ARTICLE UPDATE - Affective primes suppress attention bias to threat in socially anxious individuals.

Helfinstein SM, White LK, Bar-Haim Y, Fox NA.

Behavioral Research Therapy, in press

Anxious individuals show an attention bias towards threatening information. However, under conditions of sustained environmental threat this otherwise-present attention bias disappears. It remains unclear whether this suppression of attention bias can be caused by a transient activation of the fear system. In the present experiment, high socially anxious and low socially anxious individuals (HSA group, n=12; LSA group, n=12) performed a modified dot-probe task in which they were shown either a neutral or socially threatening prime word prior to each trial. EEG was collected and ERP components to the prime and faces displays were computed. HSA individuals showed an attention bias to threat after a neutral prime, but no attention bias after a threatening prime, demonstrating that suppression of attention bias can occur after a transient activation of the fear system. LSA individuals showed an opposite pattern: no evidence of a bias to threat with neutral primes but induction of an attention bias to threat following threatening primes. ERP results suggested differential processing of the prime and faces displays by HSA and LSA individuals. However, no group by prime interaction was found for any of ERP components.

ARTICLE UPDATE - Emotional priming of pop-out in visual search.

Lamy D, Amunts L, Bar-Haim Y.

Emotion, 8, 151-161

When searching for a discrepant target along a simple dimension such as color or shape, repetition of the target feature substantially speeds search, an effect known as feature priming of pop-out (V. Maljkovic and K. Nakayama, 1994). The authors present the first report of emotional priming of pop-out. Participants had to detect the face displaying a discrepant expression of emotion in an array of four face photographs. On each trial, the target when present was either a neutral face among emotional faces (angry in Experiment 1 or happy in Experiment 2), or an emotional face among neutral faces. Target detection was faster when the target displayed the same emotion on successive trials. This effect occurred for angry and for happy faces, not for neutral faces. It was completely abolished when faces were inverted instead of upright, suggesting that emotional categories rather than physical feature properties drive emotional priming of pop-out. The implications of the present findings for theoretical accounts of intertrial priming and for the face-in-the-crowd phenomenon are discussed.

ARTICLE UPDATE - Prefrontal cortex damage abolishes brand-cued changes in cola preference.

Koenigs M, Tranel D.

Social Cognitive Affective Neuroscience, 3, 1-6

Human decision-making is remarkably susceptible to commercial advertising, yet the neurobiological basis of this phenomenon remains largely unexplored. With a series of Coke and Pepsi taste tests we show that patients with damage specifically involving ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPC), an area important for emotion, did not demonstrate the normal preference bias when exposed to brand information. Both comparison groups (neurologically normal adults and lesion patients with intact VMPC) preferred Pepsi in a blind taste test, but in subsequent taste tests that featured brand information ('semi-blind' taste tests), both comparison groups' preferences were skewed toward Coke, illustrating the so-called 'Pepsi paradox'. Like comparison groups, the VMPC patients preferred Pepsi in the blind taste test, but unlike comparison groups, the VMPC patients maintained their Pepsi preference in the semi-blind test. The result that VMPC damage abolishes the 'Pepsi paradox' suggests that the VMPC is an important part of the neural substrate for translating commercial images into brand preferences.

ARTICLE UPDATE - The effects of nonconsciously priming emotion concepts on behavior.

Zemack-Rugar Y, Bettman JR, Fitzsimons GJ.

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 93, 927-939

Current empirical evidence regarding nonconsciously priming emotion concepts is limited to positively versus negatively valenced affect. This article demonstrates that specific, equally valenced emotion concepts can be nonconsciously activated, remain inaccessible to conscious awareness, and still affect behavior in an emotion-specific fashion. In Experiment 1A, participants subliminally primed with guilty emotion adjectives showed lower indulgence than did participants subliminally primed with sad emotion adjectives; even after the addition of a 5-min time delay, these results were replicated in Experiment 1B. Participants in the different priming conditions showed no differences in their subjective emotion ratings and were unaware of the emotion prime or concept activation. Experiments 2A and 2B replicated these findings using a helping measure, demonstrating that individuals primed with guilt adjectives show more helping than do individuals primed with sadness adjectives. In all studies, effects were moderated by individuals' specific emotion-response habits and characteristics.

ARTICLE UPDATE - Neural and Behavioral Evidence for Affective Priming from Unconsciously Perceived Emotional Facial Expressions and the Influence of T

Li W, Zinbarg RE, Boehm SG, Paller KA.

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, in press

Abstract Affective judgments can often be influenced by emotional information people unconsciously perceive, but the neural mechanisms responsible for these effects and how they are modulated by individual differences in sensitivity to threat are unclear. Here we studied subliminal affective priming by recording brain potentials to surprise faces preceded by 30-msec happy or fearful prime faces. Participants showed valence-consistent changes in affective ratings of surprise faces, although they reported no knowledge of prime-face expressions, nor could they discriminate between prime-face expressions in a forced-choice test. In conjunction with the priming effect on affective evaluation, larger occipital P1 potentials at 145-175 msec were found with fearful than with happy primes, and source analyses implicated the bilateral extrastriate cortex in this effect. Later brain potentials at 300-400 msec were enhanced with happy versus fearful primes, which may reflect differential attentional orienting. Personality testing for sensitivity to threat, especially social threat, was also used to evaluate individual differences potentially relevant to subliminal affective priming. Indeed, participants with high trait anxiety demonstrated stronger affective priming and greater P1 differences than did those with low trait anxiety, and these effects were driven by fearful primes. Results thus suggest that unconsciously perceived affective information influences social judgments by altering very early perceptual analyses, and that this influence is accentuated to the extent that people are oversensitive to threat. In this way, perception may be subject to a variety of influences that govern social preferences in the absence of concomitant awareness of such influences.

ARTICLE UPDATE - Amygdala activation in affective priming: a magnetoencephalogram study.

Garolera M, Coppola R, Muñoz KE, Elvevåg B, Carver FW, Weinberger DR, Goldberg TE.

NeurReport, 18, 1449-1453

We employed magnetoencephalography (MEG) to examine amygdala activity during a linguistic affective priming task. The experimental design included positive and negative word pairs. Using synthetic aperture magnetometry in the analysis of MEG data, we identified a left amygdala power increase in the theta frequency range during priming involving negative words. We found that the amygdala displayed a time-dependent intensification in responsiveness to negative stimuli, specifically between 150 and 400 ms after target presentation. This study provides evidence for theta power changes in the amygdala and demonstrates that the analysis of brain oscillations provides a powerful tool to explore mechanisms implicated in emotional processing.

ARTICLE UPDATE - On the nature of the affective priming effect: effects of stimulus onset asynchrony and congruency proportion in naming and evaluativ

Spruyt A, Hermans D, De Houwer J, Vandromme H, Eelen P.

Memory and Cognition, 35, 95-106

In line with the hypothesis that affective priming of evaluative categorization responses is based on processes that operate at a response selection stage, it has been observed that increasing the proportion of congruent trials brings about increased affective priming effects at short stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) in the evaluative categorization task. In the present study, we orthogonally manipulated the congruency proportion (.25, .50, and .75) and the SOA (0, 200, and 1,000 msec) in the evaluative categorization task and a naming task. Results showed that at both short and long SOAs, the affective priming effect in the evaluative categorization task was influenced by the congruency proportion. In contrast, affective priming effects in the naming task were unaffected by the congruency proportion at short SOAs. This pattern of results provides corroborating evidence for the hypotheses (1) that different processes underlie the affective priming effect in the evaluative categorization task and the naming task and (2) that valenced stimuli can automatically preactivate the memory representations of other, affectively related stimuli.

ARTICLE UPDATE - Affective priming of nonaffective semantic categorization responses.

Spruyt A, De Houwer J, Hermans D, Eelen P.

Experimental Psychology, 54, 44-53

Recent studies have shown that robust affective priming effects can be obtained when participants are required to categorize the targets on the basis of their valence, but not when participants are asked to categorize the targets on the basis of nonaffective features. On the basis of this pattern of results, it has been argued that affective priming is due to processes that operate at a response selection stage rather than to processes that operate at an encoding stage. We demonstrate (a) that affective priming of nonaffective semantic categorization responses can be obtained when participants assign attention to the affective stimulus dimension, and (b) that affective priming in the standard evaluative categorization task is strongly reduced when participants assign attention to nonaffective stimulus features. On the basis of these findings, we argue (a) that processes operating at an encoding stage do contribute to the affective priming effect, and (b) that automatic affective stimulus processing is reduced when participants selectively attend to nonaffective stimulus features.

ARTICLE UPDATE - Amygdala reactivity predicts automatic negative evaluations for facial emotions.

Dannlowski U, Ohrmann P, Bauer J, Kugel H, Arolt V, Heindel W, Suslow T.

Psychiatry Research, in press

The amygdala is a key structure in a limbic circuit involved in the rapid and unconscious processing of facial emotions. In the present study, the role of the amygdala in automatic, involuntary appraisal processes, which are believed to be a crucial component of emotion processing, was investigated in 23 healthy subjects. Amygdala activity was recorded in response to masked displays of angry, sad, and happy facial expressions using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). In a subsequent experiment, the subjects performed a masked affective priming task that characterizes automatic emotion processing by investigating the biasing effect of subliminally presented emotional faces on evaluative ratings to subsequently presented neutral stimuli. In the affective priming task, significant valence-congruent evaluation manipulation was observed. Subjects rated neutral targets more positively if they were primed by happy faces. Significant correlations were found between amygdala responses to masked negative facial expressions and negative evaluation shifts elicited by the corresponding emotion quality in the affective priming task. Spontaneous amygdala reactivity to facial emotions appears to be a determinant of automatic negative evaluative response tendencies. This finding might shed some light on how amygdala hyperresponsivity contributes to negative cognitive biases commonly observed in affective disorders.