This study examined the empathic processing of individuals with psychopathic traits and healthy controls in response to pain, applying affective perspective-taking (Self vs. Other). Twenty subjects with high psychopathic traits and twenty control subjects performed pain judgment tasks in the study. During the tasks, late positive potentials (LPPs) of the participants were measured to assess emotional processing in reaction to visual stimuli depicting painful or non-painful situations. In early LPP time stage (500-700 ms), the control group and the psychopathic trait group exhibited comparable levels of empathic processing regarding pain. However, in late LPP time window (700-1100 ms), the control group showed a greater LPP amplitude to Pain stimuli than No-pain stimuli, whereas the psychopathic trait group exhibited non-significant amplitude differences between Pain and No-pain stimuli. These findings imply that individuals with high psychopathic traits may swiftly terminate the processing and encounter difficulties in reappraising distress cues, especially in the late stage, providing psychophysiological support for distinctive empathic processing with temporal aspects.

It has been shown that affective touch can have stress-buffering effects. The current event-related potential (ERP) study investigated whether affective touch can reduce emotional distress and associated late positivity while viewing angry facial expressions. A total of 122 females (mean age = 23 years) were randomly assigned to one of three groups to either receive slow/soft brushing of their forearm (affective touch), fast brushing (nonaffective touch), or no touch while viewing images depicting angry and neutral facial expressions. The participants rated their affective state (valence, arousal) before and after the experiment. They also rated the perceived intensity of the angry facial expressions and the pleasantness of touch during the experiment. Components of the Late Positive Potential (LPP) in response to the images that are associated with stimulus significance, attention allocation, and emotion regulation (early LPP: 400-1000 ms; late LPP: 1000-3000 ms) were extracted for a frontal and a centroparietal cluster. Affective touch was associated with reduced amplitudes of the late LPP in the frontal cluster but did not affect centroparietal LPPs (early, late). Affective touch was rated as more pleasant than nonaffective touch but did not change reported valence, arousal, and perceived anger intensity. In conclusion, affective touch modulated a neural indicator of stimulus significance but did not influence self-report measures. More naturalistic touch settings might enhance the effects.

Aging is associated with changes in cognitive and affective functioning, which likely shape older adults\' social cognition. As the neural and psychological mechanisms underlying age differences in social abilities remain poorly understood, the present study aims to extend the research in this field. To this purpose, younger (n = 30; Mage = 26.6), middle-aged (n = 30; Mage = 48.4), and older adults (n = 29; Mage = 64.5) performed a task designed to assess affective perspective-taking, during an EEG recording. In this task, participants decided whether a target facial expression of emotion (FEE) was congruent or incongruent with that of a masked intervener of a previous scenario, which portrayed a neutral or an emotional scene. Older adults showed worse performance in comparison to the other groups. Regarding electrophysiological results, while younger and middle-aged adults showed higher late positive potentials (LPPs) after FEEs congruent with previous scenarios than after incongruent FEEs, older adults had similar amplitudes after both. This insensitivity of older adults\' LPPs in differentiating congruent from incongruent emotional context-target FEE may be related to their difficulty in generating information about others\' inner states and using that information in social interactions.

Previous studies have suggested that alexithymia may be related to impairments in automatic emotion processing. While it is well established that alexithymia is highly prevalent in individuals with borderline personality disorder (BPD), it is unknown whether this is reflected by an altered automatic processing of emotional stimuli. In the present study we investigated visually evoked event-related potentials using neutral and negative images from the International Affective Pictures System in 26 BPD patients and 26 healthy controls. In line with previous reports, all subjects showed increased late positive potentials (LPP) for negative compared to neutral images. There were, however, no between-group differences at any time point. Crucially, there was no difference between alexithymic and non-alexithymic BPD patients in the expression of LPP. Our study is the first to show that automatic emotion processing in the visual domain appears to be normal in BPD and unaffected by alexithymia.

OBJECTIVE: Studies have found that empathy is important in moral development and violence suppression, and emotion also affects empathy. However, the combinatorial effect of emotion and empathy on the processing of conflicts is not known.
METHODS: A total of 44 undergraduate students (23 in low-empathy group and 21 in high-empathy group) were enrolled in this study. They were subjected to positive, negative, and neutral emotion evoking, as well as conflicting or nonconflicting proposals. Event-related potential technology was used to study the combinatorial effects of empathy and emotion on the processing of conflict of interest.
RESULTS: We found that under the influence of a positive emotion, both low- and high-empathy groups exhibited lower rejection rates. In the context of conflict, individuals in the high-empathy group showed fewer refusals under positive emotion. In the low-empathy group, there was no significant difference between responses to different emotions, but conflicting proposals induced more negative medial frontal negativity than nonconflicting proposals. Individuals in the low-empathy group showed different late positive potentials when responding to different types of proposals under both neutral and negative emotions, whereas those in the high-empathy group only showed different late positive potentials responding to different types of proposals under negative emotion.
CONCLUSIONS: Our results indicate that under positive emotion, individuals with low empathy show less difference in processing either conflicting or nonconflicting proposals, whereas under negative emotion, individuals with high empathy show enhanced motivation toward nonconflicting proposals.

Males are known for more suppression of emotional displays than females. However, when the emotion regulation effect of expressive suppression is greater in males, and how this sex difference varies with emotion display-related personality (e.g., extraversion), are undetermined. Event-related potentials were recorded while male and female participants different in extraversion were required to attend to or suppress emotional expression to negative pictures. Sex and extraversion did not modulate self-reported emotional experience. However, late positive potential (LPP) amplitudes showed an extraversion-moderated sex difference in the 2000-3000 ms and the 3000-4000 ms time epochs. LPP amplitudes were decreased during suppression versus viewing conditions in ambivert males, while this effect was absent in ambivert females. However, the LPP amplitudes of extraverts were similar for suppression and viewing conditions, irrespective of sex and timing. Regardless of early, middle, or late time windows, LPP amplitudes were positively related to self-reported emotion. These results suggest a male advantage for using expressive suppression for emotion regulation in non-extraverted, ambivert individuals.

BACKGROUND: Previous studies reported that old adults, relative to young adults, showed improvement of emotional stability and increased experiences of positive affects.
METHODS: In order to better understand the neural underpinnings behind the aging-related enhancement of positive affects, it is necessary to investigate whether old and young adults differ in the threshold of eliciting positive or negative emotional reactions. However, no studies have examined emotional reaction differences between old and young adults by manipulating the intensity of emotional stimuli to date. To clarify this issue, the present study examined the impact of aging on the brain\'s susceptibility to affective pictures of varying emotional intensities. We recorded event-related potentials (ERP) for highly negative (HN), mildly negative (MN) and neutral pictures in the negative experimental block; and for highly positive (HP), mildly positive (MP) and neutral pictures in the positive experimental block, when young and old adults were required to count the number of pictures, irrespective of the emotionality of the pictures.
RESULTS: Event-related potentials results showed that LPP (late positive potentials) amplitudes were larger for HN and MN stimuli compared to neutral stimuli in young adults, but not in old adults. By contrast, old adults displayed larger LPP amplitudes for HP and MP relative to neutral stimuli, while these effects were absent for young adults. In addition, old adults reported more frequent perception of positive stimuli and less frequent perception of negative stimuli than young adults. The post-experiment stimulus assessment showed more positive ratings of Neutral and MP stimuli, and reduced arousal ratings of HN stimuli in old compared to young adults.
CONCLUSIONS: These results suggest that old adults are more resistant to the impact of negative stimuli, while they are equipped with enhanced attentional bias for positive stimuli. The implications of these results to the aging-related enhancement of positive affects were discussed.

Late positive potentials (LPPs) were found to be decreased during down-regulation and increased during up-regulation of positive and negative emotions. However, previous studies lack ecological validity, since they explicitly instructed their participants to use certain regulation strategies. The goal of our study was to test an ecologically more valid paradigm of emotion regulation. We therefore investigated the effects of freely chosen emotion regulation strategies on LPPs and additionally assessed facial EMG responses and valence and arousal ratings as control variables. Responses to positive IAPS pictures were marked by pleasant valence ratings and high activations of M. zygomaticus major, negative pictures elicited unpleasant valence ratings and high activations of M. corrugator supercilii, and both, positive and negative pictures, went along with increased arousal ratings and LPPs. Importantly, ratings and EMG activity were intensified through up-regulation and attenuated through down-regulation of emotions, while LPPs were increased through both up-and down-regulation. We conclude that LPPs in paradigms with free choice of emotion regulation strategies might be a marker of attentional resources required for the selection of adequate emotion up- and down-regulation strategies, while LPP effects following emotion regulation with specific, instructed strategies reflect modulated arousal processes.