Department of Psychology, Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany.
Emotion. 2011 Dec;11(6):1397-405. doi: 10.1037/a0024717. Epub 2011 Aug 22.
Extracting meaning from faces to understand other people's mental states and intentions, and to quickly adjust our actions accordingly, is a vital aspect of our social interactions. However, not all emotionally relevant attributes of a person are directly observable from facial features or expressions. In this study event-related brain potentials were used to investigate the effects of affective information about a person's biography that cannot be derived from the visual appearance of the face. Faces of well-known and initially unfamiliar persons with neutral expressions were associated with negative, positive or neutral biographical information. For well-known faces, early event-related brain potential (ERP) modulations induced by emotional knowledge, their scalp topographies and time course strongly resemble the effects frequently reported for emotional facial expressions even though here, access to stored semantic knowledge is required. These results demonstrate that visually opaque affective knowledge is extracted at high speed and modulates sensory processing in the visual cortex.
从面部表情中提取意义，以理解他人的心理状态和意图，并迅速相应地调整我们的行为，这是我们社交互动的一个重要方面。然而，一个人的所有情感相关属性并不都能直接从面部特征或表情中观察到。在这项研究中，我们使用事件相关脑电位来研究不能从面部外观推断出的关于一个人的传记的情感信息的影响。具有中性表情的知名和最初不熟悉的人的面孔与负面、正面或中性的传记信息相关联。对于知名面孔，由情绪知识引起的早期事件相关脑电位 (ERP) 调制、它们的头皮地形图和时间进程与经常报道的情绪面部表情的效果非常相似，尽管这里需要访问存储的语义知识。这些结果表明，视觉不透明的情感知识被高速提取，并调节视觉皮层的感觉处理。
