Age-induced differences in brain neural activation elicited by visual emotional stimuli: A high-density EEG study

Abstract

Identifying the brain sources of neural activation during processing of emotional information remains a very challenging task. In this work, we investigated the response to different emotional stimuli and the effect of age on the neuronal activation. Two negative emotion conditions, i.e., 'anger' and 'fear' faces were presented to 22 adult female participants (11 young and 11 elderly) while acquiring high-density electroencephalogram (EEG) data of 256 channels. Brain source localization was utilized to study the modulations in the early N170 event-related-potential component. The results revealed alterations in the amplitude of N170 and the localization of areas with maximum neural activation. Furthermore, age-induced differences are shown in the topographic maps and the neural activation for both emotional stimuli. Overall, aging appeared to affect the limbic area and its implication to emotional processing. These findings can serve as a step toward the understanding of the way the brain functions and evolves with age which is a significant element in the design of assistive environments.

Keywords: age effect; brain source localization; emotional stimuli; high-density EEG.