ERPs differentiate happy from angry facial processing
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1
University of New South Wales, School of Psychology, Australia
Our daily lives are filled with affective stimuli, yet our processing of these stimuli remains unresolved. This is also of particular interest given the distinct affective deficits in some clinical populations. The Orienting Reflex (OR), an automatic response directing attention to innocuous stimuli, provides a framework within which this processing can be further assessed. Here we compare the cognitive processing of happy and angry facial expressions using a visual dishabituation paradigm with black and white face stimuli. Forty healthy undergraduate participants viewed 15 trains of eight stimuli. The first six stimuli in each train were presented with a consistent emotion, the seventh stimuli expressed the alternate emotion (change/deviant trial), and the last stimulus was presented with the original emotion. Half the participants received the Happy-Angry-Happy (HAH) task, and half the Angry-Happy-Angry (AHA) task. Event related potentials were derived from artifact free trials and subjected to separate principal components analysis (PCA) for each group (HAH, AHA). Four components were assessed for response decrement (trials 1-6), response recovery (trials 6 vs. 7), and dishabituation (trials 6 vs. 8): N2b, P3a, P3b, and the classic Slow Wave (SW). N2b failed to show a significant decrement in either group but showed response recovery to the change trial in the HAH group, and dishabituation in both groups (HAH, AHA). P3a showed response recovery in the HAH group, and response decrement, recovery, and dishabituation in the AHA group. P3b only showed response decrement, and this was seen in both groups. Finally, the SW showed response decrement, recovery, and dishabituation in the HAH group, but only response decrement and recovery in the AHA group. Interestingly, many of these results were topographic in nature. The pattern of results indicates interesting differences between the processing of happy and angry facial expressions, and will be interpreted from an OR perspective.
Keywords:
emotional face processing,
Event Related Potentials (ERPs),
principal component analysis (PCA),
habituation,
dishabituation,
Orienting reflex (OR)
Conference:
ASP2015 - 25th Annual Conference of the Australasian Society for Psychophysiology, Sydney, Australia, 2 Dec - 4 Dec, 2015.
Presentation Type:
Poster Presentation
Topic:
Psychophysiology
Citation:
De Blasio
FM,
Rushby
JA,
Kornfeld
EJ,
Schollar-Root
O and
McDonald
S
(2015). ERPs differentiate happy from angry facial processing.
Conference Abstract:
ASP2015 - 25th Annual Conference of the Australasian Society for Psychophysiology.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2015.219.00007
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Received:
05 Nov 2015;
Published Online:
30 Nov 2015.
*
Correspondence:
Ms. Frances M De Blasio, University of New South Wales, School of Psychology, Sydeny, 2052, Australia, f.deblasio@unsw.edu.au