Abstract
Humans need to flexibly produce or switch different facial emotional expressions to meet social communication need. However, little is known about the control of voluntary facial emotional expression. We investigated the production and switch of facial expressions of happiness and anger in a response-priming task of 23 Chinese female university students and recorded electroencephalographic (EEG) signals. Results revealed that a frontal-central P2 component demonstrated greater positivity in the invalidly cued condition compared with the validly cued condition. Comparing the two facial emotional expressions, data from the contingent negative variation (CNV) component revealed that happiness and anger did not differ in the motor preparation phase. While data from N2 and P3 showed that switching from anger to happiness elicited larger N2 amplitudes than switching from happiness to anger and switching from happiness to anger elicited larger P3 than switching from anger to happiness. The results revealed that in invalidly cued condition, the inhibition (N2) and reprogramming (P3) cost of anger was greater than that of happiness. The findings indicated that during the switching process, both the inhibition and the reprogramming of anger cost more processing resources than those of happiness.
Highlights
Imagine that when you have dinner with a friend who has been bullied by his or her colleague, you get a call from your boss informing you of job promotion and a raise in salary
Regarding the reaction time (RT), analysis revealed a main effect of emotional expression on RT, F(1,22) = 7.33, p = 0.013, h
A negative-going Event-related potentials (ERP) which was maximal at central electrodes resembled the contingent negative variation (CNV)
Summary
Imagine that when you have dinner with a friend who has been bullied by his or her colleague, you get a call from your boss informing you of job promotion and a raise in salary. Will you just express your joy directly or switch the expression of happiness to anger and sadness in front of your friend? Better understanding, regulation, and expression of emotions can be essential and conducive to interpersonal interactions (e.g., Lopes et al, 2005). Previous studies focused more on the recognition and identification of facial emotional expression, whereas their production and switch were less well investigated and understood (Recio et al, 2014; Hildebrandt et al, 2015). It is of great importance to decrease, enhance, or switch one’s own facial expressions in certain social situations to meet the need of communicative context. Switch of Voluntary Emotional Expression from the perspective of motor control. Our aim was to investigate the neural underpinnings of the production and switch of facial emotional expressions, voluntary emotional expression
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