Abstract
Social information is particularly relevant for the human species because of its direct link to guiding physiological responses and behavior. Accordingly, extant functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data suggest that social content may form a unique stimulus dimension. It remains largely unknown, however, how neural activity underlying social (versus nonsocial) information processing temporally unfolds, and how such social information appraisal may interact with the processing of other stimulus characteristics, particularly emotional meaning. Here, we presented complex visual scenes differing in both social (vs. nonsocial) and emotional relevance (positive, negative, neutral) intermixed with scrambled versions of these pictures to N = 24 healthy young adults. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to intact pictures were examined for gaining insight to the dynamics of appraisal of both dimensions, implemented within the brain. Our main finding is an early interaction between social and emotional relevance due to enhanced amplitudes of early ERP components to emotionally positive and neutral pictures of social compared to nonsocial content, presumably reflecting rapid allocation of attention and counteracting an overall negativity bias. Importantly, our ERP data show high similarity with previously observed fMRI data using the same stimuli, and source estimations located the ERP effects in overlapping occipitotemporal brain areas. Our novel data suggest that relevance detection may occur already as early as around 100 ms after stimulus onset and may combine relevance checks not only examining intrinsic pleasantness/emotional valence but also social content as a unique, highly relevant stimulus dimension.
Highlights
Social information is relevant for the human species because of its direct link to guiding physiological responses and behavior
The most prominent Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) components sensitive to emotional relevance are the early posterior negativity (EPN) and the late positivity complex (LPC), with the latter often likewise termed as late positive potential (LPP; e.g., Schupp et al, 2004)
In order to allow direct comparisons of results between the present ERP and the previous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study (Vrtička et al, 2013), analyses were in a first step conducted for testing the social by emotional content interactions on positive/ negative pictures and neutral pictures separately
Summary
Emotional valence and arousal of images was controlled via preexperimental ratings for positive and negative social and nonsocial images (Vrtička et al, 2011, 2013), while the ratings for the neutral control condition images (neutral social, neutral nonsocial) were directly taken from the IAPS database, and these values were again entered in a 2 (social content) × 3 (emotional content) rmANOVA each These analyses revealed no significant main effect of social content, Fs(1, 19) < .282, ps > .602, and no social content x emotional content interaction, Fs(1, 19) < 1.08, ps > .348, but a main effect of emotional content, Fs(1, 19) > 532, ps < .001. For the present experiment, scrambled versions of the 120 original images were created using Adobe Photoshop (Version 11; BFilter / Telegraphics / Scramble^ command), thereby generating another set of 120 images consisting of 3,072 randomly distributed small squares each
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