De Taeye Leen, Pourtois Gilles, Meurs Alfred, Boon Paul, Vonck Kristl, Carrette Evelien, Raedt Robrecht
LCEN3, Department of Neurology, Ghent University Hospital, Ghent, Belgium.
Department of Experimental-Clinical and Health Psychology, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium.
PLoS One. 2015 Jan 14;10(1):e0116817. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0116817. eCollection 2015.
Patients with epilepsy have a high prevalence of comorbid mood disorders. This study aims to evaluate whether negative affect in epilepsy is associated with dysfunction of emotion regulation. Event-related potentials (ERPs) are used in order to unravel the exact electrophysiological time course and investigate whether a possible dysfunction arises during early (attention) and/or late (regulation) stages of emotion control. Fifty epileptic patients with (n = 25) versus without (n = 25) comorbid negative affect plus twenty-five matched controls were recruited. ERPs were recorded while subjects performed a face- or house-matching task in which fearful, sad or neutral faces were presented either at attended or unattended spatial locations. Two ERP components were analyzed: the early vertex positive potential (VPP) which is normally enhanced for faces, and the late positive potential (LPP) that is typically larger for emotional stimuli. All participants had larger amplitude of the early face-sensitive VPP for attended faces compared to houses, regardless of their emotional content. By contrast, in patients with negative affect only, the amplitude of the LPP was significantly increased for unattended negative emotional expressions. These VPP results indicate that epilepsy with or without negative affect does not interfere with the early structural encoding and attention selection of faces. However, the LPP results suggest abnormal regulation processes during the processing of unattended emotional faces in patients with epilepsy and comorbid negative affect. In conclusion, this ERP study reveals that early object-based attention processes are not compromised by epilepsy, but instead, when combined with negative affect, this neurological disease is associated with dysfunction during the later stages of emotion regulation. As such, these new neurophysiological findings shed light on the complex interplay of epilepsy with negative affect during the processing of emotional visual stimuli and in turn might help to better understand the etiology and maintenance of mood disorders in epilepsy.
癫痫患者共病情绪障碍的患病率很高。本研究旨在评估癫痫患者的消极情绪是否与情绪调节功能障碍有关。使用事件相关电位（ERP）来揭示确切的电生理时间进程，并调查在情绪控制的早期（注意力）和/或晚期（调节）阶段是否会出现可能的功能障碍。招募了50名癫痫患者，其中25名伴有共病消极情绪，25名不伴有共病消极情绪，另外还有25名匹配的对照者。当受试者执行面部或房屋匹配任务时记录ERP，在该任务中，恐惧、悲伤或中性面孔会出现在被关注或未被关注的空间位置。分析了两个ERP成分：早期的头顶正电位（VPP），通常对面孔增强；以及晚期正电位（LPP），通常对情绪刺激更大。所有参与者，无论其情绪内容如何，与房屋相比，被关注面孔的早期面部敏感VPP振幅更大。相比之下，仅患有消极情绪的患者中，未被关注的负面情绪表情的LPP振幅显著增加。这些VPP结果表明，伴有或不伴有消极情绪的癫痫并不干扰面部的早期结构编码和注意力选择。然而，LPP结果表明，患有癫痫和共病消极情绪的患者在处理未被关注的情绪面孔时存在异常调节过程。总之，这项ERP研究表明，基于对象的早期注意力过程不受癫痫影响，但当与消极情绪结合时，这种神经系统疾病与情绪调节后期的功能障碍有关。因此，这些新的神经生理学发现揭示了癫痫在情绪视觉刺激处理过程中与消极情绪的复杂相互作用，进而可能有助于更好地理解癫痫中情绪障碍的病因和维持机制。
