Shyness and the first 100 ms of emotional face processing

Abstract

Although shyness is presumed to be related to an increased sensitivity to detect motivationally salient social stimuli, we know little of how shyness affects the early perception of facial emotions. We demonstrate here that individual differences in normative shyness were related to brain responses to some emotional faces as early as the P1 electrocortical component, 80–130 ms after stimulus onset. High-shy individuals showed reduced P1 amplitude for fearful faces compared to neutral faces. Low-shy individuals processed happy faces faster than other emotions and showed increased P1 amplitudes for happy faces over neutral faces. Regardless of shyness level, participants showed increased amplitudes in the N170 component (130–200 ms) for all emotions over neutral conditions, particularly for the emotion of fear. This study presents the first evidence that shyness is related to early electrocortical responses to the processing of fearful faces, consistent with a fast-path amygdala sensitivity model.

Keywords:

• Personality
• Emotions
• Face perception
• Evoked potentials

Acknowledgments

The first author is now at the Department of Psychology at Brock University. This research was supported by a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Predoctoral Fellowship awarded to the first author under the direction of L.A.S.; NSERC and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) operating grants awarded to L.A.S.; NSERC funding to S.J.S.; and a summer NSERC student award to Juliana Tobon under the direction of L.A.S. The authors would like to thank Juliana Tobon, Sue McKee, and Stephanie Tak for their help with data collection, and Sterling Jetha for his help with stimulus preparation.