Facial and semantic emotional interference: a pilot study on the behavioral and cortical responses to the Dual Valence Association Task

Abstract

Background: Integration of compatible or incompatible emotional valence and semantic information is an essential aspect of complex social interactions. A modified version of the Implicit Association Test (IAT) called Dual Valence Association Task (DVAT) was designed in order to measure conflict resolution processing from compatibility/incompatibly of semantic and facial valence. The DVAT involves two emotional valence evaluative tasks which elicits two forms of emotional compatible/incompatible associations (facial and semantic).

Methods: Behavioural measures and Event Related Potentials were recorded while participants performed the DVAT.

Results: Behavioural data showed a robust effect that distinguished compatible/incompatible tasks. The effects of valence and contextual association (between facial and semantic stimuli) showed early discrimination in N170 of faces. The LPP component was modulated by the compatibility of the DVAT.

Conclusions: Results suggest that DVAT is a robust paradigm for studying the emotional interference effect in the processing of simultaneous information from semantic and facial stimuli.

Figure 1

Sequence representation for compatible test block. A. The schema shows a face and a word sequence presentation and the participant's response. Face and word trials are alternately presented for a short time, strictly. Positive and negative faces, along with words of positive and negative valence, are present in the stimuli set and are presented in a randomized sequence. The participant is required to classify each stimulus to the left or to the right according to labels displayed on top of the screen. When a classification response error is made, negative feedback is given (i.e., in the word sequence illustrated in the figure). B. During the incompatible block test the valence classification of a face (e.g., happy-left vs. angry-right) must be classified in the opposite valence direction of the word (unpleasant-left vs. pleasant-right). When items from compatible categories (e.g. happy + pleasant) share a response key, performance is faster and more accurate than when items from incongruent categories (e.g. angry + pleasant) share a key

Figure 2

N170 waveform and topography. N170 component elicited by emotional words and faces. The N170 modulation is predominant in the left hemisphere for words and in the right for faces. Boxes in ERPs figures are indicative of regions where statistical comparison shown significant differences. Right side of the figure: Word and Face voltage maps averaged on 140-190 ms. Abbreviations: Word P-A (pleasant words associated to anger face); Word U-A (unpleasant words associated to anger face); Face H-P (happy faces associated to pleasant word); Face H-U (happy faces associated to unpleasant word); Face A-U (anger faces associated to unpleasant word); Face A-P (anger faces associated to pleasant word).

Figure 3

Frontal LPP. Selected ROIs of LPP elicited by faces and words in response to Incompatible (continuous line) and Compatible tasks (dashed line). Top: ERPs of Faces. Bottom: ERPs of Words. In agreement with the behavioral results, we found a LPP modulation related to incompatible blocks. Note the lateralization effects for word stimuli and the bilateral effects for faces.