title: Brain activity during emotion perception: the role of attachment representation.
abstract: To examine emotional face processing in mothers of different attachment representations, event-related potentials were recorded from 16 mothers during presentation of infant emotion faces with positive, negative or neutral emotional expressions within a three-stimulus oddball paradigm, and frontal asymmetries were assessed. Insecure mothers, as compared to secure ones, showed a more pronounced negativity in the face-sensitive N170 component and a smaller N200 amplitude. Regarding the P300 component, secure mothers showed a stronger response to face stimuli than insecure mothers. No differences were found for frontal asymmetry scores. The results indicate that attachment differences may be related to neuropsychological functioning.
authors.affiliation: Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich, Germany.
authors.forename: Eva M
authors.initials: EM
authors.lastname: Fraedrich
authors.forename: Krisztina
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Lakatos
authors.forename: Gottfried
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Spangler
mesh_terms: D000223:Adaptation, Psychological; D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D004569:Electroencephalography; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005071:Evoked Potentials; D005145:Face / Q000033:anatomy & histology; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009034:Mother-Child Relations; D009035:Mothers; D009769:Object Attachment; D010865:Pilot Projects; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*