Emotional contrast and psychological function impact response inhibition to threatening faces

Poor inhibitory control over negative emotional information has been identified as a possible contributor to affective disorders, but the distinct effects of emotional contrast and fearful versus angry faces on response inhibition remain unknown. In the present study, young adults completed an emotional go/no-go task involving happy, neutral, and either fearful or angry faces. Results did not reveal differences in accuracy or speed between angry and fearful face conditions. However, responses were slower and indicated poorer inhibition in blocks where threatening faces were paired with happy, versus neutral, faces. Results may reflect cognitive load of emotional valence contrast, such that higher contrast blocks (containing threatening with happy faces) produced more conflict and required more processing than lower contrast blocks (threatening with neutral faces). Preliminary findings also revealed higher anxiety and depression symptoms corresponded with slower responses and worse accuracy, consistent with patterns of adverse impacts of anxiety and depression on response inhibition to threatening faces, even at subclinical levels of symptomatology.     

When does the brain distinguish between genuine and ambiguous smiles? An ERP study

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded to assess the processing time course of ambiguous facial expressions with a smiling mouth but neutral, fearful, or angry eyes, in comparison with genuinely happy faces (a smile and happy eyes) and non-happy faces (neutral, fearful, or angry mouth and eyes). Participants judged whether the faces looked truly happy or not. Electroencephalographic recordings were made from 64 scalp electrodes to generate ERPs. The neural activation patterns showed early P200 sensitivity (differences between negative and positive or neutral expressions) and EPN sensitivity (differences between positive and neutral expressions) to emotional valence. In contrast, sensitivity to ambiguity (differences between genuine and ambiguous expressions) emerged only in later LPP components. Discrimination of emotional vs. neutral affect occurs between 180 and 430 ms from stimulus onset, whereas the detection and resolution of ambiguity takes place between 470 and 720 ms. In addition, while blended expressions involving a smile with angry eyes can be identified as not happy in the P200 (175–240 ms) component, smiles with fearful or neutral eyes produce the same ERP pattern as genuinely happy faces, thus revealing poor discrimination.     

A tale of two negatives: differential memory modulation by threat-related facial expressions

Facial expressions serve as cues that encourage viewers to learn about their immediate environment. In studies assessing the influence of emotional cues on behavior, fearful and angry faces are often combined into one category, such as "threat-related," because they share similar emotional valence and arousal properties. However, these expressions convey different information to the viewer. Fearful faces indicate the increased probability of a threat, whereas angry expressions embody a certain and direct threat. This conceptualization predicts that a fearful face should facilitate processing of the environment to gather information to disambiguate the threat. Here, we tested whether fearful faces facilitated processing of neutral information presented in close temporal proximity to the faces. In Experiment 1, we demonstrated that, compared with neutral faces, fearful faces enhanced memory for neutral words presented in the experimental context, whereas angry faces did not. In Experiment 2, we directly compared the effects of fearful and angry faces on subsequent memory for emotional faces versus neutral words. We replicated the findings of Experiment 1 and extended them by showing that participants remembered more faces from the angry face condition relative to the fear condition, consistent with the notion that anger differs from fear in that it directs attention toward the angry individual. Because these effects cannot be attributed to differences in arousal or valence processing, we suggest they are best understood in terms of differences in the predictive information conveyed by fearful and angry facial expressions.     

Emotion processing in children who do and do not stutter: An ERP study of electrocortical reactivity and regulation to peer facial expressions

PurposeEvent-related brain potentials (ERPs) were used to investigate the neural correlates of emotion processing in 5- to 8-year-old children who do and do not stutter.MethodsParticipants were presented with an audio contextual cue followed by images of threatening (angry/fearful) and neutral facial expressions from similarly aged peers. Three conditions differed in audio-image pairing: neutral context-neutral expression (neutral condition), negative context-threatening expression (threat condition), and reappraisal context-threatening expression (reappraisal condition). These conditions reflected social stimuli that are ecologically valid to the everyday life of children.ResultsP100, N170, and late positive potential (LPP) ERP components were elicited over parietal and occipital electrodes. The threat condition elicited an increased LPP mean amplitude compared to the neutral condition across our participants, suggesting increased emotional reactivity to threatening facial expressions. In addition, LPP amplitude decreased during the reappraisal condition— evidence of emotion regulation. No group differences were observed in the mean amplitude of ERP components between children who do and do not stutter. Furthermore, dimensions of childhood temperament and stuttering severity were not strongly correlated with LPP elicitation.ConclusionThese findings are suggestive that, at this young age, children who stutter exhibit typical brain activation underlying emotional reactivity and regulation to social threat from peer facial expressions.     

Binocular rivalry: a window into emotional processing in aging

Previous binocular rivalry studies with younger adults have shown that emotional stimuli dominate perception over neutral stimuli. Here we investigated the effects of age on patterns of emotional dominance during binocular rivalry. Participants performed a face/house rivalry task where the emotion of the face (happy, angry, neutral) and orientation (upright, inverted) of the face and house stimuli were varied systematically. Age differences were found with younger adults showing a general emotionality effect (happy and angry faces were more dominant than neutral faces) and older adults showing inhibition of anger (neutral faces were more dominant than angry faces) and positivity effects (happy faces were more dominant than both angry and neutral faces). Age differences in dominance patterns were reflected by slower rivalry rates for both happy and angry compared to neutral face/house pairs in younger adults, and slower rivalry rates for happy compared to both angry and neutral face/house pairs in older adults. Importantly, these patterns of emotional dominance and slower rivalry rates for emotional-face/house pairs disappeared when the stimuli were inverted. This suggests that emotional valence, and not low-level image features, were responsible for the emotional bias in both age groups. Given that binocular rivalry has a limited role for voluntary control, the findings imply that anger suppression and positivity effects in older adults may extend to more automatic tasks.     

Attentional capture by irrelevant emotional distractor faces

We establish attentional capture by emotional distractor faces presented as a "singleton" in a search task in which the emotion is entirely irrelevant. Participants searched for a male (or female) target face among female (or male) faces and indicated whether the target face was tilted to the left or right. The presence (vs. absence) of an irrelevant emotional singleton expression (fearful, angry, or happy) in one of the distractor faces slowed search reaction times compared to the singleton absent or singleton target conditions. Facilitation for emotional singleton targets was found for the happy expression but not for the fearful or angry expressions. These effects were found irrespective of face gender and the failure of a singleton neutral face to capture attention among emotional faces rules out a visual odd-one-out account for the emotional capture. The present study thus establishes irrelevant, emotional, attentional capture.     

Differences in startle reactivity during the perception of angry and fearful faces

Emotion researchers often categorize angry and fearful face stimuli as "negative" or "threatening". Perception of fear and anger, however, appears to be mediated by dissociable neural circuitries and often elicit distinguishable behavioral responses. The authors sought to elucidate whether viewing anger and fear expressions produce dissociable psychophysiological responses (i.e., the startle reflex). The results of two experiments using different facial stimulus sets (representing anger, fear, neutral, and happy) indicated that viewing anger was associated with a significantly heightened startle response (p < .05) relative to viewing fear, happy, and neutral. This finding suggests that while anger and fear faces convey messages of "threat", their priming effect on startle circuitry differs. Thus, angry expressions, representing viewer-directed threat with an unambiguous source (i.e., the expresser), may more effectively induce a motivational propensity to withdraw or escape. The source of threat is comparatively less clear for fearful faces. The differential effects of these two facial threat signals on the defensive motivational system adds to growing literature highlighting the importance of distinguishing between emotional stimuli of similar valence, along lines of meaning and functional impact.     

Identification of angry faces in the attentional blink

According to cognitive and neural theories of emotion, attentional processing of innate threat stimuli, such as angry facial expressions, is prioritised over neutral stimuli. To test this hypothesis, the present study used a modified version of the rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) paradigm to investigate the effect of emotional face stimuli on the attentional blink (AB). The target stimuli were schematic faces which depicted threatening (angry), positive or neutral facial expressions. Results showed that performance accuracy was enhanced (i.e., the AB was reduced) on trials in which the second target was an angry face, rather than a neutral face. Results extend previous research by demonstrating that angry faces reduce the AB, and that this effect is found for schematic facial expressions. These findings further support the proposal that, when there is competition for attentional resources, threat stimuli are given higher priority in processing compared with non-threatening stimuli.     

A preliminary study of medial temporal lobe function in youths with a history of caregiver deprivation and emotional neglect

Previous research findings have linked caregiver deprivation and emotional neglect with sensitivity to threatening cues. The present preliminary study investigated whether dysfunctions of the medial temporal lobe could underlie these associations. Using fMRI, we measured medial temporal lobe responses to emotional faces (angry, fearful, happy, neutral) among 30 youths. Eleven of the youths had a history of caregiver deprivation and emotional neglect. Attention states (i.e., attention to anger, fear, or physical attributes, or passive viewing) were systematically manipulated. Relative to comparison youths, youths with a history of caregiver deprivation and emotional neglect showed significantly greater left amygdala and left anterior hippocampus activation during the processing of threatening information. To our knowledge, these findings are the first to demonstrate altered medial temporal lobe function during the processing of threat cues in youths with a history of caregiver deprivation and emotional neglect.     

Effects of long-term meditation practice on attentional biases towards emotional faces: An eye-tracking study

Attentional biases towards affective stimuli reflect an individual balance of appetitive and aversive motivational systems. Vigilance in relation to threatening information reflects emotional imbalance, associated with affective and somatic problems. It is known that meditation practice significantly improves control of attention, which is considered to be a tool for adaptive emotional regulation. In this regard, the main aim of the present study was to evaluate the influence of meditation on attentional bias towards neutral and emotional facial expressions. Eyes were tracked while 21 healthy controls and 23 experienced meditators (all males) viewed displays consisting of four facial expressions (neutral, angry, fearful and happy) for 10 s. Measures of biases in initial orienting and maintenance of attention were assessed. No effects were found for initial orienting biases. Meditators spent significantly less time viewing angry and fearful faces than control subjects. Furthermore, meditators selectively attended to happy faces whereas control subjects showed attentional biases towards both angry and happy faces. In sum we can conclude that long-term meditation practice adaptively affects attentional biases towards motivationally significant stimuli and that these biases reflect positive mood and predominance of appetitive motivation.     

Amygdala activation during masked presentation of emotional faces predicts conscious detection of threat-related faces

It has been argued that critical functions of the human amygdala are to modulate the moment-to-moment vigilance level and to enhance the processing and the consolidation of memories of emotionally arousing material. In this functional magnetic resonance study, pictures of human faces bearing fearful, angry, and happy expressions were presented to nine healthy volunteers using a backward masking procedure based on neutral facial expression. Activation of the left and right amygdala in response to the masked fearful faces (compared to neutral faces) was significantly correlated with the number of fearful faces detected. In addition, right but not left amygdala activation in response to the masked angry faces was significantly related to the number of angry faces detected. The present findings underscore the role of the amygdala in the detection and consolidation of memory for marginally perceptible threatening facial expression.     

Anxiety and sensitivity to eye gaze in emotional faces

This paper reports three studies in which stronger orienting to perceived eye gaze direction was revealed when observers viewed faces showing fearful or angry, compared with happy or neutral, emotional expressions. Gaze-related spatial cueing effects to laterally presented fearful faces and centrally presented angry faces were also modulated by the anxiety level of participants, with high- but not low-state anxious individuals revealing enhanced shifts of attention. In contrast, both high- and low-state anxious individuals demonstrated enhanced orienting to averted gaze when viewing laterally presented angry faces. These results provide novel evidence for the rapid integration of facial expression and gaze direction information, and for the regulation of gaze-cued attention by both the emotion conveyed in the perceived face and the degree of anxiety experienced by the observer.     

拥挤感启动对威胁性表情识别知觉敏感性的影响

为了考察拥挤感启动对威胁性面部表情识别的影响,以28名大学生为被试,进行不同拥挤启动条件下的愤怒-中性和恐惧-中性表情识别任务。信号检测论分析发现,拥挤感启动降低了愤怒表情识别的辨别力,不影响其判断标准,也不影响恐惧表情识别的辨别力和判断标准;主观报告的愤怒表情强度在拥挤感启动条件下显著高于非拥挤条件,恐惧、中性表情强度则不受拥挤感启动的影响。结果表明,拥挤感启动使人们辨别愤怒表情的知觉敏感性下降。     

Attentional bias to angry faces using the dot-probe task? It depends when you look for it

A number of studies using the dot-probe task now report the existence of an attentional bias to angry faces in participants who rate highly on scales of anxiety; however, no equivalent bias has been observed in non-anxious populations, despite evidence to the contrary from studies using other tasks. One reason for this discrepancy may be that researchers using the dot-probe task have rarely investigated any effects which might emerge earlier than 500 ms following presentation of the threat-related faces. Accordingly, in the current study we presented pairs of face stimuli with emotional and neutral expressions and probed the allocation of attention to these stimuli for presentation times of 100 and 500 ms. Results showed that at 100 ms there was an attentional bias towards the location of the relatively threatening stimulus (the angry face in angry/neutral pairs and the neutral face in neutral/happy pairs) and this pattern reversed by 500 ms. Comparisons of reaction time (RT) scores with an appropriate baseline suggested that the early bias toward threatening faces may actually arise through inhibition of the relatively least threatening member of a face pair rather than through facilitation of, or vigilance towards, the more threatening stimulus. However the mechanisms governing the observed biases are interpreted, these data provide evidence that probing for the location of spatial attention at 500 ms is not necessarily indicative of the initial allocation of attention between competing emotional facial stimuli.     

情绪背景对面部表情识别的影响及其作用机制

正确识别面部表情对成功的社会交往有重要意义。面部表情识别受到情绪背景的影响。本文首先介绍了情绪背景对面部表情识别的增强作用,主要表现为视觉通道的情绪一致性效应和跨通道情绪整合效应;然后介绍了情绪背景对面部表情识别的阻碍作用,主要表现为情绪冲突效应和语义阻碍效应;接着介绍了情绪背景对中性和歧义面孔识别的影响,主要表现为背景的情绪诱发效应和阈下情绪启动效应;最后对现有研究进行了总结分析,提出了未来研究的建议。     

The development of emotional face and eye gaze processing

Recent research has demonstrated that infants' attention towards novel objects is affected by an adult's emotional expression and eye gaze toward the object. The current event-related potential (ERP) study investigated how infants at 3, 6, and 9 months of age process fearful compared to neutral faces looking toward objects or averting gaze away from objects. Furthermore, we examined how the processing of novel objects is affected by gaze direction and emotional expression. We hypothesized that an adult's fearful expression should be particularly salient when it is directed toward a referent in the environment. Furthermore, responses to objects should be increased if the face previously expressed fear toward the object. Three-month-olds did not show differential neural responses to fearful vs. neutral faces regardless of gaze direction. Six-month-olds showed an enhanced negative central (Nc) component for fearful relative to neutral faces looking toward objects, but not when eye gaze was averted away from the objects. Furthermore, 6-month-olds showed an enhanced Nc for objects that had been gaze-cued by a fearful compared to a neutral face. Nine-month-olds showed an enhanced Nc for fearful relative to neutral faces in both eye gaze conditions and showed an enhanced Nc for objects that had been gaze-cued by a neutral face. The findings are discussed in the context of social cognitive and brain development.     

Angry faces are tracked more easily than neutral faces during multiple identity tracking

We investigated whether and how emotional facial expressions affect sustained attention in face tracking. In a multiple-identity and object tracking paradigm, participants tracked multiple target faces that continuously moved around together with several distractor faces, and subsequently reported where each target face had moved to. The emotional expression (angry, happy, and neutral) of the target and distractor faces was manipulated. Tracking performance was better when the target faces were angry rather than neutral, whereas angry distractor faces did not affect tracking. The effect persisted when the angry faces were presented upside-down and when surface features of the faces were irrelevant to the ongoing task. There was only suggestive and weak evidence for a facilitatory effect of happy targets and a distraction effect of happy distractors in comparison to neutral faces. The results show that angry expressions on the target faces can facilitate sustained attention on the targets via increased vigilance, yet this effect likely depends on both emotional information and visual features of the angry faces.     

Attentional bias towards emotional facial expressions in survivors of dating violence

This study identified components of attentional bias (e.g. attentional vigilance, attentional avoidance and difficulty with disengagement) that are critical characteristics of survivors of dating violence (DV). Eye movements were recorded to obtain accurate and continuous information regarding attention. DV survivors with high post-traumatic stress symptoms (DV-High PTSS group; n = 20) and low post-traumatic stress symptoms (DV-Low PTSS group; n = 22) and participants who had never experienced DV (NDV group; n = 21) were shown screens displaying emotional (angry, fearful and happy) faces paired with neutral faces and negative (angry and fearful) faces paired with happy faces for 10 s. The results indicate that the DV-High PTSS group spent longer dwelling on angry faces over time compared with the DV-Low PTSS and NDV groups. This result implies that the DV-High PTSS group focused on specific trauma-related stimuli but does not provide evidence of an attentional bias towards threatening stimuli in general.     

Facing threat: infants' and adults' visual scanning of faces with neutral, happy, sad, angry, and fearful emotional expressions

Human faces are among the most important visual stimuli that we encounter at all ages. This importance partly stems from the face as a conveyer of information on the emotional state of other individuals. Previous research has demonstrated specific scanning patterns in response to threat-related compared to non-threat-related emotional expressions. This study investigated how visual scanning patterns toward faces which display different emotional expressions develop during infancy. The visual scanning patterns of 4-month-old and 7-month-old infants and adults when looking at threat-related (i.e., angry and fearful) versus non-threat-related (i.e., happy, sad, and neutral) emotional faces were examined. We found that infants as well as adults displayed an avoidant looking pattern in response to threat-related emotional expressions with reduced dwell times and relatively less fixations to the inner features of the face. In addition, adults showed a pattern of eye contact avoidance when looking at threat-related emotional expressions that was not yet present in infants. Thus, whereas a general avoidant reaction to threat-related facial expressions appears to be present from very early in life, the avoidance of eye contact might be a learned response toward others' anger and fear that emerges later during development.     

Temporal processing of emotional stimuli: the capture and release of attention by angry faces

Neuroimaging data suggest that emotional information, especially threatening faces, automatically captures attention and receives rapid processing. While this is consistent with the majority of behavioral data, behavioral studies of the attentional blink (AB) additionally reveal that aversive emotional first target (T1) stimuli are associated with prolonged attentional engagement or "dwell" time. One explanation for this difference is that few AB studies have utilized manipulations of facial emotion as the T1. To address this, schematic faces varying in expression (neutral, angry, happy) served as the T1 in the current research. Results revealed that the blink associated with an angry T1 face was, primarily, of greater magnitude than that associated with either a neutral or happy T1 face, and also that initial recovery from this processing bias was faster following angry, compared with happy, T1 faces. The current data therefore provide important information regarding the time-course of attentional capture by angry faces: Angry faces are associated with both the rapid capture and rapid release of attention.