Effects of anxiety on the processing of fearful and happy faces: an event-related potential study

Holmes, Amanda and Nielsen, M.K. and Green, Simon (2008) Effects of anxiety on the processing of fearful and happy faces: an event-related potential study. Biological Psychology 77 (2), pp. 159-173. ISSN 0301-0511.

Full text not available from this repository.

Official URL: http://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2007.10.003

Abstract

This study investigated the influence of trait anxiety on event-related potentials (ERPs) to fearful, happy, and neutral faces. Fearful faces, relative to neutral, elicited a range of effects in the low-trait anxiety (LTA) group: an enhanced visual P1 component, an early posterior negativity (EPN), and a sustained fronto-central positivity. Emotional expression effects were generally weaker for happy faces. The enhanced fronto-central positivity and EPN triggered by fearful stimuli in LTA participants were less pronounced in the high-trait anxiety (HTA) group, while the enhancement of the visual P1 seen in the LTA group was further augmented in the HTA group. This represents a clear dissociation across anxiety groups between rapid attentional processing as reflected by the visual P1 and later strategic processing as reflected by fronto-central and EPN components. These effects of high-trait anxiety in potentiating initial threat evaluation but attenuating later cognitive processing are discussed in the context of the possible roles of neural systems underlying threat evaluation, cognitive avoidance, and differentiated affective responses.

Metadata

Item Type:	Article
Keyword(s) / Subject(s):	Attention, Brain mechanisms, Emotional expression, Face processing, Perception
School:	School of Science > Psychological Sciences
Depositing User:	Administrator
Date Deposited:	16 Feb 2016 10:22
Last Modified:	16 Feb 2016 10:22
URI:	https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/14337

Statistics

Archive Staff Only (login required)

Edit/View Item