Ran Guangming, Chen Xu
Department of Psychology, Institute of Education, China West Normal UniversityNanchong, China.
Faculty of Psychology, Southwest UniversityChongqing, China.
Front Psychol. 2017 Jul 25;8:1269. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01269. eCollection 2017.
There is evidence that people with social anxiety show abnormal processing of emotional faces. To investigate the impact of top-down prediction on emotional face processing in social anxiety, brain responses of participants with high and low social anxiety (LSA) were recorded, while they performed a variation of the emotional task, using high temporal resolution event-related potential techniques. Behaviorally, we reported an effect of prediction with higher accuracy for predictable than unpredictable faces. Furthermore, we found that participants with high social anxiety (HSA), but not with LSA, recognized angry faces more accurately than happy faces. For the P100 and P200 components, HSA participants showed enhanced brain activity for angry faces compared to happy faces, suggesting a hypervigilance to angry faces. Importantly, HSA participants exhibited larger N170 amplitudes in the right hemisphere electrodes than LSA participants when they observed unpredictable angry faces, but not when the angry faces were predictable. This probably reflects the top-down prediction improving the deficiency at building a holistic face representation in HSA participants.
有证据表明，社交焦虑症患者在处理情绪面孔时表现异常。为了研究自上而下的预测对社交焦虑中情绪面孔处理的影响，我们使用高时间分辨率的事件相关电位技术，记录了高社交焦虑和低社交焦虑（LSA）参与者在执行情绪任务变体时的大脑反应。在行为方面，我们报告了预测的影响，可预测面孔的识别准确率高于不可预测面孔。此外，我们发现，高社交焦虑（HSA）参与者而非LSA参与者识别愤怒面孔比识别快乐面孔更准确。对于P100和P200成分，HSA参与者在观察愤怒面孔时比观察快乐面孔时表现出更强的大脑活动，表明对愤怒面孔过度警觉。重要的是，当HSA参与者观察不可预测的愤怒面孔时，其右半球电极处的N170波幅比LSA参与者更大，但观察可预测的愤怒面孔时则不然。这可能反映了自上而下的预测改善了HSA参与者在构建整体面孔表征方面的缺陷。
