Discrimination of emotional facial expressions in a visual oddball task: an ERP study

• Published in: Biological psychology 2002-05, Vol.59 (3), p.171-186
• Main Authors: Campanella, S., Gaspard, C., Debatisse, D., Bruyer, R., Crommelinck, M., Guerit, J.-M.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Adult; Arousal - physiology; Attention - physiology; Behavioral psychophysiology; Biological and medical sciences; Brain Mapping; Categorical perception; Cerebral Cortex - physiology; Discrimination Learning - physiology; Dominance, Cerebral - physiology; Electroencephalography; Electrophysiology; Emotions - physiology; Event-related potential; Evoked Potentials, Visual - physiology; Facial Expression; Facial expressions; Female; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Humans; Latency; Male; N2/P3a; Oddball; Pattern Recognition, Visual - physiology; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted
• ISSN: 0301-0511; 1873-6246
• DOI: 10.1016/S0301-0511(02)00005-4

Several ERP studies have shown an orienting complex, the N2/P3a, associated to the detection of stimulus novelty. Its role consists in preparing the organism to process and react to biologically prepotent stimuli. Whether this N2/P3a: (1) could be obtained with complex visual stimuli, such as with emotional facial expressions; and (2) could take part in a complex discrimination process has yet to be determined. To investigate this issue, event-related potentials were recorded in response to repetitions of a particular facial expression (e.g. sadness) and in response to two different deviant (rare) stimuli, one depicting the same emotion as the frequent stimulus, while the other depicted a different facial expression (e.g. fear). As expected, deviant stimuli evoked an N2/P3a complex of larger amplitude than frequent stimuli. But more interestingly, when the deviant stimulus depicted the same emotion as the frequent stimulus the N2/P3a was delayed compared to the response elicited by the different-emotion deviant. The N2/P3a was thus implicated in the detection of physical facial changes, with a higher sensitivity to changes related to a new different emotional content, perhaps leading to faster adaptive reactions.