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Motivation is considered a crucial factor in determining emotion regulation choice (ER choice). Our previous study revealed that increased motivation led to a preference for distraction over reappraisal due to the narrowed attention, yet neural underpinnings supporting this phenomenon remain unclear. In this study, we used event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate whether motivation influences ER choice by early attention processing (P2) or late resource engagement (LPP). EEG activities were recorded for the pictorial contexts varying in motivational intensity and direction, while participants (N = 68) were required to decide which strategy from the two options they would use to regulate their emotions. Consistent with previous studies, the results indicated that individuals chose more distraction over reappraisal in high-withdrawal motivated contexts while a reversed pattern was observed in low-withdrawal motivated contexts. Moreover, high-intensity motivated emotional contexts result in enhanced P2 and LPP. Further analysis indicates that only frontal P2 and the early LPP mediate the effect of motivational intensity on ER choice. These findings suggest that heightened motivation leads to a preference for distraction over reappraisal during emotion regulation due to the greater occupation of attentional resources., (© 2024 Society for Psychophysiological Research.)

Social and emotional cues from faces and voices are highly relevant and have been reliably demonstrated to attract attention involuntarily. However, there are mixed findings as to which degree associating emotional valence to faces occurs automatically. In the present study, we tested whether inherently neutral faces gain additional relevance by being conditioned with either positive, negative, or neutral vocal affect bursts. During learning, participants performed a gender‐matching task on face‐voice pairs without explicit emotion judgments of the voices. In the test session on a subsequent day, only the previously associated faces were presented and had to be categorized regarding gender. We analyzed event‐related potentials (ERPs), pupil diameter, and response times (RTs) of N = 32 subjects. Emotion effects were found in auditory ERPs and RTs during the learning session, suggesting that task‐irrelevant emotion was automatically processed. However, ERPs time‐locked to the conditioned faces were mainly modulated by the task‐relevant information, that is, the gender congruence of the face and voice, but not by emotion. Importantly, these ERP and RT effects of learned congruence were not limited to learning but extended to the test session, that is, after removing the auditory stimuli. These findings indicate successful associative learning in our paradigm, but it did not extend to the task‐irrelevant dimension of emotional relevance. Therefore, cross‐modal associations of emotional relevance may not be completely automatic, even though the emotion was processed in the voice. This study provides new evidence for the transfer of affective processing to affective learning and complements previous research on the preferential processing of emotional stimuli. Our findings indicate that only task‐relevant stimulus features were robustly learned, although the task‐irrelevant emotional meaning of the same stimulus influenced online processing and behavior during learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Event‐related potential studies using affective words have indicated that selective attention to valence can increase affective discrimination at early perceptual stages. This effect most likely relies on neural associations between perceptual features of a stimulus and its affective value. Similar to words, emotional expressions in human faces are linked to specific visual elements. Therefore, selectively attending to a given emotion should allow for the preactivation of neural networks coding for the emotion and associated first‐order visual elements, leading to enhanced early processing of faces expressing the attended emotion. To investigate this, we employed an expression detection task (N = 65). Fearful, happy, and neutral faces were randomly presented in three blocks while participants were instructed to respond only to one predefined target level of expression in each block. Reaction times were the fastest for happy target faces, which was accompanied by an increased occipital P1 for happy compared with fearful faces. The N170 yielded an arousal effect (emotional > neutral) while both components were not modulated by target status. In contrast, the early posterior negativity (EPN) arousal effect tended to be larger for target compared with nontarget faces. The late positive potential (LPP) revealed large effects of status and expression as well as an interaction driven by an increased LPP specifically for nontarget fearful faces. These findings tentatively indicate that selective attention to facial affect may enhance early emotional processing (EPN) even though further research is needed. Moreover, late controlled processing of facial emotions appears to involve a negativity bias. Recent research suggests that selective attention to emotional stimuli can improve affective discrimination at early perceptual stages. Using emotional faces, we find indications that selective attention to facial affect might boost emotional processing during the EPN time window. Additionally, late controlled processing of facial emotions appears to involve a negativity bias and the increased allocation of resources toward attended (relative to unattended) faces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Numerous different objects are simultaneously visible in a person's visual field, competing for attention. This competition has been shown to affect eye‐movements and early neural responses toward stimuli, while the role of a stimulus' emotional meaning for mechanisms of overt attention shifts under competition is unclear. The current study combined EEG and eye‐tracking to investigate effects of competition and emotional content on overt shifts of attention to human face stimuli. Competition prolonged the latency of the P1 component and of saccades, while faces showing emotional expressions elicited an early posterior negativity (EPN). Remarkably, the emotion‐related modulation of the EPN was attenuated when two stimuli were competing for attention compared to non‐competition. In contrast, no interaction effects of emotional expression and competition were observed on other event‐related potentials. This finding indicates that competition can decelerate attention shifts in general and also diminish the emotion‐driven attention capture, measured through the smaller effects of emotional expression on EPN amplitude. Reduction of the brain's responsiveness to emotional content in the presence of distractors contradicts models that postulate fully automatic processing of emotions. The current study investigated overt attention to emotional faces using coregistered eye‐tracking and EEG, measuring whether emotional expressions affect early and late Event‐related Potentials. It shows that emotion effects are attenuated and delayed when several targets are competing for attention, providing evidence that cortical processing of emotion is not automatic but is influenced by distractors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior affective and social knowledge about other individuals has been shown to modulate perception of their faces and gaze‐related attentional processes. However, it remains unclear whether emotionally charged knowledge acquired through interactive social learning also modulates face processing and attentional control. Thus, the aim of this study was to test whether affective knowledge induced through social interactions in a naturalistic exchange game can influence early stages of face processing and attentional shifts in a subsequent gaze‐cueing task. As indicated by self‐reported ratings, the game was successful in inducing valenced affective knowledge towards positive and negative players. In the subsequent task, in which the locations of future targets were cued by the gaze of the game players, we observed enhanced early neural activity (larger amplitude of the P1 component) in response to a photograph of the negative player. This indicates that negative affective knowledge about an individual indeed modulates very early stages of the processing of this individual's face. Our study contributes to the existing literature by providing further evidence for the saliency of interactive social exchange paradigms that are used to induce affective knowledge. Moreover, it extends the previous research by presenting a very early modulation of perception by socially learned affective knowledge. Importantly, it also offers increased ecological validity of the findings due to the use of naturalistic social exchange in the study design. This research complements previous evidence that experimentally induced socio‐affective knowledge about other individuals, modulates processing of their faces, and shows that negative (but not positive) affect enhances very early face processing (the P1). Importantly, we provide an effective affect induction tool—an interactive social exchange game—which offers increased social ecological validity in experimental settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In everyday life, faces with emotional expressions quickly attract attention and eye movements. To study the neural mechanisms of such emotion‐driven attention by means of event‐related brain potentials (ERPs), tasks that employ covert shifts of attention are commonly used, in which participants need to inhibit natural eye movements towards stimuli. It remains, however, unclear how shifts of attention to emotional faces with and without eye movements differ from each other. The current preregistered study aimed to investigate neural differences between covert and overt emotion‐driven attention. We combined eye tracking with measurements of ERPs to compare shifts of attention to faces with happy, angry, or neutral expressions when eye movements were either executed (go conditions) or withheld (no‐go conditions). Happy and angry faces led to larger EPN amplitudes, shorter latencies of the P1 component, and faster saccades, suggesting that emotional expressions significantly affected shifts of attention. Several ERPs (N170, EPN, LPC) were augmented in amplitude when attention was shifted with an eye movement, indicating an enhanced neural processing of faces if eye movements had to be executed together with a reallocation of attention. However, the modulation of ERPs by facial expressions did not differ between the go and no‐go conditions, suggesting that emotional content enhances both covert and overt shifts of attention. In summary, our results indicate that overt and covert attention shifts differ but are comparably affected by emotional content. During real‐life social interactions, covert and overt shifts of attention are flexibly used to attend to emotional stimuli. The current preregistered coregistration study of EEG and eye tracking is the first to demonstrate independent effects of emotional content and type of attention shift on eye‐movements and event‐related potentials to neutral and emotional faces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]