Abstract
The purpose of current study is to reveal spatiotemporal features of oscillatory EEG activities in response to emotional arousal induced by emotional video stimuli, and to find the characteristics of cortical activities showing significant difference according to arousal levels. The EEGs recorded during watching affective video clips were transformed to cortical current density time-series, and then, cluster-based permutation test was applied to determine the spatiotemporal origins of alpha- and beta-band activities showing significant difference between high and low arousal levels. We found stronger desynchronization of alpha-band activities due to higher arousal in visual areas, which may be due to stronger activation for sensory information processing for the highly arousing video stimuli. In precentral and superior parietal regions, the stronger desynchronization in alpha-and low beta-bands was observed for the high arousal stimuli. This is expected to reflect enhanced mirror neuron system activities, which is involved in understanding the intention of other’s action. Similar changes according to arousal level were found also in inter-regional phase synchronization in alpha- and beta-bands.
Highlights
Emotional arousal refers to the state of heightened physiological activity, including fear and anger
Significant differences of self-assessment scores were found between high and low arousal conditions, which implies that affective video clips successfully induced emotional arousal as we intended
The alpha-band power was decreased during watching video stimuli for both high and low arousal conditions, most strongly in visual areas (Fig 3A)
Summary
Emotional arousal refers to the state of heightened physiological activity, including fear and anger. The state of emotional arousal is highly related to cognitive factors such as attention and memory. Memory enhancement was observed in response to the stimuli with high arousal [2,3]. Cortical activities due to arousal has been extensively studied using electroencephalogram (EEG) [4,5,6], and it has been consistently shown that the spectral powers of EEGs in alpha-band decrease in response to arousing stimuli [7,8,9]. Contradictory results of alpha-band power increases due to arousal were reported [10,11,12]
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