How clinical decision tasks modulate emotional related EEG responses in nursing students.

Healthcare professionals play a vital role in conveying sensitive information as patients undergo stressful, demanding situations. However, the underlying neurocognitive dynamics in routine clinical tasks remain underexplored, creating gaps in healthcare research and social cognition models. Here, we examined whether the type of clinical task may differentially affect the emotional processing of nursing students in response to the emotional reactions of patients. In a within-subjects design, 40 nursing students read clinical cases prompting them to make procedural decisions or to respond to a patient with a proper communicative decision. Afterward, participants read sentences about patients' emotional states; some semantically consistent and others inconsistent along with filler sentences. EEG recordings toward critical words (emotional stimuli) were used to capture ERP indices of emotional salience (EPN), attentional engagement (LPP) and semantic integration (N400). Results showed that the procedural decision task elicited larger EPN amplitudes, reflecting pre-attentive categorization of emotional stimuli. The communicative decision task elicited larger LPP components associated with later elaborative processing. Additionally, the classical N400 effect elicited by semantically inconsistent sentences was found. The psychophysiological measures were tied by self-report measures indexing the difficulty of the task. These results suggest that the requirements of clinical tasks modulate emotional-related EEG responses.

Effects of valence and causal direction in the emotion inferences processing during reading: evidence from a lexical decision task / Efectos de la valencia y la dirección causal en el procesamiento de inferencias emocionales durante la lectura: evidencia mediante una tarea de decisión léxica

In two experiments we investigated the role that activation of emotional inferences when readers represent fictional characters' emotional states using an affective lexical decision task. Subjects read short stories that described concrete actions. In the first experiment, we analyzed whether the valence (positive or negative) was an important factor of inference´s activation. The results showed that valence was determinant factor in the moment that emotional inference was generated, being the positive valence faster than negative. In the second experiment we studied whether the emotion inference activation was influenced by the causal direction of the story, where the causal direction of the text was manipulated in order to induce towards an emotional inference predictive (the reader looking for a consequence that promote a particular emotion) or inducing an explanatory inference (reader looking for a cause that 'explain' a particular emotion). The results suggest that emotional inferences are made online, and that valence and causal directions are two decisive components of emotional trait, but only positive valence increase their processing

En dos experimentos se investigó el papel que juega la activación de inferencias emocionales cuando los lectores representan estados emocionales de los personajes ficticios mediante una tarea de decisión léxica. Los participantes leyeron historias cortas que describían acciones concretas. En el primer experimento se analizó si la valencia emocional (positiva o negativa) influía en la activación de la inferencia. Los resultados mostraron que la valencia fue factor determinante en el momento en que generaba la inferencia emocional, siendo la valencia positiva más rápida que la negativa. En el segundo experimento se analizó la dirección causal de la historia, donde en un caso fue manipulada para inducir hacia una inferencia emocional predictiva (el lector busca una acción que anticipa una emoción particular), y en otro explicativa (el lector busca una causa que 'explique' una emoción en particular) y si estas dos condiciones diferían en la activación de la inferencia emocional. Los resultados revelaron que las inferencias emocionales se hacen de manera automática en ambos estudios y que tanto la valencia como la dirección causal se consideran componentes básicos de las inferencias emocionales, pero sólo la valencia positiva acelera aún más el procesamiento del rasgo emocional