Abstract
In the current study, electroencephalography (EEG) was recorded simultaneously with facial electromyography (fEMG) to determine whether emotional faces and emotional scenes are processed differently at the neural level. In addition, it was investigated whether these differences can be observed at the behavioural level via spontaneous facial muscle activity. Emotional content of the stimuli did not affect early P1 activity. Emotional faces elicited enhanced amplitudes of the face-sensitive N170 component, while its counterpart, the scene-related N100, was not sensitive to emotional content of scenes. At 220–280ms, the early posterior negativity (EPN) was enhanced only slightly for fearful as compared to neutral or happy faces. However, its amplitudes were significantly enhanced during processing of scenes with positive content, particularly over the right hemisphere. Scenes of positive content also elicited enhanced spontaneous zygomatic activity from 500–750ms onwards, while happy faces elicited no such changes. Contrastingly, both fearful faces and negative scenes elicited enhanced spontaneous corrugator activity at 500–750ms after stimulus onset. However, relative to baseline EMG changes occurred earlier for faces (250ms) than for scenes (500ms) whereas for scenes activity changes were more pronounced over the whole viewing period. Taking into account all effects, the data suggests that emotional facial expressions evoke faster attentional orienting, but weaker affective neural activity and emotional behavioural responses compared to emotional scenes.
Highlights
IntroductionIn emotion research two kinds of stimuli are frequently used: facial expressions (e.g. a smiling or sad face) and emotionally evocative scenes (e.g. snakes, erotic pictures)
In emotion research two kinds of stimuli are frequently used: facial expressions and emotionally evocative scenes
A significant main effect of Task was observed (F (1, 22) = 33.60, p b .001, η2 = .60), indicating that pictures viewed during the Pic– Word task produced larger mean N100/N170 deflections compared to the Pic–Pic task (Fig. 3 bottom left and right waveforms)
Summary
In emotion research two kinds of stimuli are frequently used: facial expressions (e.g. a smiling or sad face) and emotionally evocative scenes (e.g. snakes, erotic pictures). A recent meta-analysis comparing 157 functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) studies that used either emotional faces or emotional scenes (Sabatinelli et al, 2011) revealed multiple clusters of brain activations unique to these different forms of stimuli even after the subtraction of neural activity related to basic visual processing. This suggests that both types of stimuli might be processed differently. Their results demonstrate that both face and scene inversion cause a shift from specialised processing streams towards generic object-processing mechanisms, but this shift only leads to a reliable behavioural deficit in the case of face inversion
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