Stability and change in emotional processing across development: A 6-year longitudinal investigation using event-related potentials

ERPs reveal the temporal dynamics of emotional processing and are easily assessed in children. Yet, little longitudinal research has examined ERPs sensitive to emotion across development. We aimed to systematically identify timing and spatial distributions of ERPs sensitive to emotion in a longitudinal sample of youth (N = 62) using principal component analysis (PCA) and evaluate stability and change in emotional responses across development. Participants completed an emotional interrupt paradigm in childhood (M-age = 9.38, SD = 0.42), early adolescence (M-age = 13.03, SD = 0.24), and midadolescence (M-age = 15.16, SD = 0.17). ERPs were recorded to unpleasant, pleasant, and neutral images. Participants were instructed to respond to a target while viewing images. Two components sensitive to emotion emerged across development: P300/early late positive potential (LPP) and late LPP. The P300/early LPP component was characterized by an enhanced positivity for unpleasant compared to pleasant and neutral images. The late LPP was enhanced for both unpleasant and pleasant compared to neutral images, and more positive for unpleasant compared to pleasant images. The components showed moderate to strong stability. Overall LPP magnitude decreased from childhood into adolescence. There was a developmental shift in distributions from occipital sites in childhood to centroparietal sites in midadolescence. Results support use of PCA to inform scoring windows and electrode selection. The shift in distribution may reflect developmental focalization in underlying neural circuitry. Future work is needed using multimodal approaches to further understand the relationship between ERPs and changes in neural circuitry across development.