EEG alpha and cortical inhibition in affective attention

• Develops inhibitory accounts of affective attention phenomena.
• Posterior alpha from 350 to 550 may reflect inhibition by affective attention.
• Proposes hypotheses for future research of alpha activity in affective neuroscience.

Recent progress in cognitive neuroscience suggests that alpha activity may reflect selective cortical inhibition involved in signal amplification, rather than neural idling. Unfortunately, these theoretical advances remain largely ignored in affective neuroscience. To address this limitation the present paper proposes a novel research avenue aimed at using alpha to elucidate cortical inhibitory mechanisms involved in affective processes. The proposal is illustrated by developing inhibitory accounts of affective attention and affective tuning phenomena. The emergent predictions were tested using event-related perturbations from 73 students evaluating affective and nonaffective aspects of five types of emotional images. The results revealed that upper alpha power was increased by affective content in general and aversive stimuli in particular from 350 ms at posterior and from 575 ms at central sites. The evaluation task interacted with affective content only at a liberal statistical significance level in late posterior alpha. These results are generally in line with the proposed inhibitory accounts of affective attention and tuning, although the evidence is preliminary rather than conclusive. As confirmation of functional origins of alpha in affect remains beyond the scope of a single study, this paper aims to inspire further extrapolation of the inhibitory account of alpha within affective neuroscience.