An ERP study on the time course of emotional face processing

TLDR

The study used event‑related brain potentials to investigate the time course of facial expression processing in human subjects viewing fearful and neutral faces. Event‑related brain potentials were recorded while subjects watched photographs of fearful and neutral faces to examine the temporal dynamics of expression processing. Upright fearful faces produced a frontocentral positivity at ~120 ms and a sustained positivity after 250 ms, while inverted faces showed delayed and reduced effects; the N170 component was unaffected by expression, indicating that emotional analysis and structural face encoding occur in parallel, possibly reflecting rapid prefrontal activation.

Abstract

Using event-related brain potentials (ERPs), we investigated the time course of facial expression processing in human subjects watching photographs of fearful and neutral faces. Upright fearful faces elicited a frontocentral positivity within 120 ms after stimulus presentation, which was followed by a broadly distributed sustained positivity beyond 250 ms post-stimulus. Emotional expression effects were delayed and attenuated when faces were inverted. In contrast, the face-specific N170 component was completely unaffected by facial expression. We conclude that emotional expression analysis and the structural encoding of faces are parallel processes. Early emotional ERP modulations may reflect the rapid activation of prefrontal areas involved in the analysis of facial expression.