Faculty Articles

Positive Affective Priming Decreases the Middle Late Positive Potential Response to Negative Images

Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Brain and Behavior

ISSN

2162-3279

Publication Date

1-1-2019

Abstract

INTRODUCTION: This study aims to expand on previous literature showing that incidental emotion state priming in a specific domain leads to a higher probability that the primed emotion domain will be activated during a subsequent task.

METHODS: To that end, we investigated the influence of happy, fearful, and neutral incidental emotion state priming on subsequent responses to emotionally negative and neutral pictures, measured by the event-related potential (ERP) late positive potential (LPP). New to our study, we examined the influence of affective priming on the LPP response (analyzed separately at early and middle latency ranges) to emotional pictures in both the foveal and extrafoveal presentation locations.

RESULTS: Following both fearful and neutral incidental state priming, both the early and middle LPP latency ranges overwhelmingly differentiated between negative and neutral pictures. Following happy incidental state priming, however, the LPP response failed to differentiate between negative and neutral pictures by the middle LPP latency range (800-1,000 ms). These results suggest that incidental happy states can have a protective effect when viewing aversive stimuli. Additionally, the LPP showed greater sensitivity to negative stimuli when presented extrafoveally compared to foveally.

CONCLUSIONS: Overall, our findings suggest that incidental affective state and stimulus location influence emotional processing differentially for emotionally negative and emotionally neutral stimuli.

DOI

https://dx.doi.org/10.1002%2Fbrb3.1198

Volume

9

Issue

1

First Page

1

Last Page

10

Link to Full Text
Peer Reviewed

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