| A long-standing discussion in psychology concerns the temporal precedence of affective reactions (traditionally associated with facial muscular activation) and cognitive processing. Here, this issue was examined in the context of person perception, by measuring the time course of brain (event-related brain potentials---ERPs) and peripheral (corrugator supercilii electromyogram---EMG) electrophysiological activity while participants read positive and negative expectancy-consistent, expectancy-violating, expectancy-irrelevant, and semantically incongruent behavioral sentences about fictitious characters. EMG results indicated that behavior consistency and valence significantly influenced corrugator supercilii (brow) activity as early as 100--300 ms post-stimulus, suggesting the occurrence of very rapid affective responses. ERP results showed enhanced positivities with latency exceeding 300 ms to expectancy violations and negative behaviors, with the effects related to expectancy violation occurring before those related to behavior valence. In addition, semantically incongruent sentence-endings influenced a separate negative component of the ERP (N400), suggesting fundamental differences between semantic- and behavior-consistency processing. This difference also was evident in recall data. Implications for theoretical models of affective reactions and person memory and judgment are discussed. |
