Do rare emotional scenes enhance LPP modulation?

Andrew H Farkas; Timothy J Wanger; Dean Sabatinelli

doi:10.1016/j.biopsycho.2021.108204

Do rare emotional scenes enhance LPP modulation?

Biol Psychol. 2021 Nov:166:108204. doi: 10.1016/j.biopsycho.2021.108204. Epub 2021 Oct 19.

Authors

Andrew H Farkas¹, Timothy J Wanger¹, Dean Sabatinelli²

Affiliations

¹ Department of Psychology, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA.
² Department of Psychology, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA; Department of Neuroscience, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA; Bio-Imaging Research Center, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA. Electronic address: sabat@uga.edu.

PMID: 34644602
DOI: 10.1016/j.biopsycho.2021.108204

Abstract

The slow wave late positive potential (LPP) is one of the most dependable measures of emotional processing in human neuroscience. While LPP positivity shows modest malleability by emotional regulation and competing tasks, its fundamental enhancement by emotional scene perception is extremely reliable. Here we assess the impact of emotional scene frequency (67%, 50% and 17%) on the strength of LPP modulation, across 3 groups of participants, using consistent presentation and analysis methods. The results demonstrate strong consistency in the strength of emotional modulation across frequent, equiprobable, and rare emotion conditions. However, a small enhancement of LPP positivity was found during unpleasant scenes in the rare emotion condition. The LPP thus appears to be largely insensitive to contextual features such as scene frequency and predictability, suggesting that strong emotional cues persistently engage orienting and evaluation processes because this tendency was selected in phylogeny.

Keywords: EEG; Emotion; Late positive potential; Perception; Probability.

MeSH terms

Electroencephalography*
Emotions
Evoked Potentials*
Humans