Neural Mechanism Of Emotional Conflict Processing Of Face-body Compounds

Traditional emotional theory suggested that people could often recognize emotions according to facial expressions(Ekman,1993).However,the face and body are worked as an integrated whole in everyday life.Recently,studies have figured out that the incongruent emotional face-body compounds attracted more attention than the congruent face-body compounds.While the incongruent condition is usually combined with different kinds of the face-body compounds,for example,Gu et al.,(2013)designed the incongruent face-body compounds with fearful face-happy body compounds and happy face-fearful body compounds.It was not clear from the previous studies that which kind of the face-body compounds caused the incongruence effect.This study used event-related potentials(ERPs)to investigate the source of the incongruence effect'.Specifically,while face-body compound stimuli included fearful and happy emotions,the incongruent face-body compounds(i.e.,fearful face-happy body compounds and happy face-fearful body compounds)elicited larger N170 and N2 amplitudes than the congruent face-body compounds(i.e.,fearful face-fearful body compounds and happy face-happy body compounds).Then the 'incongruence effect' could be affected by fearful face-happy body compounds,happy face-fearful body compounds or both sides.The study added neutral face and neutral body stimulus to form new face-body compounds.We could compare the face-body compounds with emotional conflict and face-body compounds with neutral stimuli(i.e.,fearful face-happy body compounds and fearful face-neutral body compounds)to investigate the source of the 'incongruence effect.The experiment was designed by 3(facial expression:fearful,happy vs.neutral)× 3(bodily expression:fearful,happy vs.neutral).The task was to judge whether the face was emotional in face-body compounds.ERP data revealed that both the N170 and N2 amplitudes repeated the incongruence effect,which showed that the larger N170 and N2 amplitudes were elicited by the incongruent face-body compounds than by the congruent face-body compounds.Also,we found that in the condition of face-body compounds with happy face,happy face-fearful body compounds elicited larger N170 and N2 amplitudes than happy face-neutral body compounds.While in the condition of face-body compounds with fearful face,the difference between fearful face-happy body compounds and fearful face-neutral body compounds was not significant.In addition,happy face-fearful body compounds elicited larger N2 amplitudes than neutral face-fearful body compounds.While the difference between fearful face-happy body compounds and neutral face-happy body compounds was not significant.It could be inferred that the incongruence effect may be affected by happy face-fearful body compounds instead of fearful face-happy body compounds while taking the face-body compounds with neutral body or neutral face as the baseline.