Processing of emotions expressed through eye regions attenuates attentional blink

Abstract

Despite of the crucial role of eye region in nonverbal communication, how and when the brain responds to affective signals projected from this region remains unclear. This study explored the temporal dynamics in the processing of emotionally valenced eye regions (happy, neutral, and fearful) and the influence of attentional resources using a dual-target rapid serial visual presentation task and event-related potential (ERP) technique. Behaviorally, the recognition accuracy of happy and fearful eye regions was higher than that for neutral eye regions in the deficient attentional resources condition (lag2), indicating reduced attentional blink for emotional eye regions. The ERP findings denote that fearful and happy eye regions modulated the N170. The early posterior negativity (EPN) was influenced by the interaction between lag and emotional valence, which was reflected by larger amplitudes for fearful rather than neutral eye regions in the lag2 condition. The amplitude of the late positive potential (LPP) also increased for the happy and fearful eye regions. These outcomes suggest that the human brain is highly sensitive to isolated eye regions. Moreover, fearful signals emitted from the eye region are processed automatically and are unaffected by attentional resource availability.