Savoring is a present-focused emotion regulation strategy aimed at enhancing positive affect. Previous research has shown that savoring can increase the emotional processing of pleasant stimuli, as reflected in larger late positive potential (LPP) amplitudes for savored compared to passively viewed images. However, most savoring studies have examined neural responses during the task itself, leaving it unclear whether these effects generalize to novel stimuli. Moreover, no study has assessed baseline LPP responses to pleasant stimuli prior to the regulation session, accounting for interindividual differences in motivated attention. The present study addressed these gaps by examining whether a single savoring session – compared to a control passive viewing task – enhanced LPP amplitude in response to pleasant images and whether such effects generalized to novel stimuli. Sixty-one young adults (44 females) completed an electroencephalography (EEG) recording across three phases: a pre-session LPP assessment (T 0), an experimental session – savoring or control passive viewing – and a post-session LPP assessment (T 1). Results showed a significantly larger LPP for pleasant than neutral images, with this effect more pronounced during the post-session LPP assessment (T 1), independent of the experimental condition. Moreover, during the savoring session, LPP was larger for view than savor trials, suggesting that the selection of highly arousing stimuli may have left limited room for savoring to enhance emotional processing. Overall, these findings suggest that a single savoring session offers no clear advantage over simple exposure to highly arousing pleasant stimuli in healthy adults, pointing the need to clarify when savoring can meaningfully influence emotional processing.

Emotional visual stimuli presented in laboratory settings reliably elicit prototypical patterns of subjective and psychophysiological responses. These responses likely serve distinct functions and reflect the engagement of appetitive and defensive motivational systems, making them a valuable tool for examining emotional processing in both healthy individuals and those with mental disorders. Event-related potentials (ERPs), such as the Cue-P300, Stimulus Preceding Negativity (SPN), and Late Positive Potential (LPP), provide valuable temporal insight into anticipatory and elaborative stages of emotional processing. While these components have been extensively studied using the International Affective Picture System (IAPS), concerns about its dated content have prompted the development of alternative image sets, such as the Open Affective Standardized Image Set (OASIS). Yet, ERP responses to OASIS images remain underexplored. This study aimed to compare psychophysiological and subjective responses elicited by images from the IAPS and OASIS databases, matched for valence and arousal. Twenty-two participants completed two emotional S1–S2 tasks—one using IAPS images and the other using OASIS images—while undergoing EEG recording. In each task, a cue (S1) predicted the valence (pleasant, neutral, unpleasant) of an upcoming emotional image (S2). The SPN, Cue-P300 and the LPP components were analyzed. Results revealed that unpleasant OASIS images elicited larger Cue-P300 amplitudes than unpleasant IAPS images, and both pleasant and unpleasant OASIS images evoked greater SPN amplitudes compared to their IAPS counterparts. Conversely, only IAPS images produced a robust LPP modulation, with significantly larger amplitudes for emotional versus neutral stimuli; this pattern was not observed for OASIS images. Taken together, these findings highlight the importance of stimulus selection in studies investigating emotional processing, suggesting that OASIS images may be particularly well-suited for investigating anticipatory mechanisms, whereas IAPS images remain more effective for examining affective elaboration.

Social support is a key predictor of well-being, but not everyone experiences mental health benefits from receiving it. However, given that a growing number of interventions are based on social support, it is crucial to identify features that make individuals more likely to benefit from social ties. Emerging evidence suggests that neural responses to positive social feedback (i.e., social reward) might relate to individual differences in social functioning, but potential mechanisms linking these neural responses to psychological outcomes are yet unclear. This study examined whether neural correlates of social reward processing, indexed by the reward positivity (RewP), relate to individuals’ affective experience following self-reported real-world positive social support events. To this aim, 193 university students (71 % females) underwent an EEG assessment during the Island Getaway task and completed a 10-day ecological momentary assessment where participants reported their positive and negative affect (PA, NA) nine times a day and the count of daily positive and negative events. Experiencing a higher number of social support positive events was associated with higher PA. The RewP moderated this association, such that individuals with greater neural response to social feedback at baseline had a more positive association between social support positive events count and PA. Individual differences in the RewP to social feedback might be one indicator of the likelihood of experiencing positive affect when receiving social support.