Event-related brain potential correlates of emotional face processing

By Martin Eimer, A. Holmes. Neuropsychologia, 2006

665 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Results from recent event-related brain potential (ERP) studies investigating brain processes involved in the detection and analyses of emotional facial expression are reviewed. In all experiments, emotional faces were found to trigger an increased ERP positivity relative to neutral faces. The onset of this emotional expression effect was remarkably early, ranging from 120 ms to 180 ms post-stimulus in different experiments where faces were either presented at fixation or laterally, and with or without non-face distractor stimuli. While broadly distributed positive deflections beyond 250 ms post-stimulus have been found in previous studies for non-face stimuli, the early frontocentrally distributed phase of this emotional positivity is most likely face-specific. Similar emotional expression effects were found for six basic emotions, suggesting that these effects are not primarily generated within neural structures specialised for the automatic detection of specific emotions. Expression effects were eliminated when attention was directed away from the location of peripherally presented emotional faces, indicating that they are not linked to pre-attentive emotional processing. When foveal faces were unattended, expression effects were attenuated, but not completely eliminated. It is suggested that these ERP correlates of emotional face processing reflect activity within a neocortical system where representations of emotional content are generated in a task-dependent fashion for the adaptive intentional control of behaviour. Given the early onset of the emotion-specific effects reviewed here, it is likely that this system is activated in parallel with the ongoing evaluation of emotional content in the amygdala and related subcortical brain circuits.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/05c372d88178eb9ab341e68d807091dbcbce57ec

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

Citations in the corpus

Are you always on my mind? A review of how face perception and attention interact. (2007, background): “…appear to have earlier latencies than those to fear in both temporal regions (Batty & Taylor, 2003; Liu et al., 1999) and the amygdala (Liu et al., 1999) and ERPs over frontal regions are no earlier for fearful than other basic expressions (Eimer & Holmes, 2007; Eimer, Holmes, & McGlone, 2003).”
Event-Related Potentials, Emotion, and Emotion Regulation: An Integrative Review (2010, result): “Similar results have been obtained using threatening faces (Schupp, Ohman et al., 2004; Williams et al., 2007; Williams, Palmer, Liddell, Song, & Gordon, 2006) and facial expressions of other emotions (Eimer & Holmes, 2007; Eimer, Holmes, & McGlone, 2003).”
The effects of emotion on attention: A review of attentional processing of emotional information (2010, background): “Other notable neuroscientific approaches yielding interesting data on emotion and attention include psychophysiological and ERP studies (Eimer & Holmes, 2007 ; Palermo & Rhodes, 2007 ; Vuilleumier, 2002 ).”
How brains beware: neural mechanisms of emotional attention. (2005, background): “before any attentional modulation of these cortical responses (from w170 to 300 ms) [ 31 ].”