Early processing of the six basic facial emotional expressions

Abstract

Facial emotions represent an important part of non-verbal communication used in everyday life. Recent studies on emotional processing have implicated differing brain regions for different emotions, but little has been determined on the timing of this processing. Here we presented a large number of unfamiliar faces expressing the six basic emotions, plus neutral faces, to 26 young adults while recording event-related potentials (ERPs). Subjects were naive with respect to the specific questions investigated; it was an implicit emotional task. ERPs showed global effects of emotion from 90 ms (P1), while latency and amplitude differences among emotional expressions were seen from 140 ms (N170 component). Positive emotions evoked N170 significantly earlier than negative emotions and the amplitude of N170 evoked by fearful faces was larger than neutral or surprised faces. At longer latencies (330-420 ms) at fronto-central sites, we also found a different pattern of effects among emotions. Localization analyses confirmed the superior and middle-temporal regions for early processing of facial expressions; the negative emotions elicited later, distinctive activations. The data support a model of automatic, rapid processing of emotional expressions.