Holmes, Nielsen, Tipper & Green
30 important questions on Holmes, Nielsen, Tipper & Green
What will holmes, nielsen, tipper and green (2009) research?
What is the theoretical framework of the elecotrophysiological investigation
- 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?
- 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.
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Why is it possible that early phase of LPP is related to P3a?
Why is ERP ideally suited to an analysis of the processing stages involved in encoding facial effects
An important and controversial issue is the extent to which processing stages are automatic. What are the two positions about this
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
Research results are suggestive of enhanced automaticity of emotion processing in anxious individuals. How do Holmes, Nielsen, Tipper & Green try to investigate this further?
How did the researchers do the research
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?
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
- 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
What does it say when P1 and EPN emotions effects were immune to interference from task demands
What were the results of frontocentral components (early and late phase LPP)
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
What has reduced ERP effects to negative faces been suggested to do
ERPs to emotional faces were unaffected by trait anxiety in the low load condition. Where was this found affected
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
What does the finding of high trait anxiety people more pronounced in LPP suggest
What is three possible explanations for the elimination of emotional expression effects in low trait anxious participants under high load conditions
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
What has been suggested for high anxious people
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)
> an explanation in terms of hypersensitive emotion evaluation system may be more appropriate
What is the conclusion of this study
- 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
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