Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jun 27, 2026
Measurement of Fronto-limbic Activity Using an Emotional Oddball Task in Children with Familial High Risk for Schizophrenia
Published on: December 2, 2015
Longitudinal changes in MMN and P3 during emotional processing in adolescents who engage in NSSI: a 12-week follow-up
Jianqiang Bi1, Pei Liu2, Zhenpeng Xue2
1Department of Psychiatry, First Affiliated Hospital of Jinan University, Guangzhou, China.
Background:
Adolescents with nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI) often show deficits in negative emotion regulation. Within the dual-process framework of implicit and explicit emotion regulation, these deficits may reflect an automatic bias toward negative information and insufficient later-stage controlled regulation. Whether routine clinical intervention modifies both early automatic detection and later controlled evaluation of negative emotional information remains unclear.
Methods:
In a longitudinal sample of 32 adolescents with NSSI, we examined changes in mismatch negativity (MMN) and P3 components elicited during an emotional oddball task before and after a 12-week clinical intervention. At baseline and Week 12, participants completed clinical assessments and a two-choice visual emotional oddball task containing neutral standards and negative, positive, and neutral deviants while EEG was recorded. MMN (Fz, 240-300 ms) and P3 (Pz, 450-650 ms) amplitudes were derived from deviant-minus-standard difference waves, indexing pre-attentive deviance detection and controlled evaluation, respectively.
Results:
The intervention selectively modulated neurocognitive processing of negative deviants. Self-injury ideation days (p = .036) and NSSI episode frequency (p = .007) both significantly decreased. MMN absolute amplitude to negative stimuli decreased significantly (p = .047), suggesting attenuated automatic salience detection, whereas P3 amplitude to negative stimuli increased significantly (p = .027), indicating enhanced controlled evaluation. Responses to positive and neutral conditions and behavioural performance remained stable. No baseline ERP-clinical correlations emerged; post-intervention, NSSI ideation days correlated with positive P3 (r = 0.380, p = .032), and episode frequency with neutral P3 (r = 0.461, p = .008).
Conclusions:
A 12-week intervention may attenuate automatic negative bias while enhancing controlled evaluative processing in adolescents with NSSI, consistent with the implicit-explicit framework. MMN and P3 may serve as candidate biomarkers and temporally sensitive tools for tracking intervention response when behavioural performance is stable.
