An ERP Study About The Impact Of The Emotional Words On The Facial Trustworthiness Evaluation

Early studies have suggested that the facial trustworthiness evaluation neural process is similar to the recognition of facial expression process about happy-angry emotion.At the same time,the adaptability to facial expression also reduced the reliability for facial trustworthiness recognition level.In recent years,studies on facial credibility further proved that the perception for the emotional faces could affect our assessment for trust.Existing studies have also shown that the descriptive information could also disturb our perception for face credibility.Emotional adjectives as that contains not only the stimulation of emotional information but also the descriptive information,could it affect our perception for facial trustworthiness.In the present study,we adopted event-related potentials(ERP)technology,to explore whether and how the emotional words influence the facial credibility.In the first research,we designed emotional words as subject to research how the emotional words affect facial credibility,during the early neural process and the behavior judgment.We found a radical reversal in N170: No matter accompany with positive or negative adjective,untrustworthy faces evoked enhanced N170 amplitude for target 1,but decreased amplitude for probe stimulus compared to trustworthy faces.In the second research,we respectively adopted emotional words' unconcerned tasks as experiment 2 and emotional words' correlative tasks as experiment 3,to study the temporal dynamics of trustworthiness perception and the discrepancy of facial trustworthiness process under the emotional words,which processing the different allocation of attention resources.The results of experiment 2 show that: P1,N170,EPN amplitude changes are only affected by face credibility level when emotional vocabulary as a task irrelevant background;Experiment 3 results show that when emotional vocabulary for related task background,P1,N170 and EPN are influenced by both facial credibility and emotional words.The research results indicate that1.Facial trustworthiness evaluation is an spontaneous and fleet neural activity.2.The emotional information could subtly influence the face trustworthiness both in an early visual processing stage and behavior decision period,when emotional words are looked as subject.3.The individuals could flexibly regulate the attention resources to emotional information during the process of facial credibility time processing according to different task type,when emotional words are looked as context.4.The sensitivity of the N170 component is correlated with physical properties of stimulus and the content of specific tasks.