Roberge Amélie, Duncan Justin, Fiset Daniel, Brisson Benoit
Département de Psychologie, Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, Trois-Rivières, QC, Canada.
Département de Psychoéducation et de Psychologie, Université du Québec en Outaouais, Gatineau, QC, Canada.
Front Hum Neurosci. 2019 Nov 8;13:391. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2019.00391. eCollection 2019.
Rapid and accurate processing of potential social threats is paramount to social thriving, and provides a clear evolutionary advantage. Though automatic processing of facial expressions has been assumed for some time, some researchers now question the extent to which this is the case. Here, we provide electrophysiological data from a psychological refractory period (PRP) dual-task paradigm in which participants had to decide whether a target face exhibited a neutral or fearful expression, as overlap with a concurrent auditory tone categorization task was experimentally manipulated. Specifically, we focused on four event-related potentials (ERP) linked to emotional face processing, covering distinct processing stages and topography: the early posterior negativity (EPN), early frontal positivity (EFP), late positive potential (LPP), and also the face-sensitive N170. As expected, there was an emotion modulation of each ERP. Most importantly, there was a significant attenuation of this emotional response proportional to the degree of task overlap for each component, except the N170. In fact, when the central overlap was greatest, this emotion-specific amplitude was statistically null for the EFP and LPP, and only marginally different from zero for the EPN. N170 emotion modulation was, on the other hand, unaffected by central overlap. Thus, our results show that emotion-specific ERPs for three out of four processing stages-i.e., perceptual encoding (EPN), emotion detection (EFP), or content evaluation (LPP)-are attenuated and even eliminated by central resource scarcity. Models assuming automatic processing should be revised to account for these results.
对潜在社会威胁进行快速准确的处理对于社会繁荣至关重要，并具有明显的进化优势。尽管面部表情的自动处理已被假定存在一段时间了，但现在一些研究人员对这种情况的程度提出了质疑。在此，我们提供了来自心理不应期（PRP）双任务范式的电生理数据，在该范式中，参与者必须判断目标面部呈现的是中性表情还是恐惧表情，同时通过实验操纵与并发听觉音调分类任务的重叠情况。具体而言，我们聚焦于与情绪面部处理相关的四种事件相关电位（ERP），涵盖不同的处理阶段和脑电地形图：早期后部负波（EPN）、早期额叶正波（EFP）、晚期正波（LPP），以及对面部敏感的N170。正如预期的那样，每种ERP都存在情绪调制。最重要的是，除N170外，每个成分的这种情绪反应都与任务重叠程度成比例地显著减弱。事实上，当中央重叠最大时，EFP和LPP的这种特定情绪振幅在统计学上为零，而EPN仅略微不同于零。另一方面，N170的情绪调制不受中央重叠的影响。因此，我们的结果表明，四个处理阶段中的三个阶段——即感知编码（EPN）、情绪检测（EFP）或内容评估（LPP）——的特定情绪ERP会因中央资源稀缺而减弱甚至消除。假设自动处理的模型应进行修订以解释这些结果。
