The psychophysiological mechanism linking early childhood experiences to behavior problems remains unclear. This study aimed to examine the association of child physical abuse with P300 event-related potentials (ERP), and to test the mediating effect of P300 amplitude and latency in the relationship between child physical abuse and externalizing behaviors. Cross-sectional secondary data were obtained from 155 children (55.5% boys, mean age: 11.28 ± 0.57 years) who participated in the China Jintan Child Cohort Study. Children self-reported maternal and paternal physical abuse and externalizing behaviors, as well as P300 were obtained in 2013. Additionally, parents and teachers reported child externalizing behaviors in preschool in 2007. P300 were recorded during a standard novel auditory oddball task. Path analysis shows that after controlling for child sex, socioeconomic status, area of residence, IQ, and child externalizing behavior in preschool, children exposed to maternal physical abuse exhibited increased novelty P300 amplitude, which links to more externalizing behavior. Novelty P300 amplitude partially mediated the relationship between maternal physical abuse and externalizing behavior. These findings are the first to document the partial mediating effect of P300 amplitude on the abuse-externalizing relationship and are consistent with the view that physical abuse affects the attention bias to novel cues that likely places them at increased risk for the development and maintenance of externalizing behavior.

People have different motivations to get along with others in different sociality mental modes (i.e., communal mode and market mode), which might affect social decision-making. The present study examined how these two types of sociality mental modes affect the processing of advice-giving using the event-related potentials (ERPs). After primed with the communal mode and market mode, participants were instructed to decide whether or not give an advice (profitable or damnous) to a stranger without any feedback. The behavioral results showed that participants preferred to give the profitable advice to the stranger more slowly compared with the damnous advice, but this difference was only observed in the market mode condition. The ERP results indicated that participants demonstrated more negative N1 amplitude for the damnous advice compared with the profitable advice, and larger P300 was elicited in the market mode relative to both the communal mode and the control group. More importantly, participants in the market mode demonstrated larger P300 for the profitable advice than the damnous advice, whereas this difference was not observed at the communal mode and the control group. These findings are consistent with the dual-process system during decision-making and suggest that market mode may lead to deliberate calculation for costs and benefits when giving the profitable advice to others.

Adult attachment style is a key for understanding emotion regulation and feelings of security in human interactions as well as for the construction of the caregiving system. The caregiving system is a group of representations about affiliative behaviors, which is guided by the caregiver's sensitivity and empathy, and is mature in young adulthood. Appropriate perception and interpretation of infant emotions is a crucial component of the formation of a secure attachment relationship between infant and caregiver. As attachment styles influence the ways in which people perceive emotional information, we examined how different attachment styles associated with brain response to the perception of infant facial expressions in nulliparous females with secure, anxious, and avoidant attachment styles. The event-related potentials of 65 nulliparous females were assessed during a facial recognition task with joy, neutral, and crying infant faces. The results showed that anxiously attached females exhibited larger N170 amplitudes than those with avoidant attachment in response to all infant faces. Regarding the P300 component, securely attached females showed larger amplitudes to all infant faces in comparison with avoidantly attached females. Moreover, anxiously attached females exhibited greater amplitudes than avoidantly attached females to only crying infant faces. In conclusion, the current results provide evidence that attachment style differences are associated with brain responses to the perception of infant faces. Furthermore, these findings further separate the psychological mechanisms underlying the caregiving behavior of those with anxious and avoidant attachment from secure attachment.

Event-related potentials (ERPs) bimodal oddball task has disclosed increased sensitivity to show P300 modulations to subclinical symptoms. Even if the utility of such a procedure has still to be confirmed at a clinical level, gathering normative values of this new oddball variant may be of the greatest interest. We specifically addressed the challenge of defining the best location for the recording of P3a and P3b components and selecting the best reference to use by investigating the effect of an offline re-reference procedure on recorded bimodal P3a and P3b. Forty young and healthy subjects were submitted to a bimodal (synchronized and always congruent visual and auditory stimuli) three-stimulus oddball task in which 140 frequent bimodal stimuli, 30 deviant "target" stimuli and 30 distractors were presented. Task consisted in clicking as soon as possible on the targets, and not paying attention to frequent stimuli and distractors. This procedure allowed us to record, for each individual, the P3a component, referring to the novelty process related to distractors processing, and the P3b component, linked to the processing of the target stimuli. Results showed that both P3a and P3b showed maximal amplitude in Pz. However, P3a displayed a more central distribution. Nose reference was also shown to give maximal amplitudes compared with average and linked mastoids references. These data were discussed in light of the necessity to develop multi-site recording guidelines to furnish sets of ERPs data comparable across laboratories.

Previous reports documented abnormalities in cognitive functions and decision-making (DM) in patients with chronic pain, but these changes are not consistent across studies. Reasons for these discordant findings might include the presence of confounders, variability in chronic pain conditions, and the use of different cognitive tests. The present study was aimed to add evidence in this field, by exploring the cognitive profile of a specific type of chronic pain, i.e., chronic low back pain (cLBP). Twenty four cLBP patients and 24 healthy controls underwent a neuropsychological battery and we focused on emotional DM abilities by means of Iowa gambling task (IGT). During IGT, behavioral responses and the electroencephalogram (EEG) were recorded in 12 patients and 12 controls. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were averaged offline from EEG epochs locked to the feedback presentation (4000 ms duration, from 2000 ms before to 2000 ms after the feedback onset) separately for wins and losses and the feedback-related negativity (FRN) and P300 peak-to-peak amplitudes were calculated. Among cognitive measures, cLBP patients scored lower than controls in the modified card sorting test (MCST) and the score in this test was significantly influenced by pain duration and intensity. Behavioral IGT results documented worse performance and the absence of a learning process during the test in cLBP patients compared to controls, with no effect of pain characteristics. ERPs findings documented abnormal feedback processing in patients during IGT. cLBP patients showed poor performance in the MCST and the IGT. Abnormal feedback processing may be secondary to impingement of chronic pain in brain areas involved in DM or suggest the presence of a predisposing factor related to pain chronification. These abnormalities might contribute to the impairment in the work and family settings that often cLBP patients report.

Binge-purge eating disorders (BP-ED), such as bulimia nervosa and binge eating disorder, may share some neurobiological features. Electroencephalography (EEG) is a non-invasive measurement modality that may aid in research and diagnosis of BP-ED. We conducted a systematic review of the literature on EEG findings in BP-ED, seeking to summarize and analyze the current evidence, as well as identify shortcomings and gaps to inform new perspectives for future studies. Following PRISMA Statement recommendations, the PubMed, Embase, and Web of Science databases were searched using terms related to "electroencephalography" and "binge-purge" eating disorders. Of 555 articles retrieved, 15 met predefined inclusion criteria and were included for full-text analysis. Eleven studies investigated EEG by means of event-related potentials (ERP) in BP-ED individuals: 7 using eating disorder-related stimuli (i.e., food, body image) and 4 using non-eating disorder-related stimuli (i.e., facial expressions or auditory clicks). These studies found significant differences in the N200, P200, P300, and LPP components in BP-ED participants compared to controls, indicating that this population exhibits impairments in selective attention, attentional allocation/processing, and allocation of motivational or emotion-based attention. Five studies investigated EEG using frequency analysis; reporting significant differences in beta activity in fronto-temporal and occipito-temporo-parietal areas in BP-ED individuals compared to controls, revealing a dysfunctional brain network. However, the small number of studies, the heterogeneity of samples, study paradigms, stimulus types, and the lack of an adequate assessment of neuropsychological parameters are some limitations of the current literature. Although some EEG data are promising and consistent with neuroimaging and neuropsychological findings in individuals with BP-ED, future studies need to overcome current methodological shortcomings.

Neuroscientific research regarding mindsets is so far scarce, especially among children. Moreover, even though research indicates the importance of domain specificity of mindsets, this has not yet been investigated in neuroscientific studies regarding implicit beliefs. The purpose of this study was to examine general intelligence and math ability mindsets and their relations to automatic reactions to negative feedback in mathematics in the Finnish elementary school context. For this, event-related potentials of 97 elementary school students were measured during the completion of an age-appropriate math task, where the participants received performance-relevant feedback throughout the task. Higher growth mindset was marginally associated with a larger P300 response and significantly associated with a smaller later peaking negative-going waveform. Moreover, with the domain-specific experimental setting, we found a higher growth mindset regarding math ability, but not general intelligence, to be associated with these brain responses elicited by negative feedback regarding errors in math. This suggests that it might be important to address domain-specific and even academic-domain-specific beliefs in addition to general mindsets in research and practice.

The ability to learn from feedback is important for children's adaptive behavior and school learning. Feedback has two main components, informative value and valence. How to disentangle these two components and what is the developmental neural correlates of using the informative value of feedback is still an open question. In this study, 23 children (7-10 years old) and 19 adults (19-22 years old) were asked to perform a rule induction task, in which they were required to find a rule, based on the informative value of feedback. Behavioral results indicated that the likelihood of correct searching behavior under negative feedback was low for children. Event-related potentials showed that (1) the effect of valence was processed in a wide time window, particularly in the N2 component; (2) the encoding process of the informative value of negative feedback began later for children than for adults; (3) a clear P300 was observed for adults; for children, however, P300 was absent in the frontal region; and (4) children processed the informative value of feedback chiefly in the left sites during the P300 time window, whereas adults did not show this laterality. These results suggested that children were less sensitive to the informative value of negative feedback possibly because of the immature brain.

Delay discounting and probability discounting are two important processes, but in daily life there are many more situations that involve delayed risky outcomes. Although neuroscience research has extensively investigated delay and probability discounting in isolation, little research has explored the neural correlates of the combined discounting of delay and probability. Using the event-related brain potentials (ERPs) technique, we designed a novel paradigm to investigate neural processes related to the combined discounting of delay and probability during the evaluation of a delayed risky reward. ERP results suggested distinct temporal dynamics for delay and probability processing during combined discounting. Both the early frontal P200 and the N2 reflected only probability, not delay, while the parietal P300 was sensitive to both probability and delay. Furthermore, the late positive potential (LPP) was sensitive to probability, but insensitive to delay. These results suggest that probability has a prolonged modulatory effect on reward evaluation in the information processing stream. These findings contribute to an understanding of the neural processes underlying the combined discounting of delay and probability. The limitation of this study is to only consider four delay and probability combinations. Future studies can explore the combined discounting of more probability and delay combinations to further test the robustness of the conclusion.

Coping self-efficacy (CSE) has a positive mental health effect on athletes' ability to cope with stress. To understand the mechanism underlying the potential impact of CSE, event-related potentials (ERPs) were used to explore the neural activity of the cerebral cortex under acute psychological stress in athletes with different CSE levels. Among 106 high-level athletes, 21 high-CSE athletes and 20 low-CSE athletes were selected to participate in the experiment. A mental arithmetic task was used to induce acute psychological stress. The results showed that high-CSE athletes responded more quickly than low-CSE athletes. In the stress response stage, the N1 peak latency of low-CSE athletes was longer than that of high-CSE athletes, and the N1 amplitude was significantly larger than that of high-CSE athletes. In the feedback stage, the FRN amplitude with error feedback of high-CSE athletes was larger than that of low-CSE athletes, and the P300 amplitude with correct feedback was larger than that with error feedback. The results indicate that high-CSE athletes can better cope with stressful events, adjust their behaviors in a timely manner according to the results of their coping, and focus more on processing positive information.

The shift from childhood to adolescence is characterized by rapid remodeling of the brain and increased risk-taking behaviors. Current theories hypothesize that developmental enhancements in sensitivity to affective environmental cues in adolescence may undermine executive function (EF) and increase the likelihood of problematic behaviors. In the current study, we examined the extent to which EF in childhood predicts EF in early adolescence. We also tested whether individual differences in neural responses to affective cues (rewards/punishments) in childhood serve as a biological marker for EF, sensation-seeking, academic performance, and social skills in early adolescence. At age 8, 84 children completed a gambling task while event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. We examined the extent to which selections resulting in rewards or losses in this task elicited (i) the P300, a post-stimulus waveform reflecting the allocation of attentional resources toward a stimulus, and (ii) the SPN, a pre-stimulus anticipatory waveform reflecting a neural representation of a "hunch" about an outcome that originates in insula and ventromedial PFC. Children also completed a Dimensional Change Card-Sort (DCCS) and Flanker task to measure EF. At age 12, 78 children repeated the DCCS and Flanker and completed a battery of questionnaires. Flanker and DCCS accuracy at age 8 predicted Flanker and DCCS performance at age 12, respectively. Individual differences in the magnitude of P300 (to losses vs. rewards) and SPN (preceding outcomes with a high probability of punishment) at age 8 predicted self-reported sensation seeking (lower) and teacher-rated academic performance (higher) at age 12. We suggest there is stability in EF from age 8 to 12, and that childhood neural sensitivity to reward and punishment predicts individual differences in sensation seeking and adaptive behaviors in children entering adolescence.

Categorizing and individual as a racial ingroup or outgroup member results in processing and memory differences. However, despite processing differences for racial ingroups and outgroups, very little is known about processing of racial ingroup and outgroup members during intergroup contexts. Thus, the present research investigated attention and memory differences for racial ingroup and outgroup members during competition for attention (i.e., intergroup contexts). In experiment 1, event-related potentials (ERPs) were obtained while participants completed a working memory task that presented 4 faces (2 Black, 2 White) at once then, following a short delay, were probed to indicate the spatial location of one of the faces. Participants showed better location memory for Black than White faces. During encoding, ERP results revealed differences based on the race of the face in P300 amplitudes, such that there was greater motivated processing when attending to Black faces. At probe, the N170 indicated enhanced early processing of Black faces and greater LPCs were associated with better recollection of Black face location. In a follow-up study using the same task, we examined attention and working memory biases for Asian and White faces in Caucasian and Asian participants. Results for both Caucasian and Asian participants indicated better working memory for Asian relative to White faces. Together, results indicate that during intergroup contexts, racial minority faces capture attention, resulting in better memory for those faces. The study underscores that examining racial biases with single stimuli paradigms obscures important aspects of attention and memory biases during intergroup contexts.

The aim of the present contribution was to examine the factors influencing the prosodic processing in a language with predictable word stress. For Polish, a language with fixed penultimate stress but several well-defined exceptions, difficulties in the processing and representation of prosodic information have been reported (e.g., Peperkamp and Dupoux, 2002). The present study utilized event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate the factors influencing prosodic processing in Polish. These factors are (i) the predictability of stress and (ii) the prosodic structure in terms of metrical feet. Polish native speakers were presented with correctly and incorrectly stressed Polish words and instructed to judge the correctness of the perceived stress patterns. For some stress violations, an early negativity was found which was interpreted as a reflection of an error-detection mechanism. In addition, exceptional stress patterns (=antepenultimate stress) and post-lexical (=initial) stress evoked a task-related positivity effect (P300) whose amplitude and latency is correlated with the degree of anomaly and deviation from an expectation. In contrast, violations involving the default (=penultimate stress) did not produce such an effect. This asymmetrical result is interpreted to reflect that Polish native speakers are less sensitive to the default pattern than to the exceptional or post-lexical patterns. Behavioral results are orthogonal to the electrophysiological results showing that Polish speakers had difficulties to reject any kind of stress violation. Thus, on a meta-linguistic level Polish speakers appeared to be stress-"deaf" for any kind of stress manipulation, whereas the neural reactions differentiate between the default and lexicalized patterns.