Neural activities for negative priming with affective stimuli: An fMRI study

Negative priming refers to the slowing down in reaction time to a stimulus that is either the same as, or related to, a distracting stimulus that has been ignored by people in an immediately preceding trial. It can be used as an index to examine the extent to which people are able to disengage attention or even ignore a distracting stimulus. In this fMRI study, with healthy Mandarin-speaking Chinese participants, we replicated the basic negative priming effect with affectively neutral words. Negative priming was associated with increased activities in the anterior cingulate cortex and the insula, a result that supports the inhibition account of negative priming. We observed that the negative priming effect was attenuated by negative affective words, relative to neutral words, suggesting that subjects’ inhibition of negative information was compromised. Such attenuation of negative priming by negative affective words was associated with increased activities in the ventrolateral and medial frontal regions, the hippocampus, and supplementary motor areas. These observations indicate that specific frontal and subcortical regions take part in attention orientation toward negative-affect information.