Insights from ERPs into emotional disorders: An affective neuroscience perspective

Affective neuroscience disposes of complementary imaging tools, some identifying which neural regions are involved in a specific cognitive function, others defining the temporal sequences of these activations with an optimal temporal resolution. The aim of the present manuscript is to show how event-related potentials (ERPs) may help us to enhance our understanding of psychopathological conditions. To do so, three experiments from our laboratory will be presented. An emotional oddball design was used, in which participants are confronted with frequent stimuli (neutral faces) and deviant stimuli (emotional faces) which they have to detect as quickly as possible. These studies address anxiety, the long-term consequences of ecstasy consumption and schizophrenia. Our main purpose is to show that, if previous studies have shown for generalised anxiety disorder, as well as for drug abuse or schizophrenia, P300 alterations, the impaired processes leading to such an identical disturbance are different from one population to the other.