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Holmes, Nielsen, Tipper & Green

30 important questions on Holmes, Nielsen, Tipper & Green

What will holmes, nielsen, tipper and green (2009) research?

An electrophysiological investigation into the automaticity of emotional face processing in high versus low trait anxious individuals

What is the theoretical framework of the elecotrophysiological investigation

- research has shown that emotional stimuli are prioritized for processing threat related stimuli to draw attention rapidly and involuntarily

- ERP have also revealed a bias in selective attention toward emotional stimuli, such as face cues signaling a potential threat.

Which progress has also been made regarding the potential brain correlates of succesive stages of emotional facial expression processing?

- studies show evidence for an enhanced P1 that peaks at 130 ms in response to a negative stimulus compared to neutral and positive stimuli.

- early posterior negativity at around and beyond 220 shows an enhancement to negative and positive, relative to neutral, faces and has also been linked to ongoing feedback from the amygdala to sensory cortices.

- late positive potential takes place after 250 ms but is strongest between 400 and 700 ms. LPP involved in rapid detection of emotionally relevant stimuli in working memory.

Why is it possible that early phase of LPP is related to P3a?

Because the time course and topography of these two components are similiar

Why is ERP ideally suited to an analysis of the processing stages involved in encoding facial effects

Because they provide measures of electrical brain activity at high temporal resolution

An important and controversial issue is the extent to which processing stages are automatic. What are the two positions about this

1) holds that subcortical emotion centers subserve the automatic processing of emotional stimuli, independently of attentional resources

2) states that the availability of attentional resources is necessary for detecting emotion

What has been suggested as key factor in determining the extent to which emotion processing occurs automatically and independently of attention

Variation in anxiety

Research results are suggestive of enhanced automaticity of emotion processing in anxious individuals. How do Holmes, Nielsen, Tipper & Green try to investigate this further?

They planned to examine whether emotion processing, as measured by ERP, would be less influenced by concurrent task processing demands in high relative to low trait anxious participants.

How did the researchers do the research

We measured ERP in response to centrally presented fearful, neutral and happy facial expressions. Participants task was to detect repetitions of face stimuli.

two levels of demand: first had low level of difficulty and the second had high level of difficulty.

Although many behavioral and psychophysiological studies have demonstrated anxiety related effects that are specific to aversive stimuli, a few studies suggest that the bias may not be specific to the threat. What does this emotionality hypothesis propose?

That anxious individuals show biases for both negative and positive material.
Comparable effects of anxiety on ERP to both fearful and happy faces would be consistent with the emotionality hypothesis, whereas dissociable patterns of ERP responses to fearful and happy faces would provide evidence consistent with a valence specific

What were the results on the behavioral mesures

- there was a significant main effect of the task, because accuracy was higher for the 1 back task (83%) than for the 2 back task (51%). This means that the 2-back task was indeed more difficult.

- main effect of emotional expression because the performance was higher overall for fearful as compared with neutral or happy facial expression > participants were better at distinguishing when negative emotional were used than when neutral or positive emotional stimuli were used.

What were the results of the ERP measures for the P1 component

There was a significant main effect of emotional expression because the magnitude of P1 component was greatest for feurful faces, smallest for neutral faces and intermediate for happy faces.

only significant effect between fearful and neutral faces > not between happy faces and fearful faces.

What were the results of ERP measures for the EPN component

There was a significant main effect of emotional expression, which was subsumed under a significant trait anxiety X emotional expression interaction.

significant main effect of emotional expression for low trait anxiety participants because the EPN was enhanced to fearful and happy relative to neutral faces.

FOR HIGH trait anxiety participants; no main effect of emotional expression.

What were the results of ERP measures of LPP early phase

- significant main effect of emotional expression because the LPP was enhanced to fearful and happy relative to neutral faces. Responses to fearful and happy faces did not differ significantly from each other.

2 back test > effect of emotional expression was present for high trait anxious participants, but not for low trait anxious participants

What were the results of ERP measures of LPP late phase

There was a significant main effect of emotional expression, which was subsumed under a significant trait anxiety X emotional expression X trait anxiety interaction.

1 back task; there was a significant main effect of emotional expression

2 back task; main effect of emotional expression which was subsumed under a significant trait anxiety X emotional expression interaction.

High trait anxious; significant main effect of emotional expression
low trait anxious; no main effect of emotional expression

What has been discussed in the discussion of this paper about the behavioral measurement

The behavioral results for the detection of face repetition revealed that the 2 back task was significantly harder than the 1 back task, confirming the increased processing load.

for both posterior emotion-related components, fearful faces produced augmented effects relative neutral faces, whereass happy faces triggered an enhancement in the EPN component but not in the P1.
P1 enhancement to fearful faces was stronger at midline and right hemisphere electrode positions than at the left hemiphere position in the 2 back task

Which further work is needed within the behavioral measures

Further work is needed to examine the influence of anxiety on posterior components triggered by emotional expression

The emotion linked EPN was observed to be less pronounced in high than in low trait anxious participants, which is also consistent with some previous results. What is the reason for the attenuation of the EPN to emotional faces in anxious individuals

This is unclear, but the dissocation of this pattern from typical anxiety- related effects on the P1 component suggests that these components may not reflect the same underlying process, contrary to some proposals.

What does it say when P1 and EPN emotions effects were immune to interference from task demands

It indicates that early perceptual stages of emotion processing may not be subject to these particular variations in task difficulty

What were the results of frontocentral components (early and late phase LPP)

For frontocentral components elicited during the low load task, fearful faces triggered enhanced ERP effects relative to neutral faces.

in contrast to the postive deflections at frontocentral locations elicited by fearful faces, happy emotional faces produced significant activation within the early phase but not within the late phase LPP

True or false

there were no signifcant differences in the magnitude of the emotional expression ERP positivity between low and high trait anxious groups. A trend has been found toward reduced ERP differences between fearful and neutral faces in high trait anxious participants

TRUE

What has reduced ERP effects to negative faces been suggested to do

To index a rapid form of cognitive avoidance, following the initial vigilance that is reflected by enhanced P1 or EPN effects

ERPs to emotional faces were unaffected by trait anxiety in the low load condition. Where was this found affected

Frontocentral effects for fearful and happy faces were found to be modulated by trait anxiety level in the high load task condition

True or false

High trait anxious people showed more pronounced LPP effects in response to fearful and happy faces compared with low trait anxious participants whose emotion specific ERP responses were all but eliminated

True

What does the finding of high trait anxiety people more pronounced in LPP suggest

That in low trait anxious people task difficulty or load can influence fronto central components involved in the detection of new significant stimuli in working memory and in the controlled storage or maintenance of the stimulus representation.

What is three possible explanations for the elimination of emotional expression effects in low trait anxious participants under high load conditions

1) Is that low relative to high, anxious individuals may have found the high load task more difficult and therefore had fewer processing resources available for memory consolidation operations on emotional face content.

2) is that differences arose in the perceptual strategies that high and low trait anxious participants used for the 2 back task.

3) enhanced processing load had differential impact on the encoding of emotional expressions across high and low trait anxious groups.

Give an example of the differences in the perceptual strategeis of high and low trait anxious people

High trait anxious participants may have been focusing their attention more on the emotion relevant features of the faces, whereas low trait anxious participants possibly focused on more identity relevant characteristics in order to perform a task

What has been suggested for high anxious people

That anxious individuals possess hypersensitive automatic threat evaluation mechanisms, mediated by the amygdala and related subcortical structures.

threatening information may exert a circuit breaking action that disrupts attentional control and goal directed activity.

What is a point of note what we should bring to further research (on high anxious people)

It should be noted that the modulatory effects of anxiety were present not only for fearful faces but also for happy faces.

> an explanation in terms of hypersensitive emotion evaluation system may be more appropriate

What is the conclusion of this study

The present study supports the idea that processes involved in the enhancement of emotional stimulus representations in sensory cortical areas arise regardless of the availibility of cognitive resoruces, in contrast to their depedence on spatial attention resources

- anxiety is associated with greater automaticity of processing of emotion related information when cognitive resources are unavailable for the control of attention.

- support the idea that automaticity is not an all or none concept

The question on the page originate from the summary of the following study material:

Affective Science and Psychopathology

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