What’s in a face? The late positive potential reflects the level of facial affect expression.
Morphed faces depicting varying degrees of affect expression can be used to investigate the processing of ambiguous and thus more ecologically valid facial stimuli. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were measured while participants viewed a series of faces ranging in 10% increments from prototypically happy to prototypically neutral to prototypically angry. Results revealed that the late positive potential (LPP) – an ERP reflecting later stages of stimulus processing – followed the degree of expression of facial affect such that faces depicting a greater amount of affect elicited larger LPPs as compared to faces de...
Source: Journal of Psychophysiology - February 4, 2013 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Duval, Elizabeth R.; Moser, Jason S.; Huppert, Jonathan D.; Simons, Robert F. Source Type: research
Psychophysiological response to acoustic intensity change in a musical chord.
This paper investigates psychological and psychophysiological components of arousal and emotional response to a violin chord stimulus comprised of continuous increases (up-ramp) or decreases (down-ramp) of intensity. A factorial experiment manipulated direction of intensity change (60–90 dB SPL up-ramp, 90–60 dB SPL down-ramp) and duration (1.8 s, 3.6 s) within-subjects (N = 45). Dependent variables were ratings of emotional arousal, valence, and loudness change, and a fine-grained analysis of event-related skin conductance response (SCR). As hypothesized, relative to down-ramps, musical up-ramps elicited significantly...
Source: Journal of Psychophysiology - February 4, 2013 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Olsen, Kirk N.; Stevens, Catherine J. Source Type: research
The effect of attentional focus strategy on physiological and motor performance during a sit-up exercise.
The attentional focus of an individual can influence performance and physiological outcomes during strength training exercises. However, prior research has largely investigated this issue with male participants performing a biceps curl exercise and has not investigated the full range of attentional focus strategies. In the present experiment, 24 females did a sit-up exercise while adopting an associative or dissociative strategy of attending to cues that were external or internal to result in four conditions: external association, internal association, external dissociation, and internal dissociation. The external associat...
Source: Journal of Psychophysiology - February 4, 2013 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Neumann, David L.; Brown, Justine Source Type: research
Mismatch negativity does not show evidence of memory reactivation in the visual modality.
The possibility of reactivation of the memory representation underlying visual mismatch negativity (vMMN) was investigated in a modified passive roving-standard paradigm. Stimuli (arrays of Gábor patches) were presented in sequences with blank interval between the sequences. The first member of each sequence was identical to the standard of the previous sequence, while the second stimulus had different orientation therefore the second stimulus was considered as deviant. In a control condition the stimuli of the previous sequence had random orientations. Event-related potentials (ERPs) in response to the deviants were comp...
Source: Journal of Psychophysiology - February 4, 2013 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Sulykos, István; Kecskés-Kovács, Krisztina; Czigler, István Source Type: research
