Dataset Information

Event-related potentials to changes in facial expression in two-phase transitions.

ABSTRACT: The purpose of the study was to compare event-related potentials (ERPs) to different transitions between emotional and neutral facial expressions. The stimuli contained a single transition between two different images of the same face, giving a strong impression of changing expression though apparent motion whilst eliminating change in irrelevant stimulus variables such as image contrast or identity. Stimuli were calibrated for intensity, valence and perceived emotion category and only trials where the target emotion was correctly identified were included. In the first experiment, a magnification change (zoom) was a control condition. Transitions from neutral to angry expressions produced a more negative N1 with longer peak latency, and more positive P2 than did an increase in magnification. Critically, response to neutral following angry, relative to neutral following magnified, showed a generally more negative ERP with a delayed N1 peak and reduced P2 amplitude. In the second experiment, comparison of neutral-happy and neutral-frightened transitions showed significantly different ERPs to emotional expression change. Responses to the reversed direction of a transition (happy-neutral and frightened-neutral) were much reduced. Unlike the comparison of angry-neutral with magnified-neutral, there were minimal differences in the responses to neutral following happy and neutral following frightened. The results demonstrate in a young adult sample the directionality of responses to facial expression dynamics, and suggest a separation of neural mechanisms for detecting expression changes and magnification changes.

SUBMITTER: Wright MJ

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5391024 | biostudies-literature | 2017

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Event-related potentials to changes in facial expression in two-phase transitions.

Wright Michael J MJ Kuhn Lisa K LK

PloS one 20170413 4

The purpose of the study was to compare event-related potentials (ERPs) to different transitions between emotional and neutral facial expressions. The stimuli contained a single transition between two different images of the same face, giving a strong impression of changing expression though apparent motion whilst eliminating change in irrelevant stimulus variables such as image contrast or identity. Stimuli were calibrated for intensity, valence and perceived emotion category and only trials wh ...[more]

PMID: 28406957

Similar Datasets

Project description:Visual mismatch negativity (vMMN), a component in event-related potentials (ERPs), can be elicited when rarely presented "deviant" facial expressions violate regularity formed by repeated "standard" faces. vMMN is observed as differential ERPs elicited between the deviant and standard faces. It is not clear, however, whether differential ERPs to rare emotional faces interspersed with repeated neutral ones reflect true vMMN (i.e., detection of regularity violation) or merely encoding of the emotional content in the faces. Furthermore, a face-sensitive N170 response, which reflects structural encoding of facial features, can be modulated by emotional expressions. Owing to its similar latency and scalp topography with vMMN, these two components are difficult to separate. We recorded ERPs to neutral, fearful, and happy faces in two different stimulus presentation conditions in adult humans. For the oddball condition group, frequently presented neutral expressions (p = 0.8) were rarely replaced by happy or fearful expressions (p = 0.1), whereas for the equiprobable condition group, fearful, happy, and neutral expressions were presented with equal probability (p = 0.33). Independent component analysis (ICA) revealed two prominent components in both stimulus conditions in the relevant latency range and scalp location. A component peaking at 130 ms post stimulus showed a difference in scalp topography between the oddball (bilateral) and the equiprobable (right-dominant) conditions. The other component, peaking at 170 ms post stimulus, showed no difference between the conditions. The bilateral component at the 130-ms latency in the oddball condition conforms to vMMN. Moreover, it was distinct from N170 which was modulated by the emotional expression only. The present results suggest that future studies on vMMN to facial expressions should take into account possible confounding effects caused by the differential processing of the emotional expressions as such.

Project description:This study aims at examining the precise temporal dynamics of the emotional facial decoding as it unfolds in the brain, according to the emotions displayed. To characterize this processing as it occurs in ecological settings, we focused on unconstrained visual explorations of natural emotional faces (i.e., free eye movements). The General Linear Model (GLM; Smith and Kutas, 2015a,b; Kristensen et al., 2017a) enables such a depiction. It allows deconvolving adjacent overlapping responses of the eye fixation-related potentials (EFRPs) elicited by the subsequent fixations and the event-related potentials (ERPs) elicited at the stimuli onset. Nineteen participants were displayed with spontaneous static facial expressions of emotions (Neutral, Disgust, Surprise, and Happiness) from the DynEmo database (Tcherkassof et al., 2013). Behavioral results on participants' eye movements show that the usual diagnostic features in emotional decoding (eyes for negative facial displays and mouth for positive ones) are consistent with the literature. The impact of emotional category on both the ERPs and the EFRPs elicited by the free exploration of the emotional faces is observed upon the temporal dynamics of the emotional facial expression processing. Regarding the ERP at stimulus onset, there is a significant emotion-dependent modulation of the P2-P3 complex and LPP components' amplitude at the left frontal site for the ERPs computed by averaging. Yet, the GLM reveals the impact of subsequent fixations on the ERPs time-locked on stimulus onset. Results are also in line with the valence hypothesis. The observed differences between the two estimation methods (Average vs. GLM) suggest the predominance of the right hemisphere at the stimulus onset and the implication of the left hemisphere in the processing of the information encoded by subsequent fixations. Concerning the first EFRP, the Lambda response and the P2 component are modulated by the emotion of surprise compared to the neutral emotion, suggesting an impact of high-level factors, in parieto-occipital sites. Moreover, no difference is observed on the second and subsequent EFRP. Taken together, the results stress the significant gain obtained in analyzing the EFRPs using the GLM method and pave the way toward efficient ecological emotional dynamic stimuli analyses.

Dataset Information

Event-related potentials to changes in facial expression in two-phase transitions.

Publications

Event-related potentials to changes in facial expression in two-phase transitions.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets