TY - JOUR
T1 - The late positive potential (LPP) in response to varying types of emotional and cigarette stimuli in smokers
T2 - A content comparison
AU - Minnix, Jennifer A.
AU - Versace, Francesco
AU - Robinson, Jason D.
AU - Lam, Cho Y.
AU - Engelmann, Jeffrey M.
AU - Cui, Yong
AU - Brown, Victoria L.
AU - Cinciripini, Paul M.
N1 - Funding Information:
Dr. Cinciripini has served on the scientific advisory board of Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, received grant support and has conducted educational talks sponsored by Pfizer on smoking cessation for physicians from 2006 to 2008. The other authors declare no conflict of interest.
Funding Information:
This work was supported in part by the National Institute on Drug Abuse through grant 1R01DA017073-01 to Paul Cinciripini and training grant 1K99DA025181-01 to Jennifer Minnix.
PY - 2013/7
Y1 - 2013/7
N2 - Identifying neural mechanisms associated with addiction has substantially improved the overall understanding of addictive processes. Indeed, research suggests that drug-associated cues may take advantage of neural mechanisms originally intended for emotional processing of stimuli relevant to survival. In this study, we investigated cortical responses to several categories of emotional cues (erotic, romance, pleasant objects, mutilation, sadness, and unpleasant objects) as well as two types of smoking-related cues (people smoking and cigarette-related objects). We recorded ERPs from 180 smokers prior to their participation in a smoking cessation clinical trial and assessed emotional salience by measuring the amplitude of the late positive potential (LPP; 400 to 600. ms after picture onset). As expected, emotional and cigarette-related pictures prompted a significantly larger LPP than neutral pictures. The amplitude of the LPP increased as a function of picture arousal level, with high-arousing erotic and mutilation pictures showing the largest response in contrast to low-arousing pleasant and unpleasant objects, which showed the smallest response (other than neutral). Compared to females, male participants showed larger LPPs for high-arousing erotic and mutilation pictures. However, unlike emotional pictures, no difference was noted for the LPP between cigarette stimuli containing people versus those containing only objects, suggesting that in contrast to emotional objects, cigarette-related objects are highly relevant for smokers. We also compared the smokers to a small (N. = 40), convenience sample of never-smokers. We found that never-smokers had significantly smaller LPPs in response to erotic and cigarette stimuli containing only objects compared to smokers.
AB - Identifying neural mechanisms associated with addiction has substantially improved the overall understanding of addictive processes. Indeed, research suggests that drug-associated cues may take advantage of neural mechanisms originally intended for emotional processing of stimuli relevant to survival. In this study, we investigated cortical responses to several categories of emotional cues (erotic, romance, pleasant objects, mutilation, sadness, and unpleasant objects) as well as two types of smoking-related cues (people smoking and cigarette-related objects). We recorded ERPs from 180 smokers prior to their participation in a smoking cessation clinical trial and assessed emotional salience by measuring the amplitude of the late positive potential (LPP; 400 to 600. ms after picture onset). As expected, emotional and cigarette-related pictures prompted a significantly larger LPP than neutral pictures. The amplitude of the LPP increased as a function of picture arousal level, with high-arousing erotic and mutilation pictures showing the largest response in contrast to low-arousing pleasant and unpleasant objects, which showed the smallest response (other than neutral). Compared to females, male participants showed larger LPPs for high-arousing erotic and mutilation pictures. However, unlike emotional pictures, no difference was noted for the LPP between cigarette stimuli containing people versus those containing only objects, suggesting that in contrast to emotional objects, cigarette-related objects are highly relevant for smokers. We also compared the smokers to a small (N. = 40), convenience sample of never-smokers. We found that never-smokers had significantly smaller LPPs in response to erotic and cigarette stimuli containing only objects compared to smokers.
KW - ERP
KW - Emotion
KW - Event related potentials
KW - LPP
KW - Nicotine dependence
KW - Smoking
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U2 - 10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2013.04.019
DO - 10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2013.04.019
M3 - Article
C2 - 23643564
AN - SCOPUS:84880487497
SN - 0167-8760
VL - 89
SP - 18
EP - 25
JO - International Journal of Psychophysiology
JF - International Journal of Psychophysiology
IS - 1
ER -