ERP evidence for an early emotional bias towards happy faces in trait anxiety

Maternal anxiety and neural responses to infant faces

“…This finding resonates with weak anxiety-ERP associations reported in previous work employing oddball (Rossignol et al, 2005) and categorization (Morel et al, 2014) tasks in adult face perception studies. Given that the N170 reflects the initial categorization of visual stimuli as faces, it may not be surprising that such an early and low-level stage of visual processing is unassociated with anxiety.…”

“…However, other studies find that the N170 is unaffected by anxiety in participants completing a visual oddball task with fearful and happy faces (Rossignol et al, 2005). Similarly, anxiety does not differentiate the N170 measured during a facial categorization task presenting fearful, happy and neutral faces (Morel et al, 2014). Finally, the N170 elicited by multiple facial emotions was also unrelated to social anxiety (Rossignol et al, 2012).…”

Influence of spatial frequency and emotion expression on face processing in patients with panic disorder

“…Previous studies found increased EPN amplitude in people with anxiety disorder and high anxiety trait (Holmes et al, 2009;Morel et al, 2014;Muhlberger et al, 2009;Rossignol et al, 2013). However, our results did not replicate the previous anxiety dependent increase in EPN.…”

Fixation to features and neural processing of facial expressions in a gender discrimination task

“…However, the present data suggest a very localized happy effect at midline site for P1, rather than at the classic lateral sites (including O1/2), which might have been missed by most previous studies. In an explicit emotion categorization task, Morel et al (2014) recently reported an early happy effect with a larger P1 for happy than neutral faces (i.e. the opposite as found here) in the right hemisphere, but this was seen only for highly anxious participants and was thus likely the result of attentional demands, rather than emotional effects per se.…”