Department of Psychology, University of Würzburg, Marcusstrasse 9-11, D-97070 Würzburg, Germany.
Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2013 Apr;8(4):438-45. doi: 10.1093/scan/nss013. Epub 2012 Jan 28.
Perception and evaluation of facial expressions are known to be heavily modulated by emotional features of contextual information. Such contextual effects, however, might also be driven by non-emotional aspects of contextual information, an interaction of emotional and non-emotional factors, and by the observers' inherent traits. Therefore, we sought to assess whether contextual information about self-reference in addition to information about valence influences the evaluation and neural processing of neutral faces. Furthermore, we investigated whether social anxiety moderates these effects. In the present functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, participants viewed neutral facial expressions preceded by a contextual sentence conveying either positive or negative evaluations about the participant or about somebody else. Contextual influences were reflected in rating and fMRI measures, with strong effects of self-reference on brain activity in the medial prefrontal cortex and right fusiform gyrus. Additionally, social anxiety strongly affected the response to faces conveying negative, self-related evaluations as revealed by the participants' rating patterns and brain activity in cortical midline structures and regions of interest in the left and right middle frontal gyrus. These results suggest that face perception and processing are highly individual processes influenced by emotional and non-emotional aspects of contextual information and further modulated by individual personality traits.
面部表情的感知和评估被认为受到上下文信息中情绪特征的强烈调节。然而，这种上下文效应也可能是由上下文信息的非情绪方面驱动的，是情绪和非情绪因素的相互作用，以及观察者的固有特征。因此，我们试图评估自我参照的上下文信息除了关于效价的信息外，是否会影响中性面孔的评估和神经处理。此外，我们还研究了社交焦虑是否会调节这些影响。在本功能磁共振成像 (fMRI) 研究中，参与者观看了中性面部表情，之前是一句传达对参与者或他人的积极或消极评价的上下文句子。上下文的影响反映在评分和 fMRI 测量中，自我参照对中前额叶皮层和右侧梭状回的大脑活动有强烈影响。此外，社交焦虑强烈影响了对传达负面、与自我相关的评价的面孔的反应，这从参与者的评分模式和皮质中线结构以及左、右中额回的感兴趣区域的大脑活动中可以看出。这些结果表明，面部感知和处理是高度个体化的过程，受到上下文信息的情绪和非情绪方面的影响，并进一步受到个体个性特征的调节。
