Lapate Regina C, Samaha Jason, Rokers Bas, Hamzah Hamdi, Postle Bradley R, Davidson Richard J
1 Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
2 Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior and Center for Healthy Minds, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Psychol Sci. 2017 Jul;28(7):942-953. doi: 10.1177/0956797617699837. Epub 2017 Jun 14.
Optimal functioning in everyday life requires the ability to override reflexive emotional responses and prevent affective spillover to situations or people unrelated to the source of emotion. In the current study, we investigated whether the lateral prefrontal cortex (lPFC) causally regulates the influence of emotional information on subsequent judgments. We disrupted left lPFC function using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and recorded electroencephalography (EEG) before and after. Subjects evaluated the likeability of novel neutral faces after a brief exposure to a happy or fearful face. We found that lPFC inhibition biased evaluations of novel faces according to the previously processed emotional expression. Greater frontal EEG alpha power, reflecting increased inhibition by TMS, predicted increased behavioral bias. TMS-induced affective misattribution was long-lasting: Emotionally biased first impressions formed during lPFC inhibition were still detectable outside of the laboratory 3 days later. These findings indicate that lPFC serves an important emotion-regulation function by preventing incidental emotional encoding from automatically biasing subsequent appraisals.
日常生活中的最佳功能需要具备抑制反射性情绪反应的能力，并防止情感外溢到与情绪来源无关的情境或人身上。在当前的研究中，我们调查了外侧前额叶皮层（lPFC）是否因果性地调节情绪信息对后续判断的影响。我们使用经颅磁刺激（TMS）破坏左侧lPFC的功能，并在前后记录脑电图（EEG）。在短暂暴露于快乐或恐惧的面孔后，受试者评估新的中性面孔的喜爱程度。我们发现，lPFC抑制会根据先前处理的情绪表达对面孔的评估产生偏差。额叶EEG阿尔法功率的增加，反映了TMS抑制作用的增强，预示着行为偏差的增加。TMS诱导的情感错误归因是持久的：在lPFC抑制期间形成的情感偏差的第一印象在3天后的实验室外仍然可以检测到。这些发现表明，lPFC通过防止偶然的情绪编码自动影响后续评估，发挥着重要的情绪调节功能。
