Abstract
BackgroundAlthough ample evidence suggests that emotion and response inhibition are interrelated at the behavioral and neural levels, neural substrates of response inhibition to negative facial information remain unclear. Thus we used event-related potential (ERP) methods to explore the effects of explicit and implicit facial expression processing in response inhibition.MethodsWe used implicit (gender categorization) and explicit emotional Go/Nogo tasks (emotion categorization) in which neutral and sad faces were presented. Electrophysiological markers at the scalp and the voxel level were analyzed during the two tasks.ResultsWe detected a task, emotion and trial type interaction effect in the Nogo-P3 stage. Larger Nogo-P3 amplitudes during sad conditions versus neutral conditions were detected with explicit tasks. However, the amplitude differences between the two conditions were not significant for implicit tasks. Source analyses on P3 component revealed that right inferior frontal junction (rIFJ) was involved during this stage. The current source density (CSD) of rIFJ was higher with sad conditions compared to neutral conditions for explicit tasks, rather than for implicit tasks.ConclusionsThe findings indicated that response inhibition was modulated by sad facial information at the action inhibition stage when facial expressions were processed explicitly rather than implicitly. The rIFJ may be a key brain region in emotion regulation.
Highlights
In social context, appropriately express the negative emotion is important for emotion regulation ability [1,2,3]
Because this study focused on comparing the effects of the emotion of the stimuli on response inhibition during the implicit and explicit tasks, our analyses mainly concentrated on the interactive effects between task, valence and trial type
As a result of the temporal principal component analysis (tPCA) computation, seven temporal factors were extracted from the original event-related potential (ERP) waveforms (Figure 3)
Summary
Appropriately express the negative emotion is important for emotion regulation ability [1,2,3]. In some scenarios, it is necessary to inhibit inappropriate negative emotion in social communication. The negative emotion may influence the current goal-directed behavior and further affect social function [4]. An impairment of this ability has increasingly been suggested to be involved in cognitive neural mechanisms of the etiology, maintenance and relapse of a range of psychiatric disorders, including depression [5,6,7], anxiety [8] and post-traumatic stress disorder [9]. Sad facial expressions are fundamental negative emotional stimuli that convey important information in social communications [10]. Emotions induced by sad facial expressions influence an individual’s ability to inhibit inappropriate behavior. We used event-related potential (ERP) methods to explore the effects of explicit and implicit facial expression processing in response inhibition
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