Qianru Xu

Qianru Xu

Postdoctoral researcher @University of Oulu 🧠PhD in psychology

Posts by Collection

publications

Automatic processing of changes in facial emotions in dysphoria: A magnetoencephalography study

Published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2018

In this paper, we used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to record automatic brain responses to happy and sad faces in dysphoric and control participants. Stimuli were presented in a passive oddball condition, which allowed potential negative bias in dysphoria at different stages of face processing (M100, M170, and M300) and alterations of change detection (visual mismatch negativity, vMMN) to be investigated. The magnetic counterpart of the vMMN was elicited at all stages of face processing, indexing automatic deviance detection in facial emotions. The M170 amplitude was modulated by emotion, response amplitudes being larger for sad faces than happy faces. Group differences were found for the M300, and they were indexed by two different interaction effects. At the left occipital region of interest, the dysphoric group had larger amplitudes for sad than happy deviant faces, reflecting negative bias in deviance detection, which was not found in the control group. On the other hand, the dysphoric group showed no vMMN to changes in facial emotions, while the vMMN was observed in the control group at the right occipital region of interest. Our results indicate that there is a negative bias in automatic visual deviance detection, but also a general change detection deficit in dysphoria.

The impact of visual working memory capacity on the filtering efficiency of emotional face distractors

Published in Biological Psychology, 2018

In this paper, an event-related potential called contralateral delay activity (CDA) was applied to measure the filtering efficiency of happy, angry and neutral faces from visual working memory (VWM). The results showed that VWM capacity affected filtering of emotional faces during a VWM task. Individuals with high capacity were not distracted by emotional facial distractors. In contrast, the low-capacity group failed in filtering the neutral and angry face distractors, while the filtering was efficient for the happy face distractors. The results indicate that potentially threatening faces are particularly difficult to filter if VWM capacity is limited.

Attentional bias processing mechanism of emotional faces: anger and happiness superiority effects

Published in Acta physiologica Sinica, 2019

In this paper, the behavioral and neuroscience studies of anger and happiness superiority effects are reviewed.By comparatively integrating the previous published results, we highlight that the future studies should further control the experimental materials and procedures, and investigate the processing mechanism of anger and happiness superiority effects by combining cognitive neurobiology means to resolve the disputes (in Chinese with English abstract).

Efficient filtering of sad and fearful faces from working memory in dysphoria

Published in Journal 1, 2020

In this paper, we tested whether task-irrelevant sad and fearful faces are differently stored by dysphoric (elevated amount of depressive symptoms) and control participants who performed a visual working memory (VWM) task related to objects’ colors. We found that even if the groups differ neither in their VWM capacity, nor behavioral distractibility, they differed in filtering ability as indexed by the contralateral delay activity, a specific index for the maintenance phase of the VWM. Control participants unnecessarily stored fearful faces in memory, but they were able to filter sad faces, suggesting that specifically threatening faces are difficult to filter from VWM in healthy individuals. Dysphoric participants filtered both fearful and sad face distractors efficiently. Thus, depression-related attentional bias toward sad faces, if existing here, seems not to result in unnecessary storage of sad faces. Our results suggest a threat-related filtering difficulty and unexpected lack of this difficulty in negative face filtering in participants with depression symptoms.

Individual differences in working memory capacity are unrelated to the magnitudes of retrocue benefits

Published in Scientific Reports, 2021

In this paper, we explored individual differences in the magnitudes of object- and dimension-based retrocue benefit (RCB) and their relationships with visual working memory (VWM) capacity. We confirmed that both object- and dimension-based retrocues could improve VWM performance. We also found a significant positive correlation between the magnitudes of object- and dimension-based RCB indexes, suggesting a partly overlapping mechanism between the use of object- and dimension-based retrocues. However, our results provided no evidence for a correlation between VWM capacity and the magnitudes of the object- or dimension-based RCBs. Although inadequate attention control is usually assumed to be associated with VWM capacity, the results suggest that the internal attention mechanism for using retrocues in VWM retention is independent of VWM capacity.

Magnetoencephalography responses to unpredictable and predictable rare somatosensory stimuli in healthy adult humans.

Published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2021

In this paper, we investigated how the brain responds to unpredictable and predictable rare events. Magnetoencephalography responses were measured in adults frequently presented with somatosensory stimuli (FRE) that were occasionally replaced by two consecutively presented rare stimuli [unpredictable rare stimulus (UR) and predictable rare stimulus (PR)].The results linked the early component M55, but not M150 to prediction error signals. Our findings highlight the need for disentangling prediction error and rareness-related effects in future studies investigating prediction error signals.

Negative and Positive Bias for Emotional Faces: Evidence from the Attention and Working Memory Paradigms

Published in Neural Plasticity, 2021

In this paper, we compare previous controversial results from behavioral and neuroscience studies using Change Detection and Visual Search paradigms. We suggest three possible contributing factors that have significant impacts on the contradictory conclusions regarding different emotional bias effects; these factors are stimulus choice, experimental setting, and cognitive process. We also propose new research directions and guidelines for future studies.