Emotional expression boosts early visual processing of the face: ERP recording and its decomposition by independent component analysis

Abstract

To investigate the hypothesis that early visual processing of stimuli might be boosted by signals of emotionality, we analyzed event related potentials (ERPs) of twelve right-handed normal subjects. Gray-scale still images of faces with emotional (fearful and happy) or neutral expressions were presented randomly while the subjects performed gender discrimination of the faces. The results demonstrated that the faces with emotion (both fear and happiness) elicited a larger negative peak at about 270 ms (N270) over the posterior temporal areas, covering a broad range of posterior visual areas. The result of independent component analysis (ICA) on the ERP data suggested that this posterior N270 had a synchronized positive activity at the frontal-midline electrode. These findings confirm that the emotional signal boosts early visual processing of the stimuli. This enhanced activity might be implemented by the amygdalar re-entrant projections.

Neural processing of fearful and happy facial expressions during emotion-relevant and emotion-irrelevant tasks: A fixation-to-feature approach

“…The EPN is enhanced for emotional relative to neutral stimuli, for both verbal and non-verbal material including faces (Schacht & Sommer, 2009;Schupp Markus, Weike, & Hamm, 2003;Schupp et al, 2004;Rellecke et al, 2013). Like the N170, the EPN is commonly reported to be most pronounced for threatrelated expressions (i.e., fearful and angry) compared to neutral and happy expressions (e.g., Schupp et al, 2004;Rellecke, Palazova, Sommer, & Schacht, 2011), although there are reports of a general emotion effect with more negative amplitudes for both threatening and happy expressions compared to neutral expressions (Sato et al, 2001;Schupp, Flaisch, Stockburger, & Junghöfer, 2006). Therefore this effect has been suggested to reflect enhanced processing of emotionally salient faces in general or of threatening faces in particular (i.e., fearful and angry) in temporo-occipital areas possibly including occipital gyrus, fusiform gyrus and Superior Temporal Sulcus regions (Schupp et al, 2004).…”

“…A growing number of studies have now reported enhanced P1 amplitude for fearful relative to neutral faces (e.g., Batty & Taylor, 2003;Pourtois, Grandjean, Sander, & Vuilleumier, 2004;Sato, Kochiyama, Yoshikawa & Matsumura, 2001;Smith, Weinberg, Moran, & Jajcak, 2013;Wijers & Banis, 2012). It has been suggested that early occipito-temporal visual areas could be activated to a larger extent by intrinsically salient, threat-related stimuli, via possible projections from a subcortical route involving the amygdala (Vuilleumier & Pourtois, 2007).…”

Something always sticks? how emotional language modulates neural processes involved in face encoding and recognition memory

“…Following the N1, the early posterior negativity (EPN), a relative negativity for emotional compared to neutral stimuli occurs between 200-300 ms at occipito-temporal sites. The EPN is increased for anxious or angry facial expressions compared to happy or neutral ones (Sato et al 2001;Schupp et al 2004b). Furthermore, during emotional face processing a late positive potential (LPP) appears over centro-parietal regions.…”

Enhanced extrastriate visual response to bandpass spatial frequency filtered fearful faces: Time course and topographic evoked‐potentials mapping

“…In particular, negative facial expressions have been found to modulate the amplitude (sometimes the latency, see Williams et al [2004]) of various evoked potential components over a large temporal window following face onset, from early perceptual responses [Ashley et al, 2004, Batty andTaylor, 2003;Halgren et al, 2000;Pizzagalli et al, 1999Pizzagalli et al, , 2002 through the face-selective N170 [Campanella et al, 2002] or other early occipito-temporal negativity [Sato et al, 2001;Schupp et al, 2004], to the amodal P3 wave [Carretie and Iglesias, 1995;Meinhardt and Pekrun, 2003;Liddell et al, 2004] and other late sustained modulations [Krolak-Salmon et al, 2001]. …”