Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge MA, USA.
Front Integr Neurosci. 2012 Feb 29;6:9. doi: 10.3389/fnint.2012.00009. eCollection 2012.
A number of recent behavioral studies have shown that emotional expressions are differently perceived depending on the race of a face, and that perception of race cues is influenced by emotional expressions. However, neural processes related to the perception of invariant cues that indicate the identity of a face (such as race) are often described to proceed independently of processes related to the perception of cues that can vary over time (such as emotion). Using a visual face adaptation paradigm, we tested whether these behavioral interactions between emotion and race also reflect interdependent neural representation of emotion and race. We compared visual emotion aftereffects when the adapting face and ambiguous test face differed in race or not. Emotion aftereffects were much smaller in different race (DR) trials than same race (SR) trials, indicating that the neural representation of a facial expression is significantly different depending on whether the emotional face is black or white. It thus seems that invariable cues such as race interact with variable face cues such as emotion not just at a response level, but also at the level of perception and neural representation.
一些最近的行为研究表明，情绪表达会因面孔的种族而有所不同，并且对面孔种族线索的感知会受到情绪表达的影响。然而，与感知不变线索（例如种族）相关的神经过程通常被描述为独立于与感知随时间变化的线索（例如情绪）相关的过程。使用视觉面部适应范式，我们测试了情绪和种族之间的这些行为相互作用是否也反映了情绪和种族的相互依存的神经表示。我们比较了适应面孔和模棱两可的测试面孔在种族上不同或相同时的视觉情绪后效。在不同种族（DR）试验中，情绪后效比同种族（SR）试验小得多，这表明面部表情的神经表示因情绪面孔是黑色还是白色而有很大差异。因此，不变线索（例如种族）与可变面部线索（例如情绪）之间的相互作用不仅表现在反应水平上，而且还表现在感知和神经表示水平上。
