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Social information is highly intrinsically relevant for the human species because of its direct link to guiding physiological responses and behavior. Accordingly, extant functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data suggest that social content may form a unique stimulus dimension. It remains largely unknown, however, how neural activity underlying social (versus nonsocial) information processing temporally unfolds, and how such social information appraisal may interact with the processing of other stimulus characteristics, particularly emotional meaning. Here, we presented complex visual scenes differing in both social (versus nonsocial) and emotional relevance (positive, negative, neutral) intermixed with scrambled versions of these pictures to N= 24 healthy young adults. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to intact pictures were examined for gaining insight to the dynamics of appraisal of both dimensions, implemented within the brain. Our main finding is an early interaction between social and emotional relevance due to enhanced amplitudes of early ERP components to emotionally positive pictures of social compared to nonsocial content, presumably reflecting rapid allocation of attention and counteracting an overall negativity bias. Importantly, our ERP data show high similarity with previously observed fMRI data using the same stimuli, and source estimations located the ERP effects in overlapping occipito-temporal brain areas. Our new data suggest that relevance detection may occur already as early as around 100 ms after stimulus onset and may combine relevance checks not only examining intrinsic pleasantness/emotional valence, but also social content as a unique, highly relevant stimulus dimension.

The present study aimed at investigating whether associated motivational salience causes preferential processing of inherently neutral faces similar to emotional expressions by means of event-related brain potentials (ERPs) and changes of the pupil size. To this aim, neutral faces were implicitly associated with monetary outcome, while participants (N = 44) performed a subliminal face-matching task that ensured performance around chance level and thus an equal proportion of gain, loss, and zero outcomes. Motivational context strongly impacted processing of all - even task-irrelevant - stimuli prior to the target face, indicated by enhanced amplitudes of subsequent ERP components and increased pupil size. In a separate test session, previously associated faces as well as novel faces with emotional expressions were presented within the same task but without motivational context and performance feedback. Most importantly, previously gain-associated faces amplified the LPC, although the individually contingent face-outcome assignments were not made explicit during the learning session. Emotional expressions impacted the N170 and EPN components. Modulations of the pupil size were absent in both motivationally-associated and emotional conditions. Our findings demonstrate that neural representations of neutral stimuli can acquire increased salience via implicit learning, with an advantage for gain over loss associations.

Natalie Bleijlevens Bild

Natalie Bleijlevens

In der Abteilung für Translationale Psychotherapie am GEMI werden zum nächstmöglichen Zeitpunkt 1-2 im Bachelor oder Master Psychologie befindliche studentische Hilfskräfte (m/w/d) gesucht.