Frontal EEG Lateralization Predicts Individuals’ Emotional Flexibility

Abstract

With increasingly intense competition in society, people may encounter all kinds of events related to the emotions in the life, study, and work. It is crucial that how people carry out the flexible responses according to the requirement of the situation and the needs of the individuals. Recently, emotional flexibility has become a widely discussed topic in emotional psychology, clinical psychology, health psychology and other fields. Previous research showed that left and right hemisphere prefrontal cortex are involved in processing and regulating emotional responses in varying degrees. Thus, there is a close relationship between frontal electroencephalogram (EEG) lateralization and emotional flexibility. Up to now, however, it remains unclear that whether frontal EEG lateralization is an objective indicator of emotional flexibility, and how frontal EEG lateralization predicts emotional flexibility. This study explored the frontal EEG activation during different emotion stimuli (e.g., neutral, cheerfulness, sadness, anger, fear, aversion) by EEG measures. An emotion film paradigm was used to induce neutral, happy, sad, anger, fear, and aversive emotions. The results showed that activation pattern of emotional flexibility reflected the emotional motivation dimension, not the emotional valence dimension. Furthermore, relative left EEG lateralization individuals at rest had the trend of the left frontal active with approach-related emotions, and the trend of the right frontal active with withdrawal-related emotions. However, relative right EEG lateralization individuals at rest had no change for approach-related or withdrawal-related emotions. The results suggested that the difference of frontal EEG lateralization can predict difference in emotional flexibility. Relative left lateralization is associated with flexible emotional responses, whereas relative right lateralization is associated with inflexible emotional responses.