How does cognitive reappraisal affect the response to gains and losses?

To investigate the influence of cognitive reappraisal, one important kind of emotion regulation strategy, on psychological and electrophysiological responses to gains and losses, a monetary gambling task was performed in two conditions, that is, spontaneity and regulation. Event‐related potentials (ERP) and self‐rating emotional experiences to outcome feedback were recorded during the task. Cognitive reappraisal reduced self‐rating emotional experience to both gains and losses and the amplitudes of the feedback‐related negativity (FRN) and the P3 of ERPs. According to these results, we suggest that the application of cognitive reappraisal strategy significantly modulated the motivational salience of current outcomes, thus weakening the subjective emotional experience elicited. In addition, cognitive reappraisal might have changed the allocation of cognitive resources during outcome evaluation. This study extends emotion regulation studies by applying monetary outcomes as emotional stimuli, and also implicates the significance of emotion regulation in decision‐making processes.     

The reward‐like nature of social cues that indicate successful altruistic punishment

Altruistic punishment is the attempt to penalize deviant behavior of another person even though it is accompanied by personal costs. Here, we investigated the influence of the reaction on the socioemotional level of the other person following altruistic punishment behavior on future decision making and neural responses. We used a modified ultimatum game, which included an emotional facial feedback of the proposer following the decision of the participant. We found higher acceptance rates for proposers showing a smile upon acceptance or a sad face upon rejection of an offer, compared to proposers showing a neutral facial expression. On the neural level, we found a reversed N2 effect for negative emotional faces in the context of altruistic punishment, compared to a control condition. Specifically, when following the rejection of an unfair offer, negative emotional faces showed a reward‐like positivity that might signal successful altruistic punishment. In addition, differential effects for P3 amplitudes might signal the subjective importance of a desired outcome. Our results are in line with the interpretation that rejection of unfair offers in the ultimatum game is due to intended altruistic punishment. Social cues may exhibit reward‐like properties when indicating successful altruistic punishment and can influence subsequent decision making.     

Misfortune may be a blessing in disguise: Fairness perception and emotion modulate decision making

Fairness perception and equality during social interactions frequently elicit affective arousal and affect decision making. By integrating the dictator game and a probabilistic gambling task, this study aimed to investigate the effects of a negative experience induced by perceived unfairness on decision making using behavioral, model fitting, and electrophysiological approaches. Participants were randomly assigned to the neutral, harsh, or kind groups, which consisted of various asset allocation scenarios to induce different levels of perceived unfairness. The monetary gain was subsequently considered the initial asset in a negatively rewarded, probabilistic gambling task in which the participants were instructed to maintain as much asset as possible. Our behavioral results indicated that the participants in the harsh group exhibited increased levels of negative emotions but retained greater total game scores than the participants in the other two groups. Parameter estimation of a reinforcement learning model using a Bayesian approach indicated that these participants were more loss aversive and consistent in decision making. Data from simultaneous ERP recordings further demonstrated that these participants exhibited larger feedback‐related negativity to unexpected outcomes in the gambling task, which suggests enhanced reward sensitivity and signaling of reward prediction error. Collectively, our study suggests that a negative experience may be an advantage in the modulation of reward‐based decision making.     

Emotional content modulates response inhibition and perceptual processing

In this study, event‐related potentials were used to investigate the effect of emotion on response inhibition. Participants performed an emotional go/no‐go task that required responses to human faces associated with a “go” valence (i.e., emotional, neutral) and response inhibition to human faces associated with a “no‐go” valence. Emotional content impaired response inhibition, as evidenced by decreased response accuracy and N2 amplitudes in no‐go trials. More importantly, emotional expressions elicited larger N170 amplitudes than neutral expressions, and this effect was larger in no‐go than in go trials, indicating that the perceptual processing of emotional expression had priority in inhibitory trials. In no‐go trials, correlation analysis showed that increased N170 amplitudes were associated with decreased N2 amplitudes. Taken together, our findings suggest that emotional content impairs response inhibition due to the prioritization of emotional content processing.     

Word frequency modulates the processing of emotional words: convergent behavioral and electrophysiological data

The processing of high frequency (HF) words is speeded as compared to the processing of low frequency (LF) words, which is known as the word frequency effect. This effect has been suggested to occur at either a lexical access or in a decision processing stage. Previous work has shown that word frequency influenced the processing of emotional content at both neural and behavioral levels. However, the results of these studies lead to discrepant findings because some of the variables that have shown to impact the processing of affective information were not always controlled. In order to make a better characterization of frequency effects on emotional word processing, event related potentials (ERPs) and reaction times to HF and LF negative and neutral nouns were measured as participants performed a lexical decision task. Temporal and spatial component analyses were used to detect and quantify, in a reliable way, those components associated with the interaction between word frequency and emotion. LF negative nouns were recognized faster and more accurately than LF neutral nouns whereas no differences were found in the HF word comparison. Also, LF neutral words elicited reduced amplitudes in a late positive component (P450) as compared to LF negative words. These findings might be reflecting a different involvement of attentional mechanisms during the evaluation of lexical information that benefits the processing of LF negative nouns.     

Do emojis influence social interactions? Neural and behavioral responses to affective emojis in bargaining situations

Emojis are nowadays a common substitute for real facial expressions to integrate emotions in social interaction. In certain contexts, emojis possibly could also transport information beyond emotions, reflecting interindividual differences or social aspects. In this study, we investigated the influence of emojis as socioemotional feedback stimuli on behavior and neural responses in a social decision game. We modified the Ultimatum Game by including emotional feedback provided by the proposer as response to the decision of the participant as receiver. Therefore, we generated identities that differed in their feedback behavior to identify differences in the processing of emotional feedback in a positive (acceptance) versus negative (rejection) frame. Regarding offer sizes, we replicated the valence effect of feedback‐related negativity for small offer sizes evoking more negative brain potentials compared to larger ones. Further, we found an effect of affective emojis on distinct ERPs: A face‐detecting neural component (N170) was examined to be a part of the processing of emojis, which resulted in significantly more negative amplitudes in response to a sad‐looking emoji compared to smiling and neutral ones. Furthermore, P3 amplitudes indicate transmission effects from the feedback emoticons to the neural processing of different offer sizes. In contrast to previous findings, P3 responses of our subjects did not depend on the offer size, but rather by which kind of partner they were made. Since some evaluative processes did not reveal any effects, emojis seem to be less effective than real facial expressions, which convey more information that is socially meaningful.     

What our eyes tell us about feelings: Tracking pupillary responses during emotion regulation processes

Emotion regulation is essential for adaptive behavior and mental health. Strategies applied to alter emotions are known to differ in their impact on psychological and physiological aspects of the emotional response. However, emotion regulation outcome has primarily been assessed via self‐report, and studies comparing regulation strategies with regard to their peripheral physiological mechanisms are limited in number. In the present study, we therefore aimed to investigate the effects of different emotion regulation strategies on pupil dilation, skin conductance responses, and subjective emotional responses. Thirty healthy females were presented with negative and neutral pictures and asked to maintain or up‐ and downregulate their upcoming emotional responses through reappraisal or distraction. Pupil dilation and skin conductance responses were significantly enhanced when viewing negative relative to neutral pictures. For the pupil, this emotional arousal effect manifested specifically late during the pupillary response. In accordance with subjective ratings, increasing negative emotions through reappraisal led to the most prominent pupil size enlargements, whereas no consistent effect for downregulation was found. In contrast, early peak dilations were enhanced in all emotion regulation conditions independent of strategy. Skin conductance responses were not further modulated by emotion regulation. These results indicate that pupil diameter is modulated by emotional arousal, but is initially related to the extent of mental effort required to regulate automatic emotional responses. Our data thus provide first evidence that the pupillary response might comprise two distinct temporal components reflecting cognitive emotion regulation effort on the one hand and emotion regulation success on the other hand.     

Effects of prior mental effort on picture processing: An ERP investigation

The current study examined the aftereffects of mental effort on the processing of picture stimuli using neural measures. Ninety‐seven healthy young adults were randomly assigned to exercise more versus less mental effort on a writing task. Then participants viewed positive, negative, and neutral affective images while P1, N1, P2, N2, P3, and late positive potential (LPP) magnitudes to the images were assessed. We found that performing the more (versus less) effortful writing task caused more negative N2 amplitudes to all images. In addition, and consistent with past research, emotional (versus neutral) images elicited more positive amplitudes on the N2, P3, and LPP components. Thus, prior mental effort appeared to reduce early attentional engagement with visual stimuli but did not diminish later attention modulation by emotional content. These findings suggest novel implications for understanding the behavioral aftereffects of mental effort and self‐control.     

Time course of automatic emotion regulation during a facial Go/Nogo task

Neuroimaging research has determined that the neural correlates of automatic emotion regulation (AER) include the anterior cingulate cortex. However, the corresponding time course remains unknown. In the current study, we collected event-related potentials (ERPs) from 20 healthy volunteers during a judgment of the gender of emotional faces in a cued Go/Nogo task. The results indicate that Go-N2 amplitudes and latencies following positive and negative faces decreased more than those following neutral faces; Nogo-N2 amplitudes and latencies did not vary with valence. Moreover, positive and negative faces prompted higher P3 amplitudes and shorter P3 latencies than neutral faces in both Go and Nogo trials. These observations suggest that in the executive processes, Go-N2 reflects top-down attention toward emotions, while Go-P3 reflects only motivated attention; in the inhibitory processes, Nogo-N2 reflects cognitive conflict monitoring, while Nogo-P3 overlaps with the automatic response inhibition of emotions. These observations imply that AER can modulate early ERP components, and both Go-N2 and Nogo-P3 can be used as electrophysiological indices of AER.     

Decreased P3 amplitudes elicited by negative facial emotion in manic patients: Selective deficits in emotional processing

Manic patients have impairments in recognizing negative emotional stimuli. However, there have been few studies on manic patients’ neurophysiological responses to facial emotions. We measured the P3 event-related potentials using facial emotional stimuli to investigate whether the impairment in recognition of negative emotions is greater in maniac patients. We recruited twenty manic patients and twenty controls. A visual oddball paradigm was used with facial pictures: happy, neutral, sad, fear, and disgust emotions. While P3 amplitudes of emotional stimuli were significantly larger than those of neutral stimuli in controls, the amplitudes were not significantly different from those for neutral pictures in manic patients. Repeated-measures analysis of variance on P3 amplitudes revealed significant interaction effects of paired emotions as sad-neutral, disgust-neutral, fear-neutral, but not in the happy-neutral emotion pairs. These differential P3 responses suggest that manic patients may have abnormal neurophysiological activity when evaluating negative facial emotions. Thus, these findings may give the evidence for reduced negative emotion recognition of manic patients.     

基于ERP情绪状态对工作记忆刷新功能影响研究

近年来,情绪对工作记忆的建设作用正逐步受到关注,尤其是情绪对工作记忆中央执行系统刷新功能的影响至关重要。组织16名青年受试者参与动态工作记忆任务实验,探讨积极、中性和消极三类不同情绪状态对工作记忆刷新功能的影响。实验首先采用国际情绪图片系统(IAPS)使受试者分别进入三类情绪状态,随后执行4个数字的动态工作记忆任务。结果发现,积极情绪状态下工作记忆刷新时间显著增长(积极情绪状态:(1.016±0.338) s;中性情绪状态:(0.814±0.347) s, P<0.05);刷新ERP在额中央部N2幅值显著小于中性情绪;工作记忆刷新的后期(400～1 000 ms),在频带13～30 Hz处的能量降低显著低于中性情绪。消极情绪状态下工作记忆刷新时间与中性情绪无显著差异;工作记忆刷新的早期(0～400ms),在频带0～8Hz处的能量升高显著低于中性情绪。以上结果说明积极情绪对工作记忆刷新存在干扰作用,但未发现消极情绪对工作记忆刷新的显著影响。有关情绪状态影响工作记忆刷新机制的初步研究将为提高工作记忆刷新绩效提供实验依据。     

Contextual valence modulates the neural dynamics of risk processing

A well‐known bias in risky decision making is that most people tend to be risk averse when gains are salient but risk seeking when losses are salient. The present study addressed the neural dynamics of this process by recording ERPs during a gambling task in a gain and a loss context. Behaviorally, participants were found to be risk averse in the gain context but risk neutral in the loss context. During the anticipation stage, an increased stimulus‐preceding negativity was elicited by high‐ versus low‐risk choices in the gain but not the loss context. During the outcome‐appraisal stage, the feedback‐related negativity was larger after high‐ versus low‐risk choices in the gain instead of the loss context. For the P300, an outcome valence effect (a larger P300 for gain vs. loss outcomes) emerged following the high‐ versus low‐risk decisions in the gain but not the loss context. Our findings suggest that risk processing can be modulated by the context of valence during the anticipation stage and by both the contextual valence and the outcome valence during the outcome‐appraisal stage, which may be driven by the motivational salience imposed by the context of valence.     

Automatic emotion regulation in response inhibition: The temporal dynamics of emotion counter‐regulation during a go/no‐go task

Recent behavioral studies indicate that emotion counter‐regulation automatically allocates attention to events that are opposite in the valence to the experienced emotional state. The present study explored the effect of emotion counter‐regulation on response inhibition by using ERPs in a go/no‐go paradigm. We recruited 58 subjects and randomly assigned them to either the angry priming group (watching Nanjing Massacre movie clips) or the neutral priming group (watching “mending a computer” movie clips). The behavioral results revealed that participants in the angry priming group responded significantly more accurately to go happy and no‐go angry faces than go angry and no‐go happy faces. The analyses of ERPs revealed that the amplitudes of the no‐go N2 and no‐go P3 were significantly larger for the happy faces than for the angry faces in the angry priming group. However, no such effects were found in the neutral priming group. These results suggest that highly aroused angry emotion could prompt a priority response to happy emotion stimuli and restrict the responses to angry emotion stimuli through emotion counter‐regulation.     

The influence of attachment representation on parental perception and interpretation of infant emotions: A multilevel approach

The aim of the study was to investigate parental perception and interpretation of infant emotional expression depending on their attachment representation. Forty‐six parents' responses to infant pictures depicting positive, neutral, and negative emotions were assessed on the level of affective judgments (valence, arousal), mimic responses (facial muscle activity), and of the eyelid reflex (using the startle paradigm). Results revealed small differences between parents of different attachment representations with respect to their subjective evaluations. However, secure parents, as compared to insecure ones, showed a positive bias in their mimic responses to infant pictures. The modulation of the startle response indicated a negative evaluation of negative infant emotion expressions in dismissing parents, while an augmentation of the startle response to negative infant emotions could not be observed in secure and preoccupied parents. The findings highlight the role of attachment experiences for emotional information processing in parents and its consequences for parental behavior. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Dev Psychobiol 52: 411–423, 2010.     

Categorization of unilaterally presented emotional words: an ERP analysis

This study is intended to clarify the functional role of different ERP components as indicators of the processing of emotions. The effect of emotional connotation of words on hemispheric lateralization is also explored. Visual ERPs were recorded to unilaterally presented positive, negative, and neutral words that should be categorized according to their emotional connotation. The P2 amplitude was larger to positive than to negative words whereas P3 amplitude was larger to positive words compared with neutral ones. The slow positive wave (SPW) was influenced by words emotionality at anterior and posterior sites differently. The amplitude of the N1 component was larger in the left hemisphere to contralaterally presented words. The P2 and P3 components were larger over the left hemisphere whereas the N3 and N4 components were larger over the right hemisphere to ipsilateral stimulation. The results support our hypotheses on the functional role of positive ERP components in the processing of an affective words connotation: the P2 wave reflects a general evaluation of emotional significance, the P3 a task-related decision, and the SPW an additional decision control in the context of the emotional experience of an individual. Neither the "right hemisphere hypothesis" nor "valence hypothesis" on lateralization of the processing of emotions were confirmed. Each hemisphere seems to exert its effect on emotion through specific hemispheric resources that are unequally allocated along the different stages of task processing and may cause alternation of hemispheric dominance.     

Emotion processing in female youth: Testing the stability of the late positive potential

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 ERPs elicited from this task is limited. Establishing the psychometric properties of the EIT is critical, particularly as phenotypes and biological indicators may represent traitlike 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 EEG data were recorded to probe the late positive potential (LPP). One month later, participants were readministered 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 vs. 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.     

Positive emotion regulation in emotional disorders: A theoretical review

Conceptualizations of emotion regulation have led to the identification of cognitive and behavioral regulatory abnormalities that contribute to the development and maintenance of emotional disorders. However, existing research on emotion regulation in anxiety and mood disorders has primarily focused on the regulation of negative emotions rather than positive emotions. Recent findings indicate that disturbances in positive emotion regulation occur across emotional disorders, and may be a generative target for treatment research. The aims of this paper are to: 1. Present a transdiagnostic model of positive emotion disturbances in emotional disorders; 2. Review evidence for disturbances in positive emotion regulation in emotional disorders across categories of emotion regulation; and 3. Propose treatment strategies that may address these disturbances.     

Linking internal and external signals for performance monitoring: An event‐related potential study

The present study explored the relevance of internal signals for the dynamics of personal and nonpersonal feedback processing. To this end, pairs of participants performed concurrently a choice‐response task and received external signals in four feedback contexts. In two contexts, feedback was informative about the personal performance (personal/private and personal/public); in the other two contexts, instructions suggested that feedback was informative about the other participant's performance (nonpersonal/other) or that it was random (nonpersonal/random). Since personal feedback was contingent on performance, the two contexts with personal feedback allowed a reference between internal and external signals. This reference significantly affected personal feedback processing. On the one hand, in the processing of personal feedback, the feedback‐related negativities (FRNs) evoked by feedback associated with distinctively fast or slow responses were less negative than the FRN elicited by feedback related to responses made with average speed. On the other hand, feedback signals evoked FRNs with similar amplitudes in the two contexts with nonpersonal feedback. Furthermore, personal and nonpersonal feedback elicited ERPs with different strength. Starting with the P2 potential, personal feedback evoked a more positive electrophysiological response than nonpersonal feedback. Based on these results, we conclude that a link between internal and external signals, as for personal feedback, is a key factor influencing the dynamics of feedback processing.     

The cognitive consequences of emotion regulation: an ERP investigation

Increasing evidence suggests that emotion regulation (ER) strategies modulate encoding of information presented during regulation; however, no studies have assessed the impact of cognitive reappraisal ER strategies on the processing of stimuli presented after the ER period. Participants in the present study regulated emotions to unpleasant pictures and then judged whether a word was negative or neutral. Electromyographic measures (corrugator supercilli) confirmed that individuals increased and decreased negative affect according to ER condition. Event-related potential analyses revealed smallest N400 amplitudes to negative and neutral words presented after decreasing unpleasant emotions and smallest P300 amplitudes to words presented after increasing unpleasant emotions whereas reaction time data failed to show ER modulations. Results are discussed in the context of the developing ER literature, as well as theories of emotional incongruity (N400) and resource allocation (P300).     

Different strategies underlying uncertain decision making: Higher executive performance is associated with enhanced feedback‐related negativity

The aim of the present study was to investigate the role of executive functions (EFs) in different strategies underlying risky decision making. Adult participants from a nonclinical sample were assigned to low or high EF groups based on their performance on EF tasks measuring shifting, updating, and inhibition. ERPs were recorded while participants performed the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART). In this task, each balloon pump was associated with either a reward or a balloon pop with unknown probability. The BART behavioral measures did not show between‐group differences. However, the feedback‐related negativity (FRN) associated with undesirable outcomes was larger in the high EF group than in the low EF group. Since the FRN represents salience prediction error, our results suggest that the high EF group formed internal models that were violated by the outcomes. Thus, we provided ERP evidence for EFs influencing risky decision‐making processes.