Getting ready for an emotion: specific premotor brain activities for self-administered emotional pictures

Emotional perception has been extensively studied, but only a few studies have investigated the brain activity preceding exposure to emotional stimuli, especially when they are triggered by the subject himself. Here, we sought to investigate the emotional expectancy by means of movement related cort...

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Main Authors:	Perri, Rinaldo L., Berchicci, Marika, Lucci, Giuliana, Cimmino, Rocco L., Bello, Annalisa, Di Russo, Francesco
Format:	Online
Language:	English
Published:	Frontiers Media S.A. 2014
Online Access:	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4035832/

id	pubmed-4035832
recordtype	oai_dc
spelling	pubmed-40358322014-06-05 Getting ready for an emotion: specific premotor brain activities for self-administered emotional pictures Perri, Rinaldo L. Berchicci, Marika Lucci, Giuliana Cimmino, Rocco L. Bello, Annalisa Di Russo, Francesco Neuroscience Emotional perception has been extensively studied, but only a few studies have investigated the brain activity preceding exposure to emotional stimuli, especially when they are triggered by the subject himself. Here, we sought to investigate the emotional expectancy by means of movement related cortical potentials (MRCPs) in a self-paced task, in which the subjects begin the affective experience by pressing a key. In this experiment, participants had to alternatively press two keys to concomitantly display positive, negative, neutral, and scrambled images extracted from the International Affective Pictures System (IAPS). Each key press corresponded to a specific emotional category, and the experimenter communicated the coupling before each trial so that the subjects always knew the valence of the forthcoming picture. The main results of the present study included a bilateral positive activity in prefrontal areas during expectancy of more arousing pictures (positive and negative) and an early and sustained positivity over occipital areas, especially during negative expectancy. In addition, we observed more pronounced and anteriorly distributed Late Positive Potential (LPPs) components in the emotional conditions. In conclusion, these results show that emotional expectancy can influence brain activity in both motor preparation and stimulus perception, suggesting enhanced pre-processing in the to-be-stimulated areas. We propose that before a predictable emotional stimulus, both appetitive and defensive motivational systems act to facilitate the forthcoming processing of survival-relevant contents by means of an enhancement of attention toward more arousing pictures. Frontiers Media S.A. 2014-05-28 /pmc/articles/PMC4035832/ /pubmed/24904344 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2014.00197 Text en Copyright © 2014 Perri, Berchicci, Lucci, Cimmino, Bello and Di Russo. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
repository_type	Open Access Journal
institution_category	Foreign Institution
institution	US National Center for Biotechnology Information
building	NCBI PubMed
collection	Online Access
language	English
format	Online
author	Perri, Rinaldo L. Berchicci, Marika Lucci, Giuliana Cimmino, Rocco L. Bello, Annalisa Di Russo, Francesco
spellingShingle	Perri, Rinaldo L. Berchicci, Marika Lucci, Giuliana Cimmino, Rocco L. Bello, Annalisa Di Russo, Francesco Getting ready for an emotion: specific premotor brain activities for self-administered emotional pictures
author_facet	Perri, Rinaldo L. Berchicci, Marika Lucci, Giuliana Cimmino, Rocco L. Bello, Annalisa Di Russo, Francesco
author_sort	Perri, Rinaldo L.
title	Getting ready for an emotion: specific premotor brain activities for self-administered emotional pictures
title_short	Getting ready for an emotion: specific premotor brain activities for self-administered emotional pictures
title_full	Getting ready for an emotion: specific premotor brain activities for self-administered emotional pictures
title_fullStr	Getting ready for an emotion: specific premotor brain activities for self-administered emotional pictures
title_full_unstemmed	Getting ready for an emotion: specific premotor brain activities for self-administered emotional pictures
title_sort	getting ready for an emotion: specific premotor brain activities for self-administered emotional pictures
description	Emotional perception has been extensively studied, but only a few studies have investigated the brain activity preceding exposure to emotional stimuli, especially when they are triggered by the subject himself. Here, we sought to investigate the emotional expectancy by means of movement related cortical potentials (MRCPs) in a self-paced task, in which the subjects begin the affective experience by pressing a key. In this experiment, participants had to alternatively press two keys to concomitantly display positive, negative, neutral, and scrambled images extracted from the International Affective Pictures System (IAPS). Each key press corresponded to a specific emotional category, and the experimenter communicated the coupling before each trial so that the subjects always knew the valence of the forthcoming picture. The main results of the present study included a bilateral positive activity in prefrontal areas during expectancy of more arousing pictures (positive and negative) and an early and sustained positivity over occipital areas, especially during negative expectancy. In addition, we observed more pronounced and anteriorly distributed Late Positive Potential (LPPs) components in the emotional conditions. In conclusion, these results show that emotional expectancy can influence brain activity in both motor preparation and stimulus perception, suggesting enhanced pre-processing in the to-be-stimulated areas. We propose that before a predictable emotional stimulus, both appetitive and defensive motivational systems act to facilitate the forthcoming processing of survival-relevant contents by means of an enhancement of attention toward more arousing pictures.
publisher	Frontiers Media S.A.
publishDate	2014
url	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4035832/
_version_	1612093923235201024

Getting ready for an emotion: specific premotor brain activities for self-administered emotional pictures

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