Social and emotional relevance in face processing: happy faces of future interaction partners enhance the late positive potential

Abstract

Human face perception is modulated by both emotional valence and social relevance, but their interaction has rarely been examined. Event-related brain potentials (ERP) to happy, neutral, and angry facial expressions with different degrees of social relevance were recorded. To implement a social anticipation task, relevance was manipulated by presenting faces of two specific actors as future interaction partners (socially relevant), whereas two other face actors remained non-relevant. In a further control task all stimuli were presented without specific relevance instructions (passive viewing). Face stimuli of four actors (2 women, from the KDEF) were randomly presented for 1s to 26 participants (16 female). Results showed an augmented N170, early posterior negativity (EPN), and late positive potential (LPP) for emotional in contrast to neutral facial expressions. Of particular interest, face processing varied as a function of experimental tasks. Whereas task effects were observed for P1 and EPN regardless of instructed relevance, LPP amplitudes were modulated by emotional facial expression and relevance manipulation. The LPP was specifically enhanced for happy facial expressions of the anticipated future interaction partners. This underscores that social relevance can impact face processing already at an early stage of visual processing. These findings are discussed within the framework of motivated attention and face processing theories.

Differential effects of face-realism and emotion on event-related brain potentials and their implications for the uncanny valley theory

“…refs 36, 41 and 44, we found no differences between emotional and neutral expressions on this component. In general, during passive viewing, emotion effects are smaller for faces compared to complex scenes and participants typically report less subjective arousal for faces49.…”

“…For the LPP time windows a large parietal cluster was investigated (twenty-six electrodes: CCPz, CP5, CP5h, CP3, CP1, CPz, CP2, CP4, CP6, CPP5h, CPP3, CPPz, CPP4, P3, P1, Pz, P2, P4, PPO3, PPO1, PPOz, PPO2, PPO4, PO3, POz, PO4). Results did not change qualitatively, when selecting different literature-based electrode clusters for the N170, EPN or LPP343654.…”

“…Enhanced processing of emotional faces is also reflected in an enhanced Early Posterior Negativity (EPN), as well a larger Late Positive Potential (LPP)3536. The EPN indicates early attention mechanisms, whereas LPP is viewed as reflecting higher-order evaluation and episodic memory encoding (for an overview see ref.…”

Embodied neural responses to others’ suffering

“…Recent research has shown evidence that the N170 amplitude is also modulated by facial expression, being enhanced by positive or negative emotional faces (e.g., Calvo & Beltrán, 2013;Bublatzky, Gerdes, White, Riemer, & Alpers, 2014; see Rellecke et al, 2013, for a recent review of emotion effect on the N170). In addition, the modulation of the N170 amplitude by facial expression was influenced by the racial relationship between an onlooker and perceived faces (Tortosa, Lupiáñez, & Ruz, 2013).…”

Mental imagery of emotions: Electrophysiological evidence

“…In addition, enhanced amplitudes have also been found, when faces were high in social relevance (e.g. romantic partner, family members; famous persons with negative or positive biography; Abdel Rahman, 2011;Guerra et al, 2012;Bublatzky et al, 2014;Tiedt et al, 2014).…”