Domínguez-Borràs Judith, Garcia-Garcia Manuel, Escera Carles
Department of Psychiatry and Clinical Psychobiology, Faculty of Psychology, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain.
Eur J Neurosci. 2008 Sep;28(6):1199-206. doi: 10.1111/j.1460-9568.2008.06411.x. Epub 2008 Sep 9.
Viewing emotionally negative pictures has been proposed to attenuate brain responses towards sudden auditory events, as more attentional resources are allocated to the affective visual stimuli. However, peripheral reflexes have been shown intensified. These observations have raised the question of whether an emotional context actually facilitates or attenuates processing in the auditory novelty system. Using scalp event-related potentials we measured brain responses induced by novel sounds when participants responded to visual stimuli displaying either threatening or neutral sceneries. We then tested the modulatory effect of the emotional task conditions on auditory responses. Novel sounds yielded a stronger behavioural disruption on subjects' visual task performance when responding to negative pictures compared with when responding to the neutral ones. Accordingly, very early novelty-P3 responses to novel sounds were enhanced in negative context. These results provide strong evidence that the emotional context enhances the activation of neural networks in the auditory novelty system, gating acoustic novelty processing under potentially threatening conditions.
有人提出，观看情绪消极的图片会减弱大脑对突发听觉事件的反应，因为更多的注意力资源被分配到了情感视觉刺激上。然而，研究表明外周反射会增强。这些观察结果引发了一个问题，即情绪背景实际上是促进还是减弱了听觉新奇系统中的处理过程。我们使用头皮事件相关电位，测量了参与者对显示威胁性或中性场景的视觉刺激做出反应时，由新奇声音诱发的大脑反应。然后，我们测试了情绪任务条件对听觉反应的调节作用。与对中性图片做出反应时相比，当对消极图片做出反应时，新奇声音对受试者视觉任务表现产生的行为干扰更强。相应地，在消极背景下，对新奇声音的非常早期的新奇P3反应增强。这些结果提供了有力证据，表明情绪背景增强了听觉新奇系统中神经网络的激活，在潜在威胁条件下对声学新奇处理进行门控。
