Abstract
The processing of fearful facial expressions is prioritized by the human brain. This priority is maintained across various information processing stages as evident in early, intermediate and late components of event-related potentials (ERPs). However, emotional modulations are inconsistently reported for these different processing stages. In this pre-registered study, we investigated how feature-based attention differentially affects ERPs to fearful and neutral faces in 40 participants. The tasks required the participants to discriminate either the orientation of lines overlaid onto the face, the sex of the face or the face’s emotional expression, increasing attention to emotion-related features. We found main effects of emotion for the N170, early posterior negativity (EPN) and late positive potential (LPP). While N170 emotional modulations were task-independent, interactions of emotion and task were observed for the EPN and LPP. While EPN emotion effects were found in the sex and emotion tasks, the LPP emotion effect was mainly driven by the emotion task. This study shows that early responses to fearful faces are task-independent (N170) and likely based on low-level and configural information while during later processing stages, attention to the face (EPN) or—more specifically—to the face’s emotional expression (LPP) is crucial for reliable amplified processing of emotional faces.
Highlights
Emotional facial expressions constitute a significant part of communication as they transfer crucial non-verbal signals to others
Post hoc test showed that compared to the perceptual task, larger emotion effects were found in the sex (P = 0.002) and emotion tasks (P < 0.001), the latter two not differing (P = 0.096)
Post hoc tests show that compared to the perceptual task, larger emotion effects were found in the sex task (P = 0.016) and in the emotion task (P = 0.001), the latter two not differing (P = 0.179)
Summary
Emotional facial expressions constitute a significant part of communication as they transfer crucial non-verbal signals to others. The LPP is hypothesized to reflect the activation of broad occipitoparietal regions (Sabatinelli et al, 2007, 2014; Liu et al, 2012) linked to higher cognition, such as stimulus evaluation and affective labelling (Schupp et al, 2006; Hajcak et al, 2009) Both emotional feedback from the amygdala and top-down signalling from frontoparietal attention networks might synergistically increase the processing of emotional stimuli (Pourtois et al, 2013). A clear picture of task-dependent emotion effects cannot be derived from the literature, and studies are needed which systematically vary task instructions to directly test how neural responses across all relevant time windows depend on the attended feature In this pre-registered study (https://osf.io/qgwzd), we investigated feature-based attention effects on early (P1, N170), midlatency (EPN) and late (LPP) processing stages for fearful vs neutral faces. LPP emotion effects were expected only in the emotion decision task
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