Emotional Cues during Simultaneous Face and Voice Processing: Electrophysiological Insights

Abstract

Both facial expression and tone of voice represent key signals of emotional communication but their brain processing correlates remain unclear. Accordingly, we constructed a novel implicit emotion recognition task consisting of simultaneously presented human faces and voices with neutral, happy, and angry valence, within the context of recognizing monkey faces and voices task. To investigate the temporal unfolding of the processing of affective information from human face-voice pairings, we recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) to these audiovisual test stimuli in 18 normal healthy subjects; N100, P200, N250, P300 components were observed at electrodes in the frontal-central region, while P100, N170, P270 were observed at electrodes in the parietal-occipital region. Results indicated a significant audiovisual stimulus effect on the amplitudes and latencies of components in frontal-central (P200, P300, and N250) but not the parietal occipital region (P100, N170 and P270). Specifically, P200 and P300 amplitudes were more positive for emotional relative to neutral audiovisual stimuli, irrespective of valence, whereas N250 amplitude was more negative for neutral relative to emotional stimuli. No differentiation was observed between angry and happy conditions. The results suggest that the general effect of emotion on audiovisual processing can emerge as early as 200 msec (P200 peak latency) post stimulus onset, in spite of implicit affective processing task demands, and that such effect is mainly distributed in the frontal-central region.

Configural and featural face processing are differently modulated by attentional resources at early stages: An event-related potential study with rapid serial visual presentation

“…The EEG analyzing window was between À 200 and 600 ms, and the 200 ms pre-stimulus EEG served as a baseline. According to previous studies (Joyce and Rossion, 2005;Liu et al, 2012;Shannon et al, 2013), in order to measure the most robust effects, parietal-occipital sites were re-referenced to the average of all electrodes; these recording sites yielded a characteristic ERP response that included an early positivegoing component that peaked around 150 ms (posterior P1), followed by a negative-going peak evident 50 ms later (N170). Frontal-central electrode sites were re-referenced to the mean of the right and left mastoids (anterior N1/VPP/N2/P3).…”

Emotional sounds modulate early neural processing of emotional pictures

“…These effects have been interpreted as evidence for an early influence of one modality on the other (de Gelder et al, 1999; Pourtois et al, 2000; Liu et al, 2012). Comparing unimodal and multimodal presentations of human communication, Stekelenburg and Vroomen (2007) observed an effect of multimodality on the N100 and the P200 component time-locked to the sound onset.…”

Minho Affective Sentences (MAS): Probing the roles of sex, mood, and empathy in affective ratings of verbal stimuli

“…In the last decades, robust evidence has accumulated showing that we are especially adept at and tuned to decode emotional information from numerous types of signals (e.g., Kousta, Vinson, & Vigliocco, 2009;Liu et al, 2012;Pinheiro, del Re, Mezin, et al, 2013;Pinheiro et al, 2014). This is not surprising, considering the role played by the fast detection of emotional salience in approach versus avoidance behaviors, and its relevance for survival or attainment of goals.…”