An Event-Related Potential Investigation of Fear Generalization and Intolerance of Uncertainty.

Fear generalization is a key process in the development and maintenance of anxiety disorders. Psychobiological investigations of fear generalization have predominantly focused on defensive system activation (e.g.

The stability of the feedback negativity and its relationship with depression during childhood and adolescence.

Feedback negativity (FN) is an event-related potential elicited by monetary reward and loss; it is thought to relate to reward-related neural activity and has been linked to depression in children and adults. In the current study, we examined the stability of FN, and its relationship with depression in adolescents, over 2 years in 45 8- to 13-year-old children. From Time 1 to Time 2, FN in response to monetary loss and in response to monetary gain showed moderate to strong reliability (rs = .

Early Parenting Moderates the Association between Parental Depression and Neural Reactivity to Rewards and Losses in Offspring.

Children of parents with depression exhibit neural abnormalities in reward processing. Examining contributions of parenting could provide insight into the development of these abnormalities and to the etiology of depression. We evaluated whether early parenting moderates the effects of parental depression on a neural measure of reward and loss processing in mid-late childhood.

Impaired neural response to negative prediction errors in cocaine addiction.

Learning can be guided by unexpected success or failure, signaled via dopaminergic positive reward prediction error (+RPE) and negative reward-prediction error (-RPE) signals, respectively. Despite conflicting empirical evidence, RPE signaling is thought to be impaired in drug addiction. To resolve this outstanding question, we studied as a measure of RPE the feedback negativity (FN) that is sensitive to both reward and the violation of expectation.

Self-referential processing in depressed adolescents: A high-density event-related potential study.

Despite the alarming increase in the prevalence of depression during adolescence, particularly among female adolescents, the pathophysiology of depression in adolescents remains largely unknown. Event-related potentials (ERPs) provide an ideal approach to investigate cognitive-affective processes associated with depression in adolescents, especially in the context of negative self-referential processing biases. In this study, healthy (n = 30) and depressed (n = 22) female adolescents completed a self-referential encoding task while ERP data were recorded.

Perceived emotional intelligence is impaired and associated with poor community functioning in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

Schizophrenia and bipolar disorder have been associated with shared and distinct emotion processing abnormalities. Initial findings indicate that these disorders differ with respect to the domain of emotional intelligence (EI). Individuals with schizophrenia display deficits on performance measures of EI, whereas those with bipolar disorder do not.

Sexual desire, not hypersexuality, predicts self-regulation of sexual arousal.

A person's ability to control their own sexual arousal is important both to reduce the risks associated with some sexual behaviours and to respond sexually with intimate partners. A lack of control over sexual urges is a proposed feature of "hypersexual disorder", though some evidence suggests that sexual desire predicts the self-regulation of sexual arousal better than hypersexuality. In the current study, a sample (N = 116) of men and women recruited from community ads viewed a series of 20-second neutral and sexual films.

Behavioral and ERP measures of attentional bias to threat in the dot-probe task: poor reliability and lack of correlation with anxiety.

The dot-probe task is often considered a gold standard in the field for investigating attentional bias to threat. However, serious issues with the task have been raised. Specifically, a number of studies have demonstrated that the traditional reaction time (RT) measure of attentional bias to threat in the dot-probe task has poor internal reliability and poor test-retest reliability.

Anterior cingulate activity to monetary loss and basal ganglia activity to monetary gain uniquely contribute to the feedback negativity.

Objective: The feedback negativity (FN) is an event-related potential that differentiates unfavorable versus favorable outcomes. Although thought to reflect error-related activity within the anterior cingulate cortex, recent work indicates the FN may also reflect reward-related activity that has been linked to the basal ganglia. To date, it remains unclear how to reconcile these conflicting perspectives.

An incongruent reality: the N400 in relation to psychosis and recovery.

Background: Cognitive impairments and delusions are hallmarks of schizophrenia, and are thought to be due in part to abnormalities in semantic priming. The N400, a neural measure of semantic processing, is found to be reduced in schizophrenia. However, it is unclear if individuals with other psychoses (e.

Neural reactivity to monetary rewards and losses in childhood: longitudinal and concurrent associations with observed and self-reported positive emotionality.

Reward reactivity and positive emotion are key components of a theoretical, early-emerging approach motivational system, yet few studies have examined associations between positive emotion and neural reactivity to reward across development. In this multi-method prospective study, we examined the association of laboratory observations of positive emotionality (PE) at age 3 and self-reported positive affect (PA) at age 9 with an event-related potential component sensitive to the relative response to winning vs. losing money, the feedback negativity (ΔFN), at age 9 (N=381).

Neural indicators of error processing in generalized anxiety disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and major depressive disorder.

The ability to detect and respond to errors is critical to successful adaptation to a changing environment, and variation in error-related brain activity has been linked to psychopathology. The error-related negativity (ERN), an event-related potential component, represents a unique neural response to errors and is generated in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). In the present study, we measured the ERN in a sample of individuals with Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), or some combination of the 3.

The reward positivity: from basic research on reward to a biomarker for depression.

Feedback indicating monetary loss elicits an apparent negative deflection in the event-related potential (ERP) that has been referred to as the feedback error-related negativity, medial frontal negativity, feedback-related negativity, and feedback negativity-all conceptualizations that suggest a negative ERP component that is greater for loss than gain. In the current paper, I review a programmatic line of research indicating that this apparent negativity actually reflects a reward-related positivity (RewP) that is absent or suppressed following nonreward. I situate the RewP within a broader nomological network of reward processing and individual differences in sensitivity to rewards.

Electrocortical reactivity to social feedback in youth: a pilot study of the Island Getaway task.

Peer relationships become a major concern in adolescence, yet event-related potential (ERP) measures of reactivity to social feedback in adolescence are limited. In this pilot study, we tested a novel task to elicit reactivity to social feedback in youth. Participants (10-15 years old; 57.

In an uncertain world, errors are more aversive: evidence from the error-related negativity.

Unpredictability increases amygdala activity and vigilance toward threat. The error-related negativity (ERN) is an electrophysiological response to errors and is posited to reflect sensitivity to potential threat. The present study examined whether the ERN was modulated by predictable or unpredictable task-irrelevant auditory stimuli.

Transient tasks and enduring emotions: the impacts of affective content, task relevance, and picture duration on the sustained late positive potential.

The present experiments were designed to examine the influences of picture duration, task relevance, and affective content on neural measures of sustained engagement, as indexed by the late positive potential (LPP). Much prior work has shown that the event-related potential in and around the P3-here referred to as the early LPP-is modulated by affective content, nonaffective task relevance, and stimulus duration. However, later portions of the LPP (>1,000 ms) may represent either a return to baseline or a continued physiological process related to motivational engagement.

Self-Reported and Observed Punitive Parenting Prospectively Predicts Increased Error-Related Brain Activity in Six-Year-Old Children.

The error-related negativity (ERN) is a negative deflection in the event-related potential (ERP) occurring approximately 50 ms after error commission at fronto-central electrode sites and is thought to reflect the activation of a generic error monitoring system. Several studies have reported an increased ERN in clinically anxious children, and suggest that anxious children are more sensitive to error commission--although the mechanisms underlying this association are not clear. We have previously found that punishing errors results in a larger ERN, an effect that persists after punishment ends.

Electrocortical evidence for rapid allocation of attention to threat in the dot-probe task.

Threatening stimuli have been shown to preferentially capture attention using a range of tasks and measures. However, attentional bias to threat has not typically been found in unselected individuals using behavioral measures in the dot-probe task, one of the most common ways of examining attention to threat. The present study leveraged event-related potentials (ERPs) in conjunction with behavioral measures in the dot-probe task to examine whether more direct measures of attention might reveal an attentional bias to threat in unselected individuals.

The impact of puberty and social anxiety on amygdala activation to faces in adolescence.

Adolescence is associated with the onset of puberty, shifts in social and emotional behavior and an increased vulnerability to social anxiety disorder. These transitions coincide with changes in amygdala response to social and affective stimuli. Utilizing an emotional face-matching task, we examined amygdala response to peer-aged neutral and fearful faces in relation to puberty and social anxiety in a sample of 60 adolescent females between the ages of 8 and 15 years.

Reward dysfunction in major depression: multimodal neuroimaging evidence for refining the melancholic phenotype.

Reward dysfunction is thought to play a core role in the pathophysiology of major depressive disorder (MDD). Event-related potential (ERP) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have identified reward processing deficits in MDD, but these methods have yet to be applied together in a single MDD sample. We utilized multimodal neuroimaging evidence to examine reward dysfunction in MDD.

Cognitive load and emotional processing in generalized anxiety disorder: electrocortical evidence for increased distractibility.

Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) may be characterized by emotion regulation deficits attributable to an imbalance between top-down (i.e., goal-driven) and bottom-up (i.

Neural reactivity to rewards and losses in offspring of mothers and fathers with histories of depressive and anxiety disorders.

Depression appears to be characterized by reduced neural reactivity to receipt of reward. Despite evidence of shared etiologies and high rates of comorbidity between depression and anxiety, this abnormality may be relatively specific to depression. However, it is unclear whether children at risk for depression also exhibit abnormal reward responding, and if so, whether risk for anxiety moderates this association.

Heritability of the neural response to emotional pictures: evidence from ERPs in an adult twin sample.

Affect-modulated event-related potentials (ERPs) are increasingly used to study psychopathology and individual differences in emotion processing. Many have suggested that variation in these neural responses reflects genetically mediated risk. However, to date, no studies have demonstrated genetic contributions to affect-modulated ERPs.