Rapid processing of neutral and angry expressions within ongoing facial stimulus streams: Is it all about isolated facial features?

ABSTRACT: Our visual system extracts the emotional meaning of human facial expressions rapidly and automatically. Novel paradigms using fast periodic stimulations have provided insights into the electrophysiological processes underlying emotional content extraction: the regular occurrence of specific identities and/or emotional expressions alone can drive diagnostic brain responses. Consistent with a processing advantage for social cues of threat, we expected angry facial expressions to drive larger responses than neutral expressions. In a series of four EEG experiments, we studied the potential boundary conditions of such an effect: (i) we piloted emotional cue extraction using 9 facial identities and a fast presentation rate of 15 Hz (N = 16); (ii) we reduced the facial identities from 9 to 2, to

SUBMITTER: Schettino A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7182236 | biostudies-literature | 2020

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature