Processing emotions from faces and words measured by event-related brain potentials

ABSTRACT

Affective aspects of a stimulus can be processed rapidly and before cognitive attribution, acting much earlier for verbal stimuli than previously considered. Aimed for specific mechanisms, event-related brain potentials (ERPs), expressed in facial expressions or word meaning and evoked by six basic emotions – anger, disgust, fear, happy, sad, and surprise – relative to emotionally neutral stimuli were analysed in a sample of 116 participants. Brain responses in the occipital and left temporal regions elicited by the sadness in facial expressions or words were indistinguishable from responses evoked by neutral faces or words. Confirming previous findings, facial fear elicited an early and strong posterior negativity. Instead of expected parietal positivity, both the happy faces and words produced significantly more negative responses compared to neutral. Surprise in facial expressions and words elicited a strong early response in the left temporal cortex, which could be a signature of appraisal. The results of this study are consistent with the view that both types of affective stimuli, facial emotions and word meaning, set off rapid processing and responses occur very early in the processing stage.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotions
• affective processing
• event-related potentials (ERPs)
• facial expressions
• emotional words

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank Svetlana Bolotova, Dariia Temirova, Jelena Gorbova and Ikechukwu Ofodile for assisting in data collection, Egils Avots for help with the set-up of the experimental program and Stênio Foerster for his valuable input. We also thank the reviewers for their thorough comments and insights.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available at OSF at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/9YJGK, reference number 9YJGK.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the Estonian Research Council grant IUT2-13 'Psychological mechanisms of cognition and personality processes’, PRG1151 ‘Pre-attentive information processing in the brain: relationship to state and trait variables, and behaviour’, and PUT638 'Enhancing human-computer interaction using multimodal emotion recognition based on gesture, face, and speech'.