RESEARCH ARTICLE Event-Related Potentials Reveal Preserved Attention Allocation but Impaired Emotion Regulation in Patients with Epilepsy and Comorbid Negative Affect

Patients with epilepsy have a high prevalence of comorbid mood disorders. This study aims to evaluate whether negative affect in epilepsy is associated with dysfunction of emotion regulation. Event-related potentials (ERPs) are used in order to unravel the exact electrophysiological time course and investigate whether a possible dysfunction arises dur-ing early (attention) and/or late (regulation) stages of emotion control. Fifty epileptic patients with (n = 25) versus without (n = 25) comorbid negative affect plus twenty-five matched con-trols were recruited. ERPs were recorded while subjects performed a face- or house-matching task in which fearful, sad or neutral faces were presented either at attended or un-attended spatial locations. Two ERP components were analyzed: the early vertex positive potential (VPP) which is normally enhanced for faces, and the late positive potential (LPP) that is typically larger for emotional stimuli. All participants had larger amplitude of the early face-sensitive VPP for attended faces compared to houses, regardless of their emotional content. By contrast, in patients with negative affect only, the amplitude of the LPP was sig-nificantly increased for unattended negative emotional expressions. These VPP results indi