Psychophysiological And Psychopathological Mechanisms Of Emotional Vocabulary Processing

Neurology,which is originated from Psychiatry,separated with the latter as an independent discipline until the middle of the 20th century on account of the development and refinement of related branches of disciplines such as neural anatomy.Nowadays,neurologists still contact with a lot of patients with mental problems in clinical receptions,such as depression,anxiety,insomnia,material abuse and so on;some of them have mental disorders as the first symptom or associated psychiatric symptoms,such as viral encephalitis,multiple sclerosis,Parkinson's disease.Findings(2006) show that there are 26 kinds of neurological disease associate with depression,including stroke,Alzheimer silent disease,multiple sclerosis,migraine and epilepsy.Therefore,in order to get a better understanding of brain diseases and various cognitive behavioral obstacles,we need to break the artificial line between neurology and psychiatry.Neuropsychiatry will be the direction in the 21st century.In general,Cognitive Neuroscience studies neural mechanism of cognitive, emotional and behavior process.It's an integrating product of cognitive psychology and neural science,using brain function imaging technology,such as positron emission tomography(PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging(fMRI) to record brain functions.However,PET can bring about radioactive damage,the same as the latter technology;it is difficult to make real-time imaging.Besides,they are too expensive to popularize.Event-related Potentials(ERP) can take real-time measurements in millisecond resolving accuracy on brain potentials triggered by specific awareness incidents.Combined with spatial resolution of modern BEAM (brain electrical activity mapping),researchers are able to make an objective evaluation of instant changes in emotional processing and brain's cognitive function, effectively identify emotional stress response,emotional processing and cognitive mechanisms of brain function.Emotion and cognition influence each other.Affective disorder is accompanied with functional disorder on specific brain regions.Hence the study of patients with affective disorder can reveal in-depth mutual relationship between emotion and cognition.Utilizing ERPs' temporal and spatial patterns,the study makes a comparative study on normal subjects and depression patients in different gender, different age groups,and different educational background.The object is to discover Psychophysiological and Psychopathological Mechanism of brain work then explore a new way to diagnose and evaluate cognitive and affective disorder.Experiment 1 Establish emotional pictures database for the lexical emotional judgment experimentObjective:to establish a standardized emotional pictures database.Method:Select a total of 1,300 adjectives and nouns from Chinese common vocabulary and prepare emotional vocabulary pictures.Carry out quantitative evaluation and statistics on 65 participants in accordance with valence,arousal and familiarity.Result:words in the standardized emotional vocabulary database possess three dimensions of quantitative scoring index.Conclusion:1) This representative database covers common words in daily life,can be adapted to various groups' emotional research.2) The emotional vocabulary database has been applied in posterior studies of this dissertation on Psychophysiological and Psychopathological Mechanism,may become an objective clinical diagnose instrument. Experiment 2 ERP Spatio-temporal mode research on emotional vocabulary processingObjective:with high time resolution of multi-channel ERPs and good spatial resolution of spatio-temporal mode,the experiment probe into normal young subjects' brain neural electrical activity mechanism of emotional vocabulary cognitive processing.Experimental Materials and Methods:Altogether 31 testing volunteers are in healthy physical conditions.Before the experiment,we carried out Hamilton anxiety and depression rating scale for every subject.The experiment uses 360 pieces of emotional stimulation pictures by five valences in the emotional vocabulary database.The task is make valence judgments on presented vocabularies and record according 19 conductors ERP and response.Results:1.Behavior data:There is no significant interaction between gender and emotional responses.All the subjects have faster reaction time toward obvious negative and positive emotional vocabulary,and delayed reaction time toward neutral and micro-negative emotional vocabulary.The correct response rate for positive vocabulary was significantly greater than negative terms in 31 participants.2.The average waveform patterns and the ERPs results:P130,N175,P200,P270 are distributed evenly in the front head.Approximately 500 ms,there is a generous amount of largest fluctuation LPC on top central and temporal and then begin with a negative drift at 700 ms,most obvious at the front,the central,the top,mainly left.A prominent negative sharp wave N170 shows at the slot in the double- occipital and temporal areas.Parameters image map(SPM) implies that,1) response time shows a significant main effect of valence,that is,there is a significant difference between ERPs evoked by the positive and negative emotional stimulation and the neutral ones.2) The earliest obvious different response to vocabulary valence judgment can be seen after 60～170ms of stimulation.3) in the late 200～400 ms,subjects process all terms mainly in central left,top,temporal,occipital but back cerebral area;4) the late significant difference is in the large-scale 400～1000ms,distributed widely on left forehead,the central roof,temporal,occipital areas;emotional responses to positive and negative words have obvious difference in two hemispheres.Conclusions:1) There are significant differences in the responses of emotional vocabulary processing.That is,for the very negative and positive words,judgment is prompt and accurate.In contrast,neutral words and partial negative words are difficult to judge and then need more time to respond.2) Gender effect on processing emotional vocabulary appears in bilateral forehead and occipital areas(140-400 ms) and bilateral forehead in later period(600-700 ms).3) Positive and negative emotional vocabularies involve quite different brain areas. Partial negative ones processing involve left forehead(400-500 ms) and maybe related to semantic delicate differentiation.Later(400-650 ms),homopolar negative words bring on obvious activation of fight hemisphere.However,positive vocabulary mainly activate forehead in two sides(780-880 ms).4) Extensive region of both hemispheres participate in the emotional vocabulary processing of different levels.Differences between early structure coding to emotional vocabulary and fast rough processing of emotional information;differences in the middle period,when the whole cerebral cortex holistic analyze,estimate, classify,relate and discriminate emotional vocabulary;terminal differences are related to relevant cerebral cortex's complicated delicate processing of emotional lexis information.Experiment 3 The Spatio-temporal Study of Event-related Potentials on the effect of age factor on the emotional vocabulary processingObjective:with multi-channel ERPs' spatio-temporal mode,the experiment probe into the brain neural electrical activity mechanism of emotional vocabulary cognitive processing among subjects with different ages. Methods:altogether 60 volunteers divided in 4 groups,each of which includes 15 people:＜30,30-40,40-50,＞50.Before the experiment,we carried out 17 versions of Hamilton anxiety and depression rating scale for every subject.360 pieces of emotional vocabulary pictures of five valences in the emotional vocabulary database are used in this experiment.The tasks include judging valence of the presented emotional words and recording their 19 conducts ERP and actions.Results:1.behavior data:There was no interaction between response time like gender and age factors and emotional responses.Male volunteers have a shorter response time than women.However,there was significant difference in response time,the average response time,error rate,etc in different age groups.Overall there was a longer response time as the growth of age.The correct rate in positive vocabulary is significantly higher than negative vocabulary.2.ERPs data:In this experiment the statistics in the four different age groups all showed that,P130,N120,N200,P250 are distributed evenly in the front head;waves present maximum amplitude in central and parietal area and attenuation outward. Approximately 500 ms,there is a generous amount of largest fluctuation LPC on top central and temporal and then begin with a negative drift at 700 ms,most obvious at the front,the central,the top,mainly left.A prominent negative sharp wave N170 shows at the slot in the double- occipital and temporal areas.The brain activation for the emotional reaction of less than 30 years old and above 50 years old groups is more obvious than the 30-40 age group and 40-50 age group.There was a more significant activation of the right than the left and a higher wave in the negative emotional vocabulary than the positive one in all age groups.ERP topographic map results showed that:l) there is a declining trend of emotional responses to the very negative vocabulary as the age grows,more obvious in the left.2) More intense emotional response than positive vocabulary with stronger amplitude and longer term, more obvious in the left.The results of the F value of the ERPs statistical parameters map(SPM) showed that:1) the initial processing to emotional vocabulary of all age groups happened in brain regions of the activated significant difference in the performance of reaction after the stimulus was on the part of 120-200 ms of a bilateral,places,top,the central regional area,mainly indulge in the top right of the central region.2) the medium-term period after the stimulus 340-360 ms had temporal significant difference in activation reaction;3) late-medium-term period after the stimulus in the 520-800 ms for bilateral sessions,the central and parietal brain regions showed more extensive activation significant effect;4) late period 840-940 ms,the right front and occipital region still showed significant differences activation effect.After 940ms periods showed a beginning of decline.The experimental results of different ages of 5 different emotional vocabulary processing emotional response in a number of brain regions over time have different levels of significant difference,late-medium-term hours was obvious,especially to the extremely negative vocabulary.Conclusion:1) Along with the growth of age,the total reaction time,the average response time gradually extended and the response error rate increased significantly.2) The prominent main effect of age mainly distributed in the area of bilateral forehead,more sensible in the right front.The age effect regions are mainly distributed in the entire cerebral cortex at many time periods.Many stages of mood vocabulary processing are influenced by age growth.3) N270,P300,N350,P500,N700,which are derived from ERP,are likely to related to emotional semantics processing.Moreover,along with age growth,N270,P300, N350,P500 swing gradually decrease and change slightly in potential period, especially shown in the emotional response to very negative vocabularies.Experiment 4 Event-related potential spatio-temporal mode of the emotional vocabulary processing of depression patientObjective:With the spatio-temporal mode of multi-channel ERPs,discuss neural mechanism of emotional vocabulary processing of depression patient. Methods:20 depression patients,20 healthy people,with matched gender,age, occupation,educational background.17 versions of Hamilton anxiety and depression rating scale assessments were carded out before the experiment.360 pieces of emotional vocabulary pictures of five valences in the emotional vocabulary database are used in this experiment.The tasks include judging valence of the presented emotional words and recording their 19 conducts ERP and actions.Results:1,behavior data:There is no significant interaction between disease factors and emotional factors.There are significantly differences between depression patients and the normal control group in the factor of total reaction time,the average response time,the error rate,reaction error rate of positive and negative vocabulary,and anxiety - depression score.Partial correlation analysis showed that anxiety depression score is significantly related with the total reaction time,the average response time,the error rate,reaction error rate of positive and negative vocabulary. Linear regression results can be ruled out the interference of gender,age,education level,and anxiety - depression score has significant impact on the reaction time,the total error rate,and reaction error rate of positive and negative vocabulary of trial subjects.The accuracy ratio of the response of depression patients towards positive vocabulary is higher than negative one.2,ERPs data 1) depression patients' overall amplitude of ERPs is taller than that of normal control group.2) the brain activation reaction's initial significant differences of processing emotional vocabulary between patients with depression and normal control group present after stimulation 120-200 ms and widely distributed in bilateral frontal top,the forehead,the central region,more obvious in the right.3) Depression patients' the medium-term period of 340-360 ms and late in the 520-800 ms after the stimulus of a bilateral,the amount of central and top,temporal,occipital diffuse brain regions showed major effect area of significant differences.Attenuation appeared in 660ms.In the late period,effects of the main differences gradually concentrated in the right temporal region 4) For the depression group,the medium-term 340-360 and 520-800 ms time integrated into a huge positive amplitude, which is different with the normal control group significantly.5) For the depression group,there is a clear negative drift in the average amplitude at 700 ms time,which is quite different with normal group.6) For the depression subjects,the average wave amplitude of the left is higher than right.7) There is an obvious interactive effect in the response to these two groups of emotional vocabularies,located in the central area of two sides' forehead,mainly in the right.Two groups of emotional major effects for significant differences located in abroad brain areas in many time periods,meanwhile the disease differences mainly located in the central bilateral parietal and temporal regions.Conclusions:1) Depression may influence emotional vocabulary processing:significant delay of response time,obvious increase of response error rate;anxiety-depression impediment can be an independent factor that directly influences subjects' behavior response in the emotional words processing and the change of their ERP.Depression patients incline to escape negative emotions and actions of negative stimulation.They are in depressed and anxious for a long time and lack of inner motivations.This leads to a serious impairment in brain cortex's cognitive processing,like focus, understanding,judgment,analysis and memory,towards various stimulations and present abnormal ERP response and acts.2) The general amplitude of depression is much higher and wider than that of normal control group and did not show P300 and N400.ERP waves polarize infirmly.P300, P500,P600 and P700 emerge extensively.Negative slow waves disappear after 700 ms.this series of ERP abnormal performance reflects the prevalence of depression patients' mental block,slow information processing,decreased resources in the cognitive processes,declining attention and identify ability to the target stimulation.3) Significant differences in two hemispheres exist between depression patients and the normal group when they process emotional vocabulary:represent obviously in different brain areas in two phases:cognitive and understanding impediment to positive,neutral and negative emotional vocabularies(310-400 ms,left temple), positive emotional vocabularies corresponded 600-1000ms phase,right hemisphere (especially in forehead) differences implies patients' positive mood experience obstacle.