An Eye Tracking and Event-Related Potentials Study With Visual Stimuli for Adolescents Emotional Issues

Psychological issues are common among adolescents, which have a significant impact on their growth and development. However, the underlying neural mechanisms of viewing visual stimuli in adolescents are poorly understood.

This study applied the Chinese version of the DSM-V self-assessment scales to evaluate 73 adolescents' psychological characteristics for depressive and manic emotional issues. Combined with eye-tracking and event-related potential (ERP), we explored the characteristics of their visual attention and neural processing mechanisms while freely viewing positive, dysphoric, threatening and neutral visual stimuli.

Compared to controls, adolescents with depressive emotional tendencies showed more concentrated looking behavior with fixation distribution index than the controls, while adolescents with manic emotional tendencies showed no such trait. ERP data revealed individuals with depressive tendencies showed lower arousal levels toward emotional stimuli in the early stage of cognitive processing (N1 amplitude decreased) and with prolonged reaction time (N1 latency increased) than the control group. We found no significant difference between the manic group and the control group. Furthermore, the depression severity scores of the individuals with depressive tendencies were negatively correlated with the total fixation time toward positive stimuli, were negatively correlated with the fixation distribution index toward threatening stimuli, and were positively correlated with the mean N1 amplitudes while viewing dysphoric stimuli. Also, for the individuals with depressive tendencies, there was a positive correlation between the mean N1 amplitudes and the fixation time on the area of interest (AOI) while viewing dysphoric stimuli. For the individuals with manic tendencies, the manic severity scores of the individuals with manic tendencies were positively correlated with the total fixation time toward the positive stimuli. However, no significant correlations were found between the manic severity scores and N1 amplitudes, and between N1 amplitudes and eye-tracking output variables.

This study proposes the application of eye-tracking and ERP to provide better biological evidence to alter the neural processing of emotional stimuli for adolescents with emotional issues.