Three stages of facial expression processing: ERP study with rapid serial visual presentation

Abstract

Electrophysiological correlates of the processing facial expressions were investigated in subjects performing the rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task. The peak latencies of the event-related potential (ERP) components P1, vertex positive potential (VPP), and N170 were 165, 240 and 240 ms, respectively. The early anterior N100 and posterior P1 amplitudes elicited by fearful faces were larger than those elicited by happy or neutral faces, a finding which is consistent with the presence of a ‘negativity bias’. The amplitude of the anterior VPP was larger when subjects were processing fearful and happy faces than when they were processing neutral faces; it was similar in response to fearful and happy faces. The late N300 and P300 not only distinguished emotional faces from neutral faces but also differentiated between fearful and happy expressions in lag2. The amplitudes of the N100, VPP, N170, N300, and P300 components and the latency of the P1 component were modulated by attentional resources. Deficient attentional resources resulted in decreased amplitude and increased latency of ERP components. In light of these results, we present a hypothetical model involving three stages of facial expression processing.

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

“…In contrast to several previous studies, we did not find the "threat gist" effect on P1 that is thought to reflect the coarse extraction of fearful information (e.g., Luo et al, 2010;see Vuilleumier & Poutois, 2007 for a review). We also did not reproduce the early leftlateralized fear effect around 80ms reported by Neath and Itier (2015), although the exact reason why remains unknown.…”

“…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). The current view is that the EPN reflects more in depth appraisal of the emotion, some form of semantic stage where the meaning of the emotion is extracted (Luo et al, 2010;Vuilleumier & Pourtois, 2007). Some studies have suggested that the EPN reflects the neural activity related to the processing of the emotion that is superimposed onto the normal processing of the face.…”

“…Clark, Fan, & Hillyard, 1995), this P1 fear effect is thought to reflect a coarse emotion extraction, the "threat gist" (e.g., Luo, Feng, He, Wang, & Lu, 2010;Vuilleumier & Poutois, 2007), that might rely on fast extraction of low spatial frequencies (Vuilleumier, Armony, Driver, & Dolan, 2003). Actual processing of the visual threat would occur later, around or after the N170 (e.g., Luo et al, 2010), the second ERP component studied in facial expression research. However, let's note that this early P1 modulation by emotion is debated as many studies also failed to report modulations of the P1 by facial expressions of emotion (see Vuilleumier & Pourtois, 2007 for a review).…”

Impaired neural processing of dynamic faces in left-onset Parkinson's disease

“…In fact, the ERP literature reports early emotion effects in 22 face perception at a very early point in time, namely in the time window of N1/P1 (e.g., Jetha et al, 23 2012; Luo et al, 2010). Such early emotion effects may occur when stimuli are highly salient, as in the 24 27 case of fear or anger expressions (Adolphs, 2002).…”

The Emotional Content of Faces Interferes with Inhibitory Processing: An Event Related Potential Study

“…VPP is recorded primarily at frontocentral sites between 140 and 180 ms after face presentation in relation to the face structural encoding stage that precedes the processing of emotional recognition (Jeffreys, 1996;Joyce & Rossion, 2005;Rossion et al, 1999;Yuan, Guan, et al, 2011). Differences between emotions and neutral faces (Luo, Feng, et al, 2010), and among different emotions (Williams, Palmer, et al, 2006) have been found in VPP amplitudes.…”