Department of Psychiatry, University of Michigan Health System, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA.
Department of Psychology, Shepherd University, Shepherdstown, West Virginia, USA.
Psychophysiology. 2018 Apr;55(4). doi: 10.1111/psyp.13012. Epub 2017 Sep 26.
Affective faces are important stimuli with relevance to healthy and abnormal social and affective information processing. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of brief presentations of affective faces on attention and emotional state across the time course of stimulus processing, as indexed by startle eyeblink response modulation. Healthy adults were presented with happy, neutral, and disgusted male and female faces that were backward masked by neutral faces. Startle responses were elicited at 300, 800, and 3,500 ms following stimulus presentation to probe early and late startle eyeblink modulation, indicative of attention allocation and emotional state, respectively. Results revealed that, at 300 ms, both face expression and face gender modulated startle eyeblink response, suggesting that more attention was allocated to masked happy compared to disgusted female faces, and masked disgusted compared to neutral male faces. There were no effects of either face expression or face gender on startle modulation at 800 ms. At 3,500 ms, target face expression did not modulate startle, but male faces elicited larger startle responses than female faces, indicative of a more negative emotional state. These findings provide a systematic investigation of attention and emotion modulation by brief affective faces across the time course of stimulus processing.
情感面孔是与健康和异常的社会及情感信息处理相关的重要刺激物。本研究旨在探讨在刺激处理的时程内，即通过眨眼反射起始潜伏期的调制，短暂呈现情感面孔对面孔注意和情绪状态的影响。健康成年人观看了被中性面孔掩蔽的快乐、中性和厌恶的男性和女性面孔。在刺激呈现后 300、800 和 3500 毫秒时引出眨眼反射，以探测早期和晚期的眨眼反射调制，分别代表注意分配和情绪状态。结果表明，在 300 毫秒时，面孔表情和面孔性别都调制了眨眼反射，表明与厌恶的女性面孔相比，人们会更多地注意被掩蔽的快乐面孔，与中性的男性面孔相比，人们会更多地注意被掩蔽的厌恶面孔。在 800 毫秒时，既没有面孔表情也没有面孔性别对面孔反射调制产生影响。在 3500 毫秒时，目标面孔表情没有调制眨眼反射，但男性面孔比女性面孔引发了更大的眨眼反射，表明情绪状态更消极。这些发现为我们提供了一个系统的研究，探讨了在刺激处理的时程内，短暂的情感面孔对面孔注意和情绪调节的影响。
