Premium
Frontal EEG alpha asymmetry and emotion: From neural underpinnings and methodological considerations to psychopathology and social cognition
Author(s) -
Allen John J. B.,
Keune Philipp M.,
Schönenberg Michael,
Nusslock Robin
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
psychophysiology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.661
H-Index - 156
eISSN - 1469-8986
pISSN - 0048-5772
DOI - 10.1111/psyp.13028
Subject(s) - psychology , abnormal psychology , psychoanalysis , cognitive science , psychiatry
Forty years ago, in September of 1978, at the annual meeting of the Society for Psychophysiological Research inMadison,Wisconsin, the early-career scientist Richie Davidson presented a paper suggesting that the experience of positive affect and of negative affect were associated with differently lateralized patterns of frontal brain electrical activity. Following the publication of the abstract of this presentation on frontal EEG asymmetry the next year (Davidson, Schwartz, Saron, Bennett, & Goleman, 1979), there were almost no publications in the following decade, with only 15 empirical articles examining frontal EEG asymmetry and emotion by 1990. It might have been hard to predict at that time how popular this measure of frontal brain asymmetry would become, with now hundreds of articles published using frontal EEG asymmetry to examine emotion-related and motivation-related trait individual differences and staterelated changes. Among other topics, frontal EEG asymmetry has been used to investigate risk for depression, anxiety, and internalizing psychopathology, as well as externalizing disorders such as mania, addiction, and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). It has also been used extensively to examine individual differences in temperament and motivational style, and responses to emotional stimuli and social provocation. An advantage of frontal EEG asymmetry is its association with a highly successful conceptual model of emotion and motivation. The approach-withdrawal model of frontal asymmetry posits that increased relative left-frontal activity indicates a propensity to approach or engage a stimulus, whereas decreased relative left-frontal activity indicates a propensity toward reduced approach motivation or increased withdrawal motivation (e.g., Coan & Allen, 2004; Davidson, 1998; HarmonJones, 2003). Thus, frontal EEG asymmetry involves a unidimensional metric capturing large variations in motivation, emotion, and behavior. This metric is not only useful in understanding normative variation in motivation and emotion, but also abnormal variation, including mania and depression. Additionally, frontal asymmetry can be assessed as both a traitlike individual differences variable and as a measure of staterelated variation to particular stimuli or experimental paradigms (Coan & Allen, 2004; Coan, Allen, & McKnight, 2006).