Event-related Brain Potential Recordings Research Articles

Tonal and syllabic encoding in overt Cantonese Chinese speech production: An ERP study.

This study was conducted to investigate how syllables and lexical tones are processed in Cantonese speech production using the picture-word interference task with concurrent recording of event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Cantonese-speaking participants were asked to name aloud individually presented pictures and ignore an accompanying auditory word distractor. The target and distractor either shared the same word-initial syllable with the same tone (Tonal-Syllable related), the same word-initial syllable without the same tone (Atonal-Syllable related), the same tone only (Tone alone related), or were phonologically unrelated. Participants' naming responses were faster, relative to an unrelated control, when the target and distractor shared the same tonal- or atonal-syllable but null effect was found in the Tone alone related condition. The mean ERP amplitudes (per each 100-ms time window) were subjected to stimulus-locked (i.e., time-locked to stimulus onset) and response-locked (i.e., time-locked to response onset) analyses. Significant differences between related and unrelated ERP waves were similarly observed in both Tonal-Syllable related and Atonal-Syllable related conditions in the time window of 400-500 ms post-stimulus. However, distinct ERP effects were observed in these two phonological conditions within the 500-ms pre-response period. In addition, null effects were found in the Tone alone related condition in both stimulus-locked and response-locked analyses. These results suggest that in Cantonese spoken word production, the atonal syllable of the target is retrieved first and then associated with the target lexical tone, consistent with the view that tone has an important role to play at a late stage of phonological encoding in tonal language production.

Category Mistakes Electrified

AbstractOccurrences of sentences that are traditionally considered category mistakes, such as ‘The red number is divisible by three’, tend to elicit a sense of oddness in assessors. In attempting to explain this oddness, existing accounts in the philosophical literature commonly claim that occurrences of such sentences are associated with a defect or phenomenology unique to the class of category mistakes. It might be thought that recent work in experimental psycholinguistics—in particular, the recording of event-related brain potentials (patterns of voltage variation in the brain)—holds the potential to shed new light on this debate. I review the relevant experimental results, before arguing that they present advocates of accounts of category mistakes with a dilemma: either the uniqueness claims should be rejected, or the experimental technique in question cannot be used to test existing accounts of category mistakes in the manner that philosophers might hope.

Combining Topical Agonists With the Recording of Event-Related Brain Potentials to Probe the Functional Involvement of TRPM8, TRPA1 and TRPV1 in Heat and Cold Transduction in the Human Skin

TRP channels play a central role in the transduction of thermal and nociceptive stimuli by free nerve endings. Most of the research on these channels has been conducted in vitro or in vivo in nonhuman animals and translation of these results to humans must account for potential experimental biases and interspecific differences. This study aimed at evaluating the involvement of TRPM8, TRPA1 and TRPV1 channels in the transduction of heat and cold stimuli by the human thermonociceptive system. For this purpose, we evaluated the effects of topical agonists of these 3 channels (menthol, cinnamaldehyde and capsaicin) on the event-related brain potentials (ERPs) elicited by phasic thermal stimuli (target temperatures: 10°C, 42°C, and 60°C) selected to activate cold Aδ thermoreceptors, warm sensitive C thermoreceptors and heat sensitive Aδ polymodal nociceptors. Sixty-four participants were recruited, 16 allocated to each agonist solution group (20% menthol, 10% cinnamaldehyde, .025% capsaicin and 1% capsaicin). Participants were treated sequentially with the active solution on one forearm and vehicle only on the other forearm for 20 minutes. Menthol decreased the amplitude and increased the latency of cold and heat ERPs. Cinnamic aldehyde decreased the amplitude and increased the latency of heat but not cold ERPs. Capsaicin decreased the amplitude and increased the latency of heat ERPs and decreased the amplitude of the N2P2 complex of the cold ERPs without affecting the earlier N1 wave or the latencies of the peaks. These findings are compatible with previous evidence indicating that TRPM8 is involved in innocuous cold transduction and that TRPV1 and TRPA1 are involved in noxious heat transduction in humans. PerspectiveBy chemically modulating TRPM8, TRPA1 and TRPV1 reactivity (key molecules in the transduction of temperature) and assessing how this affected EEG responses to the activation of cold thermoreceptors and heat nociceptors, we aimed at confirming the role of these channels in a functional healthy human model.

Perceiving faces through reconnection-colored glasses after social exclusion: Evidence from N100.

Social exclusion motivates individuals to selectively reconnect with others, in which face categorization plays an important role. However, it remains unknown how reconnection possibility interacts with perception at the very early stage of face categorization. To address this issue, after social exclusion or social inclusion priming, participants were instructed to select one person from two gender-matched strangers as a future "coworker" (with high reconnection possibility; the left one is a future "stranger," with low reconnection possibility) for another ostensible task, and then complete an orientation judgment task of self-face, coworker face and stranger face, with event-related brain potential (ERP) recordings. Results showed that excluded participants produced larger N100 to future coworker face than to stranger face, but no such difference was found among included participants. Compared with included participants, excluded participants produced significantly larger N100 to future coworker face. Moreover, N100 elicited by future coworker face was significantly negatively correlated with rating scores of exclusion only for social excluded participants. These findings indicate that social reconnection desire may contribute to the biased face perception which facilitates face categorization of socially excluded people.

Neural processes of reward and punishment processing in childhood and adolescence: An event-related potential study on age differences

Reward and punishment processing are subject to substantial developmental changes during youth. However, little is known about the neurophysiological correlates that are associated with these developmental changes, particularly with regard to both anticipatory and outcome processing stages. Thus, the aim of this study was to address this research gap in a sample of typically developing children and adolescents.Fifty-four children and adolescents (8–18 years) performed a Monetary Incentive Delay Task comprising a monetary reward and punishment condition. Using event-related brain potential recordings, the cue-P3 and the stimulus-preceding negativity (SPN) were analyzed during the anticipation phase, while the Reward Positivity and the feedback-P3 were analyzed during the outcome phase.When anticipating monetary loss or no gain, SPN amplitude in the right hemisphere decreased with age. Moreover, exploratory analyses revealed a decrease in feedback-P3 amplitudes in response to monetary loss with increasing age. No other group differences were observed.Age-related changes in the SPN and fP3 component suggest that sensitivity to negative outcomes decreases from childhood to late adolescence, supporting the notion that adolescence is associated with reduced harm-avoidance. Longitudinal research including young adults is needed to substantiate our findings and its clinical implications regarding disturbed developmental trajectories in psychiatric populations.

How alliteration enhances conceptual–attentional interactions in reading

In linguistics, the relationship between phonological word form and meaning is mostly considered arbitrary. Why, then, do literary authors traditionally craft sound relationships between words? We set out to characterise how dynamic interactions between word form and meaning may account for this literary practice. Here, we show that alliteration influences both meaning integration and attentional engagement during reading. We presented participants with adjective-noun phrases, having manipulated semantic relatedness (congruent, incongruent) and form repetition (alliterating, non-alliterating) orthogonally, as in “dazzling-diamond”; “sparkling-diamond”; “dangerous-diamond”; and “creepy-diamond”. Using simultaneous recording of event-related brain potentials and pupil dilation (PD), we establish that, whilst semantic incongruency increased N400 amplitude as expected, it reduced PD, an index of attentional engagement. Second, alliteration affected semantic evaluation of word pairs, since it reduced N400 amplitude even in the case of unrelated items (e.g., “dangerous-diamond”). Third, alliteration specifically boosted attentional engagement for related words (e.g., “dazzling-diamond”), as shown by a sustained negative correlation between N400 amplitudes and PD change after the window of lexical integration. Thus, alliteration strategically arouses attention during reading and when comprehension is challenged, phonological information helps readers link concepts beyond the level of literal semantics. Overall, our findings provide a tentative mechanism for the empowering effect of sound repetition in literary constructs.

Dissociable functional activities of cortical theta and beta oscillations in the lateral prefrontal cortex during intertemporal choice

The lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) plays an important role in the neural networks involved in intertemporal choice. However, little is known about how the neural oscillation of LPFC functions during intertemporal choice, owing to the technical limitations of functional magnetic resonance imaging and event-related brain potential recordings. Electrocorticography (ECoG) is a novel neuroimaging technique that has high spatial and temporal resolution. In this study, we used ECoG and projected the ECoG data onto individual brain spaces to investigate human intracranial cortex activity and how neural oscillations of the LPFC impact intertemporal choice. We found that neural activity of theta oscillation was significantly higher during impulsive decisions, while beta oscillation activity was significantly higher during non-impulsive ones. Our findings suggest a functional dissociation between cortical theta and beta oscillations during decision-making processes involved in intertemporal choice, and that decision outcomes may be determined by LPFC modulation, which involves neural oscillations at different frequencies.

Uncanny valley as a window into predictive processing in the social brain

Uncanny valley refers to humans' negative reaction to almost-but-not-quite-human agents. Theoretical work proposes prediction violation as an explanation for uncanny valley but no empirical work has directly tested it. Here, we provide evidence that supports this theory using event-related brain potential recordings from the human scalp. Human subjects were presented images and videos of three agents as EEG was recorded: a real human, a mechanical robot, and a realistic robot in between. The real human and the mechanical robot had congruent appearance and motion whereas the realistic robot had incongruent appearance and motion. We hypothesize that the appearance of the agent would provide a context to predict her movement, and accordingly the perception of the realistic robot would elicit an N400 effect indicating the violation of predictions, whereas the human and the mechanical robot would not. Our data confirmed this hypothesis suggesting that uncanny valley could be explained by violation of one's predictions about human norms when encountered with realistic but artificial human forms. Importantly, our results implicate that the mechanisms underlying perception of other individuals in our environment are predictive in nature.

EEG frequency tagging using ultra-slow periodic heat stimulation of the skin reveals cortical activity specifically related to C fiber thermonociceptors

The recording of event-related brain potentials triggered by a transient heat stimulus is used extensively to study nociception and diagnose lesions or dysfunctions of the nociceptive system in humans. However, these responses are related exclusively to the activation of a specific subclass of nociceptive afferents: quickly-adapting thermonociceptors. In fact, except if the activation of Aδ fibers is avoided or if A fibers are blocked, these responses specifically reflect activity triggered by the activation of Type 2 quickly-adapting A fiber mechano-heat nociceptors (AMH-2). Here, we propose a novel method to isolate, in the human electroencephalogram (EEG), cortical activity related to the sustained periodic activation of heat-sensitive thermonociceptors, using very slow (0.2Hz) and long-lasting (75s) sinusoidal heat stimulation of the skin between baseline and 50°C. In a first experiment, we show that when such long-lasting thermal stimuli are applied to the hand dorsum of healthy volunteers, the slow rises and decreases of skin temperature elicit a consistent periodic EEG response at 0.2Hz and its harmonics, as well as a periodic modulation of the magnitude of theta, alpha and beta band EEG oscillations. In a second experiment, we demonstrate using an A fiber block that these EEG responses are predominantly conveyed by unmyelinated C fiber nociceptors. The proposed approach constitutes a novel mean to study C fiber function in humans, and to explore the cortical processing of tonic heat pain in physiological and pathological conditions.

Unirhinal Olfactory Testing for the Diagnostic Workup of Mild Cognitive Impairment.

Olfactory dysfunction is associated with Alzheimer's disease (AD), and already present at pre-dementia stage. Based on the assumption that early neurodegeneration in AD is asymmetrical and that olfactory input is primarily processed in the ipsilateral hemisphere, we assessed whether unirhinal psychophysical and electrophysiological assessment of olfactory function can contribute to the diagnostic workup of mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Olfactory function of 13 MCI patients with positive amyloid PET, 13 aged-matched controls (AC) with negative amyloid PET and 13 patients with post-infectious olfactory loss (OD) was assessed unirhinally using (1) psychophysical testing of olfactory detection, discrimination and identification performance and (2) the recording of olfactory event-related brain potentials. Time-frequency analysis was used to enhance the signal-to-noise ratio of the electrophysiological responses. Psychophysical and electrophysiological assessment of auditory and trigeminal chemosensory function served as controls. As compared to AC and OD, MCI patients exhibited a significant asymmetry of olfactory performance. This asymmetry efficiently discriminated between MCI and AC (sensitivity: 85% , specificity: 77% ), as well as MCI and OD (sensitivity: 85% , specificity: 70% ). There was also an asymmetry of the electrophysiological responses, but not specific for MCI. In both MCI and OD, olfactory stimulation of the best nostril elicited significantly more activity than stimulation of the worse nostril, between 3-7.5 Hz and 1.2-2.0 s after stimulus onset. Trigeminal and auditory psychophysical testing did not show any difference between groups. MCI patients exhibit a marked asymmetry of behavioral olfactory function, which could be useful for the diagnostic workup of MCI.

Is Semantic Processing During Sentence Reading Autonomous or Controlled? Evidence from the N400 Component in a Dual Task Paradigm.

The present study contributes to the discussion on the automaticity of semantic processing. Whereas most previous research investigated semantic processing at word level, the present study addressed semantic processing during sentence reading. A dual task paradigm was combined with the recording of event-related brain potentials. Previous research at word level processing reported different patterns of interference with the N400 by additional tasks: attenuation of amplitude or delay of latency. In the present study, we presented Spanish sentences that were semantically correct or contained a semantic violation in a critical word. At different intervals preceding the critical word a tone was presented that required a high-priority choice response. At short intervals/high temporal overlap between the tasks mean amplitude of the N400 was reduced relative to long intervals/low temporal overlap, but there were no shifts of peak latency. We propose that processing at sentence level exerts a protective effect against the additional task. This is in accord with the attentional sensitization model (Kiefer & Martens, 2010), which suggests that semantic processing is an automatic process that can be enhanced by the currently activated task set. The present experimental sentences also induced a P600, which is taken as an index of integrative processing. Additional task effects are comparable to those in the N400 time window and are briefly discussed.

17. The contribution of intracranial eeg to research on the empathy for pain

In the last decade, a number of functional neuroimaging studies have identified a set of neural structures that are involved in empathy for another person’s pain. Bilateral anterior insular cortex and medial/anterior cingulate cortex seem to play a crucial role, but several other brain regions are also co-activated; this includes structures associated mostly with “Theory of Mind” or “mentalizing”, including precuneus, ventral prefrontal cortex, superior temporal cortex, and temporo-parietal junction. Electrophysiological pain-empathy responses have been analyzed to investigate the temporal dynamics of neural activity underlying this process. To the best of our knowledge, however, this has been performed with scalp recordings only; pain empathy-related brain potentials have not recorded using intracranial electrodes until now. In the present study, we investigated intracranial event-related brain potentials (ERPs) from three intractable epileptic patients who underwent preoperatively diagnostic invasive video-EEG monitoring. During the experiment, patients watched 3-second dynamic visual stimuli depicting needle injections into a left hand (N = 42), or the same left hand touched by a cue tip (N = 42). Intracranial EEGs were recorded using intracerebral and subdural electrodes, investigating in total more than 300 brain sites. The ERPs in each condition (needle and cue tip) were averaged separately off-line, and statistical differences in response amplitudes after painful vs. non-painful stimuli were detected. In all three subjects, significantly different event-related responses to painful vs. non-painful stimuli were observed in some investigated neural structures, including left-hemispheric temporo-parietal junction, right-sided temporo-occipital junction, and right-sided lateral occipital cortex. In these brain sites, painful needle stimuli evoked more prominent ERPs compared to cue-tip touch. The latency of these intracranial ERPs can be used for direct measurement of local activation with millisecond temporal resolution, and can be compared across different brain structures as well as with the scalp ERPs. Our pilot data demonstrate the ability of intracranial ERP recordings to contribute to our understanding of pain empathy. More generally, these data provide important insights into more complex social phenomena, and complement widely available functional neuroimaging data which are limited by their reliance on hemodynamic rather than direct neural measurements.

Neurophysiological correlates of emotional directed-forgetting in persons with Schizophrenia: An event-related brain potential study

BackgroundRecent research has shown that patients with schizophrenia (SCZ) exhibit reduced directed forgetting (DF) for negative words, suggesting impaired ability to instantiate goal-directed inhibition in order to suppress a competing, emotion-driven responses (i.e., emotional memory enhancement). However, disrupted inhibition is not the only possible mechanism by which patients could manifest reduced emotional DF. Therefore, the primary objective of the current study was to use event-related brain potential (ERP) recordings to investigate alternative hypotheses. MethodsERPs were recorded while patients and controls completed an item-method DF paradigm using negative and neutral words. The N2 indexed goal-directed inhibition of to-be-forgotten items. The late positive potential (LPP) indexed emotional memory enhancement for negative study items. The P300 indexed selective rehearsal of to-be-remembered items. ResultsThe SCZ group exhibited a reduced DF effect overall, but this was not modulated by emotion. N2 amplitude at anterior sites was larger for forget versus remember cues in the control group only, but this effect was not modulated by emotion. LPP amplitude was greater for negative versus neutral words in both groups, independent of region. P300 amplitude at posterior sites was greater for remember versus forget cues in the control group only. DiscussionThese data suggest that reduced DF in SCZ may be due, in part, to both diminished goal-directed inhibition of to-be-forgotten items and reduced selective rehearsal of to-be-remembered items. However, these data do not support the hypothesis that goal-directed, inhibitory processes are disrupted by competing, emotion-driven processes in SCZ. Patients' ERP data also suggested that they did not exhibit disproportionately heightened encoding of emotional stimuli, nor did they have deficient selective rehearsal of to-be-remembered emotional items.

Towards an optimal paradigm for simultaneously recording cortical and brainstem auditory evoked potentials.

Simultaneous recording of brainstem and cortical event-related brain potentials (ERPs) may offer a valuable tool for understanding the early neural transcription of behaviorally relevant sounds and the hierarchy of signal processing operating at multiple levels of the auditory system. To date, dual recordings have been challenged by technological and physiological limitations including different optimal parameters necessary to elicit each class of ERP (e.g., differential adaptation/habitation effects and number of trials to obtain adequate response signal-to-noise ratio). We investigated a new stimulus paradigm for concurrent recording of the auditory brainstem frequency-following response (FFR) and cortical ERPs. The paradigm is "optimal" in that it uses a clustered stimulus presentation and variable interstimulus interval (ISI) to (i) achieve the most ideal acquisition parameters for eliciting subcortical and cortical responses, (ii) obtain an adequate number of trials to detect each class of response, and (iii) minimize neural adaptation/habituation effects. Comparison between clustered and traditional (fixed, slow ISI) stimulus paradigms revealed minimal change in amplitude or latencies of either the brainstem FFR or cortical ERP. The clustered paradigm offered over a 3× increase in recording efficiency compared to conventional (fixed ISI presentation) and thus, a more rapid protocol for obtaining dual brainstem-cortical recordings in individual listeners. We infer that faster recording of subcortical and cortical potentials might allow more complete and sensitive testing of neurophysiological function and aid in the differential assessment of auditory function.

Compound words prompt arbitrary semantic associations in conceptual memory

Linguistic relativity theory has received empirical support in domains such as color perception and object categorization. It is unknown, however, whether relations between words idiosyncratic to language impact non-verbal representations and conceptualizations. For instance, would one consider the concepts of horse and sea as related were it not for the existence of the compound seahorse? Here, we investigated such arbitrary conceptual relationships using a non-linguistic picture relatedness task in participants undergoing event-related brain potential recordings. Picture pairs arbitrarily related because of a compound and presented in the compound order elicited N400 amplitudes similar to unrelated pairs. Surprisingly, however, pictures presented in the reverse order (as in the sequence horse–sea) reduced N400 amplitudes significantly, demonstrating the existence of a link in memory between these two concepts otherwise unrelated. These results break new ground in the domain of linguistic relativity by revealing predicted semantic associations driven by lexical relations intrinsic to language.

Orthographic transparency modulates the grain size of orthographic processing: Behavioral and ERP evidence from bilingualism

Grapheme-to-phoneme mapping regularity is thought to determine the grain size of orthographic information extracted whilst encoding letter strings. Here we tested whether learning to read in two languages differing in their orthographic transparency yields different strategies used for encoding letter-strings as compared to learning to read in one (opaque) language only. Sixteen English monolingual and 16 early Welsh–English bilingual readers undergoing event-related brain potentials (ERPs) recordings were asked to report whether or not a target letter displayed at fixation was present in either a nonword (consonant string) or an English word presented immediately before. Bilinguals and monolinguals showed similar behavioural performance on target detection presented in words and nonwords, suggesting similar orthographic encoding in the two groups. By contrast, the amplitude of ERPs locked to the target letters (P3b, 340–570ms post target onset, and a late frontal positive component 600–1000ms post target onset) were differently modulated by the position of the target letter in words and nonwords between bilinguals and monolinguals. P3b results show that bilinguals who learnt to read simultaneously in an opaque and a transparent orthographies encoded orthographic information presented to the right of fixation more poorly than monolinguals. On the opposite, only monolinguals exhibited a position effect on the late positive component for both words and nonwords, interpreted as a sign of better re-evaluation of their responses. The present study shed light on how orthographic transparency constrains grain size and visual strategies underlying letter-string encoding, and how those constraints are influenced by bilingualism.

Steady-state evoked potentials to study the processing of tactile and nociceptive somatosensory input in the human brain

The periodic presentation of a sensory stimulus induces, at certain frequencies of stimulation, a sustained electroencephalographic response of corresponding frequency, known as steady-state evoked potentials (SS-EP). In visual, auditory and vibrotactile modalities, studies have shown that SS-EP reflect mainly activity originating from early, modality-specific sensory cortices. Furthermore, it has been shown that SS-EP have several advantages over the recording of transient event-related brain potentials (ERP), such as a high signal-to-noise ratio, a shorter time to obtain reliable signals, and the capacity to frequency-tag the cortical activity elicited by concurrently presented sensory stimuli. Recently, we showed that SS-EP can be elicited by the selective activation of skin nociceptors and that nociceptive SS-EP reflect the activity of a population of neurons that is spatially distinct from the somatotopically-organized population of neurons underlying vibrotactile SS-EP. Hence, the recording of SS-EP offers a unique opportunity to study the cortical representation of nociception and touch in humans, and to explore their potential crossmodal interactions. Here, (1) we review available methods to achieve the rapid periodic stimulation of somatosensory afferents required to elicit SS-EP, (2) review previous studies that have characterized vibrotactile and nociceptive SS-EP, (3) discuss the nature of the recorded signals and their relationship with transient event-related potentials and (4) outline future perspectives and potential clinical applications of this technique.

Electrophysiological correlates of working memory performance in the course of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis

Aims: Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is primarily a motor system disease. However, despite the motor neuron degeneration, these patients also develop cognitive impairments including executive dysfunctions, in particular working memory and fluency. We used serial recordings of event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to provide the first assessment of longitudinal changes in working memory in patients with ALS compared to controls.

Impaired preparatory re-mapping of stimulus–response associations and rule-implementation in schizophrenic patients—The role for differences in early processing

An accurate representation of task-set information is needed for successful goal directed behavior. Recent studies point to disturbances in the early processing stages as plausible causes for task-switching deficits in schizophrenia. A task-cueing protocol was administered to a group of schizophrenic patients and compared with a sample of age-matched healthy controls. Patients responded slower and less accurate compared with controls in all conditions. The concurrent recording of event-related brain potentials to contextual cues and target events revealed abnormalities in the early processing of both cue-locked and target-locked N1 potentials. Abnormally enhanced target-locked P2 amplitudes were observed in schizophrenic patients for task-switch trials only, suggesting disrupted stimulus evaluation and memory retrieval processes. The endogenous P3 potentials discriminated between task conditions but without further differences between groups. These results suggest that the observed impairments in task-switching behavior were not specifically related to anticipatory set-shifting, but derived from a deficit in the implementation of task-set representations at target onset in the presence of irrelevant and conflicting information.

Interrelation of self-report, behavioural and electrophysiological measures assessing pain-related information processing.

A number of variables reflecting attentional and emotional mechanisms of processing pain-related information have recently attracted interest, ie, fear of pain, pain catastrophizing, hypervigilance and attentional bias to pain. These variables can be assessed by explicit measures based on conscious self-report, or by implicit measures assessing mainly preconscious stages of information processing such as behavioural or electrophysiological tests. Convergent validity within implicit measures was assumed to be high, as was the discriminant validity between implicit and explicit measures. In the present study, two implicit measures (the dot-probe task for pain words and a word-processing task for pain words allowing event-related brain potential recordings) and three self-report measures (Pain Catastrophizing Scale, Pain Anxiety Symptoms Scale, and Pain Hypervigilance and Awareness Questionnaire) were administered to 27 healthy participants. No significant associations were found between the implicit measures, or between the event-related brain potentials of pain words and the explicit measures. A single significant positive correlation was found between the dot-probe pain bias and the Pain Anxiety Symptoms Scale. All variables appeared to be only weakly associated. The attempt to organize the field of variables targeting attentional and emotional mechanisms of processing pain-related information using concepts such as implicit and explicit measures failed as far as the present test on convergent⁄discriminant validity proved.