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Fleeting images: A new look at early emotion discrimination

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 March 2001

MARKUS JUNGHÖFER ,
MARGARET M. BRADLEY ,
THOMAS R. ELBERT  and
PETER J. LANG
MARKUS JUNGHÖFER
Affiliation:
University of Florida, Gainesville, USA University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany
MARGARET M. BRADLEY
Affiliation:
University of Florida, Gainesville, USA
THOMAS R. ELBERT
Affiliation:
University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany
PETER J. LANG
Affiliation:
University of Florida, Gainesville, USA
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Abstract

The visual brain quickly sorted stimuli for emotional impact despite high-speed presentation (3 or 5 per s) in a sustained, serial torrent of 700 complex pictures. Event-related potentials, recorded with a dense electrode array, showed selective discrimination of emotionally arousing stimuli from less affective content. Primary sources of this activation were over the occipital cortices, extending to right parietal cortex, suggesting a processing focus in the posterior visual system. Emotion discrimination was independent of formal pictorial properties (color, brightness, spatial frequency, and complexity). The data support the hypothesis of a very short-term conceptual memory store (M. C. Potter, 1999)—shown here to include a fleeting but reliable assessment of affective meaning.

Keywords

EmotionERPRSVPPicturesAttention capture
Type
SPECIAL REPORT
Information
Psychophysiology , Volume 38 , Issue 2 , March 2001 , pp. 175 - 178
Copyright
2001 Society for Psychophysiological Research

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