Larger Late Positive Potential Amplitudes Research Articles

Event-related potentials in response to early terminated and completed sequential decision-making

The process of outcome evaluation effectively navigates subsequent choices in humans. However, it is largely unclear how people evaluate decision outcomes in a sequential scenario, as well as the neural mechanisms underlying this process. To address this research gap, the study employed a sequential decision task in which participants were required to make a series of choices in each trial, with the option to terminate their choices. Based on participants' decisions, two outcome patterns were classified: the “reached” condition and the “unreached” condition, and the event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. Further, in the unreached condition, we investigated how the distance (i.e., the position interval between the actual outcome and potential outcome) modulated outcome evaluation. Behavioral data showed a higher emotion rating when people got a reward rather than a loss (i.e., the reached condition), while the opposite was true in the unreached condition. ERP results showed a larger feedback-related negativity (FRN), a smaller P3, and a larger late positive potential (LPP) when people got a loss compared to a reward. Importantly, a hierarchical processing pattern was found in the unreached condition: people processed separately the potential outcome and the distance at the early stage, manifested in the FRN amplitude; subsequently, the brain focused on the distance—a lower distance elicited an enhanced P3 amplitude. Finally, the potential outcome and distance were processed interactively in the LPP amplitude. Overall, these findings shed light on the neural underpinnings of outcome evaluation in sequential decision-making.

Scarcity mindset reduces empathic responses to others' pain: the behavioral and neural evidence.

Resource scarcity pervades our life. A scarcity mindset triggered by perceiving insufficient resources has been proven to influence our cognition and behaviors, yet it remains unknown whether this mindset specifically influences empathy. The present study induced feelings of scarcity or abundance in separate groups of participants through experimental manipulation, and examined the effects of both mindsets on the behavioral and neural responses to others' pain. Behaviorally, pain intensity ratings of others' pain were lower in the scarcity group than in the abundance group. Analysis of event-related potentials (ERPs) revealed that N1 amplitudes for painful and nonpainful stimuli were comparable in the scarcity group but differed significantly in the abundance group. Additionally, while both groups showed larger late positive potential (LPP) amplitudes for painful stimuli than for nonpainful stimuli, this amplitude differential was significantly smaller in the scarcity group than in the abundance group. Thus, behavioral and neural evidence suggest that inducing a scarcity mindset significantly dampens the ability to empathize with others' pain during both early and late stages of empathic processing. These findings shed lights on our understanding of how scarcity mindset may influence social emotions and behaviors.

The Influence of Industry Leaders' Behavior on the Decisions of Common Enterprise Leaders in Enterprise Clustering: An Event-Related Potential Study.

PurposeThis study aims to explore the influence of industry leaders’ behavior on common enterprise leaders’ decisions in enterprise clustering by recognizing top executives’ cognitive processes of brains.MethodsTwenty-one real top executives from twelve textile enterprises were recruited in the lab experiment, and decisions about whether entering an industrial zone under two conditions of following an industry leader or a common enterprise were designed as the experiment task. Throughout the formal experimental task, participants’ electroencephalograms were recorded.ResultsThe behavioral results preliminarily proved the effect of industry leaders’ behaviors on the real top executives’ decisions in common enterprises: participants had a higher acceptance rate with a shorter reaction time in the condition of following an industry leader rather than that in the condition of following a common enterprise. Event-related potential results indicated that choices of following an industry leader led to a more positive perception of emotional valence (reflected by a smaller P2 amplitude) and better evaluation categorization and greater decision confidence (reflected by a larger late positive potential amplitude) than choices of following a common enterprise.ConclusionTop executives from common enterprises tend to evaluate industry leaders’ behaviors better than other common enterprises’ behaviors, and they tend to make a similar business decision to keep their enterprises consistent with these industry leaders.

A Difference of Past Self-Evaluation Between College Students With Low and High Socioeconomic Status: Evidence From Event-Related Potentials.

Socioeconomic status (SES) refers to the social position or class according to their material and non-material social resources. We conducted a study with 60 college students to explore whether SES affects past self-evaluation and used event-related potentials (ERPs) in a self-reference task that required participants to judge whether the trait adjectives (positive or negative) describing themselves 5 years ago were appropriate for them. Behavioral data showed that individuals’ positive past self-evaluations were significantly higher than individuals’ negative past self-evaluations, regardless of high or low SES. Individuals with high SES had significantly higher positive past self-evaluations than those with low SES. ERP data showed that in the low SES group, negative adjectives elicited a marginally greater N400 amplitude than positive adjectives; in the high SES group, negative adjectives elicited a greater late positive potential (LPP) amplitude than positive adjectives. N400 is an index of the accessibility of semantic processing, and a larger N400 amplitude reflects less fluent semantic processing. LPP is an index of continuous attention during late processing; the larger LPP amplitude is elicited, the more attention resources are invested. Our results indicated that compared with college students with low SES, the past self-evaluations of college students with high SES were more positive; college students with high SES paid more attention to negative adjectives. However, college students with low SES were marginally less fluent in processing negative adjectives.

Rational civil servant interviewers: evidence from an event-related potential study of beauty premiums in Chinese civil servant interviews.

Physical attractiveness can greatly influence business job applications (the "beauty premium" effect). However, little is known about whether and how physical attractiveness influences interviewers' evaluations of Chinese civil servant applicants, given that many characteristics of civil service appear to be different from those of business jobs. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), the current study investigated how female job candidates' physical attractiveness influenced interviewers' evaluations in Chinese civil servant interviews for both technical and managerial positions. The behavioral results showed that for the managerial positions, attractive female candidates had a much higher acceptance rate than unattractive candidates. However, for the technical positions, no significant difference was found between attractive and unattractive candidates. At the brain level, for the managerial positions, pairs of attractive faces with managerial posts elicited smaller N400 and larger late positive potential (LPP) amplitudes than did pairs of unattractive faces with managerial posts. However, this relationship was not observed for technical posts. The negative correlation between N400 amplitude and acceptance rate as well as the positive correlation between LPP amplitude and acceptance rate further confirmed these results. The present study suggests that beauty could potentially influence if candidates are accepted in real Chinese civil servant interviews, as observed experimentally in this research.

An electrophysiological index of outcome evaluation that may influence subsequent cooperation and aggression strategies

ABSTRACTHuman social decision-making is significantly modulated by previous decision outcomes. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), we examined whether ERP components evoked by outcome feedback could serve as electrophysiological indices to examine the influence of current outcome evaluation on subsequent cooperative or aggressive decision-making. Thirty-four adult volunteers participated in a social game task, in which they were asked to choose between cooperation and aggression with an opponent player.Conventionally-averaged ERPs and temporospatial principal components analysis (PCA) factors were tested for their associations with subsequent decision-making. Results revealed that a central-parietal late positive potential (LPP) and central-parietal PCA factor approximating the classic LPP were related to changes of decision-making strategies on subsequent trials; however, the effect was significant only when the opponent selected ‘cooperate’ in the initial trial. The decision to cooperate in subsequent trials induced a larger LPP relative to the decision to aggress following opponent cooperation in the initial trial. Furthermore, we found that larger LPP amplitudes for an opponent’s cooperative decision on the initial trial were associated with a higher probability of choosing cooperation on the subsequent trial.The results suggest that the amplitude of the central-parietal LPP is an electrophysiological index of the influence of initial outcome on subsequent social decision-making.

Emotion processing in female youth: Testing the stability of the late positive potential.

The Emotional Interrupt Task (EIT) has been used to probe emotion processing in healthy and clinical samples; however, research exploring the stability and reliability of behavioral measures and ERPs elicited from this task is limited. Establishing the psychometric properties of the EIT is critical, particularly as phenotypes and biological indicators may represent traitlike characteristics that underlie psychiatric illness. To address this gap, test-retest stability and internal consistency of behavioral indices and ERPs resulting from the EIT in healthy, female youth (n = 28) were examined. At baseline, participants were administered the EIT while high-density 128-channel EEG data were recorded to probe the late positive potential (LPP). One month later, participants were readministered the EIT. Four principal findings emerged. First, there is evidence of an interference effect at baseline, as participants showed a slower reaction time for unpleasant and pleasant images relative to neutral images, and test-retest of behavioral measures was relatively stable over time. Second, participants showed a potentiated LPP to unpleasant and pleasant images compared to neutral images, and these effects were stable over time. Moreover, in a test of the difference waves (unpleasant-neutral vs. pleasant-neutral), there was sustained positivity for unpleasant images. Third, behavioral measures and LPP demonstrated excellent internal consistency (odd/even correlations) across conditions. Fourth, highlighting important age-related differences in LPP activity, younger age was associated with larger LPP amplitudes across conditions. Overall, these findings suggest that the LPP following emotional images is a stable and reliable marker of emotion processing in healthy youth.

The sound and the fury: Late positive potential is sensitive to sound affect.

Emotion is an emergent construct of multiple distinct neural processes. EEG is uniquely sensitive to real-time neural computations, and thus is a promising tool to study the construction of emotion. This series of studies aimed to probe the mechanistic contribution of the late positive potential (LPP) to multimodal emotion perception. Experiment 1 revealed that LPP amplitudes for visual images, sounds, and visual images paired with sounds were larger for negatively rated stimuli than for neutrally rated stimuli. Experiment 2 manipulated this audiovisual enhancement by altering the valence pairings with congruent (e.g., positive audio + positive visual) or conflicting emotional pairs (e.g., positive audio + negative visual). Negative visual stimuli evoked larger early LPP amplitudes than positive visual stimuli, regardless of sound pairing. However, time frequency analyses revealed significant midfrontal theta-band power differences for conflicting over congruent stimuli pairs, suggesting very early (∼500 ms) realization of thematic fidelity violations. Interestingly, late LPP modulations were reflective of the opposite pattern of congruency, whereby congruent over conflicting pairs had larger LPP amplitudes. Together, these findings suggest that enhanced parietal activity for affective valence is modality independent and sensitive to complex affective processes. Furthermore, these findings suggest that altered neural activities for affective visual stimuli are enhanced by concurrent affective sounds, paving the way toward an understanding of the construction of multimodal affective experience.

The electrocortical modulation effects of different emotion regulation strategies.

The current event-related potential study investigated the modulation effects of different emotion regulation strategies on electrocortical responses. When watching negative or neutral pictures, participants were instructed to perform three tasks: cognitive reappraisal, expressive suppression and passive viewing. We found that negative pictures elicited a larger late positive potential (LPP) than neutral pictures. Moreover, processes involved in strategy also had an effect on LPP amplitude, which was indicated by a larger LPP in reappraisal compared with suppression and viewing tasks when neutral pictures were presented. After the influence of processes on LPP was excluded, results showed that reappraisal effectively decreased the emotion-enhanced LPP than suppression and viewing. The difference in regulatory effect may be determined by the underlying processing mechanism. A larger frontal-central component, N2, was observed in suppression than reappraisal and viewing, which suggested that it involved the processes focusing on behavioral response. While the larger LPP found in reappraisal implicated that it recruited cognitive processes focusing on the picture meaning.

It's all in your head - how anticipating evaluation affects the processing of emotional trait adjectives.

Language has an intrinsically evaluative and communicative function. Words can serve to describe emotional traits and states in others and communicate evaluations. Using electroencephalography (EEG), we investigate how the cerebral processing of emotional trait adjectives is modulated by their perceived communicative sender in anticipation of an evaluation. 16 students were videotaped while they described themselves. They were told that a stranger would evaluate their personality based on this recording by endorsing trait adjectives. In a control condition a computer program supposedly randomly selected the adjectives. Actually, both conditions were random. A larger parietal N1 was found for adjectives in the supposedly human-generated condition. This indicates that more visual attention is allocated to the presented adjectives when putatively interacting with a human. Between 400 and 700 ms a fronto-central main effect of emotion was found. Positive, and in tendency also negative adjectives, led to a larger late positive potential (LPP) compared to neutral adjectives. A centro-parietal interaction in the LPP-window was due to larger LPP amplitudes for negative compared to neutral adjectives within the ‘human sender’ condition. Larger LPP amplitudes are related to stimulus elaboration and memory consolidation. Participants responded more to emotional content particularly when presented in a meaningful ‘human’ context. This was first observed in the early posterior negativity window (210–260 ms). But the significant interaction between sender and emotion reached only trend-level on post hoc tests. Our results specify differential effects of even implied communicative partners on emotional language processing. They show that anticipating evaluation by a communicative partner alone is sufficient to increase the relevance of particularly emotional adjectives, given a seemingly realistic interactive setting.

The late positive potential and explicit versus implicit processing of facial valence

The late positive potential (LPP) depicts brain electrical activity during both automatic and controlled sustained attentional processing of emotional stimuli. We investigated in a sample of 18 healthy women how the LPP is modulated by facial expression during an explicit valence rating task and an implicit sex classification task. Midline LPP amplitudes were significantly larger for valence rating than for sex classification. During valence rating, faces with a positive valence resulted in larger LPP amplitudes at centrofrontal electrodes than faces with a negative valence. During sex classification, a similar valence effect was observed at midline parietal electrodes. This implicit LPP valence effect appears to depend on higher visual processing, as during an additional sex classification task with blurred faces no such implicit valence effect was found.

CLINICAL STUDY: Cocaine craving is associated with electrophysiological brain responses to cocaine‐related stimuli

Several studies show that substance dependence disorders are characterized by an enhanced processing of substance-related stimuli. The present study was designed to examine the association between craving levels and selective processing of drug cues in cocaine-dependent patients using event-related brain potentials (ERPs). In abstinent cocaine-dependent patients and a healthy control group, we studied the late positive potential (LPP) amplitudes elicited by neutral and cocaine-related stimuli. The results show that cocaine-dependent patients have an enhanced electrophysiological response in the late LPP time window to cocaine-related stimuli as compared to controls, suggesting an enhanced processing of these stimuli. Most importantly, a robust association was observed between cocaine craving and LPP amplitude. High craving levels were associated with larger LPP amplitudes at central electrode sites in the right hemisphere. These findings are in line with theories linking motivational aspects and appetitive stimulus processing. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that ERPs are a useful index to assess motivational properties of stimuli in cocaine-dependent patients. These findings suggest that electrophysiological measures may have clinical relevance in substance use disorders.