The processing of fearful facial expressions is prioritized by the human brain. This priority is maintained across various information processing stages as evident in early, intermediate and late components of event-related brain potentials (ERP). However, emotional modulations are inconsistently reported for these different processing stages. In this preregistered study, we investigated how feature-based attention differentially affects ERPs to fearful and neutral faces in 40 participants. The tasks required participants to discriminate either the orientation of lines overlaid onto the face, the sex of the face, or the face’s emotional expression, increasing attention to emotion-related features. We found main effects of emotion for the N170, EPN and LPP. While N170 emotional modulations were task-independent, interactions of emotion and task were observed for the EPN and LPP. While EPN emotion effects were found in the sex and emotion tasks, the LPP emotion effect was mainly driven by the emotion task. This study shows that early responses to fearful faces are task-independent (N170) and likely based on low-level and configural information, while during later processing stages, attention to the face (EPN) or—more specifically—to the face’s emotional expression (LPP) is crucial for reliable amplified processing of emotional faces.

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