Unresolved loss, a risk factor for offspring, predicts event-related potential responses to death-related imagery.

This study investigates whether individual differences in attachment status can be detected by electrophysiological responses to loss-themed pictures. The Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) was used to identify discourse/reasoning lapses during the discussion of loss experiences via death that place speakers in the Unresolved/disorganized AAI category. In parents, Unresolved AAI status has been associated with Disorganized infant Strange Situation response, a known risk factor for psychopathology (e.

An fMRI study of caring vs self-focus during induced compassion and pride.

This study examined neural activation during the experience of compassion, an emotion that orients people toward vulnerable others and prompts caregiving, and pride, a self-focused emotion that signals individual strength and heightened status. Functional magnetic resonance images (fMRI) were acquired as participants viewed 55 s continuous sequences of slides to induce either compassion or pride, presented in alternation with sequences of neutral slides. Emotion self-report data were collected after each slide condition within the fMRI scanner.

The voice conveys specific emotions: evidence from vocal burst displays.

Studies of emotion signaling inform claims about the taxonomic structure, evolutionary origins, and physiological correlates of emotions. Emotion vocalization research has tended to focus on a limited set of emotions: anger, disgust, fear, sadness, surprise, happiness, and for the voice, also tenderness. Here, we examine how well brief vocal bursts can communicate 22 different emotions: 9 negative (Study 1) and 13 positive (Study 2), and whether prototypical vocal bursts convey emotions more reliably than heterogeneous vocal bursts (Study 3).

Affective and cognitive modulation of performance monitoring: behavioral and ERP evidence.

This study investigates the effects of negative affect on performance monitoring. EEG was acquired during a lateralized, numeric Stroop working memory task that featured task-irrelevant aversive and neutral pictures between stimuli. Performance accuracy showed a right-hemisphere advantage for stimuli that followed aversive pictures.

Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence of a right hemisphere bias for the influence of negative emotion on higher cognition.

We examined how responses to aversive pictures affected performance and stimulus-locked event-related potentials (ERPs) recorded during a demanding cognitive task. Numeric Stroop stimuli were brief ly presented to either left or right visual hemifield (LVF and RVF, respectively) after a centrally presented aversive or neutral picture from the International Affective Picture System. Subjects indicated whether a quantity value from each Stroop stimulus matched the preceding Stroop stimulus while passively viewing the pictures.

Distributed neural activity during object, spatial and integrated processing in humans.

Information about the form and the spatial location of objects is seamlessly integrated during visual perception. We used event-related potentials (ERPs) to explore neural activity related to processing form, location or the combination of both kinds of features. Healthy subjects performed three versions of a 'match-to-sample' task: a two-object task, a two-location task and an integrated object-location task.