Individual Differences in Automatic Emotion Regulation Affect the Asymmetry of the LPP Component

Jing Zhang,Renlai Zhou,Philip Allen

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0088261

Jing Zhang, Renlai Zhou + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0088261

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Journal: PloS one	Publication Date: Feb 11, 2014
Citations: 50	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: Renmin University of China, Beijing Normal University

Abstract

The main goal of this study was to investigate how automatic emotion regulation altered the hemispheric asymmetry of ERPs elicited by emotion processing. We examined the effect of individual differences in automatic emotion regulation on the late positive potential (LPP) when participants were viewing blocks of positive high arousal, positive low arousal, negative high arousal and negative low arousal pictures from International affect picture system (IAPS). Two participant groups were categorized by the Emotion Regulation-Implicit Association Test which has been used in previous research to identify two groups of participants with automatic emotion control and with automatic emotion express. The main finding was that automatic emotion express group showed a right dominance of the LPP component at posterior electrodes, especially in high arousal conditions. But no right dominance of the LPP component was observed for automatic emotion control group. We also found the group with automatic emotion control showed no differences in the right posterior LPP amplitude between high- and low-arousal emotion conditions, while the participants with automatic emotion express showed larger LPP amplitude in the right posterior in high-arousal conditions compared to low-arousal conditions. This result suggested that AER (Automatic emotion regulation) modulated the hemispheric asymmetry of LPP on posterior electrodes and supported the right hemisphere hypothesis.

Highlights

The question of how the two separate hemispheres of the brain process emotion has been the focus of many neuropsychological studies employing event-related potentials (ERPs)
We examined whether automatic emotion regulation modulated the hemispheric asymmetry of late positive potential (LPP) component, in response to emotion combined with the effects of emotion arousal and valence
The present study examined whether individual difference in automatic emotion regulation (AER) affected emotion-related hemispheric asymmetry for LPP component, with the interaction between valence and arousal

Summary

Introduction

The question of how the two separate hemispheres of the brain process emotion has been the focus of many neuropsychological studies employing event-related potentials (ERPs). Some ERPs studies assessed hemispheric asymmetry within a number of tasks, including the determination of emotional content from a picture showing a baby’s expression [1], detecting an emotion from sound [2], and memorizing emotional expressions [3]. The right hemisphere hypothesis suggests that the right hemisphere is dominant over the left for emotional perception and the experience of either positive or negative emotions [4,5,6,7,8,9,10]. The valence hypothesis refers to anterior hemispheric asymmetry for the production and perception of emotions depending on the valence of that emotion, with the right hemisphere being dominant for negative emotions and the left dominant for positive emotions [13,14,15,16,17]. Davidson et al [18] extended this approach in the approach–withdrawal model suggesting that left sided anterior neural activity is involved in approach related emotions whereas right sided anterior activity is involved in withdrawal related emotions

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