Elsevier

Biological Psychology

Volume 86, Issue 1, January 2011, Pages 26-30
Biological Psychology

Perceived parental support predicts enhanced late positive event-related brain potentials to parent faces

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2010.10.002Get rights and content

Abstract

This study examined event-related brain potentials in college students viewing facial pictures of their parents, celebrities, and strangers in the context of a guessing task. A temporal principal component analysis of data obtained from midline electrode sites was used to extract a component reflecting the mid- to late-positive deflection observed between 200 and 500 ms following stimulus onset. Parent faces elicited enhanced positivity compared to celebrity and stranger faces suggesting greater attention allocation to parent faces. In addition, greater perceived parental support predicted larger factor scores to parent faces relative to non-parent faces. Greater perceived negative interaction with parent, however, attenuated this relationship.

Research highlights

▶ Parent faces elicited ERPs with enhanced late positivity relative to other pictures. ▶ Parental support positively correlated with late ERP positivity to parent pictures. ▶ Perceived negative interaction attenuated the parental support/ERP relationship.

Introduction

A growing interest in delineating neural mechanisms of human affiliation has led to a rise in neuroimaging and electrophysiological studies reporting differences in brain activity when individuals process information related to significant others compared to unfamiliar or less significant others. These include fMRI studies reporting increased activity in areas of the brain associated with reward and empathy when mothers view facial pictures of their children compared to familiar and unfamiliar children (i.e., amygdala, insula, anterior paracingulate cortex, posterior temporal sulcus; Leibenluft et al., 2004), when mothers listen to infant cries (i.e., medial thalamus, medial prefrontal and right orbitofrontal cortices, midbrain hypothalamus, dorsal and ventral striatum; Lorberbaum et al., 2002), and when individuals view facial pictures of their romantic partners compared to familiar faces (i.e., right ventral tegmental area, right postero-dorsal body, medial caudate nucleus; Aron et al., 2005, Fisher et al., 2005), as well as compared to pictures of non-romantic friends (i.e., striatum, middle insula, anterior cingulate cortex, dentate gyrus/hippocampus, hypothalamus, ventral tegmental area; Bartels and Zeki, 2000). Studies examining event-related brain potentials (ERPs) complement imaging research by enabling a finer examination of the time course of emotional processing of personally relevant stimuli. These include ERP studies reporting enhanced P3 responses (i.e., early P3a), associated with attention allocation, when individuals view facial pictures of acquaintances compared to unfamiliar faces (Bobes et al., 2007), increased late positive potential (LPP) components when individuals view facial pictures of their romantic partners compared to unfamiliar faces (Langeslag et al., 2007), and enhanced positivity at frontal (i.e., P2) and parietal sites (i.e., P3) when mothers view facial pictures of their infants compared to familiar and unfamiliar infants and adults (Grasso et al., 2009).

Research suggests that the processing of faces, versus other types of visual stimuli, may possess ethological importance related to human social behavior (Depue and Morrone-Strupinsky, 2005, Zebrowitz, 2006). Facial features provide the means to garner important characteristics such as age, race, gender, and emotional state, as well as to determine familiarity and personal significance of individuals. In addition, facial stimuli have the potential to elicit emotionally laden, affiliative memories and facilitate the formation and maintenance of human relationships—tapping brain processes that elicit appetitive or approach behavior (Depue and Morrone-Strupinsky, 2005). This suggests that processing the face of a personally relevant individual, like a romantic partner, parent, or child, may lead to greater activation of appetitive brain regions compared to viewing the face of a stranger or less significant other. It also suggests that brain activity associated with social behavior may correlate with measures of relational qualities or characteristics (e.g., intimacy, support, companionship). We began to explore this possibility in an earlier study of mothers viewing a facial picture of their infant child versus pictures of other faces, in which we used an observational coding scheme1 (i.e., This is My Baby Interview [TIMB]; Bates and Dozier, 2002) to measure characteristics of the mother–child relationship (Grasso et al., 2009). We found that mothers who were rated higher on Acceptance (i.e., perceiving her relationship with the child as positive and rewarding) and Awareness of Influence (i.e., perceiving the relationship as instrumental to her child's emotional wellbeing and development) exhibited ERPs with enhanced late positivity, associated with greater attention allocation, while viewing facial pictures of their child (Grasso et al., 2009). Given that the TIMB measures positive relational constructs, however, we could not examine whether high scores on a negative relational construct (e.g., negative parent–child interaction) also relate to ERP patterns. It seems plausible that a measure of negative interaction, which need not necessarily share a negative relationship with positive support, might also be reflected in the LPP.

In the current study, we aimed to replicate and extend findings from our mother–infant study in the context of the parent/young–adult relationship by exploring the potential associations between late positive ERP responses and both positive and negative aspects of this relationship. Undergraduate college students rated a parent on a measure with two scales, positive support and negative interaction, and engaged in a task in which they were instructed to choose one of three doors to reveal a hidden facial picture, either their parent, a celebrity, or a stranger. We expected to find enhanced late positivity to parent faces compared to stranger faces and celebrity faces, which were used to control for familiarity. We also predicted a positive association between ratings of positive support and late positivity. Our examination of the potential association between negative interaction and the LPP was exploratory.

Section snippets

Participants

The sample included 27 undergraduate college students (60.7% female) enrolled in an Introductory Psychology class and receiving course credit for participating in the study. Subjects were between the ages of 18.06 and 20.56 years (M = 18.96, SD = .98) and all were classified as Non-Hispanic and European American.

Face stimuli

Digital pictures were obtained from subjects’ parents electronically and uploaded into Adobe Photoshop CS Version 8.0. Pictures were cropped to 800 × 800 pixels (8 × 8 in.) so that the head,

Results

Raw waveforms at all midline electrode sites are depicted in Fig. 1. Visual inspection of the grand averaged waveform and the plotted components from the PCA led to the identification of the component corresponding to the late positivity observed between 200 and 500 ms (see Fig. 2). Factor scores were derived from this component. An RM ANOVA with face type as the within-subject factor and factor scores as the dependent variable revealed a main effect for face type, F(2,22) = 27.66, p < .0001, ηp2 = 

Discussion

The results of the current study replicate other findings from our lab demonstrating enhanced positivity of the ERP waveform between 200 and 500 ms in response to facial stimuli of a significant other compared to familiar and unfamiliar facial stimuli. Undergraduate college students exhibited enhanced positivity at all midline electrode sites when viewing a facial picture of their parent relative to facial pictures of a known celebrity and a stranger. This finding is consistent with other

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