Passing faces: sequence-dependent variations in the perceptual processing of emotional faces

ABSTRACT

There is broad evidence that contextual factors influence the processing of emotional facial expressions. Yet temporal-dynamic aspects, inter alia how face processing is influenced by the specific order of neutral and emotional facial expressions, have been largely neglected. To shed light on this topic, we recorded electroencephalogram from 168 healthy participants while they performed a gender-discrimination task with angry and neutral faces. Our event-related potential (ERP) analyses revealed a strong emotional modulation of the N170 component, indicating that the basic visual encoding and emotional analysis of a facial stimulus happen, at least partially, in parallel. While the N170 and the late positive potential (LPP; 400–600 ms) were only modestly affected by the sequence of preceding faces, we observed a strong influence of face sequences on the early posterior negativity (EPN; 200–300 ms). Finally, the differing response patterns of the EPN and LPP indicate that these two ERPs represent distinct processes during face analysis: while the former seems to represent the integration of contextual information in the perception of a current face, the latter appears to represent the net emotional interpretation of a current face.

KEYWORDS:

• Face
• sequence
• N170
• EPN
• LPP

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. We included the manipulation as additional between factor (free speech vs. control) in each ANOVA, but the manipulation factor never reached the level of significance (all tests containing the manipulation factor had an F-value smaller than 3.434 and p-value higher than .065 for the N170, F-value smaller than 1.616 and p-value higher than .205 for the EPN and an F-value smaller than 0.605 and p-value higher than .437 for the LPP.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the German Research Foundation—DFG under Grant OS 422/2-1.