was more pronounced for positive pictures across all time windows from the centro-parietal to the frontal part, and localized in the left hemisphere. Positive pictures also elicited a greater successful encoding effect at anterior clusters in adults. By combining behavioral and neurophysiological measures to assess the EEM in children compared with adults, our study provides new knowledge concerning the interaction between emotional and memory processes during development.
... It is worth noting that one study using an emotional dot-probe task with 4-to 7-year-old children did not find significant differences in P1, N1, or P2 amplitudes between emotional and neutral images, suggesting the effects of emotion on earlier ERP components in childhood may be task-dependent (Deveney et al., 2020;Usler et al., 2020). Similarly, longitudinal research from middle childhood into adolescence did not identify early ERPs that were consistently modulated by emotion across development (Pegg et al., 2019). These inconsistencies may be attributable to variability in task design (e.g., dot-probe paradigms versus passive viewing paradigms) and ERP scoring parameters. ...
... In addition to changes in the latency and emotional modulation of early ERPs, early to middle childhood is associated with distinct developmental differences in relatively later stages of emotional processing captured by the LPP. The LPP is a sustained positive deflection in the ERP waveform emerging around 300 ms post-stimulus onset that is enhanced for motivationally-salient stimuli , and may actually consist of multiple overlapping, but functionally distinct, positivities Pegg et al., 2019). Around early to middle childhood, the LPP appears to be modulated by emotional stimuli in patterns similar to those observed in adults , with enhancements for both pleasant and unpleasant developmentally appropriate stimuli compared to neutral (Hua et al., 2014;Solomon et al., 2012). ...
... There are also notable changes in the distribution of the LPP, which shifts from being maximal over occipital sites early in development to more central and parietal sites by adolescence and adulthood (Bondy et al., 2018;Kujawa et al., 2012b;Kujawa et al., 2013a;MacNamara et al., 2016b;Mulligan et al., 2020;Pegg et al., 2019;Zhang et al., 2012). A study of 8-to 13-year-old children also found differences in the distribution of the LPP depending on the valence of the images, such that LPPs to sad faces and unpleasant emotional scenes appeared more broadly distributed over both occipital and parietal sites, while LPPs to pleasant emotional scenes were pronounced only over parietal sites (Kujawa et al., 2012b). ...
Article
Emotionally-salient stimuli receive selective attention and elicit complex neural responses that evolve considerably across development. Event-related potentials (ERPs) optimally capture the dynamics of emotion processing and regulation, with sensitivity to detect changes in magnitude, latency, and maximal location across development. In this selective qualitative review, we summarize evidence of developmental changes in neural reactivity to emotional stimuli and modulation of neural responses during emotion regulation indexed by ERPs across infancy, childhood, and adolescence. The cumulative ERP literature suggests the transition from childhood to adulthood is characterized by a gradual decrease in neural reactivity to emotional stimuli and increased efficiency in attentional allocation towards emotional stimuli. Some studies show sensitivity to emotional stimuli peaks in adolescence, but the evidence is mixed. While both early (<300 ms) and late (>300 ms) ERPs demonstrate sensitivity to emotional stimuli, emotional modulation is more consistently observed in relatively later ERPs across development. The literature additionally shows improvements in regulation abilities across development, though ERP research on developmental changes in emotion regulation is still relatively limited, highlighting a critical direction for future research. Finally, we briefly discuss changes in emotion-related ERPs relevant to the emergence of depression and anxiety. Findings from this review indicate that ERPs provide abundant information about the development of emotion processing and regulation, with potential clinical utility for detecting early-emerging vulnerabilities for internalizing forms of psychopathology.
... Comme chez les adultes, l'activité du LPP pouvait également être modulée lors de l'utilisation de stratégies intentionnelles de régulation des émotions chez les enfants de 5 à 7 ans (Babkirk, Rios, & Dennis, 2015), de 7 à 10 ans ) et les adolescents de 12 à 17 ans (Desatnik, Bel-Bahar, Nolte, et al. 2017). Néanmoins, la distribution topographique du LPP semblerait varier avec l'âge, migrant des régions postérieures chez les enfants vers des régions plus antérieures chez les adolescents (Kujawa, Klein, & Hajcak, 2012 ;Kujawa, Klein, & Proudfit, 2013 ;Pegg, Dickey, Mumper, Kessel, Klein, & Kujawa, 2019), associée à une baisse de l'amplitude du LPP jusqu'à l'âge adulte (Bondy, Stewart, Hajcak, et al., 2018 ;pour Un des exemples de vie quotidienne les plus marquants de cet effet des émotions sur la mémoire est le phénomène de flashbulb memories, qui fait référence à un souvenir disposant d'une qualité de détails quasiment photographique d'un événement fortement émotionnel (Brown & Kulik, 1977). ...
... These discrepancies could be due in part to developmental changes that occur at the neural level for emotion processes, as children in our study were in average older than the children in Leventon's et al. study. Indeed, some other ERP studies that have investigated the development of emotion processes, albeit without memory task (Kujawa et al., 2012(Kujawa et al., , 2013Pegg et al., 2019), bring some evidences of a shift in the scalp distribution of the LPP from posterior sites in middle childhood to more centro-parietal regions in adolescence (Kujawa et al. 2012(Kujawa et al. , 2013Pegg et al., 2019). In these studies, both negative and positive pictures were associated with a larger LPP compared to neutral pictures, and negative pictures also elicited larger LPP compared to positive pictures, for all groups of age from 8-to 15-year-old children. ...
... These discrepancies could be due in part to developmental changes that occur at the neural level for emotion processes, as children in our study were in average older than the children in Leventon's et al. study. Indeed, some other ERP studies that have investigated the development of emotion processes, albeit without memory task (Kujawa et al., 2012(Kujawa et al., , 2013Pegg et al., 2019), bring some evidences of a shift in the scalp distribution of the LPP from posterior sites in middle childhood to more centro-parietal regions in adolescence (Kujawa et al. 2012(Kujawa et al. , 2013Pegg et al., 2019). In these studies, both negative and positive pictures were associated with a larger LPP compared to neutral pictures, and negative pictures also elicited larger LPP compared to positive pictures, for all groups of age from 8-to 15-year-old children. ...
Thesis
Full-text available
Ces dernières années, les émotions et la cognition, et en particulier le lien entre ces deux domaines, ont fasciné les scientifiques du monde entier, donnant naissance à de nombreux travaux de recherche en psychologie, sciences cognitives et neurosciences. L’une des fonctions cognitives qui a éminemment attirée l’attention des chercheurs, en lien avec la modulation émotionnelle à laquelle elle est assujettie, est la mémoire épisodique. Aussi, les travaux de recherche réalisés chez l’Homme se sont largement accordés sur un point : les émotions participent à l’amélioration de la mémoire épisodique, un phénomène qui, dans la littérature, porte le nom de Emotional Enhancement of Memory (EEM). Si ce phénomène a amplement été étudié dans la population adulte, la nature de l’interaction entre mémoire et émotions reste largement inexplorée au cours du développement ontogénétique. Or, l’enfance est une période charnière durant laquelle des modifications majeures émergent au niveau du fonctionnement cérébral, sous-tendant le développement cognitif et émotionnel de l’enfant jusqu’à l’âge adulte. Ce travail de thèse s’est donc centré, dans un premier temps, sur l’étude de l’EEM chez l’enfant au développement typique (DT) afin de mettre en exergue de potentielles modulations développementales comparativement à la population adulte. Dans un deuxième temps, afin d’élargir nos connaissances sur l’EEM au cours du développement, ce travail de thèse a adopté une approche neuropsychologique avec l’étude de ce phénomène auprès d’enfants et d’adolescents porteurs d’un trouble neuro-développemental appelé syndrome de Williams-Beuren (SWB). Ainsi, plusieurs études expérimentales ont été conduites afin d’évaluer l’EEM chez l’enfant au DT et dans le SWB, à la fois avec des évaluations comportementales, comprenant des tâches d’encodage et de récupération en mémoire de stimuli émotionnels (négatifs et positifs) et neutres, ainsi qu’avec des mesures neurophysiologiques grâce à l’électro-encéphalographie (EEG). En particulier, les évaluations comportementales se sont intéressées à l’analyse de la mémoire épisodique dans sa globalité, c’est-à-dire en tenant compte de ses deux composants principaux qui sont la mémoire de l’item et la mémoire associative. Les résultats obtenus dans ce travail de recherche ont permis, pour la première fois, de mettre en évidence l’émergence d’un EEM à la fois en mémoire de l’item et en mémoire associative chez les enfants au DT âgés de 8 à 11 ans, et ceci de façon similaire à des jeunes adultes. Des premiers indices de la modulation des réponses neuronales lors de l’encodage de stimuli émotionnels pouvant prédire les performances comportementales en mémoire, ont également été apportés chez les enfants au DT. Par ailleurs, ce travail de recherche a contribué à fournir des premières preuves de l’émergence d’un EEM chez les enfants et adolescents porteurs du SWB âgés de 8 à 18 ans, qui apparaissait de façon similaire à un groupe de jeunes enfants au DT. Dans l’ensemble, ce travail de thèse a permis de démontrer que l’EEM est un phénomène robuste, qui se mettrait en place précocement au cours du développement et qui ne semblerait pas être affecté par l’immaturité de certains processus mnésiques observée chez les enfants au DT, ni par l’altération de ces processus dans le cas du SWB.
... Of particular relevance, the late positive potential (LPP) is an ERP component characterized by a sustained positive deflection beginning around 300-ms, post-stimulus onset that is heightened for emotional stimuli compared with neutral, indexing the sustained processing of motivationally salient stimuli Schupp et al., 2000). The LPP is evidenced to be a reliable, stable indicator of individual differences in emotion processing across development (Bondy et al., 2018;Cassidy et al., 2012;Pegg, Dickey, et al., 2019a). Furthermore, research indicates that the LPP is sensitive to the content, valence, arousal, and class of stimuli (Olofsson et al., 2008;Thom et al., 2014;Weinberg & Hajcak, 2010). ...
... While EEG was recorded, participants completed a novel interpersonal emotion task analogous to the emotional interrupt paradigm, which has been shown to reliably elicit the LPP in prior research (Kujawa et al., 2012;Nelson et al., 2015;Pegg, Dickey, et al., 2019a). Stimuli for this task were specifically selected to be relevant to the social experiences of adolescents and emerging adults and consisted of 15 threatening interpersonal images (e.g., bullying by peers, young people arguing with parents or friends), 15 pleasant interpersonal images (e.g., friends laughing, young happy couples), and 15 nonsocial neutral images (e.g., nature and city scenes). ...
... However, we did not observe any impact of condition on participants' behavioral performance, although we did observe the expected modulation of subjective ratings of the images. Developmental research evidences reduced RTs and increased accuracy on emotion interrupt paradigms with age (Pegg, Dickey, et al., 2019a), thus as cognitive control improves, behavioral interference effects decrease, which may partially account for the lack of an effect of interpersonal emotional condition on accuracy. Although some research on adults found slowed RTs and decreased accuracy for emotional conditions compared to neutral (Weinberg & Hajcak, 2011), other research had null behavioral effects depending on the type of stimuli used (Kujawa et al., 2012). ...
Article
Affective neuroscience research using electrocortical event-related potentials has provided valuable insights on alterations in emotion processing in internalizing disorders. However, internalizing disorders are accompanied by additional impairments in social cognition and functioning, and most extant research examines neural responses to broad categories of emotional scenes or faces presented irrespective of context. Examining neural reactivity specifically to interpersonal emotional scenes may more precisely capture and disentangle processes involved in depression and social anxiety, two highly comorbid forms of psychopathology. The current study validated a novel set of positive and threatening interpersonal emotional stimuli in a sample of emerging adults (N = 114) who completed a modified emotional interrupt paradigm while electroencephalogram and behavioral data were recorded. Participant ratings of valence and arousal supported the validity of the emotional images. Consistent with prior research, sustained neurophysiological processing indexed by the late positive potential (LPP) was observed for interpersonal emotional images, especially positive, compared with neutral images. Elevated LPP reactivity to both positive and threatening interpersonal images moderated the effects of chronic interpersonal stress on social anxiety symptoms, such that enhanced LPP reactivity in conjunction with higher levels of chronic interpersonal stress was associated with elevated social anxiety symptoms. These results were unique to social anxiety symptoms and not symptoms of depression, suggesting sustained neural processing of interpersonal stimuli may differentiate social anxiety from depression. Future research on emotional reactivity specifically within the interpersonal domain is needed to inform our understanding of developmental pathways to internalizing psychopathology.
... Combined electroencephalography (EEG)-functional magnetic resonance imaging studies show that scalp-recorded LPP correlates with activation within a broad network of cortical and subcortical regions, including the amygdala, nucleus accumbens, medial and ventrolateral prefrontal cortices, and visual cortices (23)(24)(25)(26). The LPP demonstrates sensitivity to individual differences in emotion processing and is reliably elicited across development (27)(28)(29). ...
... However, one study found enhanced LPPs to emotional faces when controlling for comorbid anxiety (41), supporting heterogeneous patterns of reactivity within major depressive disorder, potentially because of specific symptom combinations, such as the presence or absence of anhedonia. These discrepancies may also relate to developmental differences in reactivity, given the evidence for overall reductions in LPPs with age (29). Reduced LPPs in depression fit with emotion context insensitivity theories (42), possibly reflecting the inability to sustain activation in motivational systems (30,43), particularly for positive stimuli (44). ...
... Interpersonal Emotional Interrupt Task. EEG was continuously recorded while participants completed an interpersonal version of an emotional interrupt paradigm, which reliably elicits the LPP (29,58). Stimuli were selected for relevance to the social experiences of emerging adults, including 15 threatening interpersonal images (e.g., bullying by peers, arguing with parents or friends), 15 pleasant interpersonal images (e.g., friends laughing, happy couples), and 15 nonsocial neutral images (e.g., nature and city scenes). ...
Article
Background Exposure to stressful events related to COVID-19 has been associated with increases in the prevalence of depression and anxiety, raising questions about vulnerabilities that make some individuals most susceptible to internalizing symptoms following stress exposure. Methods The current prospective study examined the effects of neurophysiological reactivity to positive and threatening interpersonal stimuli, indexed by the late positive potential (LPP) event-related potential, in conjunction with exposure to interpersonal pandemic-related stressors in the prediction of internalizing symptom changes from pre- to during the pandemic. Emerging adults (N=75) initially completed measures of internalizing symptoms and an interpersonal emotional images task while electroencephalogram was recorded pre-pandemic and were re-contacted during the COVID-19 pandemic in May 2020 to complete measures of exposure to pandemic-related stressful events and current internalizing symptoms. Results Results indicated that emerging adults experienced numerous stressful events associated with the pandemic, as well as overall increases in symptoms of depression and traumatic intrusions during the pandemic. Furthermore, significant interactions between LPP reactivity to positive and threatening interpersonal stimuli and interpersonal stress exposure emerged in the prediction of internalizing symptoms, controlling for baseline symptoms. Under high exposure to interpersonal stressors, reduced positive LPPs predicted increases in depressive symptoms while enhanced threatening LPPs predicted increases in traumatic intrusions. Conclusions These findings highlight the mental health impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on emerging adults, and the role of individual differences in neurophysiological reactivity to emotional stimuli in vulnerability for depression and traumatic intrusions following stress exposure.
... 10,24 Meanwhile, P200 and P300 showed greater positive deflection in negative conditions than in neutral conditions consistently in multiple studies. 25,26,27 In older ERP studies, the P300 (often overlapping with LPP) is often associated with memory processes 25 and attentional processes. 26 In more recent studies, P300 amplitude has been known to be typically higher during disgust visual cues and less so for angry visual cues when compared against neutral cues. ...
... 25,26,27 In older ERP studies, the P300 (often overlapping with LPP) is often associated with memory processes 25 and attentional processes. 26 In more recent studies, P300 amplitude has been known to be typically higher during disgust visual cues and less so for angry visual cues when compared against neutral cues. 27 ...
Article
INTRODUCTION: Moral violation is known to elicit negative moral emotions and is associated with the electroencephalography (EEG)-derived P300 wave. However, the neural basis of moral categorisation (immoral behaviors towards animate beings or inanimate beings) has yet to be explored in moral psychology, which may increase knowledge and further understanding of brain function for the rehabilitation process. Thus our study aims to investigate the difference in brain processes between animate and inanimate moral violations. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Twenty-six participants (mean age of 24 years old) were involved in the experimental observation that was held in the Neuroscience Laboratory. In the event-related potential (ERP) session, EEG-derived P300 data were recorded while participants viewed a random series of 200 trials of visual stimuli that were distributed according to the odd-ball paradigm. The trials consisted of three image categories (15% of immoral behaviour toward animate beings, 15% of immoral behaviour to non-animate beings, and 70% of neutral images). Participants also pressed the buttons numbered ‘1’ or ‘2’ while responding to animate beings and inanimate beings, respectively. RESULTS: When compared to neutral images and nonanimate objects, the brain regions that were activated with immoral behavior toward animate beings had the biggest P300 amplitude with stronger neural activation in the temporal and occipital regions. CONCLUSION: Immoral behaviour towards animate beings is associated with greater neural cognition, as reflected by the activation in most brain regions. This discovery contributes to a better understanding of the moral foundation. It could be applied in determining the abnormal pattern of brain function and as a baseline reference to be used in the medical rehabilitation field.
... The discrepancy might be related to cortical development. Previous studies have revealed that the distribution of the LPC emotion effect shifts from occipital regions in childhood to central-parietal regions in adolescence (Kujawa et al., 2012;Kujawa et al., 2013;Mulligan et al., 2020;Pegg et al., 2019), and more toward frontal regions in adulthood (Foti et al., 2009). Neuroimaging data have further indicated that the neural circuits of emotional processing underlying the LPC include a bidirectional connection between the prefrontal and subcortical cortex (Moratti et al., 2011). ...
... However, the group difference in the current study may or may not be a product of development. More advanced techniques, such as principal component analysis (PCA) with a follow-up study, could be considered to more confidently examine the developmental shifts in the N400 and LPC components (e.g., Kujawa et al., 2013;Pegg et al., 2019). ...
Article
Prior studies involving adults have shown that words can elicit emotional processing, with emotion-label (e.g., happiness) and emotion-laden words (e.g., gift) having distinct processes. However, limited studies have explored the developmental changes in these processes in relation to emotional valence. To address this question, this exploratory study measured event-related potentials (ERPs) in 11–14-year-old children/adolescents (N = 25) and adults (N = 23) while performing an emotional categorization task. The stimuli used were two-character Chinese words, with factors for word type (emotion-label versus emotion-laden) and valence (positive versus negative). To confirm word emotionality, neutral words were also included and compared with all emotional words. The results showed that adults exhibited reduced N400 amplitudes to emotion-label words compared to emotion-laden ones in both positive and negative valence contexts. The differentiation was only sustained for negative valence in the late positive component (LPC). Similar scalp distributions of the effects of word type were found in children/adolescents; however, they exhibited a more prolonged processing of all emotional words than adults. These results suggest that the processing of emotion-label and emotion-laden words are distinct in late childhood, and this discrepancy varies with emotional valence and increasing age.
... For the LPP, studies of reactivity to emotional stimuli (i.e., faces or images) have also suggested developmental differences in amplitude as well as location. Specifically, studies have generally found decreases in LPP magnitude to emotional stimuli from childhood to adolescence (e.g., Bunford et al., 2018;Kujawa et al., 2013;MacNamara et al., 2016;Pegg et al., 2019) as well as some evidence for age-related differences in peak location, shifting from occipitoparietal sites in childhood to more purely parietal sites in adolescence, though this may depend on stimulus type (Kujawa et al., 2012). A key question is whether similar developmental differences are observed for reward-related P3 and LPP, particularly with regard to age-related differences in response to gains versus losses. ...
... Further, although not statistically significant in this age range, there was a trend toward larger fb-LPP responses to gains than losses by early adolescence, suggesting a potential target to be explored in future research. These findings are partially consistent with what has been seen in studies examining the LPP outside of the context of reward tasks (e.g., Bunford et al., 2018;Kujawa et al., 2013;MacNamara et al., 2016;Pegg et al., 2019). In these studies, however, LPP amplitudes for both positive and negative stimuli appear to decrease with age, suggesting that there may be meaningful age-related differences in LPP responses to passively viewing positive stimuli versus stimuli reflecting receipt of monetary reward. ...
Article
The goal of this study was to examine age-related differences in children's reward processing. Focusing on reward outcome processing, we used event-related potentials to examine substages of neural response to gain versus loss feedback in a sample of 7-11-year-old children (M = 9.67, SD = 1.40) recruited from the community (N = 234; 47.6% girls, 66.2% non-Hispanic European American). Using principal components analysis (PCA), we focused on temporospatial combinations that closely resembled the RewP, fb-P3, and fb-LPP in temporal and spatial distributions. Two of these, the PCA factors reflecting the RewP and fb-LPP, demonstrated age-related differences in response to gains versus losses. Age-related changes in the RewP were specific to gain feedback, with RewP amplitudes to gain, but not loss, increasing from middle to late childhood. In contrast, age-related changes in fb-LPP were specific to loss feedback, with fb-LPP amplitudes to losses, but not gains, decreasing from middle to late childhood. Follow-up analyses revealed that children younger than age 8 exhibited larger fb-LPP responses to loss than gain, whereas children older than age 10 exhibited larger RewP responses to gain than loss. Similar results were obtained using mean amplitude-based ERP indices and the results do not appear to have been due to age-related differences in the latency or location of the ERPs themselves. These results highlight the importance of examining distinct substages of reward outcome processing and suggest that robust neural responses to loss feedback may emerge earlier in childhood than responses to gains.
... PCA provides an effective way to analyze high-density ERP datasets and to separate components that vary in their sensitivity to spatial, temporal, or functional parameters (Dien & Frishkoff, 2005). PCA has successfully been utilized to differentiate ERPs sensitive to emotion in a variety of studies using other paradigms besides the dot-probe (Kujawa et al., 2013;Mulligan et al., 2020;Pegg et al., 2019). ...
... PCA belongs to a class of factor-analytic procedures that use eigenvalue decomposition to extract linear combinations of variables (latent factors) in order to account for patterns of covariance in the data parsimoniously (i.e., with the fewest factors) (Dien & Frishkoff, 2005). In ERP data, PCA extracts linear combinations of data from all time points and recording sites to distinguish patterns of electrocortical activity (Kujawa et al., 2013;Pegg et al., 2019). ...
Article
Full-text available
Threat-related attention bias is thought to contribute to the development and maintenance of anxiety disorders. Dot-probe studies using event-related potentials (ERPs) have indicated that several early ERP components are modulated by threatening and emotional stimuli in anxious populations, suggesting enhanced allocation of attention to threat and emotion at earlier stages of processing. However, ERP components selected for examination and analysis in these studies vary widely and remain inconsistent. The present study used temporospatial principal component analysis (PCA) to systematically identify ERP components elicited to face pair cues and probes in a dot-probe task in anxious adults. Cue-locked components sensitive to emotion included an early occipital C1 component enhanced for happy versus angry face pair cues and an early parieto-occipital P1 component enhanced for happy versus angry face pair cues. Probe-locked components sensitive to congruency included a parieto-occipital P2 component enhanced for incongruent probes (probes replacing neutral faces) versus congruent probes (probes replacing emotional faces). Split-half correlations indicated that the mean value around the PCA-derived peaks was reliably measured in the ERP waveforms. These results highlight promising neurophysiological markers for attentional bias research that can be extended to designs comparing anxious and healthy comparison groups. Results from a secondary exploratory PCA analysis investigating the effects of emotional face position and analyses on behavioral reaction time data are also presented.
... The sample was characterized by a wide range in age due to sampling and study design of this multigenerational study. We intentionally opted not to restrict the age range because of statistical power considerations and because of prior studies showing moderate to strong stability for the ERP measures of interest, suggesting that the P3 is stable across development (Kujawa et al., 2013;Pegg et al., 2019). Not surprisingly, however, subjects under 18 were disproportionately in the "none" group, likely due to the limited amount of time to develop any of these disorders, although the occurrence of a first depressive episode peaks from 15 to 18 years of age (Hankin et al., 1998). ...
... Conversely, the lowest probability of having a comorbid diagnosis is at high levels of both measures, as indicated by the blue (light gray) area in the top right corner of the heatmap. Although we included adolescents in the current sample given that the P3 in response to emotional stimuli appeared to be stable throughout development (Pegg et al., 2019), there are well-known age-related changes in P3 for cognitive tasks (e.g., Bourisly, 2016;van Dinteren et al., 2014). To account for possible developmental changes during adolescent brain maturation, we repeated the ANOVAs and multinomial logistic regression for the adults-only subsample (n = 95; see Supplementary Material). ...
Article
Full-text available
In a multigenerational study of families at risk for depression, individuals with a lifetime history of depression had: 1) abnormal perceptual asymmetry (PA; smaller left ear/right hemisphere [RH] advantage) in a dichotic emotion recognition task, and 2) reduced RH late positive potential (P3RH) during an emotional hemifield task. We used standardized difference scores for processing auditory (PA sad-neutral) and visual (P3RH negative-neutral) stimuli for 112 participants (52 men) in a logistic regression to predict history of depression, anxiety or comorbidity of both. Whereas comorbidity was separately predicted by reduced PA (OR = 0.527, p = .042) or P3RH (OR = 0.457, p = .013) alone, an interaction between PA and P3RH (OR = 2.499, p = .011) predicted depressive disorder. Follow-up analyses revealed increased probability of depression at low (lack of emotional differentiation) and high (heightened reactivity to negative stimuli) levels of both predictors. Findings suggest that reduced or heightened right-lateralized emotional responsivity to negative stimuli may be uniquely associated with depression.
... A temporospatial Principal components analysis (PCA) was used to empirically identify temporally and spatially distinct components consistent with LPP in each phase (Dien, 2012). PCA is a data reduction method that identifies and parses out linear combinations of data across both temporal and spatial domains, which allows for the identification of overlapping electrocortical activity (Dien, 2010;Foti et al., 2009;Pegg et al., 2019). Because LPP typically presents as a sustained ERP (Cuthbert et al., 2000;Hajcak & Olvet, 2008) and slow-going components may be split into multiple factors during PCA, data in the present study were down sampled to 1,024 Hz for the purpose of the PCA. ...
... Because LPP typically presents as a sustained ERP (Cuthbert et al., 2000;Hajcak & Olvet, 2008) and slow-going components may be split into multiple factors during PCA, data in the present study were down sampled to 1,024 Hz for the purpose of the PCA. This sampling rate is consistent with prior PCA ERP work with LPP (Kujawa, Weinberg, Hajcak, & Klein, 2013;MacNamara, Rabinak, Kennedy, & Phan, 2018;Pegg et al., 2019), and allows for the analysis to be conducted using fewer data points, minimizing the likelihood of identifying temporospatial components due to artifact without altering the pattern of data. Temporospatial PCAs were conducted separately for each trimester using ERP PCA Toolkit, version 2.83 (Dien, 2010). ...
Article
Full-text available
Reactivity to emotional information, measurable at the level of neural activity using event‐related potentials, is linked to symptoms of affective disorders. Behavioral evidence suggests that contextual factors, such as social support, can alter emotional reactivity such that affective responding is normalized when social support is high. This possibility remains largely untested at the neural level, specifically through approaches that can offer insight into the mechanistic processes contributing to individual differences in emotional reactivity. Yet, such knowledge could be useful for prevention and intervention efforts, particularly with groups at risk for increased emotional reactivity, such as pregnant mothers for whom emotional distress predicts both maternal and child outcomes. Expectant mothers took part in a longitudinal study that tested whether the late positive potential (LPP), a neural index of reactivity to emotional information, was moderated by maternal perceptions of social support. In the third trimester of pregnancy, lower perceived social support was associated with an absence of a traditional LPP effect, which differentiates valenced from neutral stimuli. Findings suggest that perceptions of social support may normalize emotional processing at the neural level and highlight the potential importance of social support modulation of emotional reactivity during times of known biological change.
... Particularly relevant ERP components for assessing PVS function include the J o u r n a l P r e -p r o o f reward positivity (RewP) and late positive potential (LPP; see Figure 1). Longitudinal evidence indicates that both RewP and LPP are reliably elicited in response to reward feedback and pleasant stimuli, respectively (Kujawa et al., 2018;Pegg et al., 2019). RewP, which is thought to reflect reinforcement learning processes (Holroyd and Coles, 2002), appears as a relative positivity in the ERP wave approximately 300 ms after reward or positive feedback compared to loss or neutral feedback. ...
... Several studies have failed to find significant developmental changes in RewP from childhood to adolescence or adolescence to adulthood (Kujawa et al., 2018;Lukie et al., 2014;Santesso et al., 2011), although others have found evidence of a relatively enhanced (Hämmerer et al., 2011) or reduced (Kujawa et al., 2019a;Zottoli and Grose-Fifer, 2012 (Kujawa et al., 2013;MacNamara et al., 2016). Developmental changes in LPP may be best characterized by shifts in the scalp topography of responses from more occipital distributions in childhood to centroparietal into adolescence and adulthood, rather than increasing or decreasing activation of PVS specifically (Pegg et al., 2019). RewP and LPP reflect electrophysiological responses in broad neural networks (e.g., Becker et al., 2014;Liu et al., 2012), which may include regions with distinct developmental trajectories. ...
Article
Full-text available
Reduced activation of positive valence systems (PVS), including blunted neural and physiological responses to pleasant stimuli and rewards, has been shown to prospectively predict the development of psychopathology. Yet, little is known about how reduced PVS activation emerges across development or what implications it has for prevention. We review genetic, temperament, parenting, and naturalistic and laboratory stress research on neural measures of PVS and outline developmentally-informed models of trajectories of PVS activation. PVS function is partly heritable and appears to reflect individual differences in early-emerging temperament traits. Although lab-induced stressors blunt PVS activation, effects of parenting and naturalistic stress on PVS are mixed and depend on the type of stress, developmental timing, and interactions amongst risk factors. We propose that there may be multiple, dynamic developmental trajectories to reduced PVS activation in which combinations of genes, temperament, and exposure to severe, prolonged, or uncontrollable stress may exert direct and interactive effects on PVS function. Critically, these risk factors may alter PVS development trajectories and/or PVS sensitivity to proximal stressors. Distinct factors may converge such that PVS activation proceeds along a typical, accelerated, chronically low, or stress-reactive trajectory. Finally, we present directions for future research with translational implications.
... Ambiguities surrounding the quantification of specific ERPs are particularly problematic for complex emotion regulation tasks, where stimuli presentation times are extended for several seconds. Principal component analysis (PCA) is a data-driven approach that systematically disentangles ERPs sensitive to emotion across development [22,29,62]. Research leveraging multiple scoring approaches could help in characterizing the temporal dynamics of emotion regulation in depressed youth. ...
Article
Full-text available
Depressed individuals tend to use maladaptive emotion regulation strategies more frequently than non-depressed individuals while using adaptive strategies (e.g., reappraisal) less frequently. Objective neural markers of emotion regulation ability could aid in identifying youth at greatest risk for depression and functional impairment more broadly. We used electroencephalography to examine emotion regulation in adolescents (aged 14–17; N = 201) with current depression (n = 94) and without any history of depression (n = 107) at high (n = 54) and low (n = 53) risk for depression based on a maternal history of depression. Results revealed group differences in event-related potential markers of emotion regulation using multiple scoring approaches. Never-depressed adolescents had significant reductions in mean-activity and principal component analysis-identified late positive potential responses to dysphoric stimuli under reappraisal instructions compared to passive viewing. There was no significant difference in neural responses between conditions among depressed adolescents. The magnitude of the reappraisal effects appeared slightly stronger for low-risk adolescents relative to high-risk. Exploratory analyses further demonstrated that the association between neural markers of emotion regulation and overall functioning was moderated by age, such that impaired emotion regulation abilities predicted poorer functioning among older adolescents. Findings support the sensitivity of the late positive potential to emotion regulation impairments in depression and psychopathology more broadly.
... The LPP waveforms are presented in Fig. 2. To assess the Fig. 1 Waveforms for ERPs in response to win trials (green) and loss trials (red) at Cz. The scalp distribution depicts electrocortical activity to wins minus losses for illustrative purposes; unstandardized residual scores for RewP to wins were used in analyses temporal dynamics of emotion regulation and given prior research showing the LPP is composed of several distinct but overlapping positivities (Foti et al., 2009;Pegg et al., 2019), the LPP was scored across three time windows: 400-1000 ms, 1000-3500 ms, and 3500-6000 ms, consistent with prior research (Gupta et al., 2022). Spearman-Brown coefficients for split-half reliabilities for the full LPP window (400-6000 ms) were acceptable to good (0.58-0.74 across electrode poolings and conditions), but reliability varied across the time course of the LPP (reliabilities across frontal sites for reappraisal in the middle and late window and the neutral condition in the late window ranged from 0.53-0.58; ...
Article
Earlier depression onsets are associated with more debilitating courses and poorer life quality, highlighting the importance of effective early intervention. Many youths fail to improve with evidence-based treatments for depression, likely due in part to heterogeneity within the disorder. Multi-method assessment of individual differences in positive and negative emotion processing could improve predictions of treatment outcomes. The current study examined self-report and neurophysiological measures of reward responsiveness and emotion regulation as predictors of response to cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT). Adolescents (14-18 years) with depression (N = 70) completed monetary reward and emotion regulation tasks while electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded, and self-report measures of reward responsiveness, emotion regulation, and depressive symptoms at intake. Adolescents then completed a 16-session group CBT program, with depressive symptoms and clinician-rated improvement assessed across treatment. Lower reward positivity amplitudes, reflecting reduced neural reward responsiveness, predicted lower depressive symptoms with treatment. Larger late positive potential residuals during reappraisal, potentially reflecting difficulty with emotion regulation, predicted greater clinician-rated improvement. Self-report measures were not significant predictors. Results support the clinical utility of EEG measures, with impairments in positive and negative emotion processing predicting greater change with interventions that target these processes.
... Lastly, differences in processing pipelines may also contribute to heterogeneous results. While the LPP is most frequently characterized as the centroparietal mean amplitude of the event-related potential (ERP) within a time window approximately 400-1000 ms following the visual presentation of emotionally laden images Schupp et al., 2000), principal component analyses have identified multiple positive ERP components within this time window extending over parietal sites Pegg et al., 2019). As a result, there is substantial variation in the time interval and region of interest selected for the LPP in the literature. ...
Article
Background Individuals with major depressive disorder (MDD) present with deficits in emotional reactivity. Conflicting models have been proposed to explain this effect. We sought to confirm reports of blunted reactivity to negatively-valanced emotional stimuli, in line with the emotional context insensitivity hypothesis of depression, in a preregistered study. Methods Forty-one depressed participants and 41 age- and gender-matched healthy controls were presented a series of unpleasant and neutrally-valanced pictures in a passive view paradigm while acquiring electroencephalography (EEG). The late positive potential (LPP), an EEG correlate of emotional reactivity, was compared between groups using mixed-effects repeated-measures models and exploratory cluster-based permutation tests. A sensitivity analysis was performed to assess the robustness of LPP findings by reanalysing the LPPs using 24 EEG pipelines from studies identified in the literature. Results We found no difference in LPP amplitudes between MDD and healthy individuals using the preregistered analysis pipeline. The sensitivity analysis revealed that the magnitude and direction of LPP effect sizes were affected by the analysis pipeline. Exploratory permutation analysis revealed an electrode cluster that showed a significant reduction in the LPP for MDD participants while viewing unpleasant pictures. Conclusions These results do not provide evidence in support of the emotional context insensitivity hypothesis, except for the exploratory data-driven approach. Methodological differences, in particular in the analysis pipeline, contribute to the heterogeneity of LPP modulation in depression. A standardised approach to quantify EEG correlates of emotional reactivity is needed to evaluate alternative models of emotional reactivity in depression.
... There is limited amount of ERP research on ER in children, however, findings have largely been in line with research in adult populations (Lewis et al., 2006). Child LPP amplitudes are enhanced in response to emotional versus neutral images, are modulated by ER strategies Kujawa et al., 2013), and are test-rest reliable (Pegg et al., 2019). To date there are few LPP studies of ER in adolescents; these show that the LPP is modulated by the use of ER strategies of distraction and expressive suppression (Desatnik et al., 2017). ...
Article
Emotion regulation (ER) strategies can decrease the intensity or modify the experience of emotions. Deficits in emotion regulation are implicated in a wide range of psychopathologies. It is argued that interpersonal, socio-cognitive, and developmental variables play an important role in ER. This is the first study to explore the contribution of individual differences in internal representations of relationships (IRR) to neural correlates of ER in a sample of adolescents. Event related potentials of 53 adolescents (12 to 17 years old) were collected while performing an ER task. IRR was assessed with the social cognition and object relations scale (SCORS-G; Westen, 1995) coding of narratives from interviews. Results show that individual differences in IRR significantly predicted the modulation of emotional responses by expressive suppression in adolescents, accounting for 48% of the variance of changes in occipital late positive potentials (LPP). Thus, it appears that IRR are implicated in an individual's ability to regulate emotions. The clinical implications of the findings are discussed.
... In general, affective content can produce stronger emotional effects than neutral content can (Olofsson et al., 2008). Many studies have demonstrated this using synchronicity (Zhang et al., 2012), amplitude (Pegg et al., 2019) and other characteristics. Furthermore, some studies find that bad moods have a larger impact than good moods and that events involving unpleasant emotions remain more salient in people's minds than events involving pleasant emotions do (Baumeister et al., 2001;Amrisha et al., 2008). ...
Article
Full-text available
In recent years, traditional methods such as power spectrum and amplitude analysis have been used to research the emotional electroencephalogram (EEG). The brain network method is also used in emotional EEG research, which can better reflect the activity of brains. A minimum spanning tree (MST) represents the key information flow in the weighted brain network, and it provides a sensitive method to capture subtle information in network organization while effectively avoiding the shortcomings of traditional brain networks. The DEAP dataset provides electroencephalogram (EEG) data for four categories of emotions: high arousal and high valence (HAHV), high arousal and low valence (HALV), low arousal and high valence (LAHV), and low arousal and low valence (LALV). Phase lag index (PLI) weighted matrices were calculated in five frequency bands. On this basis, the minimum spanning trees were constructed. At the same valence level in the gamma (γ) band, HAHV and HALV showed significant higher mean PLI (MPLI), maximum degree (Degreemax) and leaf fraction and significant lower diameter and eccentricity than LAHV and LALV. At the same arousal level in the γ band, HALV showed significant higher MPLI, Degreemax and leaf fraction and significant lower diameter and eccentricity than HAHV. These results indicate that the low-arousal showed more line-shaped configurations than the high-arousal. Additionally, in the high-arousal condition, a shift toward more star-shaped trees from high-valence to low-valence supports the trend toward randomness of the brain network with negative emotions and that the brain is more activated when faced with negative emotions. From a brain network perspective, this phenomenon provides a theoretical basis for negative bias.
... The temporal-spatial factors that accounted for at least 0.5% unique variance, i.e. 40 factors for faces processing and 39 factors for targets processing, were subjected to a robust ANOVA [84][85][86] to determine which components were significantly modulated by experimental conditions. As recommended by Dien and colleagues (2005), a visual inspection of the waveforms associated with each combination of factors was used to select those that corresponded the most to ERP components relevant to the paradigm used. ...
Article
Full-text available
Background Cognitive models indicated that social anxiety disorder (SAD) would be caused and maintained by a biased attentional processing of threatening information. This study investigates whether socially anxious children may present impaired attentional engagement and disengagement from negative emotional faces, as well as their underlying event-related potential responses. Methods and findings Fifteen children with high levels of social anxiety (HSA; 9 boys; mean age = 9.99y; SD = 1.14) and twenty low socially anxious children (LSA; 16 boys; mean age = 10.47y; SD = 1.17) participated in a spatial cueing task in which they had to detect targets following neutral/disgusted faces in a valid or invalid location. No group effect was reported on reaction times [p>.05]. However, electrophysiological data showed lower P3a amplitude in HSA children compared with the LSA group when processing facial stimuli. They also reported larger N2 amplitudes for valid-disgusted targets and a larger P3a amplitude for the invalid-disgusted ones. Conclusion In terms of electrophysiological data, our results validated, the hypothesis of attentional disengagement difficulties in SAD children. We also confirm the idea that high levels of social anxiety are associated with cognitive control impairments and have a greater impact on the processing efficiency than on the performance effectiveness.
Article
The late positive potential (LPP), an event‐related potential reflecting affective processing, may exhibit developmental shifts in magnitude and scalp location. In the present longitudinal study, 501 youth (47.3% female; 89.4% White; 12.0% Hispanic) completed the emotion interrupt task to elicit the LPP to neutral, positive, and negative images at approximately 9, 12, 15, and 18 years old (data collected 2010–2022). Multilevel growth models indicated an initial decrease in the occipital LPP and an increase in the parietal and central LPP during late childhood, with rates of change leveling off across adolescence. Trial condition (i.e., valence) significantly impacted trajectories only when the LPP was measured over occipital sites. Results provide novel evidence of stability and change in the LPP across development.
Article
The ability to recognize emotions in others is crucial for social interaction and develops during childhood. We studied the effects of age on emotional facial recognition in schoolchildren using ERP components. Children aged 6, 8, and 10 completed identity, sex, and emotion recognition (happiness, anger, sadness) tasks. The oldest group had the highest accuracy and fastest reaction times. Only the LPP component showed age-related differences, with lower amplitudes in older children. LPP showed higher amplitude during emotion recognition, which may be associated with motivational evaluation. ERP accounted for the temporal dynamics of facial processing, which involve cognitive and emotional processes.
Article
Electroencephalography (EEG) data processing to derive event‐related potentials (ERPs) follows a standard set of procedures to maximize signal‐to‐noise ratio. This often includes ocular correction, which corrects for artifacts introduced by eye movements, typically measured by electrooculogram (EOG) using facial electrodes near the eyes. Yet, attaching electrodes to the face may be uncomfortable for some populations, best to avoid in some situations, and contribute to data loss. Eye movements can also be measured using electrodes in a standard 10–20 EEG cap. An examination of the impact of electrode selection on ERPs is needed to inform best practices. The present study examined data quality when using different electrodes to measure eye movements for ocular correction (i.e., facial electrodes, cap electrodes, and no ocular correction) for two well‐established and widely studied ERP components (i.e., reward positivity, RewP; and late positive potential, LPP) elicited in adolescents ( N = 34). Results revealed comparable split‐half reliability and standardized measurement error (SME) between facial and cap electrode approaches, with lower SME for the RewP with facial or cap electrodes compared to no ocular correction. Few significant differences in mean amplitude of ERPs were observed, but the LPP to positive images differed when using facial compared to cap electrodes. Findings provide preliminary evidence of the ability to collect high‐quality ERP data without facial electrodes. However, when using cap electrodes for EOG measurement and ocular correction, it is recommended to use consistent procedures across the sample or statistically examine the impact of ocular correction procedures on results.
Article
Theoretical account of attachment proposed that individual differences in adult attachment styles play a key role in adjusting balance between affective evaluation and cognitive control. Yet, little is known about the temporal characteristics of emotional conflict processing modulated by attachment styles. Accordingly, the present study used event-related potentials (ERP) and multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) combined with an emotional face-word Stroop task to investigate the temporal dynamics of attachment-related cognitive-affective patterns in emotional conflict processing. The ERP results demonstrated multiple-process of emotional conflict modulated by attachment styles. In early sensory processing, positive faces captured avoidant attachment individuals' attention as reflected in greater P1, while the same situation led to greater N170 in secure and anxious individuals. Crucially, impairment in conflict-monitoring function was found in anxious individuals as reflected by the absence of interference effect on N450, leading to impaired ability of inhibitory control as indicated by decreased slow potential. In contrast, avoidant individuals showed greater slow potential for inhibiting emotional interference. Furthermore, MVPA revealed that the corresponding time window for conflict monitoring was found for emotional distractors decoding rather than congruency decoding in the anxious attachment group. Convergent results from ERPs and MVPA indicated that the deficit in emotional conflict monitoring and resolution among anxious individuals might be due to the excessive approach to emotional distractors, as they habitually use emotional evaluation rather than cognitive control. In summary, the present study provides electrophysiological evidence that attachment styles modulated emotional conflict processing, which highlights the contribution of attachment to social information processing.
Article
Adolescence is a period of heightened risk for multiple forms of psychopathology, partly due to greater exposure to interpersonal stress. One way that interpersonal stress may increase risk for psychopathology is by altering the normative development of neural systems that support socio-affective processing. The late positive potential (LPP) is an event-related potential component that reflects sustained attention to motivationally-salient information and is a promising marker of risk for stress-related psychopathology. However, it is not clear how the LPP to socio-affective information changes across adolescence, nor whether exposure to stress with peers interferes with normative developmental differences in the LPP to socio-affective content during this period. In 92 adolescent girls (10 to 19 years old), we assessed the LPP to task-irrelevant emotional and neutral faces, as well as behavioural measures of interference following the presentation of these faces. Adolescents at more advanced stages of puberty showed a smaller LPP to emotional faces, but adolescents exposed to greater peer stress exhibited a larger LPP to these stimuli. Additionally, for girls exposed to lower levels of peer stress, more advanced pubertal development was associated with a smaller LPP to emotional faces, whereas for girls exposed to higher levels of peer stress, the association between pubertal development and the LPP to emotional faces was not significant. Neither stress nor pubertal stage was significantly associated with behavioural measures. Combined, these data suggest that one pathway through which stress exposure increases risk for psychopathology during adolescence is by interfering with the normative development of socio-affective processing.
Article
Full-text available
Background. Emotional and cognitive processing are interconnected. Several researchers studied the association between different cognitive control processes and emotional memory, defined as the long-term storage of information accompanied by activating factors that will later favor its recall. Moreover, cognitive control processes include functions that regulate and coordinate attention, memory, language, inhibitory control, and planning. Method. Since these processes are susceptible to change during development, this study analyzed the associations between emotional memory (free recall and recognition) and cognitive processes (evaluated through Corsi and Stroop tasks) at 4 and 4.5 years of age in children from households with different socio-environmental conditions. Results. Significant correlations were found between: a) free recall of negative images and Stroop performance at 4 and 4.5 years; b) free recall of neutral images and Corsi performance at 4 years; c) recognition of negative and positive images and Stroop performance at 4.5 years; d) recognition of neutral images and socio-environmental conditions at 4.5 years. Conclusions. The results of this investigation allow us to highlight the fundamental relationship between the variables studied in this age of life cycle. These processes are closely linked and need to be analyzed together to provide a greater understanding of their mutual influences throughout child development.
Article
Cross-sectional group comparisons have shown altered neurocognitive and neurophysiological profiles in individuals with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). We report a two-year longitudinal observational study of ADHD children and adolescents (N = 239) regarding ADHD symptoms, behavioral metrics, and event-related potentials (ERP) and compared them to healthy controls (N = 91). The participants were assessed up to five times with a cued Go/NoGo task while ERPs were recorded. We fitted the trajectories of our variables of interest with univariate and bivariate latent growth curve models. At baseline, the ADHD group had increased reaction time variability, higher number of omission and commission errors, and attenuated CNV and P3d amplitudes compared to controls. The task performance in terms of behavioral metrics improved in both groups over two years; however, with differential patterns: the decrease in reaction time and omission errors were stronger in the control group, and the reduction of commission errors was more substantial in the ADHD group. The cueP3, CNV, and N2d amplitudes changed slightly over two years, with negligible differences between both groups. Furthermore, the parent-rated symptom burden in the ADHD group decreased by 22 % (DSM-5-based questionnaire). We did not identify any associations between the changes in symptoms and the changes in the behavioral or neurophysiological metrics. The lack of association between the changes in symptoms and the behavioral or ERP metrics supports the trait liability hypothesis, which claims that the neurocognitive deficits are independent of symptom alleviation. Furthermore, the change in symptom burden was substantial, questioning the stability of the reported ADHD symptoms.
Article
Full-text available
In this meta-analytic and narrative review, we examine several overarching issues related to the study of coping, emotion regulation, and internalizing and externalizing symptoms of psychopathology in childhood and adolescence, including the conceptualization and measurement of these constructs. We report a quantitative meta-analysis of 212 studies (N = 80,850 participants) that measured the associations between coping and emotion regulation with symptoms of internalizing and externalizing psychopathology. Within the meta-analysis we address the association of broad domains of coping and emotion regulation (e.g., total coping, emotion regulation), intermediate factors of coping and emotion regulation (e.g., primary control coping, secondary control coping), and specific coping and emotion regulation strategies (e.g., emotional expression, cognitive reappraisal) with internalizing and externalizing symptoms. For cross-sectional studies, which made up the majority of studies included, we examine 3 potential moderators: age, measure quality, and single versus multiple informants. Finally, we separately consider findings from longitudinal studies as these provide stronger tests of the effects. After accounting for publication bias, findings indicate that the broad domain of emotion regulation and adaptive coping and the factors of primary control coping and secondary control coping are related to lower levels of symptoms of psychopathology. Further, the domain of maladaptive coping, the factor of disengagement coping, and the strategies of emotional suppression, avoidance, and denial are related to higher levels of symptoms of psychopathology. Finally, we offer a critique of the current state of the field and outline an agenda for future research. (PsycINFO Database Record
Article
Full-text available
There is growing interest in psychophysiological and neural correlates of psychopathology, personality, and other individual differences. Many studies correlate a criterion individual difference variable (e.g., anxiety) with a psychophysiological measurement derived by subtracting scores taken from two within-subject conditions. These subtraction-based difference scores are intended to increase specificity by isolating variability of interest. Using data on the error-related negativity (ERN) and correct response negativity (CRN) in relation to generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), we highlight several conceptual and practical issues with subtraction-based difference scores and propose alternative approaches based on regression. We show that ERN and CRN are highly correlated, and that the ΔERN (i.e., ERN − CRN) is correlated in opposite directions both with ERN and CRN. Bivariate analyses indicate that GAD is related to ΔERN and ERN, but not CRN. We first show that, by using residualized scores, GAD relates both to a larger ERN and smaller CRN. Moreover, by probing the interaction of ERN and CRN, we show that the relationship between GAD and ERN varies by CRN. These latter findings are not evident when using traditional subtraction-based difference scores. We then completed follow-up analyses that suggested that an increased P300 in anxious individuals gave rise to the apparent anxiety/CRN relationship observed. These findings have important conceptual implications for facilitating the interpretability of results from individual difference studies of psychophysiology.
Article
Full-text available
Social development has been the focus of a great deal of neuroscience based research over the past decade. In this review, we focus on providing a framework for understanding how changes in facets of social development may correspond with changes in brain function. We argue that (1) distinct phases of social behavior emerge based on whether the organizing social force is the mother, peer play, peer integration, or romantic intimacy; (2) each phase is marked by a high degree of affect-driven motivation that elicits a distinct response in subcortical structures; (3) activity generated by these structures interacts with circuits in prefrontal cortex that guide executive functions, and occipital and temporal lobe circuits, which generate specific sensory and perceptual social representations. We propose that the direction, magnitude and duration of interaction among these affective, executive, and perceptual systems may relate to distinct sensitive periods across development that contribute to establishing long-term patterns of brain function and behavior.
Article
Full-text available
Emotional problems figure prominently in many clinical conditions. Recent efforts to explain and treat these conditions have emphasized the role of emotion dysregulation. However, emotional problems are not always the result of emotion dysregulation, and even when emotional problems do arise from emotion dysregulation, it is necessary to specify precisely what type of emotion dysregulation might be operative. In this review, we present an extended process model of emotion regulation, and we use this model to describe key points at which emotion-regulation difficulties can lead to various forms of psychopathology. These difficulties are associated with (a) identification of the need to regulate emotions, (b) selection among available regulatory options, (c) implementation of a selected regulatory tactic, and (d) monitoring of implemented emotion regulation across time. Implications and future directions for basic research, assessment, and intervention are discussed. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Clinical Psychology Volume 11 is March 28, 2015. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/catalog/pubdates.aspx for revised estimates.
Article
Full-text available
Depression appears to be characterized by reduced neural reactivity to receipt of reward. Despite evidence of shared etiologies and high rates of comorbidity between depression and anxiety, this abnormality may be relatively specific to depression. However, it is unclear whether children at risk for depression also exhibit abnormal reward responding, and if so, whether risk for anxiety moderates this association. The feedback negativity (FN) is an event-related potential component sensitive to receipt of rewards versus losses that is reduced in depression. Using a large community sample (N = 407) of 9-year-old children who had never experienced a depressive episode, we examined whether histories of depression and anxiety in their parents were associated with the FN following monetary rewards and losses. Results indicated that maternal history of depression was associated with a blunted FN in offspring, but only when there was no maternal history of anxiety. In addition, greater severity of maternal depression was associated with greater blunting of the FN in children. No effects of paternal psychopathology were observed. Results suggest that blunted reactivity to rewards versus losses may be a vulnerability marker that is specific to pure depression, but is not evident when there is also familial risk for anxiety. In addition, these findings suggest that abnormal reward responding is evident as early as middle childhood, several years prior to the sharp increase in the prevalence of depression and rapid changes in neural reward circuitry in adolescence. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved).
Article
Full-text available
Recent human imaging and animal studies highlight the importance of frontoamygdala circuitry in the regulation of emotional behavior and its disruption in anxiety-related disorders. Although tracing studies have suggested changes in amygdala-cortical connectivity through the adolescent period in rodents, less is known about the reciprocal connections within this circuitry across human development, when these circuits are being fine-tuned and substantial changes in emotional control are observed. The present study examined developmental changes in amygdala-prefrontal circuitry across the ages of 4-22 years using task-based functional magnetic resonance imaging. Results suggest positive amygdala-prefrontal connectivity in early childhood that switches to negative functional connectivity during the transition to adolescence. Amygdala-medial prefrontal cortex functional connectivity was significantly positive (greater than zero) among participants younger than 10 years, whereas functional connectivity was significantly negative (less than zero) among participants 10 years and older, over and above the effect of amygdala reactivity. The developmental switch in functional connectivity was paralleled by a steady decline in amygdala reactivity. Moreover, the valence switch might explain age-related improvement in task performance and a developmentally normative decline in anxiety. Initial positive connectivity followed by a valence shift to negative connectivity provides a neurobiological basis for regulatory development and may present novel insight into a more general process of developing regulatory connections.
Article
Full-text available
The reliability, stability, and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of event-related potentials (ERPs) were investigated in children, adolescents, younger adults, and older adults in performance monitoring tasks. P2, N2, P3, and P2-N2 peak-to-peak amplitude showed high odd-even split reliabilities in all age groups, ranging from.70 to.90. Multigroup analyses showed that test-retest stabilities (across 2 weeks) of ERP amplitudes did not differ among the four age groups. In contrast, relative to adolescents and younger adults, SNRs were lower in children and older adults, with higher noise levels in children and lower signal power in older adults. We conclude that age differences in the SNR of stimulus-locked ERPs can be successfully compensated by the averaging procedure with about 40 trials in the average. However, age differences in baseline noise and split-half reliability should be considered when comparing age groups in single trial measures or time-varying processes with ERPs.
Article
Full-text available
In the context of the development of prototypic assessment instruments in the areas of cognition, personality, and adaptive functioning, the issues of standardization, norming procedures, and the important psychometrics of test reliability and validity are evaluated critically. Criteria, guidelines, and simple rules of thumb are provided to assist the clinician faced with the challenge of choosing an appropriate test instrument for a given psychological assessment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Article
Full-text available
The late positive potential (LPP) is a reliable electrophysiological index of emotional perception in humans. Despite years of research, the brain structures that contribute to the generation and modulation of LPP are not well understood. Recording EEG and fMRI simultaneously, and applying a recently proposed single-trial ERP analysis method, we addressed the problem by correlating the single-trial LPP amplitude evoked by affective pictures with the blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) activity. Three results were found. First, relative to neutral pictures, pleasant and unpleasant pictures elicited enhanced LPP, as well as heightened BOLD activity in both visual cortices and emotion-processing structures such as amygdala and prefrontal cortex, consistent with previous findings. Second, the LPP amplitude across three picture categories was significantly correlated with BOLD activity in visual cortices, temporal cortices, amygdala, orbitofrontal cortex, and insula. Third, within each picture category, LPP-BOLD coupling revealed category-specific differences. For pleasant pictures, the LPP amplitude was coupled with BOLD in occipitotemporal junction, medial prefrontal cortex, amygdala, and precuneus, whereas for unpleasant pictures significant LPP-BOLD correlation was observed in ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, insula, and posterior cingulate cortex. These results suggest that LPP is generated and modulated by an extensive brain network composed of both cortical and subcortical structures associated with visual and emotional processing and the degree of contribution by each of these structures to the LPP modulation is valence specific.
Article
Full-text available
Enhanced late positive potentials (LPPs) evoked by highly arousing unpleasant and pleasant stimuli have been consistently observed in event-related potential experiments in humans. Although the psychological factors modulating the LPP have been studied in detail, the neurobiological underpinnings of this response remain poorly understood. Current models suggest that the LPP is a product of both an automatic facilitation of perceptual activity, as well as postperceptual processing under cognitive control. Here we applied magnetoencephalography (MEG) and beamformer analysis combined with Granger causality measures to provide a mechanistic account for LPP generation that reconciles these two models. We demonstrate that the magnetic homolog of the LPP, mLPP, is localized within bilateral occipitoparietal and right prefrontal cortex. Critically, directed functional connectivity analysis between these brain regions, indexed by Granger causality, demonstrates stronger bidirectional influences between frontal and occipitoparietal cortex for high arousing emotional relative to low arousing neutral pictures. Thus, both bottom-up and top-down accounts of the late latency response to emotion derived from psychological studies can be explained by a reciprocal codependency between activity in prefrontal and occipitoparietal cortex.
Article
Full-text available
The current study investigated the association between neural engagement with task-irrelevant images and subsequent interference with target processing using the Emotional Interrupt paradigm [Mitchell, D., Richell, R., Leonard, A., & Blair, R. Emotion at the expense of cognition: Psychopathic individuals outperform controls on an operant response task. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 115, 559, 2006]. Consistent with previous studies, PCA-derived factors corresponding to the early posterior negativity, P300, and late positive potential (LPP) were enhanced for emotional (i.e., both unpleasant and pleasant) compared with neutral distracters, and the P300 elicited by targets was smaller following emotional compared with neutral pictures. In addition, RTs were increased to targets that followed emotional pictures. Within-subject analyses demonstrated that slow trials were characterized by a smaller P300 and were preceded by pictures with a larger LPP. Additionally, between-subject analyses indicate that individuals with a larger LPP also demonstrated slower RTs to targets and reduced target-elicited P300s. All results were specific to the LPP and were not observed for either the early posterior negativity or the P300 elicited by task-irrelevant pictures. By relating the LPP to subsequent behavioral and ERP interference in both within- and between-subject analyses, the current study provides direct support for the notion that LPP indexes attentional engagement with visual stimuli that is uniquely associated with subsequent interference in terms of both RT slowing and P300 reduction to targets.
Article
Full-text available
A subcortical pathway through the superior colliculus and pulvinar to the amygdala is commonly assumed to mediate the non-conscious processing of affective visual stimuli. We review anatomical and physiological data that argue against the notion that such a pathway plays a prominent part in processing affective visual stimuli in humans. Instead, we propose that the primary role of the amygdala in visual processing, like that of the pulvinar, is to coordinate the function of cortical networks during evaluation of the biological significance of affective visual stimuli. Under this revised framework, the cortex has a more important role in emotion processing than is traditionally assumed.
Article
Full-text available
Models of visual emotional perception suggest a reentrant organization of the ventral visual system with the amygdala. Using focused functional magnetic resonance imaging in humans with a sampling rate of 100 ms, here we determine the relative timing of emotional discrimination in amygdala and ventral visual cortical structures during emotional perception. Results show that amygdala and inferotemporal visual cortex differentiate emotional from nonemotional scenes approximately 1 s before extrastriate occipital cortex, whereas primary occipital cortex shows consistent activity across all scenes. This pattern of discrimination is consistent with a reentrant organization of emotional perception in visual processing, in which transaction between rostral ventral visual cortex and amygdala originates the identification of emotional relevance.
Article
The common approach to the multiplicity problem calls for controlling the familywise error rate (FWER). This approach, though, has faults, and we point out a few. A different approach to problems of multiple significance testing is presented. It calls for controlling the expected proportion of falsely rejected hypotheses — the false discovery rate. This error rate is equivalent to the FWER when all hypotheses are true but is smaller otherwise. Therefore, in problems where the control of the false discovery rate rather than that of the FWER is desired, there is potential for a gain in power. A simple sequential Bonferronitype procedure is proved to control the false discovery rate for independent test statistics, and a simulation study shows that the gain in power is substantial. The use of the new procedure and the appropriateness of the criterion are illustrated with examples.
Article
The neural bases of emotion are commonly measured using blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) signal and the late positive potential (LPP) event-related potential (ERP) component, but rarely together in the same individuals. Despite evidence of developmental changes in processing socio-emotional signals (e.g., faces) as reflected by both BOLD and LPP indices of brain maturation, the literature on the correspondence between these measures is limited to healthy adults, leaving questions regarding such correspondence across development and in clinical populations unaddressed. We examined the relationship between BOLD and LPP during an emotional face processing task in a large sample of youth (N = 70; age 7-19 years) with and without anxiety disorders, and tested whether BOLD signal in regions corresponding to LPP may account for age-related decreases in LPP. Greater activation in bilateral inferior frontal gyrus (IFG)/orbitofrontal gyrus (OFG), left supplementary motor area, right superior parietal lobule, and bilateral amygdala correlated with enhanced LPP to emotional faces in both anxious and healthy youth. Older youth exhibited reduced activation in bilateral IFG/OFG and bilateral amygdala, as well as reduced LPP. Decreased right IFG/OFG activation mediated the association between age and LPP. These findings support correspondence between these measures and need for multi-method approaches and indicate that age-related decreases in LPP may be driven, in part, by decreased IFG/OFG activation.
Article
Brain regions involved in reward processing undergo developmental changes from childhood to adolescence, and alterations in reward-related brain function are thought to contribute to the development of psychopathology. Event-related potentials (ERPs), such as the reward positivity (RewP) component, are valid measures of reward responsiveness that are easily assessed across development and provide insight into temporal dynamics of reward processing. Little work has systematically examined developmental changes in ERPs sensitive to reward. In this longitudinal study of 75 youth assessed 3 times across 6years, we used principal components analyses (PCA) to differentiate ERPs sensitive to monetary reward and loss feedback in late childhood, early adolescence, and middle adolescence. We then tested reliability of, and developmental changes in, ERPs. A greater number of ERP components differentiated reward and loss feedback in late childhood compared to adolescence, but components in childhood accounted for only a small proportion of variance. A component consistent with RewP was the only one to consistently emerge at each of the 3 assessments. RewP demonstrated acceptable reliability, particularly from early to middle adolescence, though reliability estimates varied depending on scoring approaches and developmental periods. The magnitude of the RewP component did not significantly change across time. Results provide insight into developmental changes in the structure of ERPs sensitive to reward, and support RewP as a consistently observed and relatively stable measure of reward responsiveness, particularly across adolescence.
Article
The Emotional Interrupt Task (EIT) has been used to probe emotion processing in healthy and clinical samples; however, research exploring the stability and reliability of behavioral measures and event-related potentials (ERPs) elicited from this task is limited. Establishing the psychometric properties of the EIT is critical, particularly as phenotypes and biological indicators may represent trait-like characteristics that underlie psychiatric illness. To address this gap, test-retest stability and internal consistency of behavioral indices and ERPs resulting from the EIT in healthy, female youth (n = 28) were examined. At baseline, participants were administered the EIT while high-density 128-channel electroencephalography (EEG) data were recorded to probe the late positive potential (LPP). One month later, participants were re-administered the EIT. Four principal findings emerged. First, there is evidence of an interference effect at baseline, as participants showed a slower reaction time for unpleasant and pleasant images relative to neutral images, and test-retest of behavioral measures was relatively stable over time. Second, participants showed a potentiated LPP to unpleasant and pleasant images compared to neutral images, and these effects were stable over time. Moreover, in a test of the difference waves (unpleasant-neutral versus pleasant-neutral), there was sustained positivity for unpleasant images. Third, behavioral measures and LPP demonstrated excellent internal consistency (odd/even correlations) across conditions. Fourth, highlighting important age-related differences in LPP activity, younger age was associated with larger LPP amplitudes across conditions. Overall, these findings suggest that the LPP following emotional images is a stable and reliable marker of emotion processing in healthy youth.
Article
The ability to differentiate between rewards and losses is critical for motivated action, and aberrant reward and loss processing has been associated with psychopathology. The reward positivity (RewP) and feedback negativity (FN) are ERPs elicited by monetary gains and losses, respectively, and are promising individual difference measures. However, few studies have reported on the psychometric properties of the RewP and FN-crucial characteristics necessary for valid individual difference measures. The current study examined the internal consistency and 1-week test-retest reliability of the RewP and FN as elicited by the doors task among 59 young adults. The RewP, FN, and their difference score (ΔRewP) all showed significant correlations between Time 1 and Time 2. The RewP and FN also achieved acceptable internal consistency at both time points within 20 trials using both Cronbach's α and a generalizability theory-derived dependability measure. Internal consistency for ΔRewP was notably weaker at both time points, which is expected from two highly intercorrelated constituent scores. In conclusion, the RewP and FN have strong psychometric properties in a healthy adult sample. Future research is needed to assess the psychometric properties of these ERPs in different age cohorts and in clinical populations.
Article
This study examined whether exposure to Hurricane Sandy-related stressors altered children's brain response to emotional information. An average of 8 months (Mage = 9.19) before and 9 months after (Mage = 10.95) Hurricane Sandy, 77 children experiencing high (n = 37) and low (n = 40) levels of hurricane-related stress exposure completed a task in which the late positive potential, a neural index of emotional reactivity, was measured in response to pleasant and unpleasant, compared to neutral, images. From pre- to post-Hurricane Sandy, children with high stress exposure failed to show the same decrease in emotional reactivity to unpleasant versus neutral stimuli as those with low stress exposure. Results provide compelling evidence that exposure to natural disaster-related stressors alters neural emotional reactivity to negatively valenced information.
Article
Analysis of variance (ANOVA) is a fundamental procedure for event-related potential (ERP) research and yet there is very little guidance for best practices. It is important for the field to develop evidence-based best practices: 1) to minimize the Type II error rate by maximizing statistical power, 2) to minimize the Type I error rate by reducing the latitude for varying procedures, and 3) to identify areas for further methodological improvements. While generic treatments of ANOVA methodology are available, ERP datasets have many unique characteristics that must be considered. In the present report, a novelty oddball dataset was utilized as a test case to determine whether three aspects of ANOVA procedures as applied to ERPs make a real-world difference: the effects of reference site, regional channels, and robust ANOVAs. Recommendations are provided for best practices in each of these areas.
Article
Understanding how and why affective responses change with age is central to characterizing typical and atypical emotional development. Prior work has emphasized the role of the amygdala and prefrontal cortex (PFC), which show age-related changes in function and connectivity. However, developmental neuroimaging research has only recently begun to unpack whether age effects in the amygdala and PFC are specific to affective stimuli or may be found for neutral stimuli as well, a possibility that would support a general, rather than affect-specific, account of amygdala-PFC development. To examine this, 112 individuals ranging from 6-23 years of age viewed aversive and neutral images while undergoing fMRI scanning. Across age, participants reported more negative affect and showed greater amygdala responses for aversive than neutral stimuli. However, children were generally more sensitive to both neutral and aversive stimuli, as indexed by affective reports and amygdala responses. At the same time, the transition from childhood to adolescence was marked by a ventral-to-dorsal shift in medial prefrontal responses to aversive, but not neutral, stimuli. Given the role that dmPFC plays in executive control and higher-level representations of emotion, these results suggest that adolescence is characterized by a shift towards representing emotional events in increasingly cognitive terms.
Article
The ability to process and respond to emotional facial expressions is a critical skill for healthy social and emotional development. There has been growing interest in understanding the neural circuitry underlying development of emotional processing, with previous research implicating functional connectivity between amygdala and frontal regions. However, existing work has focused on threatening emotional faces, raising questions regarding the extent to which these developmental patterns are specific to threat or to emotional face processing more broadly. In the current study, we examined age-related changes in brain activity and amygdala functional connectivity during an fMRI emotional face matching task (including angry, fearful, and happy faces) in 61 healthy subjects aged 7–25 years. We found age-related decreases in ventral medial prefrontal cortex activity in response to happy faces but not to angry or fearful faces, and an age-related change (shifting from positive to negative correlation) in amygdala–anterior cingulate cortex/medial prefrontal cortex (ACC/mPFC) functional connectivity to all emotional faces. Specifically, positive correlations between amygdala and ACC/mPFC in children changed to negative correlations in adults, which may suggest early emergence of bottom-up amygdala excitatory signaling to ACC/mPFC in children and later development of top-down inhibitory control of ACC/mPFC over amygdala in adults. Age-related changes in amygdala–ACC/mPFC connectivity did not vary for processing of different facial emotions, suggesting changes in amygdala–ACC/mPFC connectivity may underlie development of broad emotional processing, rather than threat-specific processing. Hum Brain Mapp, 2016.
Article
Background: Natural disasters expose entire communities to stress and trauma, leading to increased risk for psychiatric symptoms. Yet, the majority of exposed individuals are resilient, highlighting the importance of identifying underlying factors that contribute to outcomes. Methods: The current study was part of a larger prospective study of children in Long Island, New York (n = 260). At age 9, children viewed unpleasant and pleasant images while the late positive potential (LPP), an event-related potential component that reflects sustained attention toward salient information, was measured. Following the event-related potential assessment, Hurricane Sandy, the second costliest hurricane in United States history, hit the region. Eight weeks after the hurricane, mothers reported on exposure to hurricane-related stress and children's internalizing and externalizing symptoms. Symptoms were reassessed 8 months after the hurricane. Results: The LPP predicted both internalizing and externalizing symptoms after accounting for prehurricane symptomatology and interacted with stress to predict externalizing symptoms. Among children exposed to higher levels of hurricane-related stress, enhanced neural reactivity to unpleasant images predicted greater externalizing symptoms 8 weeks after the disaster, while greater neural reactivity to pleasant images predicted lower externalizing symptoms. Moreover, interactions between the LPP and stress continued to predict externalizing symptoms 8 months after the hurricane. Conclusions: Results indicate that heightened neural reactivity and attention toward unpleasant information, as measured by the LPP, predispose children to psychiatric symptoms when exposed to higher levels of stress related to natural disasters, while greater reactivity to and processing of pleasant information may be a protective factor.
Article
Socio-emotional processing is an essential part of development, and age-related changes in its neural correlates can be observed. The late positive potential (LPP) is a measure of motivated attention that can be used to assess emotional processing; however, changes in the LPP elicited by emotional faces have not been assessed across a wide age range in childhood and young adulthood. We used an emotional face matching task to examine behavior and event-related potentials (ERPs) in 33 youth aged 7-19 years old. Younger children were slower when performing the matching task. The LPP elicited by emotional faces but not control stimuli (geometric shapes) decreased with age; by contrast, an earlier ERP (the P1) decreased with age for both faces and shapes, suggesting increased efficiency of early visual processing. Results indicate age-related attenuation in emotional processing that may stem from greater efficiency and regulatory control when performing a socio-emotional task. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Dev Psychobiol. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Article
The late positive potential (LPP) is an event-related potential component that is sensitive to the motivational salience of stimuli. Children with a parental history of depression, an indicator of risk, have been found to exhibit an attenuated LPP to emotional stimuli. Research on depressive and anxiety disorders has organized these conditions into two empirical classes: distress and fear disorders. The present study examined whether parental history of distress and fear disorders was associated with the LPP to emotional stimuli in a large sample of adolescent girls. The sample of 550 girls (ages 13.5-15.5 years) with no lifetime history of depression completed an emotional picture-viewing task and the LPP was measured in response to neutral, pleasant and unpleasant pictures. Parental lifetime history of psychopathology was determined via a semi-structured diagnostic interview with a biological parent, and confirmatory factor analysis was used to model distress and fear dimensions. Parental distress risk was associated with an attenuated LPP to all stimuli. In contrast, parental fear risk was associated with an enhanced LPP to unpleasant pictures but was unrelated to the LPP to neutral and pleasant pictures. Furthermore, these results were independent of the adolescent girls' current depression and anxiety symptoms and pubertal status. The present study demonstrates that familial risk for distress and fear disorders may have unique profiles in terms of electrocortical measures of emotional information processing. This study is also one of the first to investigate emotional/motivational processes underlying the distress and fear disorder dimensions.
Article
The late positive potential (LPP) may be a useful measure of individual differences in emotional processing across development, but little is known about the stability of the LPP across time. We assessed the LPP and behavioral measures of emotional interference following pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral images in 8- to 13-year-old youth. Approximately two years later, the same participants completed the task again (N=34). Results indicated that the LPP is moderately-to-highly reliable across development. Stability was lower and more inconsistent for behavioral measures. In addition, consistent with previous cross-sectional analyses, a decrease in occipital activity was observed at the second assessment. Results indicate that the LPP appears to be a stable measure of emotional processing, even across a fairly large period of development.
Article
Standard least squares analysis of variance methods suffer from poor power under arbitrarily small departures from normality and fail to control the probability of a Type I error when standard assumptions are violated. These problems are vastly reduced when using a robust measure of location; incorporating bootstrap methods can result in additional benefits. This paper illustrates the use of trimmed means with an approximate degrees of freedom heteroskedastic statistic for independent and correlated groups designs in order to achieve robustness to the biasing effects of nonnormality and variance heterogeneity. As well, we indicate when a boostrap methodology can be effectively employed to provide improved Type I error control. We also illustrate, with examples from the psychophysiological literature, the use of a new computer program to obtain numerical results for these solutions.
Article
Principal components analysis (PCA) has attracted increasing interest as a tool for facilitating analysis of high-density event-related potential (ERP) data. While every researcher is exposed to this statistical procedure in graduate school, its complexities are rarely covered in depth and hence researchers are often not conversant with its subtleties. Furthermore, application to ERP datasets involves unique aspects that would not be covered in a general statistics course. This tutorial seeks to provide guidance on the decisions involved in applying PCA to ERPs and their consequences, using the ERP PCA Toolkit to illustrate the analysis process on a novelty oddball dataset.
Article
Event-related potentials (ERPs) may be particularly useful for examining emotional processing across development. Though a number of ERP components are sensitive to emotional content in adults, previous studies have yet to systematically examine the components sensitive to emotion in children. The current study used temporal-spatial principal components analysis (PCA) to identify ERP components in response to complex emotional images in 9-year-old children. Three components were modulated by emotional content and were similar to those previously observed in adults, including: the early posterior negativity, the P300, and a sustained relative positivity similar to the late positive potential (LPP). Compared to those previously observed in adults, the components sensitive to emotion in children were maximal over more occipital regions and the LPP component appeared to be less protracted in time, perhaps indicative of less elaborative processing of emotional stimuli. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Dev Psychobiol.
Article
The late positive potential (LPP) is an event-related potential (ERP) component that indexes sustained attention toward motivationally salient information. The LPP has been observed in children and adults, however little is known about its development from childhood into adolescence. In addition, whereas LPP studies examine responses to images from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS; Lang et al., 2008) or emotional faces, no previous studies have compared responses in youth across stimuli. To examine how emotion interacts with attention across development, the current study used an emotional-interrupt task to measure LPP and behavioral responses in 8- to 13-year-olds using unpleasant, pleasant, and neutral IAPS images, as well as sad, happy, and neutral faces. Compared to older youth, younger children exhibited enhanced LPPs over occipital sites. In addition, sad but not happy faces elicited a larger LPP than neutral faces; behavioral measures did not vary across facial expressions. Both unpleasant and pleasant IAPS images were associated with increased LPPs and behavioral interference compared to neutral images. Results suggest that there may be developmental differences in the scalp distribution of the LPP, and compared to faces, IAPS elicit more robust behavioral and electrocortical measures of attention to emotional stimuli.
Article
In adults, emotional (e.g., both unpleasant and pleasant) compared to neutral pictures elicit an increase in the early posterior negativity (EPN) and the late positive potential (LPP); modulation of these ERP components are thought to reflect the facilitated processing of, and increased attention to, motivationally salient stimuli. To determine whether the EPN and LPP are sensitive to emotional content in children, high-density EEG was recorded from 18 children who were 5–8 years of age (mean age = 77 months, SD = 11 months) while they viewed developmentally appropriate pictures selected from the International Affective Picture System. Self-reported ratings of valence and arousal were also obtained. An EPN was not evident following emotional compared to neutral pictures; however, a positivity maximal at occipital–parietal recording sites was increased from 500 to 1000 ms following pleasant pictures and from 500 to 1500 ms following unpleasant pictures. Comparisons between the EPN and LPP observed in children and adults, and implications for developmental studies of emotion, are discussed.
Article
Event-related potentials (ERPs) offer unparalleled temporal sensitivity in tracing the distinct electrocortical processing stages enabling cognition and are frequently utilized in clinical and experimental investigations, yet few studies have investigated their retest reliability. We administered a battery of typical ERP paradigms to elicit a diverse range of components linked to distinct perceptual and cognitive processes (P1, N1, N170, P3a, P3b, error-related negativity, error positivity, P400). Twenty-five participants completed the battery on two occasions, 1 month apart. Analysis of component amplitudes indicated moderate-to-strong split-half and strong test-retest reliability. Peak latency reliability varied substantially across components and ranged from weak to strong. We confirm that a range of prominent ERPs provide highly stable neurophysiological indices of human cognitive function.
Article
The late positive potential (LPP) reflects increased attention to emotional versus neutral stimuli in adults. To date, very few studies have examined the LPP in children, and whether it can be used to measure patterns of emotional processing that are related to dispositional mood characteristics, such as temperamental fear and anxiety. To examine this question,39 typically developing 5–7 year olds (M age in months = 75.27, SD = 5.83) passively viewed complex emotional and neutral pictures taken from the International Affective Picture System.Maternal report of temperamental fear and anxiety was obtained and fearful behavior during an emotional challenge was observed. As documented in adults, LPP amplitudes to pleasant and unpleasant stimuli were larger than to neutral stimuli, although some gender differences emerged. Larger LPP amplitude differences between unpleasant and neutral stimuli were associated with greater observed fear. The LPP as a measure of individual differences in emotional processing is discussed.
Article
Progress in the study of emotion and emotion regulation has increasingly been informed by neuroscientific methods. This article focuses on two components of the event-related potential (ERP)--the P300 and the late positive potential (LPP)--and how they can be used to understand the interaction between the more automatic and controlled processing of emotional stimuli. Research is reviewed exploring: the dynamics of emotional response as indexed at early and late latencies; neurobiological correlates of emotional response; individual and developmental differences; ways in which the LPP can be utilized as a measure of emotion regulation. Future directions for the application of ERP/electroencephalogram (EEG) in achieving a more complete understanding of emotional processing and its regulation are presented.
Article
This article presents an open source Matlab program, the ERP PCA (EP) Toolkit, for facilitating the multivariate decomposition and analysis of event-related potential data. This program is intended to supplement existing ERP analysis programs by providing functions for conducting artifact correction, robust averaging, referencing and baseline correction, data editing and visualization, principal components analysis, and robust inferential statistical analysis. This program subserves three major goals: (1) optimizing analysis of noisy data, such as clinical or developmental; (2) facilitating the multivariate decomposition of ERP data into its constituent components; (3) increasing the transparency of analysis operations by providing direct visualization of the corresponding waveforms.
Article
We examined the relationships between six emotion-regulation strategies (acceptance, avoidance, problem solving, reappraisal, rumination, and suppression) and symptoms of four psychopathologies (anxiety, depression, eating, and substance-related disorders). We combined 241 effect sizes from 114 studies that examined the relationships between dispositional emotion regulation and psychopathology. We focused on dispositional emotion regulation in order to assess patterns of responding to emotion over time. First, we examined the relationship between each regulatory strategy and psychopathology across the four disorders. We found a large effect size for rumination, medium to large for avoidance, problem solving, and suppression, and small to medium for reappraisal and acceptance. These results are surprising, given the prominence of reappraisal and acceptance in treatment models, such as cognitive-behavioral therapy and acceptance-based treatments, respectively. Second, we examined the relationship between each regulatory strategy and each of the four psychopathology groups. We found that internalizing disorders were more consistently associated with regulatory strategies than externalizing disorders. Lastly, many of our analyses showed that whether the sample came from a clinical or normative population significantly moderated the relationships. This finding underscores the importance of adopting a multi-sample approach to the study of psychopathology.
Article
Emotions are generally thought to arise through the interaction of bottom-up and top-down processes. However, prior work has not delineated their relative contributions. In a sample of 20 females, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to compare the neural correlates of negative emotions generated by the bottom-up perception of aversive images and by the top-down interpretation of neutral images as aversive. We found that (a) both types of responses activated the amygdala, although bottom-up responses did so more strongly; (b) bottom-up responses activated systems for attending to and encoding perceptual and affective stimulus properties, whereas top-down responses activated prefrontal regions that represent high-level cognitive interpretations; and (c) self-reported affect correlated with activity in the amygdala during bottom-up responding and with activity in the medial prefrontal cortex during top-down responding. These findings provide a neural foundation for emotion theories that posit multiple kinds of appraisal processes and help to clarify mechanisms underlying clinically relevant forms of emotion dysregulation.
Article
Consistent with the notion that emotional stimuli receive preferential attention and perceptual processing, many event-related potential (ERP) components appear sensitive to emotional stimuli. In an effort to differentiate components that are sensitive to emotional versus neutral stimuli, the current study utilized temporospatial principal components analysis to analyze ERPs from a large sample (N=82) while pleasant, neutral, and unpleasant images were passively viewed. Several factors sensitive to emotional stimuli were identified-corresponding to the N1, early posterior negativity (EPN), and P3; multiple factors resembling the late positive potential (LPP) emerged. Results indicate that the N1 represents the earliest component modulated by emotional stimuli; the EPN and the LPP represent unique components; the scalp-recorded LPP appears to include a P3-like positivity as well as additional positivities at occipital and central recording sites.
Article
Self-regulation is a complex process that involves consumers’ persistence, strength, motivation, and commitment in order to be able to override short-term impulses. In order to be able to pursue their long-term goals, consumers typically need to forgo immediate pleasurable experiences that are detrimental to reach their overarching goals. Although this sometimes involves resisting to simple and small temptations, it is not always easy, since the lure of momentary temptations is pervasive. In addition, consumers’ beliefs play an important role determining strategies and behaviors that consumers consider acceptable to engage in, affecting how they act and plan actions to attain their goals. This dissertation investigates adequacy of some beliefs typically shared by consumers about the appropriate behaviors to exert self-regulation, analyzing to what extent these indeed contribute to the enhancement of consumers’ ability to exert self-regulation.
Article
Throughout childhood and adolescence, there are consistent age differences in speed of processing. Here 72 published studies yielded 1,826 pairs of response times (RTs) in which each pair consisted of adults' mean RT for a condition and the corresponding mean RT for a younger group. The primary results were that (a) children's and adolescents' RTs increase linearly as a function of adult RTs in corresponding conditions and (b) the amount of increase becomes smaller with age in a manner that is well described by an exponential function. These results are consistent with the view that age differences in processing speed reflect some general (i.e., nontask specific) component that changes rapidly during childhood and more slowly during adolescence. Possible candidates for the general component are discussed.
Article
Emotionally arousing picture stimuli evoked scalp-recorded event-related potentials. A late, slow positive voltage change was observed, which was significantly larger for affective than neutral stimuli. This positive shift began 200-300 ms after picture onset, reached its maximum amplitude approximately 1 s after picture onset, and was sustained for most of a 6-s picture presentation period. The positive increase was not related to local probability of content type, but was accentuated for pictures that prompted increased autonomic responses and reports of greater affective arousal (e.g. erotic or violent content). These results suggest that the late positive wave indicates a selective processing of emotional stimuli, reflecting the activation of motivational systems in the brain.
Article
Emotionally arousing pictures elicit larger late positive potentials (LPPs) than neutral pictures during passive viewing. Moreover, these cortical responses do not rely on voluntary evaluation of the hedonic content and are relatively unaffected by task demands. In this study, we examined modulation of the late positive potential as it varies with stimulus repetition. Three pictures (pleasant, neutral, unpleasant) were presented up to 60 times each. Although the amplitude of the late positive potential during picture viewing declined with stimulus repetition, affective modulation remained intact. On the other hand, autonomic responses (skin conductance and heart rate change) habituated rapidly with stimulus repetition. These findings suggest that while stimulus detection and categorization, reflected in the LPP, is mandatory, autonomic modulation reflects initial orienting responses that habituate rapidly.
Article
Recent imaging studies have suggested that developmental changes may parallel aspects of adult learning in cortical activation becoming less diffuse and more focal over time. However, while adult learning studies examine changes within subjects, developmental findings have been based on cross-sectional samples and even comparisons across studies. Here, we used functional MRI in children to test directly for shifts in cortical activity during performance of a cognitive control task, in a combined longitudinal and cross-sectional study. Our longitudinal findings, relative to our cross-sectional ones, show attenuated activation in dorsolateral prefrontal cortical areas, paralleled by increased focal activation in ventral prefrontal regions related to task performance.