Emotional perception: Correspondence of early and late event-related potentials with cortical and subcortical functional MRI.

Biol Psychol. 2012 Apr 26;

Authors: Sabatinelli D, Keil A, Frank DW, Lang PJ

Abstract
Using a picture perception task, here we investigate the relationship of early occipitotemporal and later centroparietal emotion-modulated event-related potentials (ERPs) in one sample to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) estimates of neural activity in another sample in a replicated experiment. Using this approach, we aimed to link effects found in time-resolved electrocortical measures to specific cerebral structures across individual emotional and nonemotional picture stimuli. The centroparietal late positive potential (LPP) showed covariation with emotion-modulated regions of hemodynamic activation across multiple dorsal and ventral visual cortical structures, while the early occipitotemporal potential was not reliably associated. Subcortical and corticolimbic structures involved in the perception of motivationally relevant stimuli also related to modulation of the LPP, and were modestly associated to the amplitude of the early occipitotemporal potential. These data suggest that early occipitotemporal potentials may reflect multiple sources of modulation including motivational relevance, and supports the perspective that the slow-wave LPP represents aggregate cortical and subcortical structures involved in emotional discrimination.

PMID: 22560889 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]