Electrocortical reactivity to emotional images and faces in middle childhood to early adolescence

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.

[1]  M. Bradley,et al.  Emotion and the motivational brain , 2010, Biological Psychology.

[2]  Jennifer C. Britton,et al.  Facial expressions and complex IAPS pictures: Common and differential networks , 2006, NeuroImage.

[3]  Evan M. Gordon,et al.  Developmental cognitive neuroscience , 2011, Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience.

[4]  An Event-related-potential Study of Emotional Processing in Adolescence , 2010 .

[5]  Jonas K. Olofsson,et al.  Affective picture processing: An integrative review of ERP findings , 2008, Biological Psychology.

[6]  Tobias Flaisch,et al.  Emotion and the processing of symbolic gestures: an event-related brain potential study. , 2011, Social cognitive and affective neuroscience.

[7]  P. Lang.  International affective picture system (IAPS) : affective ratings of pictures and instruction manual , 2005 .

[8]  D. Yurgelun-Todd,et al.  Fear-related activity in the prefrontal cortex increases with age during adolescence: A preliminary fMRI study , 2006, Neuroscience Letters.

[9]  G. Hajcak,et al.  Differentiating neural responses to emotional pictures: evidence from temporal-spatial PCA. , 2009, Psychophysiology.

[10]  G. Hajcak,et al.  Electrocortical reactivity to emotional faces in young children and associations with maternal and paternal depression. , 2012, Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines.

[11]  M. Bradley,et al.  Brain potentials in perception: picture complexity and emotional arousal. , 2007, Psychophysiology.

[12]  Christopher S. Monk,et al.  The development of emotion-related neural circuitry in health and psychopathology , 2008, Development and Psychopathology.

[13]  J. Sergeant,et al.  ERPs associated with monitoring and evaluation of monetary reward and punishment in children with ADHD. , 2011, Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines.

[14]  M. Junghöfer,et al.  The facilitated processing of threatening faces: an ERP analysis. , 2004, Emotion.

[15]  Anna Weinberg,et al.  The Late Positive Potential Predicts Subsequent Interference with Target Processing , 2011, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[16]  Anna Weinberg,et al.  Beyond good and evil: the time-course of neural activity elicited by specific picture content. , 2010, Emotion.

[17]  Joseph P. McCleery,et al.  Use of event-related potentials in the study of typical and atypical development. , 2008, Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

[18]  Annmarie MacNamara,et al.  ERPs and the Study of Emotion , 2011 .

[19]  Greg Hajcak,et al.  Brain potentials during affective picture processing in children , 2009, Biological Psychology.

[20]  D. Pine,et al.  The development of fear learning and generalization in 8-13 year-olds. , 2012, Developmental psychobiology.

[21]  Stephan Moratti,et al.  Prefrontal-Occipitoparietal Coupling Underlies Late Latency Human Neuronal Responses to Emotion , 2011, The Journal of Neuroscience.

[22]  Greg Hajcak,et al.  The persistence of attention to emotion: brain potentials during and after picture presentation. , 2008, Emotion.

[23]  M. Bradley,et al.  Emotional perception: correlation of functional MRI and event-related potentials. , 2006, Cerebral cortex.

[24]  R. Blair,et al.  Emotion at the expense of cognition: psychopathic individuals outperform controls on an operant response task. , 2006, Journal of abnormal psychology.

[25]  Tobias Banaschewski,et al.  Annotation: what electrical brain activity tells us about brain function that other techniques cannot tell us - a child psychiatric perspective. , 2007, Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines.

[26]  L. F. Barrett,et al.  Handbook of emotions, 2nd ed. , 2000 .

[27]  Axel Schäfer,et al.  Psychophysiology of spider phobia in 8- to 12-year-old girls , 2010, Biological Psychology.

[28]  John J. B. Allen,et al.  Methods for Studying the Psychophysiology of Emotion. , 2007 .

[29]  J. Cacioppo,et al.  The psychophysiology of emotion. , 1993 .

[30]  Sheri L. Johnson,et al.  Emotion and psychopathology: Bridging affective and clinical science. , 2007 .

[31]  Anna Weinberg,et al.  The development of the error-related negativity (ERN) and its relationship with anxiety: Evidence from 8 to 13 year-olds , 2012, Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience.

[32]  Ezra E. Smith,et al.  Neural response to reward and depressive symptoms in late childhood to early adolescence , 2012, Biological Psychology.

[33]  M. Bradley,et al.  Brain potentials in affective picture processing: covariation with autonomic arousal and affective report , 2000, Biological Psychology.

[34]  L. F. Barrett,et al.  Handbook of Emotions , 1993 .

[35]  E Donchin,et al.  A new method for off-line removal of ocular artifact. , 1983, Electroencephalography and clinical neurophysiology.