Department of Psychology, University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany.
Psychophysiology. 2023 Oct;60(10):e14325. doi: 10.1111/psyp.14325. Epub 2023 May 10.
Event-related potential studies using affective words have indicated that selective attention to valence can increase affective discrimination at early perceptual stages. This effect most likely relies on neural associations between perceptual features of a stimulus and its affective value. Similar to words, emotional expressions in human faces are linked to specific visual elements. Therefore, selectively attending to a given emotion should allow for the preactivation of neural networks coding for the emotion and associated first-order visual elements, leading to enhanced early processing of faces expressing the attended emotion. To investigate this, we employed an expression detection task (N = 65). Fearful, happy, and neutral faces were randomly presented in three blocks while participants were instructed to respond only to one predefined target level of expression in each block. Reaction times were the fastest for happy target faces, which was accompanied by an increased occipital P1 for happy compared with fearful faces. The N170 yielded an arousal effect (emotional > neutral) while both components were not modulated by target status. In contrast, the early posterior negativity (EPN) arousal effect tended to be larger for target compared with nontarget faces. The late positive potential (LPP) revealed large effects of status and expression as well as an interaction driven by an increased LPP specifically for nontarget fearful faces. These findings tentatively indicate that selective attention to facial affect may enhance early emotional processing (EPN) even though further research is needed. Moreover, late controlled processing of facial emotions appears to involve a negativity bias.
使用情感词的事件相关电位研究表明，对效价的选择性注意可以在早期感知阶段增加情感辨别。这种效应很可能依赖于刺激的感知特征与其情感价值之间的神经关联。与单词类似，人类面部的情绪表达与特定的视觉元素相关联。因此，选择性地关注给定的情绪应该允许对编码情绪和相关一阶视觉元素的神经网络进行预激活，从而增强对表达所关注情绪的面孔的早期处理。为了研究这一点，我们采用了表情检测任务（N=65）。恐惧、快乐和中性面孔在三个块中随机呈现，而参与者被指示在每个块中仅对一个预定义的目标表情水平做出反应。对于快乐目标面孔，反应时间最快，并且与恐惧面孔相比，快乐面孔的枕部 P1 增加。N170 产生了唤醒效应（情绪>中性），而这两个成分不受目标状态的调节。相比之下，早期后负波（EPN）的唤醒效应对于目标面孔相对于非目标面孔往往更大。晚期正电位（LPP）揭示了状态和表情的大效应，以及由非目标恐惧面孔的 LPP 特异性增加驱动的交互作用。这些发现初步表明，选择性地关注面部情感可能会增强早期情感处理（EPN），尽管需要进一步研究。此外，面部情绪的晚期控制处理似乎涉及负性偏差。
