Brain regions modulated by cognitive tasks during emotional processing were investigated using fMRI. Participants performed indirect and direct emotional processing tasks on positive and negative faces and pictures. We used a multivariate technique, partial least squares (PLS) to determine spatially distributed patterns of brain activity associated with different tasks and stimulus conditions, ...

Background. Previous research suggests depressed individuals engage in prolonged elaborative processing of emotional information. A computational neural network model of emotional information processing (Siegle 1999) suggests this process involves sustained amygdala activity in response to processing negative features information. This study examined whether brain activity in response to emotio...

Stress can increase emotional vigilance at the cost of a decrease in attention towards non-emotional stimuli. However, the time-dependent effects of acute stress on emotion processing are uncertain. We tested the effects of acute stress on subsequent emotion processing up to 40 min following an acute stressor. Our measure of emotion processing was the late positive potential (LPP) component of ...

Emotion processing has been shown to acquire priority by biasing allocation of attentional resources. Aversive images or fearful expressions are processed quickly and automatically. Many existing findings suggested that processing of emotional information was pre-attentive, largely immune from attentional control. Other studies argued that attention gated the processing of emotion. To tackle th...

introduction : we aimed to assess the status of sensory processing in children with attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder, high-functioning autism and typical peers. methods: participants in this study are children 7 to 10 years old with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (n = 30), autistic children with high cognitive function (n = 28) and 30 matched typical children. parents of c...

Emotional words in a bilingual's second language (L2) seem to have less emotional impact compared to emotional words in the first language (L1). The present study examined the neural mechanisms of emotional word processing in Chinese-English bilinguals' two languages by using both event-related potentials (ERPs) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Behavioral results show a robust ...

BACKGROUND Alexithymia, or "no words for feelings", is a personality trait which is associated with difficulties in emotion recognition and regulation. It is unknown whether this deficit is due primarily to regulation, perception, or mentalizing of emotions. In order to shed light on the core deficit, we tested our subjects on a wide range of emotional tasks. We expected the high alexithymics t...

Numerous theories posit that affectively salient stimuli are privileged in their capacity to capture attention and disrupt ongoing cognition. Two underlying assumptions in this theoretical position are that the potency of affective stimuli transcends task boundaries (i.e., emotional distracters do not have to belong to a current task-set to disrupt processing) and that there is an asymmetry bet...

Emotional stimuli are preferentially processed over neutral stimuli. Previous studies, however, disagree on whether emotional stimuli capture attention preattentively or whether the processing advantage is dependent on allocation of attention. The present study investigated attention and emotion processes by measuring brain responses related to eye movement events while 11 participants viewed i...

OBJECTIVES To elucidate the potential relationship between classification of emotional faces and impaired central processing in eating disorders and to investigate the potential mediatory role of alexithymia and depression in this relationship. METHODS Visual-evoked potentials (VEPs) to emotional faces and classification performance were assessed in 12 anorexic females and matched healthy con...