Zhang Ming, Fu Qiufang, Chen Yu-Hsin, Fu Xiaolan
State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
Department of Psychology, Dalian Medical University, Dalian, China.
Psych J. 2018 Mar;7(1):13-24. doi: 10.1002/pchj.196. Epub 2018 Jan 3.
Micro-expression recognition is influenced by emotional contexts at the behavioral level. It is found that the recognition for micro-expressions is poorer following a negative context compared to the recognition following a neutral context. However, it remains unclear whether the modulation takes place in the early or later stage of the processing of micro-expressions as reflected in event-related potentials (ERPs). Using synthesized micro-expressions in this study, we investigated how emotional context modulates the ERP components that are elicited by micro-expressions. We observed that, compared to neutral contexts, negative and positive contexts elicited more positive amplitude trends for processing the subsequent target micro-expressions, and more positive P1 and N170 effects were elicited by target micro-expressions following negative and positive contexts compared to those following neutral contexts. Moreover, there were larger P1 effects elicited by the target micro-expressions when the context and target expressions were incongruent compared to when they were congruent. Our findings provide new ERP evidence to indicate that emotional contexts modulate micro-expression processing, and that the modulation of emotional contexts takes place at the early stage of facial-expression processing.
微表情识别在行为层面受到情绪背景的影响。研究发现，与中性背景相比，在负面背景下对微表情的识别较差。然而，事件相关电位（ERP）所反映的微表情加工过程中，这种调节是发生在早期还是后期仍不清楚。在本研究中，我们使用合成微表情，研究了情绪背景如何调节由微表情引发的ERP成分。我们观察到，与中性背景相比，负面和正面背景在处理后续目标微表情时引发了更正向的振幅趋势，并且与中性背景相比，负面和正面背景下的目标微表情引发了更正向的P1和N170效应。此外，当背景和目标表情不一致时，目标微表情引发的P1效应比它们一致时更大。我们的研究结果提供了新的ERP证据，表明情绪背景调节微表情加工，并且情绪背景的调节发生在面部表情加工的早期阶段。
