When Faces Signal Danger: Event-Related Potentials to Emotional Facial Expressions in Animal Phobics

Abstract

Attentional bias research indicates that specific phobics prioritize the processing of disorder-relevant stimuli, although the time course of attentional allocation to the phobic threat remains unclear. The present study employed event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate whether a processing bias also exists towards specific facial expressions that are able to signal potential phobic cues in the environment. Fifteen women with snake phobia and 15 healthy controls performed an attention-shifting task in which angry, fearful, disgusted and neutral faces were presented as emotional cues. ERP to facial expressions and reaction times to target stimuli were collected during the task. The P200 amplitude was significantly lower in phobics than in controls, specifically in response to facial expressions of fear and disgust. Such reduction in cortical activity may reflect reduced processing associated with rapid cognitive avoidance. Such an avoidance response would not be determined by the threat value of the face stimuli per se, but rather by the ability of fearful and disgusted faces to avert attention by signaling a possible phobic threat in the surrounding area. In addition, phobics showed relatively greater positivity to negative than neutral facial expressions in the later processing stages, indicating a general hypervigilant processing mode.

Kin rejection: social signals, neural response and perceived distress during social exclusion

“…Due to the temporal nature of the P2 and the discrepancies observed between kin and stranger rejection, our results suggest that this event is processed rapidly, in less than a quarter of a second. Furthermore, greater distress was associated with a smaller P2 peak, in line with research showing a negative correlation with this peak and fear states (Lyby, Aslaksen & Flaten, ; Sarlo & Munafo, ). While a large P2 peak may suggest greater responsiveness to external cues, the smaller P2 peak for more distressed participants could reflect greater disengagement from external events (throws) for these subjects or possibly greater avoidance.…”

Facial Affect Recognition Performance and Event-Related Potentials in Violent and Non-Violent Schizophrenia Patients

“…Images rated as increasingly more arousing than neutral evoke increasingly larger ERP amplitudes [42]. A similar effect of amplitude amplification in ERPs to emotional facial expressions was found for phobic patients compared to healthy controls and was interpreted as indicating a general hypervigilant processing mode [43]. Therefore, the significantly larger N250 amplitudes of FOS may reflect a higher arousal evoked by emotional faces.…”

Vocal emotions influence verbal memory: Neural correlates and interindividual differences

“…In contrast, reports of a P200 modulation for these stimuli are rare (Eimer & Holmes, 2007;Herbert, Kissler, Junghöfer, Peyk & Rockstroh 2006). Moreover, unlike the voice findings, visual P200 modulations do not show consistently across a range of emotions, and sometimes they may even entail an emotioninduced amplitude reduction (Sarlo & Munafò, 2010). Finally, research using environmental sounds produced by everyday events or objects has failed to reveal ERP amplitude differences within the P200 time range for neutral and intensitymatched unpleasant sounds (Thierry & Roberts, 2007).…”