The Event-related Potential Research On The Facial Expressions Process Of Deaf-mute Children

Because of various reasons, deaf-mute children can hear so little voice that they may notcommunicate with language symbols, therefore, it will produce a variety of social adaptive problems. Thefacial expression is an important emotional stimulation in social interaction, and it is also a special form ofcommunication with adaptive value. The research of emotion cognition and brain mechanism, especiallythe relationship between emotion and cognition and its potential neural mechanism gradually becomes thehotspot of cognitive neuroscience in recent years. Currently, foreign studies of deaf–mute children aremainly about the research of emotional understanding and emotional attribution. There is no special brainmechanism research about deaf-mute children’s facial expression recognition.In this paper, it examined the differences of facial expressions of deaf-mute children betweennormal children by adopting the method of event-related potential, choosing deaf-mute children as testeesand using the cartoon facial pictures and real facial pictures as the experimental material. Experiment1adopted cartoon facial pictures and experiment2used real Facial pictures. The results showed:①under theconditions of happy, sad and neutral faces’ judgment task, the deaf-mute children’s N170components werenot modulated by the emotional contents of faces as the same as the situation of the normal children;②ininitial stage, though the deaf-mute children were not modulated by the emotional contents, they showed thelarger amplitude under the inducing of happy, sad and neutral faces than the that of the normal children inthe initial stage of facial expressions.③the deaf-mute children and normal children appeared the titereffect after400-800ms of stimulus presentation, it showed that the positive voltage strength and range ofthe judgment of happy faces and sad faces pictures was greater than that of the neutral faces pictures,besides the strength and range of the judgment of sad faces was greater than that of the happy faces. At thesame time, it showed that the amplitude of late positive component (LPC) was significantly diferentbetween the deaf-mute children and normal children.④in the lateperiod stage of processing, the deaf-mutechildren and normal children activated different brain areas by the emotional judgment, it showed that theyboth activated the occipital region, central area, and Frontal area, in addition, the normal children alsoactivated the right temporal occipital region.⑤in the late stages of processing, the degree of activation of deaf-mute children and normal children to the real emotional faces is geartly higher than that to the cartoonemotional faces;⑥cartoon emotionalfaces processing showed the right hemisphere lateralization.