Stop laughing! Humor perception with and without expressive suppression

The neurophysiological study of emotion regulation focused on the strategy of reappraisal-i.e., the cognitive reinterpretation of a stimulus. Reappraisal reduces emotional expression, the experience of both negative and positive feelings, and the amplitude of an event-related potential (ERP)-the late positive potential (LPP). In contrast, the strategy of expressive suppression (ES), being the inhibition of emotional expression, has been reported to reduce subjective feelings of positive, but not negative emotion, and has not yet been investigated with ERPs. We focused on the LPP to assess the correlates of ES in the context of humor perception. Twenty-two female participants rated sequences of humorous (H) and non-humorous (NH) pictures, while their zygomaticus muscle was recorded. A spontaneous (SP) condition, in which participants attended naturally to the pictures, resulted in higher ratings of funniness, increased smiling, and increased LPP amplitude for H compared to NH stimuli. An ES condition, in which participants suppressed their facial reactions, resulted in reduced smiling, without affecting subjective ratings. LPP amplitude did not differ between H and NH stimuli during ES, suggesting equal allocation of processing resources to both stimuli. These results suggest that, similarly to reappraisal, ES modifies the way the brain processes positive emotional stimuli.     

Altered emotional information processing in borderline personality disorder: An electrophysiological study

Emotional dysregulation is one of the key symptoms of patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD). In the present study it is hypothesized that borderline patients display a cortical hyper-responsivity to emotional stimuli compared with a healthy control group. Further, we aimed to examine whether BPD patients were able to suppress stimuli with negative emotional valence as well as healthy control participants could. This is the first study addressing the electrophysiological processing of emotional stimuli in BPD. The electrophysiological response to emotional information was studied among 30 BPD patients and compared with the response in 30 normal controls using event-related potentials (ERPs). Participants were shown pictures selected from the International Affective Picture System with neutral, positive, and negative valence. After performing an attentional task, the participants were asked to perform a reappraisal task. The assignment was to consciously suppress emotions that might occur after viewing pictures with an unpleasant content. Borderline patients displayed larger late positive potentials (LPP) to pictures with an unpleasant valence as compared with the control group, indicating an enhanced elaborative processing of unpleasant stimuli. However, they did not differ on the reappraisal task. Borderline patients show an enhanced emotional cortical reactivity to unpleasant stimuli as compared with a control group. This suggests an emotional dysfunctioning in BPD patients. This feature might be an important focus in the treatment of BPD.     

Time course of emotion-related responding during distraction and reappraisal

Theoretical accounts of emotion regulation (ER) discriminate various cognitive strategies to voluntarily modify emotional states. Amongst these, attentional deployment (i.e. distraction) and cognitive change (i.e. reappraisal), have been shown to successfully down-regulate emotions. Neuroimaging studies found that both strategies differentially engage neural structures associated with selective attention, working memory and cognitive control. The aim of this study was to further delineate similarities and differences between the ER strategies reappraisal and distraction by investigating their temporal brain dynamics using event-related potentials (ERPs) and their patterns of facial expressive behavior. Twenty-one participants completed an ER experiment in which they had to either passively view positive, neutral and negative pictures, reinterpret them to down-regulate affective responses (reappraisal), or solve a concurrently presented mathematical equation (distraction). Results demonstrate the efficacy of both strategies in the subjective control of emotion, accompanied by reductions of facial expressive activity (Corrugator supercilii and Zygomaticus major). ERP results indicated that distraction, compared with reappraisal, yielded a stronger and earlier attenuation of the late positive potential (LPP) magnitude for negative pictures. For positive pictures, only distraction but not reappraisal had significant effect on LPP attenuation. The results support the process model of ER, separating subtypes of cognitive strategies based on their specific time course.     

Neural correlates of cognitive reappraisal in children: an ERP study

Cognitive emotion regulation strategies, such as reappraising the emotional meaning of events, are linked to positive adjustment and are disrupted in individuals showing emotional distress, like anxiety. The late positive potential (LPP) is sensitive to reappraisal: LPP amplitudes are reduced when unpleasant pictures are reappraised in a positive light, suggesting regulation of negative emotion. However, only one study has examined reappraisal in children using the LPP. The present study examined whether directed reappraisals reduce the LPP in a group of 5- to 7-year-olds, and correlate with individual differences in fear and anxiety. EEG was recorded from 32 typically developing children via 64 scalp electrodes during a directed reappraisal task. Mothers reported on child anxiety. Fearful behavior was observed. As predicted, LPP amplitudes were larger to unpleasant versus neutral pictures;counter to predictions, the LPP was not sensitive to reappraisal. The degree to which unpleasant versus neutral pictures elicited larger LPPs was correlated with greater anxiety and fear. Results suggest that reappraisal in young children is still developing, but that the LPP is sensitive to individual differences related to fear and anxiety. The utility of the LPP as a measure of cognitive emotion regulation and emotional processing biases in children is discussed.     

Lasting effects of cognitive emotion regulation: neural correlates of reinterpretation and distancing

Reinterpretation and distancing are two cognitive reappraisal tactics, used to regulate one’s emotions in response to emotion-eliciting stimuli or situations. Relatively less is known about their (differential) lasting effects on emotional responding and related neural correlates. This functional magnetic resonance imaging study investigated 85 healthy females, participating in a 2-day cognitive emotion regulation experiment. On the first day, participants were instructed to passively look at, reinterpret or distance from repeatedly presented aversive pictures. One week later, they were re-exposed to the same stimuli without regulation instruction, in order to assess lasting effects. The main outcome measures comprised ratings of negative feelings and blood-oxygen-level-dependent responses. Lasting effects for reinterpretation compared with looking at aversive pictures during passive re-exposure 1 week later were reflected in stronger activation of the left amygdala, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and reduced negative feelings. Neither distancing compared with looking at aversive pictures nor reinterpretation compared with distancing did result in significant effects during re-exposure. These findings indicate that reinterpretation leads to reduced negative feelings 1 week later, which might be mediated by inhibitory vmPFC activation or stronger positive emotions during re-exposure. However, the missing difference compared with distancing questions the specificity of the results and the mechanisms underlying these two cognitive reappraisal tactics.     

The right VLPFC and downregulation of social pain: A TMS study

Previous studies have demonstrated that the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (RVLPFC) is crucially involved in downregulating physical and social pain. However, it remains unclear whether the RVLPFC is more specific to either physical or social pain. The present study compares the role of RVLPFC in emotion regulation in physical‐ and social‐pain conditions using repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS). A total of 60 healthy participants underwent active (n = 30) or sham (n = 30) rTMS over the RVLPFC. Following each TMS session, participants performed a non‐reappraisal and then a reappraisal task to downregulate imagined physical or social pain evoked by pictures. Self‐reported negative emotional ratings and electroencephalogram data were recorded during the emotion regulation task. Participants were then required to rate the valence and arousal of those pictures 30 min after the task. It is found that rTMS‐activated RVLPFC led to reductions in subjective negative feelings and amplitudes of the late positive potential during reappraisal; however, these effects were found exclusively in the social‐pain condition. Participants also reported higher positive valence for socially, compared to physically, painful pictures after 30 min of the task. Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence both supported the functional specificity of RVLPFC in regulation of social pain. The prominent delayed effect of rTMS makes it possible to consider the potential application of rTMS‐VLPFC in clinical practice for social pain relief.     

The impact of verbal framing on brain activity evoked by emotional images

Emotional stimuli generally command more brain processing resources than non-emotional stimuli, but the magnitude of this effect is subject to voluntary control. Cognitive reappraisal represents one type of emotion regulation that can be voluntarily employed to modulate responses to emotional stimuli. Here, the late positive potential (LPP), a specific event-related brain potential (ERP) component, was measured in response to neutral, positive and negative images while participants performed an evaluative categorization task. One experimental group adopted a "negative frame" in which images were categorized as negative or not. The other adopted a "positive frame" in which the exact same images were categorized as positive or not. Behavioral performance confirmed compliance with random group assignment, and peak LPP amplitude to negative images was affected by group membership: brain responses to negative images were significantly reduced in the "positive frame" group. This suggests that adopting a more positive appraisal frame can modulate brain activity elicited by negative stimuli in the environment.     

Neural correlates of immediate and prolonged effects of cognitive reappraisal and distraction on emotional experience

Cognitive emotion regulation strategies are important components of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT). Additionally, up-regulation and difficulties in the down-regulation of negative feelings are associated with mental disorders. However, little is known about the lasting effects of cognitive emotion regulation strategies on emotional experience and associated neural activation. Therefore, this study investigated immediate and prolonged effects of emotion regulation using cognitive reappraisal and distraction on subjective report and its neural correlates. Twenty-seven healthy females took part in a 2-day functional magnetic resonance imaging study. They were instructed to either up-regulate or down-regulate their negative feelings using a situation-focused cognitive reappraisal strategy, to distract themselves by imagining a specific neutral situation, or to passively look at repeatedly presented aversive and neutral pictures. Re-exposure to the same stimuli without a regulation instruction was conducted one day later. Self-reported negative feelings and blood-oxygen-level-dependent responses served as main outcome variables. As expected, the results show successful immediate up- or down-regulation of negative feelings by cognitive reappraisal and down-regulation of negative feelings by distraction. Furthermore, these changes in negative feelings were correlated with amygdala activation. A lasting effect on emotional experience associated with stronger ventromedial prefrontal cortex activation was found for down-regulation of negative feelings via cognitive reappraisal. Compared to distraction, down-regulation via cognitive reappraisal led to reduced negative feelings and stronger dorso- and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex responses one day later. While cognitive reappraisal and distraction are both effective strategies during active regulation, only cognitive reappraisal had a lasting effect. These findings might have implications for CBT.     

Motivated attention to cocaine and emotional cues in abstinent and current cocaine users--an ERP study

Event-related potentials (ERPs) are a direct measure of neural activity and are ideally suited to study the time-course of attentional engagement with emotional and drug-related stimuli in addiction. In particular, the late positive potential (LPP) appears to be enhanced following cocaine-related compared with neutral stimuli in human participants with cocaine use disorders (CUD). However, previous studies have not directly compared cocaine-related with emotional stimuli while examining potential differences between abstinent and current cocaine users. The present study examined ERPs in 55 CUD (27 abstinent and 28 current users) and 29 matched healthy controls while they passively viewed pleasant, unpleasant, neutral and cocaine-related pictures. To examine the time-course of attention to these stimuli, we analysed both an early and later window in the LPP as well as the early posterior negativity (EPN), established in assessing motivated attention. Cocaine pictures elicited increased electrocortical measures of motivated attention in ways similar to affectively pleasant and unpleasant pictures in all CUD, an effect that was no longer discernible during the late LPP window for the current users. This group also exhibited deficient processing of the other emotional stimuli (early LPP window - pleasant pictures; late LPP window - pleasant and unpleasant pictures). Results were unique to the LPP and not EPN. Taken together, results support a relatively early attention bias to cocaine stimuli in cocaine-addicted individuals, further suggesting that recent cocaine use decreases such attention bias during later stages of processing but at the expense of deficient processing of other emotional stimuli.     

晚期正电位技术在垂体腺瘤病人情绪加工功能障碍评估中的应用

目的 探讨晚期正电位（LPP）在垂体腺瘤病人情绪加工功能障碍评估中的应用价值。方法 2018年6月2019年12月前瞻性收集26例垂体腺瘤和26例健康志愿者（对照组）,使用10-20国际标准化系统记录头皮中央、顶部脑电数据,头皮电阻降到5 kΩ以下,采样率为1 000 Hz,滤波带宽在0.05~200 Hz;从国际情感图片系统中选择45张图片,包括15幅正性刺激图像、15幅负性刺激图像和15幅中性刺激图像。结果 无论是垂体腺瘤病人,还是健康志愿者,正性刺激和中性刺激均可以诱发出显著的LPP成分;与中性刺激引起的LPP振幅相比,正性刺激诱发的两侧顶叶LPP振幅更大（P<0.05）。负性刺激情况下,对照组LPP振幅[（2.435±0.419）μV]显著大于垂体腺瘤组[（0.656±0.427）μV;P=0.005];正性刺激情况下,对照组LPP振幅[（1.450±0.316）μV]也显著大于垂体腺瘤组[（0.495±0.322）μV;P=0.040]。对照组右侧顶叶LPP振幅[（1.993±0.299）μV]显著大于垂体腺瘤组[（0.269±0.305）μV;P=0.001]。结论 垂体腺瘤病人存在情绪加工功能障碍,提示临床除了关注垂体腺瘤本身的治疗外,还要重视病人的情绪加工能力障碍。     

Emotional picture processing in children: an ERP study

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.     

‘Ecstasy’ as a social drug: MDMA preferentially affects responses to emotional stimuli with social content

3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA, ‘ecstasy’) is used recreationally to improve mood and sociability, and has generated clinical interest as a possible adjunct to psychotherapy. One way that MDMA may produce positive ‘prosocial’ effects is by changing responses to emotional stimuli, especially stimuli with social content. Here, we examined for the first time how MDMA affects subjective responses to positive, negative and neutral emotional pictures with and without social content. We hypothesized that MDMA would dose-dependently increase reactivity to positive emotional stimuli and dampen reactivity to negative stimuli, and that these effects would be most pronounced for pictures with people in them. The data were obtained from two studies using similar designs with healthy occasional MDMA users (total N = 101). During each session, participants received MDMA (0, 0.75 and 1.5 mg/kg oral), and then rated their positive and negative responses to standardized positive, negative and neutral pictures with and without social content. MDMA increased positive ratings of positive social pictures, but reduced positive ratings of non-social positive pictures. We speculate this ‘socially selective’ effect contributes to the prosocial effects of MDMA by increasing the comparative value of social contact and closeness with others. This effect may also contribute to its attractiveness to recreational users.     

Brain dynamics of visual attention during anticipation and encoding of threat- and safe-cues in spider-phobic individuals

This study systematically investigated the sensitivity of the phobic attention system by measuring event-related potentials (ERPs) in spider-phobic and non-phobic volunteers in a context where spider and neutral pictures were presented (phobic threat condition) and in contexts where no phobic but unpleasant and neutral or only neutral pictures were displayed (phobia-irrelevant conditions). In a between-group study, participants were assigned to phobia-irrelevant conditions either before or after the exposure to spider pictures (pre-exposure vs post-exposure participants). Additionally, each picture was preceded by a fixation cross presented in one of three different colors that were informative about the category of an upcoming picture. In the phobic threat condition, spider-phobic participants showed a larger P1 than controls for all pictures and signal cues. Moreover, individuals with spider phobia who were sensitized by the exposure to phobic stimuli (i.e. post-exposure participants) responded with an increased P1 also in phobia-irrelevant conditions. In contrast, no group differences between spider-phobic and non-phobic individuals were observed in the P1-amplitudes during viewing of phobia-irrelevant stimuli in the pre-exposure group. In addition, cues signaling neutral pictures elicited decreased stimulus-preceding negativity (SPN) compared with cues signaling emotional pictures. Moreover, emotional pictures and cues signaling emotional pictures evoked larger early posterior negativity (EPN) and late positive potential (LPP) than neutral stimuli. Spider phobics showed greater selective attention effects than controls for phobia-relevant pictures (increased EPN and LPP) and cues (increased LPP and SPN). Increased sensitization of the attention system observed in spider-phobic individuals might facilitate fear conditioning and promote generalization of fear playing an important role in the maintenance of anxiety disorders.     

Cognitive and physiological dissociations in response to emotional pictures in patients with anorexia

Recent studies suggest that patients with anorexia may express dissociated cognitive and physiological reactivities to emotional stimuli. The present research aimed to compare subjective and autonomic responses to pleasant, unpleasant and neutral scenes during a categorization task and an activation rating task in anorexic (AN), alexithymic (AL), depressed (DEP) and control participants (CONT). The participants first categorized pictures according to their emotional valence, followed by a rating of their activation level, concomitant with the recording of skin conductance responses (SCRs). Main findings showed that the AN patients presented major difficulty in categorizing pictures, particularly neutral ones. Contrary to the AL participants, this difficulty did not induce significant increases of SCR amplitude in the AN patients. In the second task, the AN patients rated the intensity of activation of unpleasant pictures higher than the AL participants and that of pleasant ones higher than the AL and CONT participants. In addition, no significant linear correlation was observed between the intensity of activation ratings and SCR amplitude in the AN, AL or DEP participants contrarily to what was observed for control participants. This lack of relation suggests a non-specific disconnection between physiological and cognitive self-reported responses to emotional stimuli. Our results highlight a specific form of emotional processing in the AN patients distinct from that observed in alexithymia or depression and characterized by a dissociation between cognitive and physiological responses. This kind of disconnection could be associated with emotional regulation processes and may benefit the AN patients by lowering the psychological stress response.     

Emotional intensity influences pre-implementation and implementation of distraction and reappraisal

Although emotional intensity powerfully challenges regulatory strategies, its influence remains largely unexplored in affective-neuroscience. Accordingly, the present study addressed the moderating role of emotional intensity in two regulatory stages—implementation (during regulation) and pre-implementation (prior to regulation), of two major cognitive regulatory strategies—distraction and reappraisal. According to our framework, because distraction implementation involves early attentional disengagement from emotional information before it gathers force, in high-intensity it should be more effective in the short-term, relative to reappraisal, which modulates emotional processing only at a late semantic meaning phase. Supporting findings showed that in high (but not low) intensity, distraction implementation resulted in stronger modulation of negative experience, reduced neural emotional processing (centro-parietal late positive potential, LPP), with suggestive evidence for less cognitive effort (frontal-LPP), relative to reappraisal. Related pre-implementation findings confirmed that anticipating regulation of high-intensity stimuli resulted in distraction (over reappraisal) preference. In contrast, anticipating regulation of low-intensity stimuli resulted in reappraisal (over distraction) preference, which is most beneficial for long-term adaptation. Furthermore, anticipating cognitively demanding regulation, either in cases of regulating counter to these preferences or via the more effortful strategy of reappraisal, enhanced neural attentional resource allocation (Stimulus Preceding Negativity). Broad implications are discussed.     

Intact motivated attention in schizophrenia: evidence from event-related potentials

Emotionally significant stimuli typically capture attention (called motivated attention) even when they are irrelevant to tasks where attention is directed. Previous studies indicate that several components of emotional processing are intact in schizophrenia when subjects are instructed to attend to emotionally-evocative stimuli. However, few studies have examined whether emotional stimuli capture attention to a normal degree in people with schizophrenia when attention is directed elsewhere. The current event-related potential study examined motivated attention to task-irrelevant emotional stimuli in 35 stabilized outpatients and 26 healthy controls with a modified visual P300 oddball detection task. Participants viewed images of rare target and commonly occurring standard letter stimuli, as well as intermixed emotional (unpleasant, pleasant, neutral) pictures. Subjects were instructed to count the number of rare targets; the emotional valence of the picture stimuli was, therefore, task-irrelevant. We separately evaluated the Early Posterior Negativity (EPN) and Late Positive Potential (LPP) to emotional pictures and the P300 to target stimuli. Patients and controls showed similar patterns of EPN and LPP amplitude to the emotional stimuli, such that the EPN and LPP were larger for both pleasant and unpleasant versus neutral pictures. Although patients performed worse than controls on the target counting task, both groups showed comparable P300 differentiation between target versus non-target stimuli. Emotional stimuli captured attentional resources in people with schizophrenia even when the emotional stimuli were task-irrelevant, suggesting intact motivated attention at the level of early electrophysiological responding.     

Motivated and controlled attention to emotion: Time-course of the late positive potential

ObjectiveThe present study examined the time-course of automatic and controlled modulation of the late positive potential (LPP) during emotional picture viewing.MethodsParticipants (N = 32) viewed neutral and unpleasant stimuli for 6000 ms; at 3000 ms, one of two tones signaled participants to attend either to a more or less arousing portion of the picture. The time-course of the LPP was examined both during the passive viewing and directed attention portions of the trial using the method proposed by Guthrie and Buchwald [Guthrie D, Buchwald JS. Significance testing of difference potentials. Psychophysiology 1991;28(2):240–4].ResultsDuring passive viewing, the LPP became reliably larger following the presentation of unpleasant pictures from 160 ms onward; the magnitude of the LPP became reliably smaller beginning 620 ms after participants were instructed to attend to the less arousing aspects of unpleasant pictures – and this difference was maintained throughout the duration of the trial.ConclusionsThe LPP reflects relatively automatic attention to emotional visual stimuli, but is also sensitive to manipulations of directed attention toward arousing versus neutral aspects of such stimuli.SignificanceThese results shed further light on the time-course of emotional and cognitive modulation of the LPP, and suggest that the LPP reflects the relatively rapid and dynamic allocation of increased attention to emotional stimuli.     

Distinct electrocortical and behavioral evidence for increased attention to threat in generalized anxiety disorder

Background: Neural activity is increasingly used in addition to behavioral measures to study anxiety and attentional biases toward threatening stimuli. Event‐related potentials (ERPs) might be particularly useful because of their excellent temporal resolution. In particular, the late positive potential (LPP) reflects increased attention to emotional stimuli—and was recently found to be larger with increasing state anxiety. This study sought to examine the LPP among individuals with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). Methods: Fifteen individuals with GAD and 15 healthy controls (HCs) viewed briefly presented pairs of aversive and neutral pictures that were presented to the left and right of, as well as above and below, fixation on each trial; ERP and behavioral measures were recorded as participants indicated whether the horizontal or vertical image pairs were the same or different. Results: Aversive pictures presented in unattended locations were associated with more errors overall, and this effect was larger in GAD than HC participants. Moreover, aversive targets elicited larger LPPs across all participants; this difference was larger in GAD than HC participants when distracters were neutral. Conclusions: Threatening stimuli presented in both target and distracting spatial locations have a greater impact on GAD than HC participants. Behavioral and ERP measures provide complimentary indices of attention toward threat in GAD. In terms of attentional control theory, behavioral interference indexes impaired processing effectiveness, whereas the LPP might index reduced processing efficiency in GAD. Both measures may provide unique windows onto how increased stimulus‐driven attention to threat impacts and characterizes GAD. Depression and Anxiety, 2010. © 2010 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.     

Directed and motivated attention during processing of natural scenes

Abstract Visual attention can be voluntarily oriented to detect target stimuli in order to facilitate goal-directed behaviors. Other visual stimuli capture attention because of motivational significance. The aim of the present study was to investigate the relationship between directed and motivated attention using event-related potentials. Affectively engaging pictures were presented either as target stimuli or as nontargets in a categorization task. Results indicated that both task relevance and emotional significance modulated the late positive potential (LPP) over centro-parietal sensors. Effects of directed and motivated attention on the LPP were additive, with the largest centro-parietal positivity found for emotional pictures that were targets of directed attention, and the least for neutral pictures that were nontargets. Taken together, the data provide new information regarding the relationship between motivated and directed attention, and suggest that the LPP reflects the operation of attentional neural circuits that are utilized by both top-down and bottom-up processes.