TY  - JOUR
A1  - Wirkner, Janine
A1  - Ventura-Bort, Carlos
A1  - Schwabe, Lars
A1  - Hamm, Alfons O.
A1  - Weymar, Mathias
T1  - Chronic stress and emotion: Differential effects on attentional processing and recognition memory
JF  - Psychoneuroendocrinology
N2  - Previous research indicates that acute stress around the time of learning facilitates attention and memory for emotionally salient information. Despite accumulating evidence for these acute stress effects, less is known about the role of chronic stress. In the present study, we therefore tested emotional and neutral scene processing and later recognition memory in female participants using hair cortisol concentrations as a biological marker for chronic stress. Event-related potentials recorded during picture viewing indicated enhanced late positive potentials (LPPs) for emotional, relative to neutral contents. These brain potentials varied as a function of long-term hair cortisol levels: hair-cortisol levels were positively related to overall LPP amplitudes. Results from recognition memory testing one week after encoding revealed better memory for emotional relative to neutral scenes. Hair-cortisol levels, however, were related to poorer memory accuracy. Taken together, our results indicate that chronic stress enhanced attentional processing during encoding of new stimuli and impaired later recognition memory. Results are discussed with regard to putatively opposite effects of chronic stress on certain brain regions (e.g., amygdala and hippocampus).
KW  - Chronic stress
KW  - Emotion
KW  - Event-related potential
KW  - Late positive potential
KW  - Memory
KW  - Hair cortisol
Y1  - 2019
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psyneuen.2019.05.008
SN  - 0306-4530
VL  - 107
SP  - 93
EP  - 97
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - Oxford
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Czerwon, Beate
A1  - Hohlfeld, Annette
A1  - Wiese, Heike
A1  - Werheid, Katja
T1  - Syntactic structural parallelisms influence processing of positive stimuli evidence from cross-modal ERP priming
JF  - International journal of psychophysiology
N2  - Language can strongly influence the emotional state of the recipient. In contrast to the broad body of experimental and neuroscientific research on semantic information and prosodic speech, the emotional impact of grammatical structure has rarely been investigated. One reason for this might be, that measuring effects of syntactic structure involves the use of complex stimuli, for which the emotional impact of grammar is difficult to isolate. In the present experiment we examined the emotional impact of structural parallelisms, that is, repetitions of syntactic features, on the emotion-sensitive "late positive potential" (LPP) with a cross-modal priming paradigm. Primes were auditory presented nonsense sentences which included grammatical-syntactic parallelisms. Visual targets were positive, neutral, and negative faces, to be classified as emotional or non-emotional by the participants. Electrophysiology revealed diminished LPP amplitudes for positive faces following parallel primes. Thus, our findings suggest that grammatical structure creates an emotional context that facilitates processing of positive emotional information.
KW  - Language
KW  - Emotion
KW  - Priming
KW  - ERP
KW  - Late positive potential
KW  - Structural parallelisms
Y1  - 2013
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2012.10.014
SN  - 0167-8760
SN  - 1872-7697
VL  - 87
IS  - 1
SP  - 28
EP  - 34
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - Amsterdam
ER  -