Differential emotional responses to positive and negative visual perception in children and young adults: An electroencephalography study

Abstract

Currently, the number of children with problems associated with mood disorders and emotion regulation is increasing. However, little is known about the development of emotional responses, especially in the developmental population.

To examine the temporal dynamics of emotional neuronal activation, we presented a subset of standardized emotional pictures from the International Affective Picture System dataset to 45 children and young adult participants. Of these, 15 were children (mean age = 10.0 years, range = 7.1–12.7; 6 boys) and 30 were young adults (mean age = 23.5 years, range = 18.9–33.1; 12 men). We used electroencephalography (EEG) to investigate the spatiotemporal dynamics of emotion processing and measured the brain responses elicited by positive and negative images. Differences in activation patterns were studied using topographic analysis of variance. The study was conducted at Miguel Hernández University in Elche, Spain. Our results show that brain responses move from a high amplitude signal in EEG responses to positive stimuli in children to a high amplitude response to negative stimuli in adults. We confirmed lateralization to the left hemisphere in the processing of positive emotions and to the right hemisphere for negative emotions in both children and young adults. We also found differences in the amplitude of the responses to emotional images between female and male participants, although these were significant only in adults (p < .05). Our results support and expand the existing knowledge about the differing processes of emotion processing in children and adults.