LAUSR

Differences in the processing of emotions like fear and sadness have important implications for our understanding of many psychological phenomena (e.g., attentional biases, psychopathology). The late positive potential (LPP) is an established event-related potential that reflects motivated attention to emotional stimuli at the neural level with excellent temporal resolution, but has been infrequently used to study differences across emotions. Drawing on functional theories of emotion suggesting that the quick processing of fear-inducing stimuli increases chances of survival, we hypothesized that fear-inducing pictures would produce larger LPP amplitudes compared to other emotions (happy and sad) in the early time windows of the LPP (e.g., 400–700, 700–1000 ms). The results supported our hypothesis, offering new, albeit preliminary, evidence of the differential processing of threat-related stimuli on the LPP.