The Recognition Of Different Types Of Facial Emotional Change: An ERP Study

As fundamental visual stimuli,emotional faces convey some important social information.Such information contributes to forecasting in a direct or indirect way the actions of other people.Facial emotional change is a well-established phenomenon in the face processing literature,whereby an emotional face suddenly changes to another emotional face.For example,a neutral face suddenly changed to an angry face.An increasing number of studies have explored the perception of neutral-angry facial emotional change.However,little is known aboutthe perception of angry-neutral facial emotional change.Social anxiety disorder(SAD),also known as social phobia(SP).It is characterized by an extensive fear of being evaluated by others in social interaction,which leads socially anxious individuals to engage in so-called safety behaviors.Although considerable research has investigated the perception ofstatic emotional faces in social anxiety individuals,none of the previous studieshas directly examined that these anxiety individuals process others' facial emotional change.Therefore,the current study examined the perception of neutral-angry and angry-neutral facial emotional change using high temporal resolution event-related potential techniques.Furthermore,we investigated the perception of these facial emotional changes in social anxiety individuals.Our study contributes to a better understanding of the perception of facial emotional change,the clarification of cognitive processing and pathomechanism in social anxiety individuals,and the rehabilitation work of the social anxiety disorder.Materials consisted of 8 house images and 78 videos of facial emotional change(26 neutral-angry,26 angry-neutral and 26 neutral-neutral videos).Half of the videos were female videos,and the other half were male ones.We adopted the S1-S2 paradigm in the present study.Participants were asked to judge whether the people in the second video(S2)had the same or a different identity to the people in the first video(S1).Twenty-five participants in experiment 1 were asked to observe the neutral-angry and angry-neutral facial emotional change.In experiment 2,thirteen high social anxiety individuals and fourteen low social anxiety individuals were asked to observe these facial emotional changes.In conclusion,the current study showed that high social anxiety individualsdemonstrated smaller P200 amplitudes in angry-neutral than neutral-neutral facial emotional change condition,suggesting a deficit of facial emotional change.Furthermore,high and low social anxiety individualsshowed larger N170 amplitudes in angry-neutral than neutral-angry facial emotional change condition,which indicated a feature-based processing of angry-neutral facial emotional change.Finally,the behavioral data showed faster reaction times in angry-neutral than neutral-angry facial emotional change condition.This is consistent with the result of P100 which demonstrated shorter latencies for angry-neutral versus neutral-angry facial emotional change.These results suggest a perceptual bias of angry-neutral facial emotional change.