Emotion Recognition and Event-related Potentials During Facial Expression Changes

Abstract

Russell & Bullock (1985) proposed that facial expressions are emotionally categorized through psychological evaluation consisting of two dimensions, i.e., “pleasure (pleasant feeling–unpleasant feeling)” and “arousal (high arousal–sleepiness)”. On the other hand, previous ERP (event-related potential) studies for facial expression recognition suggest that ERP amplitude and latency vary depending on facial emotion categories. In the present study, participants received the neutral face as the first stimulus, which was immediately followed by the facial expression (happy, angry, and surprise) or random dots as the second stimulus. In addition, each facial expression was evaluated by the Affect Grid. Both the arousal score and the P130 amplitude for surprise facial expression were greater than those for happy and angry facial expressions. The amplitude and latency of N170 and P300 were not different among the facial expressions. These results suggest that changes in the arousal dimension elicited by emotional faces may be linked to early visual processing shown in P130.