Attention to emotion: Auditory-evoked potentials in an emotional choice reaction task and personality traits as assessed by the NEO FFI

Several studies suggest that attention to emotional content is related to specific changes in central information processing. In particular, event-related potential (ERP) studies focusing on emotion recognition in pictures and faces or word processing have pointed toward a distinct component of the visual-evoked potential, the EPN ('early posterior negativity'), which has been shown to be related to attention to emotional content. In the present study, we were interested in the existence of a corresponding ERP component in the auditory modality and a possible relationship with the personality dimension extraversion-introversion, as assessed by the NEO Five-Factors Inventory. We investigated 29 healthy subjects using three types of auditory choice tasks: (1) the distinction of syllables with emotional intonation, (2) the identification of the emotional content of adjectives and (3) a purely cognitive control task. Compared with the cognitive control task, emotional paradigms using auditory stimuli evoked an EPN component with a distinct peak after 170 ms (EPN 170). Interestingly, subjects with high scores in the personality trait extraversion showed significantly higher EPN amplitudes for emotional paradigms (syllables and words) than introverted subjects.