Emotional Deviants Research Articles

Impact of emotional valence on mismatch negativity in the course of cortical face processing.

Various aspects of cortical face processing have been studied by assessing event related potentials (ERP). It has been described in the literature that mismatch negativity (MMN), a well-studied ERP, is not only modulated by sensory features but also emotional valence. However, the exact impact of emotion on the temporo-spatial profile of visual MMN during face processing remains inconsistent. By employing a sequential oddball paradigm using both neutral and emotional deviants, we were able to differentiate two distinct vMMN subcomponents. While an early subcomponent at 150-250ms is elicited by emotional salient facial stimuli, the later subcomponent at 250-400ms seems to reflect the detection of regularity violations in facial recognition per se, unaffected by emotional salience. Our results suggest that emotional valence is encoded in vMMN signal strength at an early stage of facial processing. Furthermore, we assume that of facial processing consists of temporo-spatially distinct, partially overlapping levels concerning different facial aspects.

Emotional expression visual mismatch negativity in children.

Detection of changes in facial emotions is crucial to communicate and to rapidly process threats in the environment. This function develops throughout childhood via modulations of the earliest brain responses, such as the P100 and the N170 recorded using electroencephalography. Automatic brain signatures can be measured through expression‐related visual mismatch negativity (vMMN), which reflects the processing of unattended changes. While increasing research has investigated vMMN processing in adults, few studies have been conducted on children. Here, a controlled paradigm previously validated was used to disentangle specific responses to emotional deviants (angry face) from that of neutral deviants. Latencies and amplitudes of P100 and N170 both decrease with age, confirming that sensory and face‐specific activity is not yet mature in school‐aged children. Automatic change detection‐related activity is present in children, with a similar vMMN pattern in response to both emotional and neutral deviant stimuli to what previously observed in adults. However, vMMN processing is delayed in children compared to adults and no emotion‐specific response is yet observed, suggesting nonmature automatic detection of salient emotional cues. To our knowledge, this is the first study investigating expression‐related vMMN in school‐aged children, and further investigations are needed to confirm these results.

Emotional visual mismatch negativity: a joint investigation of social and non-social dimensions in adults with autism

Unusual behaviors and brain activity to socio-emotional stimuli have been reported in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Atypical reactivity to change and intolerance of uncertainty are also present, but little is known on their possible impact on facial expression processing in autism. The visual mismatch negativity (vMMN) is an electrophysiological response automatically elicited by changing events such as deviant emotional faces presented among regular neutral faces. While vMMN has been found altered in ASD in response to low-level changes in simple stimuli, no study has investigated this response to visual social stimuli. Here two deviant expressions were presented, neutral and angry, embedded in a sequence of repetitive neutral stimuli. vMMN peak analyses were performed for latency and amplitude in early and late time windows. The ASD group presented smaller amplitude of the late vMMN to both neutral and emotional deviants compared to the typically developed adults (TD) group, and only the TD group presented a sustained activity related to emotional change (i.e., angry deviant). Source reconstruction of the vMMNs further revealed that any change processing elicited a reduced activity in ASD group compared to TD in the saliency network, while the specific processing emotional change elicited activity in the temporal region and in the insula. This study confirms atypical change processing in ASD and points to a specific difficulty in the processing of emotional changes, potentially playing a crucial role in social interaction deficits. Nevertheless, these results require to be further replicated with a greater sample size and generalized to other emotional expressions.

Emotional oddball: A review on memory effects.

How do emotional stimuli influence perception, attention, and ultimately memory? This debate at the cross-section of emotion and cognition research has a long tradition. The emotional oddball paradigm (EOP) has frequently been applied to investigate the detection and processing of (emotional) change detection (Schlüter & Bermeitinger, 2017). However, the EOP has also been used to reveal the effects of emotional deviants on memory for serially presented stimuli. In this integrative article, we review the results of 29 experiments published between the years 2000 and 2017. Based on these data, we provide an overview of how the EOP is applied in the context of memory research. We also review and integrate the empirical evidence for memory effects in the EOP (with a special focus on retrograde and anterograde emotion-induced effects) and present theories of emotional memory as well as their fit with the results obtained by the EOP. Directions for future research are presented that would help to address important issues of the current debate around emotion-induced memory effects.

Neurophysiological differentiation between preattentive and attentive processing of emotional expressions on French vowels

The present electrophysiological study investigated the processing of emotional prosody by minimizing as much as possible the effect of emotional information conveyed by the lexical-semantic context. Emotionally colored French vowels (i.e., happiness, sadness, fear, and neutral) were presented in a mismatch negativity (MMN) oddball paradigm. Both the MMN, i.e., an event-related potential (ERP) component thought to reflect preattentive change detection, and the P3a, i.e., an ERP marker of involuntary orientation of attention toward deviant stimuli, were significantly modulated by the emotional deviants compared to the neutral ones. Critically, the largest amplitude (MMN, P3a) and the shortest peak latency (MMN) were observed for fear deviants, all other things being equal. Taken together, the present findings lend support to a sequential neurocognitive model of emotion processing (Scherer, 2001) which postulates, among other checks, a first stage of automatic emotion detection (MMN) followed by a second stage of subjective evaluation of the stimulus or event (P3a). Consistently with previous studies, our data suggest that among the six universal emotions, fear could have a special status probably because of its adaptive role in the evolution of the human species.

Facial Expression Related vMMN: Disentangling Emotional from Neutral Change Detection.

Detection of changes in facial emotional expressions is crucial to communicate and to rapidly and automatically process possible threats in the environment. Recent studies suggest that expression-related visual mismatch negativity (vMMN) reflects automatic processing of emotional changes. In the present study we used a controlled paradigm to investigate the specificity of emotional change-detection. In order to disentangle specific responses to emotional deviants from that of neutral deviants, we presented neutral expression as standard stimulus (p = 0.80) and both angry and neutral expressions as deviants (p = 0.10, each). In addition to an oddball sequence, an equiprobable sequence was presented, to control for refractoriness and low-level differences. Our results showed that in an early time window (100–200 ms), the controlled vMMN was greater than the oddball vMMN only for the angry deviant, suggesting the importance of controlling for refractoriness and stimulus physical features in emotion related studies. Within the controlled vMMN, angry and neutral deviants both elicited early and late peaks occurring at 140 and 310 ms, respectively, but only the emotional vMMN presented sustained amplitude after each peak. By directly comparing responses to emotional and neutral deviants, our study provides evidence of specific activity reflecting the automatic detection of emotional change. This differs from broader “visual” change processing, and suggests the involvement of two partially-distinct pre-attentional systems in the detection of changes in facial expressions.

Emotional context facilitates cortical prediction error responses.

In the predictive coding framework, mismatch negativity (MMN) is regarded a correlate of the prediction error that occurs when top-down predictions conflict with bottom-up sensory inputs. Expression-related MMN is a relatively novel construct thought to reflect a prediction error specific to emotional processing, which, however, has not yet been tested directly. Our paradigm includes both neutral and emotional deviants, thereby allowing for investigating whether expression-related MMN is emotion-specific or unspecifically arises from violations of a given sequence. Twenty healthy participants completed a visual sequence oddball task where they were presented with (1) sequence deviants, (2) emotional sequence deviants, and (3) emotional deviants. Mismatch components were assessed at ventral occipitotemporal scalp sites and analyzed regarding their amplitudes, spatiotemporal profiles, and neuronal sources. Expression-related MMN could be clearly separated from its neutral counterpart in all investigated aspects. Specifically, expression-related MMN showed enhanced amplitude, shorter latency, and different neuronal sources. Our results, therefore, provide converging evidence for a quantitative specificity of expression-related MMN and seems to provide an opportunity to study prediction error during preattentive emotional processing. Our neurophysiological evidence ultimately suggests that a basic cognitive operator, the prediction error, is enhanced at the cortical level by processing of emotionally salient stimuli.

Emotional Deviants and the Politics of Love: ‘spiritual friendships’ in late nineteenth-century Christchurch

William Smith, also known as ‘the man with two wives’, and Mary Colborne-Veel's ‘spiritual friendships’ are part of a significant window into the emotional politics of late nineteenth-century New Zealand. This research explores the relationship between the apparently ‘deviant’ emotions expressed by respectable middle-class political reformers like Smith and his second wife Kate Sheppard, and the political nation-state which they sought to reform. It is the contention of this article that emotional ‘deviancy’ was a reflection of the wider contemporary political situation which saw the nation in flux; the early women's movement politicised love and affection, while the fractured nation that that movement unsettled enabled emotional deviance the privilege of social sanctioning.

Event-Related Potentials Elicited by Pre-Attentive Emotional Changes in Temporal Context

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.

Measuring affective reactivity in individuals with autism spectrum personality traits using the visual mismatch negativity event-related brain potential.

The primary aim of this research was to determine how modulation of the visual mismatch negativity (vMMN) by emotionally laden faces is related to autism spectrum personality traits. Emotionally neutral faces served as the standard stimuli and happy and sad expressions served as vMMN-eliciting deviants. Consistent with prior research, it was anticipated that the amplitude of the vMMN would be increased for emotionally salient stimuli. Extending this finding, it was expected that this emotion-based amplitude sensitivity of the vMMN would be decreased in individuals with higher levels of autism spectrum personality traits as measured by the Adult Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ). Higher AQ scores were associated with smaller amplitudes of the vMMN in response to happy, but not sad emotional deviants. The fact that higher AQ scores were associated with less sensitivity only to happy emotional expressions is interpreted to be consistent with the negative experience of social interactions reported by individuals who are high on the autism spectrum. This research suggests that the vMMN elicited by deviant emotional expressions may be a useful indicator of affective reactivity and may thus be related to social competency in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).

The visual system discounts emotional deviants when extracting average expression

There has been a recent surge in the study of ensemble coding, the idea that the visual system represents a set of similar items using summary statistics (Alvarez & Oliva, 2008; Ariely, 2001; Chong & Treisman, 2003; Parkes, Lund, Angelucci, Solomon, & Morgan, 2001). We previously demonstrated that this ability extends to faces and thus requires a high level of object processing (Haberman & Whitney, 2007, 2009). Recent debate has centered on the nature of the summary representation of size (e.g., Myczek & Simons, 2008) and whether the perceived average simply reflects the sampling of a very small subset of the items in a set. In the present study, we explored this further in the context of faces, asking observers to judge the average expressions of sets of faces containing emotional outliers. Our results suggest that the visual system implicitly and unintentionally discounts the emotional outliers, thereby computing a summary representation that encompasses the vast majority of the information present. Additional computational modeling and behavioral results reveal that an intentional cognitive sampling strategy does not accurately capture observer performance. Observers derive precise ensemble information given a 250-msec exposure, suggesting a rapid and flexible system not bound by the limits of serial attention.

Early sensory encoding of affective prosody: Neuromagnetic tomography of emotional category changes

In verbal communication, prosodic codes may be phylogenetically older than lexical ones. Little is known, however, about early, automatic encoding of emotional prosody. This study investigated the neuromagnetic analogue of mismatch negativity (MMN) as an index of early stimulus processing of emotional prosody using whole-head magnetoencephalography (MEG). We applied two different paradigms to study MMN; in addition to the traditional oddball paradigm, the so-called optimum design was adapted to emotion detection. In a sequence of randomly changing disyllabic pseudo-words produced by one male speaker in neutral intonation, a traditional oddball design with emotional deviants (10% happy and angry each) and an optimum design with emotional (17% happy and sad each) and nonemotional gender deviants (17% female) elicited the mismatch responses. The emotional category changes demonstrated early responses (<200 ms) at both auditory cortices with larger amplitudes at the right hemisphere. Responses to the nonemotional change from male to female voices emerged later (∼300 ms). Source analysis pointed at bilateral auditory cortex sources without robust contribution from other such as frontal sources. Conceivably, both auditory cortices encode categorical representations of emotional prosodic. Processing of cognitive feature extraction and automatic emotion appraisal may overlap at this level enabling rapid attentional shifts to important social cues.

ERP phase-locking properties of emotional processing in the visual search for fearful stimuli

Event Abstract Back to Event ERP phase-locking properties of emotional processing in the visual search for fearful stimuli Florian Strelzyk1*, Patrick Britz1, Diana F. De-Sa1 and Ewald Naumann1 1 University of Trier, Germany Emotion severely impacts human cognition. Evidence demonstrating this effect is derived from visual search paradigms that involve emotional stimuli. In paradigms that require subjects to judge whether or not all of the pictures of a 2x2 or 3x3 grid are from the same category, emotional deviants are detected faster than neutral deviants. Previous work from our lab has replicated the results of such a standard paradigm using behavioral data, event-related potentials (ERPs), and event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (efMRI). However, after having optimized the paradigm with a more complete set of neutral and emotional stimuli, our results have not yielded a general search advantage for emotional pictures. After reanalyzing the ERP data with the aim of investigating more of the electrophysiological properties of the effects, we found that the phase locking in the 12-18 Hz band supports our previous findings. These results continue to question whether the stimuli's emotional properties are processed in the investigated paradigm. Conference: 41st European Brain and Behaviour Society Meeting, Rhodes Island, Greece, 13 Sep - 18 Sep, 2009. Presentation Type: Poster Presentation Topic: Poster presentations Citation: Strelzyk F, Britz P, De-Sa DF and Naumann E (2009). ERP phase-locking properties of emotional processing in the visual search for fearful stimuli. Conference Abstract: 41st European Brain and Behaviour Society Meeting. doi: 10.3389/conf.neuro.08.2009.09.310 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 15 Jun 2009; Published Online: 15 Jun 2009. * Correspondence: Florian Strelzyk, University of Trier, Trier, Germany, florian@strelzyk.de Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Florian Strelzyk Patrick Britz Diana F De-Sa Ewald Naumann Google Florian Strelzyk Patrick Britz Diana F De-Sa Ewald Naumann Google Scholar Florian Strelzyk Patrick Britz Diana F De-Sa Ewald Naumann PubMed Florian Strelzyk Patrick Britz Diana F De-Sa Ewald Naumann Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.

Perception of emotional speech in Parkinson's Disease

Nonmotor symptoms in Parkinson's disease (PD) involving cognition and emotionality have progressively received attention. The objective of the present study was to investigate recognition of emotional prosody in patients with PD (n = 14) in comparison to healthy control subjects (HC, n = 14). Event-related brain potentials (ERP) were recorded in a modified oddball paradigm under passive listening and active target detection instructions. Results showed a poorer performance of PD patients in classifying emotional prosody. ERP generated by emotional deviants (happy/sad) during passive listening revealed diminished amplitudes of the mismatch-related negativity for sad deviants, indicating an impairment of early preattentive processing of emotional prosody in PD.