Key Laboratory of Brain, Cognition and Education Sciences, Ministry of Education, School of Psychology, Center for Studies of Psychological Application, And Guangdong Key Laboratory of Mental Health and Cognitive Science, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, China; Department of Psychology, Ningbo University, Ningbo, China.
Department of Psychology, Ningbo University, Ningbo, China.
Neuropsychologia. 2022 Sep 9;174:108345. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2022.108345. Epub 2022 Aug 6.
Emotion perception, the ability to detect and categorize the emotions of others, is an important component of social competence. The basic emotion theory and constructed emotion theory remain controversial over the role of emotional semantic information in the processing of facial expressions. In the present study, in order to explore the mechanism of emotional semantic information in different processing stages of facial expressions, we used the ERPs to investigate the effects of emotion-label words (e.g., happy, disgusted) and emotion-laden words (e.g., flower, maggot) on the perception of happy and disgusted faces. The results showed that disgusted faces were more susceptible to emotion words, and there were differences between word types and consistency conditions in the N170 component. More importantly, disgusted faces showed a significant N400 effect in the emotion-label words condition, that is, the amplitude in the emotion inconsistent condition was negative compared with that in the emotion consistent condition. The processing of happy faces was not significantly affected by the emotional information of words, and no significant effects related to consistency or to word types were found. These results found that disgusted faces exhibited emotional semantic conflict in the inconsistent emotion-label words condition, suggesting that emotion words moderated the perception of disgusted faces, supporting the hypothesis that emotional semantic information influenced the perception of facial expressions.
情绪感知是指察觉和分类他人情绪的能力，是社交能力的重要组成部分。基本情绪理论和构建情绪理论在情绪语义信息对面部表情加工的作用上仍存在争议。在本研究中，为了探讨情绪语义信息在面部表情不同加工阶段的作用机制，我们使用 ERP 技术考察了情绪标签词（如高兴、厌恶）和情绪承载词（如花、蛆）对面部表情感知的影响。结果表明，厌恶表情对面部表情感知更为敏感，且在 N170 成分上存在词类和一致性条件的差异。更为重要的是，在情绪标签词条件下，厌恶表情诱发了显著的 N400 效应，即情绪不一致条件下的振幅为负，而情绪一致条件下的振幅为正。愉快表情的加工不受词的情绪信息影响，未发现一致性或词类相关的显著效应。这些结果发现，在情绪标签词不一致条件下，厌恶表情表现出情绪语义冲突，表明情绪词调节了对厌恶表情的感知，支持了情绪语义信息影响面部表情感知的假设。
