Methods Madness
What does EEG measure in the brain?
Electrical activity from pyramidal neurons in the cortex.
What role does attention play in emotion regulation?
Directing attention helps manage emotional responses by focusing on or away from stimuli.
What behavioral trait was linked to differences in neural mechanisms of emotion regulation in Lewis et al. (2006)?
Aggression
What neural marker did Myruski et al. (2022) find to be predictive of future emotion regulation?
Delta-beta coupling.
100
How might the use of different visual stimuli during the attention task in Perry et al. (e.g. more complex stimuli instead of a glove puppet) potentially affect infants' attentional engagement and the corresponding EEG changes observed in the study?
What is the main advantage of EEG in studying brain activity?
High temporal resolution (ability to track brain activity in real time)
According to Perry et al. (2016), what early behavior predicts better emotion regulation later in childhood?
Stronger attentional engagement in infancy
How do aggressive children differ in their neural responses to emotional stimuli?
They exhibit altered activity in brain regions linked to cognitive control and emotional reactivity
How did children with higher delta-beta coupling perform in emotion regulation tasks?
They exhibited better emotion regulation skills at the time of measurement and two years later
200
Perry et al. found opposing relations between left/right frontal EEG power and attention in infants. Are these lateralized patterns more reflective of innate hemispheric specialization or early environmental influences (e.g., caregiving)?
What is a key limitation of EEG compared to other brain imaging techniques like fMRI?
Poor spatial resolution (difficulty pinpointing the exact location of activity)
In Dennis et al. (2009), how did children with better emotion regulation respond to emotional faces in ERP studies?
They showed increased ERP amplitudes linked to attention and cognitive control.
Why might aggressive children struggle with emotion regulation, according to neural findings?
They may have deficits in brain regions responsible for inhibiting impulsive emotional responses.
What does Perry et al. (2016) suggest about the link between early attention and later emotional development?
Infants with stronger attentional control tend to develop better emotion regulation skills.
300
Myruski et al mention that DBC predict ER strategy from 5-7, but at 7-9 only parietal DBC predict ER. They say this is evidence of a developmental shift but don’t elaborate. What might be the behavioral or cognitive consequences of such a shift?
How are ERPs derived from EEG data?
By averaging EEG responses to a specific stimulus over multiple trials
What ERP component is often associated with cognitive control and attention during emotion regulation tasks?
The P3 component.
What is the relationship between emotion regulation difficulties and externalizing behaviors like aggression?
Poor emotion regulation is often linked to increased externalizing behaviors, including aggression and impulsivity.
How do findings from Myruski et al. (2022) support early intervention efforts in childhood emotion regulation?
Since neural markers like delta-beta coupling predict emotion regulation, early identification and intervention can help children develop better coping skills.
400
Lewis et al. suggests that there may be neurocognitive differences among subtypes of aggressive children according to their studies of negative emotion-eliciting tasks. Would there be similar indications of flexibility among aggressive children if presented with ambiguous emotion-related stimuli?
What does an increased amplitude in ERP components typically indicate about cognitive processing?
It suggests greater neural engagement or stronger attentional processing of a stimulus
How do the findings of Dennis et al. (2009) and Perry et al. (2016) complement each other in explaining emotion regulation?
Perry et al. (2016) shows that early attention predicts later emotion regulation, while Dennis et al. (2009) demonstrates that children who regulate emotions well show distinct neural responses to emotional stimuli.
If aggression is linked to neural patterns of poor emotion regulation, what implications does this have for behavioral interventions?
Interventions should target improving cognitive control and emotional processing to reduce aggression.
What is the main takeaway from Myruski et al. (2022) and Perry et al. (2016)?
Both studies highlight that early neural and attentional markers are strong predictors of a child’s future ability to regulate emotions, emphasizing the importance of early intervention
500
Attention is a process that is often about alerting to external stimuli; we have recently been looking at models that are focused on how emotion regulation is shaped by internal stimuli. How do we understand the link between autonomic regulation of arousal with attentional control?