Age-related differences in event-related potentials for early visual processing of emotional faces

Abstract

With advancing age, processing resources are shifted away from negative emotional stimuli and toward positive ones. Here, we explored this 'positivity effect' using event-related potentials (ERPs). Participants identified the presence or absence of a visual probe that appeared over photographs of emotional faces. The ERPs elicited by the onsets of angry, sad, happy and neutral faces were recorded. We examined the frontocentral emotional positivity (FcEP), which is defined as a positive deflection in the waveforms elicited by emotional expressions relative to neutral faces early on in the time course of the ERP. The FcEP is thought to reflect enhanced early processing of emotional expressions. The results show that within the first 130 ms young adults show an FcEP to negative emotional expressions, whereas older adults show an FcEP to positive emotional expressions. These findings provide additional evidence that the age-related positivity effect in emotion processing can be traced to automatic processes that are evident very early in the processing of emotional facial expressions.

Behavioral and neural correlates of visual emotion discrimination and empathy in mild cognitive impairment

“…While young adults recall negative events more easily than neutral events (Negativity bias; [90], older people tend to mainly focus on positive stimuli [91] and the ability to recognize negative facial expressions declines [92][93][94]. This may depend on early automatic and implicit processes of attentional avoidance [95], rather than higher level of cognitive elaboration of the stimulus content [96]. In older adults, this kind of "optimism" is also related to anxiety [97,98], particularly in the perception of emotional threatening faces [91,99].…”

Neural Processing of Emotional Prosody across the Adult Lifespan

“…In a combined functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and event-related potentials (ERP) study by Williams and colleagues [ 7 ], no significant age-related changes in the temporooccipital components emerged, suggesting preservation of emotional facial encoding across lifespan. Using a go/no go task with positive, negative, and neutral facial expressions (task irrelevant stimulation), Hilimire et al [ 8 ] found pronounced early negativity at occipital sites and positivity at frontocentral sites to positive emotions in older adults. In young adults, a similar pattern emerged for negative emotions.…”

“…In young adults, a similar pattern emerged for negative emotions. The authors concluded that aging is characterized by enhanced early processing of positive emotions [ 8 ].…”

Facial identity and emotional expression as predictors during economic decisions

“…At this level, previous research has reported early orientation of attention to low-level facial characteristics (black versus white faces; e.g., Ito & Urland, 2003). Similarly, it has been suggested that these potentials reflect a fast global extraction of salient emotional information before fine-grained face decoding (e.g., Dennis, Malone, & Chen, 2009;Eimer & Holmes, 2002;Hilimire et al, 2014;Pitcher, Walsh, Yovel, & Duchaine, 2007;Pizzagalli et al, 2002;Pourtois, Dan, Grandjean, Sander, & Vuilleumier, 2005).…”

“…The earliest ERP responses to face stimuli appear approximately one hundred milliseconds after stimulus onset at the posterior bilateral P1 and the central N1 (Eimer & Holmes, 2002;Hilimire, Mienaltowski, Blanchard-Fields, & Corballis, 2014;Yang, Gu, Guo, & Qiu, 2011). At this level, previous research has reported early orientation of attention to low-level facial characteristics (black versus white faces; e.g., Ito & Urland, 2003).…”