Influence Of Emotional Scenes In The Encoding On Different Intensities Of Fearful Face

Faces are part of everyday life scenes,most previous studies used independent emotional faces to explore emotion recognition.However,emotional faces often appear along with other scenes in daily life,and emotional information of scene also plays an important role in the processing of emotional faces.Studies have shown that fearful faces are easier to identified in fearful scenes than in happy scenes,and elicited a larger N170 amplitudes,indicating that the impact of emotional scenes on emotional face processing occurs in the early processing stages.However,the study of scene-face compounds use explicitly emotional faces(eg,fearful faces),and it is not clear whether the valence of emotional scene(positive and negative)will be have different influence on recognition of fearful faces(0%,50%,100%),whether the influence of emotional scenes on the processing between 0%,50%and 100%fearful faces will occur in other processing stages of fearful face.Experiment 1 used 3(intensity of fearful face:0%,50%,100%)×2(valence of scenes:positive,negative)two-factors experimental design,to investigate whether emotional scene will be have different effect on intensities of fearful faces.The task was to judge face's emotion in the face-scene compound stimulus.Surprisingly,the RTs of the 0%fearful face(neutral face)were longer in negative scene than in positive,and percentage of the face judged as fearful is higher;the RTs of the 50%fearful face were longer in positive scene than in negative,and percentage of the face judged as fearful is not significantly.There was no significant difference in RTs of 100%fearful face between positive and negative scenes and "the percentage".This result indicates that negative information of scene on scene-face compound stimulus can attracted more attention resources than positive,and directly change the subject's cognitive of face emotion.Experiment 2 used Event-related Potential(ERP)to add the scrambled type of scene picture based on Experiment 1.The purpose is to confirm that differences in the impact of emotional scenes on different intensities of fearful face processing is caused by emotion of scene,rather than the low physical properties of the scene.Thus further exploring the neural mechanisms of emotional scene affect the processing of different intensities of fearful face.The behavioral results repeatedly verified the experimental results of Experiment 1.ERP results showed that 50%and 100%fearful faces in negative scenes elicited large N170(150-170ms)amplitudes than positive,but not significant withe 0%fearful face;the N2(230-270ms)amplitudes in negative and positive scenes are not significant with 0%,50%,100%fearful face;only 50%fearful faces in negative scenes elicited large P300(400-500ms)amplitudes.The above ERP effects are not significant in scrambled scenes.Moreover,it shows that negative scene should change the cognitive processing of different fearful faces exactly,and the effects existed on different stages processing of fearful face.