Abstract
The ability to detect emotional change in the environment is essential for adaptive behavior. The current study investigated whether event-related potentials (ERPs) can reflect emotional change in a visual sequence. To assess pre-attentive processing, we examined visual mismatch negativity (vMMN): the negative potentials elicited by a deviant (infrequent) stimulus embedded in a sequence of standard (frequent) stimuli. Participants in two experiments pre-attentively viewed visual sequences of Japanese kanji with different emotional connotations while ERPs were recorded. The visual sequence in Experiment 1 consisted of neutral standards and two types of emotional deviants with a strong and weak intensity. Although the results indicated that strongly emotional deviants elicited more occipital negativity than neutral standards, it was unclear whether these negativities were derived from emotional deviation in the sequence or from the emotional significance of the deviants themselves. In Experiment 2, the two identical emotional deviants were presented against different emotional standards. One type of deviants was emotionally incongruent with the standard and the other type of deviants was emotionally congruent with the standard. The results indicated that occipital negativities elicited by deviants resulted from perceptual changes in a visual sequence at a latency of 100–200 ms and from emotional changes at latencies of 200–260 ms. Contrary to the results of the ERP experiment, reaction times to deviants showed no effect of emotional context; negative stimuli were consistently detected more rapidly than were positive stimuli. Taken together, the results suggest that brain signals can reflect emotional change in a temporal context.
Highlights
Emotional events often modulate attention and perception, resulting in the facilitation of cognitive processing and behavioral responses
Emotional deviants elicited equivalent event-related potentials (ERPs) amplitudes compared to standards, these weak deviants were still reported by psychological ratings as more pleasant or unpleasant than neutral standards
It is possible that visual mismatch negativity (vMMN) for emotional changes are not evoked until the magnitude of emotional change in a visual sequence reaches a threshold for detection, instead of reflecting the magnitude of emotional change
Summary
Emotional events often modulate attention and perception, resulting in the facilitation of cognitive processing and behavioral responses. Recent studies have shown that EPN and LPP are evoked when viewing emotional words [6,7,8,9]. These components reflect selective attention and the motivational relevance of emotional stimuli. A previous study found that ERP amplitudes were modulated by emotional change in context [10].
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