title: Age-related changes in emotional face processing across childhood and into young adulthood: Evidence from event-related potentials.
abstract: Socio-emotional processing is an essential part of development, and age-related changes in its neural correlates can be observed. The late positive potential (LPP) is a measure of motivated attention that can be used to assess emotional processing; however, changes in the LPP elicited by emotional faces have not been assessed across a wide age range in childhood and young adulthood. We used an emotional face matching task to examine behavior and event-related potentials (ERPs) in 33 youth aged 7-19 years old. Younger children were slower when performing the matching task. The LPP elicited by emotional faces but not control stimuli (geometric shapes) decreased with age; by contrast, an earlier ERP (the P1) decreased with age for both faces and shapes, suggesting increased efficiency of early visual processing. Results indicate age-related attenuation in emotional processing that may stem from greater efficiency and regulatory control when performing a socio-emotional task.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL. amacnamara@psych.uic.edu.
authors.forename: Annmarie
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: MacNamara
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL.
authors.forename: Alvaro
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Vergés
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL.
authors.forename: Autumn
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Kujawa
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI.
authors.forename: Kate D
authors.initials: KD
authors.lastname: Fitzgerald
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI.
authors.forename: Christopher S
authors.initials: CS
authors.lastname: Monk
authors.affiliation: Departments of Psychiatry, Psychology and Anatomy and Cell Biology, and the Graduate Program in Neuroscience, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL.
authors.forename: K Luan
authors.initials: KL
authors.lastname: Phan
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000367:Age Factors; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology; D002540:Cerebral Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D002648:Child; D002657:Child Development / Q000502:physiology; D004569:Electroencephalography; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005071:Evoked Potentials / Q000502:physiology*; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D012938:Social Perception; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: ERP; LPP; P1; adolescent; affect; children; development; emotion; event-related potential; faces; late positive potential; neural