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. 2022 May 11:16:866253.
doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2022.866253. eCollection 2022.

Early Influence of Emotional Scenes on the Encoding of Fearful Expressions With Different Intensities: An Event-Related Potential Study

Sutao Song  1   2 , Meiyun Wu  3 , Chunliang Feng  4
Affiliations

Early Influence of Emotional Scenes on the Encoding of Fearful Expressions With Different Intensities: An Event-Related Potential Study

Sutao Song et al. Front Hum Neurosci. .

Abstract

Contextual affective information influences the processing of facial expressions at the relatively early stages of face processing, but the effect of the context on the processing of facial expressions with varying intensities remains unclear. In this study, we investigated the influence of emotional scenes (fearful, happy, and neutral) on the processing of fear expressions at different levels of intensity (high, medium, and low) during the early stages of facial recognition using event-related potential (ERP) technology. EEG data were collected while participants performed a fearful facial expression recognition task. The results showed that (1) the recognition of high-intensity fear expression was higher than that of medium- and low-intensity fear expressions. Facial expression recognition was the highest when faces appeared in fearful scenes. (2) Emotional scenes modulated the amplitudes of N170 for fear expressions with different intensities. Specifically, the N170 amplitude, induced by high-intensity fear expressions, was significantly higher than that induced by low-intensity fear expressions when faces appeared in both neutral and fearful scenes. No significant differences were found between the N170 amplitudes induced by high-, medium-, and low-intensity fear expressions when faces appeared in happy scenes. These results suggest that individuals may tend to allocate their attention resources to the processing of face information when the valence between emotional context and expression conflicts i.e., when the conflict is absent (fear scene and fearful faces) or is low (neutral scene and fearful faces).

Keywords: ERP; N170; P1; emotional scenes; fear expression; intensity.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

FIGURE 1
FIGURE 1
Illustration of fearful facial expressions with different intensities. The image has been obtained from a public database with the publish permission.
FIGURE 2
FIGURE 2
Illustration of the experimental procedure. Fixation mark (*).
FIGURE 3
FIGURE 3
Response time (A) and fearful expression recognition rate (B) when faces appeared in different scenes (M ± SE).
FIGURE 4
FIGURE 4
Mean amplitudes of N170 for different fearful facial expression intensities in different scenes. Error bars indicate standard errors, *p < 0.05. ***p < 0.001.
FIGURE 5
FIGURE 5
Grand Average N170 amplitudes for (A) low intensity, (B) medium intensity, and (C) high intensity fearful facial expressions in different emotional scenes.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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