Emotional arousal deficit or emotional regulation bias? An electrophysiological study of age-related differences in emotion perception.

Background/Study context: Adult age differences in emotion processing have been attributed to age-related decline in earlier emotional perception and age-related bias in later emotional regulation. Yet, the relationship between the processes of early emotion perception and bias in emotional regulation and their influence on behavioral outcomes remains unclear. Event-related potentials (ERPs) have the temporal precision to allow for the online measure of neurophysiological activity and provide potential insight into the complex dynamics of emotion processing and aging. METHODS: ERPs were used as the primary measure to examine the hypotheses that younger adults will differ in emotional arousal and emotional bias as represented by the early P1 waveform and later P3 waveform, respectively. Thirty-two younger and older adults (16 each) performed a facial emotion discrimination task in which they identified standardized angry, happy, or neutral expressions of faces from the NimStim database. RESULTS: Younger adults showed a greater P1 ERP for angry faces relative to happy faces at parietal channels, while older adults did not exhibit any emotional modulation of the P1. In contrast, both younger and older adults showed a greater late P3 ERP for angry faces compared to happy faces. CONCLUSION: The authors' results provide evidence for an age-related deficit in early emotion perception and autonomic arousal. Younger adults, but not older adults, exhibited a pattern of neurophysiological activity believed to reflect preconscious and reflexive identification of threat. Despite these age group differences in early emotion processing, younger and older adults did not exhibit differences in neurophysiological processes believed to reflect emotion regulation.

Task-specific and general cognitive effects in Chiari malformation type I.

OBJECTIVE: Our objective was to use episodic memory and executive function tests to determine whether or not Chiari Malformation Type I (CM) patients experience cognitive dysfunction. BACKGROUND: CM is a neurological syndrome in which the cerebellum descends into the cervical spine causing neural compression, severe headaches, neck pain, and number of other physical symptoms. While primarily a disorder of the cervico-medullary junction, both clinicians and researchers have suspected deficits in higher-level cognitive function. DESIGN AND METHODS: We tested 24 CM patients who had undergone decompression neurosurgery and 24 age- and education-matched controls on measures of immediate and delayed episodic memory, as well as three measures of executive function. RESULTS: The CM group showed performance decrements relative to the controls in response inhibition (Stroop interference), working memory computational speed (Ospan), and processing speed (automated digit symbol substitution task), but group differences in recall did not reach statistical significance. After statistical control for depression and anxiety scores, the group effects for working memory and processing speed were eliminated, but not for response inhibition. This response inhibition difference was not due to overall general slowing for the CM group, either, because when controls' data were transformed using the linear function fit to all of the reaction time tasks, the interaction with group remained statistically significant. Furthermore, there was a multivariate group effect for all of the response time measures and immediate and delayed recall after statistical control of depression and anxiety scores. CONCLUSION: These results suggest that CM patients with decompression surgery exhibit cognitive dysfunction compared to age- and education-matched controls. While some of these results may be related to anxiety and depression (likely proxies for chronic pain), response inhibition effects, in particular, as well as a general cognitive deficit persisted even after control for anxiety and decompression.

Electrophysiological evidence for adult age-related sparing and decrements in emotion perception and attention.

The present study examined adult age differences in processing emotional faces using a psychological refractory period paradigm. We used both behavioral and event-related potential (P1 component) measures. Task 1 was tone discrimination (fuzzy vs. pure tones) and Task 2 was emotional facial discrimination ("happy" vs. "angry" faces). The stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between the two tasks was 100, 300, and 900 ms. Earlier research observed larger age deficits in emotional facial discrimination for negative (angry) than for positive (happy) faces (Baena et al., 2010). Thus, we predicted that older adults would show decreased attentional efficiency in carrying out dual-task processing on the P1 (a component linked to amygdalar modulation of visual perception; Rotshtein et al., 2010). Both younger and older groups showed significantly higher P1 amplitudes at 100- and 300-ms SOAs than at the 900-ms SOA, and this suggests that both age groups could process Task 2 faces without central attention. Also, younger adults showed significantly higher P1 activations for angry than for happy faces, but older adults showed no difference. These results are consistent with the idea that younger adults exhibited amygdalar modulation of visual perception, but that older adults did not.