Abstract
Facial identity and facial expression processing are crucial socio-emotional abilities but seem to show only limited psychometric uniqueness when the processing speed is considered in easy tasks. We applied a comprehensive measurement of processing speed and contrasted performance specificity in socio-emotional, social and non-social stimuli from an individual differences perspective. Performance in a multivariate task battery could be best modeled by a general speed factor and a first-order factor capturing some specific variance due to processing emotional facial expressions. We further tested equivalence of the relationships between speed factors and polymorphisms of dopamine and serotonin transporter genes. Results show that the speed factors are not only psychometrically equivalent but invariant in their relation with the Catechol-O-Methyl-Transferase (COMT) Val158Met polymorphism. However, the 5-HTTLPR/rs25531 serotonin polymorphism was related with the first-order factor of emotion perception speed, suggesting a specific genetic correlate of processing emotions. We further investigated the relationship between several components of event-related brain potentials with psychometric abilities, and tested emotion specific individual differences at the neurophysiological level. Results revealed swifter emotion perception abilities to go along with larger amplitudes of the P100 and the Early Posterior Negativity (EPN), when emotion processing was modeled on its own. However, after partialling out the shared variance of emotion perception speed with general processing speed-related abilities, brain-behavior relationships did not remain specific for emotion. Together, the present results suggest that speed abilities are strongly interrelated but show some specificity for emotion processing speed at the psychometric level. At both genetic and neurophysiological levels, emotion specificity depended on whether general cognition is taken into account or not. These findings keenly suggest that general speed abilities should be taken into account when the study of emotion recognition abilities is targeted in its specificity.
Highlights
Human faces convey a large variety of socially relevant information
The COMT Val158Met polymorphism was related with emotion perception speed, showing the Met/Met genotype group to perform significantly better than valine allele (Val)/Met genotype group (β = −0.35, p = 0.04) and as suggested by the effect size, somewhat better than Val/Val genotype group (β = −0.25, p = 0.22)
Our study showed the overall swiftness of processing complex objects from several domains, including houses, faces and facial expressions to be associated with larger P100 and N170 amplitudes, shorter N170 latency and larger early posterior negativity (EPN)
Summary
Human faces convey a large variety of socially relevant information. Face perception and emotion decoding ( termed perception, identification or recognition of emotions) are abilities of great importance in our everyday life. Despite a large amount of behavioral and neuroscientific research on face recognition and facial expression processing, comprehensive multivariate research, studying specificity with respect to individual differences across different levels of data, including behavior, neurophysiology and genetics, is still scarce. Our overarching aim was to contrast the processing of socio-emotional (facial expressions of emotion), social (facial identity) and non-social (houses) stimuli from an individual differences perspective. We studied theoretically expected specificity of processing social and socio-emotional content at the level of multivariate ability measures, along with their genetic and neurophysiological correlates
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