正立和倒立的威胁性身体表情的识别

为探索身体表情的加工时程以及加工方式是否为构形加工,采用ERP技术考察对正立和倒立的威胁性身体表情（恐惧和愤怒）的识别。行为结果发现倒置效应存在。ERP结果发现：早期阶段已有对威胁性情绪（P1）和倒置效应（N1）的加工;中期阶段主要存在对倒置效应的加工（N170）;晚期阶段,威胁性情绪在正立条件上得到更多的加工（P3和LPP）。结果表明,威胁性身体表情加工有独特的时间进程,加工方式以构形加工为主。     

Effects of anxiety and attention control on processing pictorial and linguistic emotional information

This study investigated the role of executive attention control in modulating selective processing of emotional information in anxiety. It was hypothesized that the combination of high anxiety and poor attention control would be associated with greater difficulty in ignoring task-irrelevant threat-related information. The study included both faces and words as stimuli. Cognitive interference effects were assessed using two emotional Stroop tasks: one with angry, fearful, happy and neutral faces, and one with threat-related, positive, and neutral words. An objective measure of attention control was obtained from the Attention network task. There were four participant groups with high/low trait anxiety and high/low attention control. Results indicated that the combination of high anxiety and poor attention control was associated with greater cognitive interference by emotional faces (including angry faces), compared to neutral faces. This interference effect was not evident in participants with high anxiety and high attentional control, or in low-anxious individuals. There was no evidence of associations between anxiety, attention control, and the interference effect of emotional words. Results indicate that high anxiety and poor attention control together predict enhanced processing of emotionally salient information, such as angry facial expressions. Implications for models of emotion processing are discussed.     

Anxiety not only increases,but also alters early error-monitoring functions

Anxiety has profound influences on a wide range of cognitive processes, including action monitoring. Eventrelated brain potential (ERP) studies have shown that anxiety can boost early error detection mechanisms, as reflected by an enhanced error-related negativity (ERN) following errors in high-anxious, as compared with low-anxious, participants. This observation is consistent with the assumption of a gain control mechanism exerted by anxiety onto error-related brain responses within the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). However, whether anxiety simply enhances or, rather, alters early error detection mechanisms remains unsolved. In this study, we compared the performance of low-versus high-trait-anxious participants during a go/no-go task while high-density EEG was recorded. The two groups showed comparable behavioral performance, although levels of state anxiety increased following the task for high-anxious participants only. ERP results confirmed that the ERN/Ne to errors was enhanced for high-anxious, relative to low-anxious, participants. However, complementary topographic analyses revealed that the scalp map of the ERN/Ne was not identical between the two groups, suggesting that anxiety did not merely increase early error detection mechanisms, but also led to a qualitative change in the early appraisal of errors. Inverse solution results confirmed a shift within the ACC for the localization of neural generators underlying the ERN/Ne scalp map in high-anxious participants, corroborating the assumption of an early effect of anxiety on early error-monitoring functions. These results shed new light on the dynamic interplay between anxiety and error-monitoring functions in the human brain.     

注视方向和面部表情对注意朝向的影响

摘 要 本文以三种表情面孔为材料,运用事件相关电位（ERP）方法探讨表情线索在注意朝向中与注视转移发生的交互及两者如何共同影响观察者的反应。结果发现：（1）线索效应在三种表情面孔的两种SOA中都出现了;（2）SOA较长时,注视线索效应量间的显著差异出现在中性和恐惧面孔、高兴和恐惧面孔间;（3）面部表情的效应出现在了表情线索诱发的P1成分上;（4）目标诱发的P1和N1说明了注视线索效应的存在及与表情间的交互。结论：表情线索先对观察者的朝向反应产生影响,随后是注视线索及其与表情线索发生的交互。     

抑郁个体对情绪面孔的返回抑制能力不足

探讨抑郁对情绪面孔返回抑制能力的影响。以贝克抑郁量表、自评抑郁量表、CCMD-3和汉密顿抑郁量表为工具筛选出了正常对照组、抑郁康复组和抑郁患者组各17名被试进行了真人情绪面孔线索-靶子任务的行为学实验和事件相关电位(ERP)实验。在线索靶子范式中, 靶子在线索消失后出现, 被试对靶子的位置作出反应。行为学实验显示线索靶子间隔时间(stimulus onset asynchronies, SOA)为14ms时, 正常对照组对中性面孔有返回抑制效应, 抑郁康复组对所有面孔均存在返回抑制效应, 患者组对愤怒、悲伤面孔和中性面孔存在返回抑制效应; SOA为250ms时三组被试均对悲伤面孔存在返回抑制能力不足, 以患者组最突出, 康复组对高兴面孔存在返回抑制能力不足; SOA为750ms时正常组对悲伤面孔存在返回抑制效应, 康复组对高兴和悲伤面孔存在返回抑制能力不足, 患者组对悲伤面孔存在返回抑制能力不足, 对愤怒面孔存在返回抑制效应。在SOA为750ms的条件下, ERP波形特点为正常组对高兴面孔线索P3波幅大于其他组, 对高兴面孔无效提示P1波幅小于其他面孔, 对悲伤面孔有效提示P1波幅小于高兴面孔, 对高兴面孔有效提示P3波幅大于患者组, 对悲伤面孔无效提示P3波幅大于其他组; 康复组对悲伤面孔线索P3波幅大于其他面孔, 对高兴面孔有效提示P3波幅大于患者组, 对悲伤面孔无效提示P3波幅小于正常组; 患者组对悲伤面孔线索P1波幅大于其他组、P3波幅大于其他面孔, 对悲伤面孔无效提示P3波幅小于正常组, 高兴面孔有效提示P3波幅小于其他组。提示抑郁患者对负性刺激有返回抑制能力不足, 这种对负性刺激抑制能力的缺失导致抑郁个体难以抗拒负性事件的干扰而受到不良情绪状态的困扰, 所以他们可能更多的体验到抑郁情绪, 并致使抑郁持续和发展。而抑郁康复个体对高兴、悲伤面孔均有返回抑制能力不足, 这让康复个体能同时感受到正、负性刺激, 从而能保持一种认知和情绪上特定的平衡。     

Emotions in word and face processing: Early and late cortical responses

Recent research suggests that emotion effects in word processing resemble those in other stimulus domains such as pictures or faces. The present study aims to provide more direct evidence for this notion by comparing emotion effects in word and face processing in a within-subject design. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded as participants made decisions on the lexicality of emotionally positive, negative, and neutral German verbs or pseudowords, and on the integrity of intact happy, angry, and neutral faces or slightly distorted faces. Relative to neutral and negative stimuli both positive verbs and happy faces elicited posterior ERP negativities that were indistinguishable in scalp distribution and resembled the early posterior negativities reported by others. Importantly, these ERP modulations appeared at very different latencies. Therefore, it appears that similar brain systems reflect the decoding of both biological and symbolic emotional signals of positive valence, differing mainly in the speed of meaning access, which is more direct and faster for facial expressions than for words.     

Attentional Bias for Threat: Evidence for Delayed Disengagement from Emotional Faces

The present paper reports three new experiments suggesting that the valence of a face cue can influence attentional effects in a cueing paradigm. Moreover, heightened trait anxiety resulted in increased attentional dwell-time on emotional facial stimuli, relative to neutral faces. Experiment 1 presented a cueing task, in which the cue was either an "angry", "happy", or "neutral" facial expression. Targets could appear either in the same location as the face (valid trials) or in a different location to the face (invalid trials). Participants did not show significant variations across the different cue types (angry, happy, neutral) in responding to a target on valid trials. However, the valence of the face did affect response times on invalid trials. Specifically, participants took longer to respond to a target when the face cue was "angry" or "happy" relative to neutral. In Experiment 2, the cue-target stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) was increased and an overall inhibition of return (IOR) effect was found (i.e., slower responses on valid trials). However, the "angry" face cue eliminated the IOR effect for both high and low trait anxious groups. In Experiment 3, threat-related and jumbled facial stimuli reduced the magnitude of IOR for high, but not for low, trait-anxious participants.These results suggest that: (i) attentional bias in anxiety may reflect a difficulty in disengaging from threat-related and emotional stimuli, and (ii) threat-related and ambiguous cues can influence the magnitude of the IOR effect.     

Emotional face prediction in rejection sensitive individuals: Evidence from event-related potentials

Human beings live in an uncertain world, but they continuously generate top-down predictions about emotional face information of other people around them. Although the prediction processing has repeatedly been investigated in the literature of prediction, little is known about the impact of rejection sensitive (RS) on individuals’ emotional face prediction. To this end, high and low RS participants were asked to perform an identification task of emotional faces in which target faces were shown in either an angry or happy expression while their brain responses were recorded using an event-related potential (ERP) technique. The behavioral results suggested an effect of emotional face prediction. For the P100 component, low RS participants showed longer P100 peak latencies in the left than right hemisphere when they viewed predictable emotional faces. In addition, low RS participants showed larger N170 mean amplitudes for angry compared to happy faces when they perceived unpredictable faces, but not when these faces were predictable. This presumably reflected a sensibility to angry faces in the unpredictable trails. Interestingly, high RS participants did not demonstrate such a N170 difference, suggesting that high RS participants showed a reduced sensitivity to unpredictable angry faces. Furthermore, angry faces triggered increased LPP mean amplitudes compared to happy faces, which was consistent with the results of other ERP studies examining the processing of emotional faces. Finally, we observed significant negative correlations between behavioral and ERP prediction effect, indicating one consistency between the behavioral and electrophysiological data.     

BRIEF REPORT

We employed a psychophysiological marker of directed attention (the visual scanpath) to investigate visuocognitive processing of particular facial expressions in healthy individuals (N = 47). Visual scanpaths were recorded using video-oculography while subjects viewed digitised photographs of threat-related (fear, anger) and nonthreat (sad, happy, neutral) facial expressions. Hypotheses regarding the existence of a differential viewing strategy for threat-related facial expressions were based upon the adaptive significance of rapid detection and effective appraisal of social threat from conspecific face stimuli. When compared with each of the nonthreat faces, viewing strategies for expressions of anger and fear were characterised by increased distance between fixations (extended scanning), with more fixations, of longer duration, to feature areas of these faces. The extended scanning style suggests that threat-related faces evoke a "vigilant" style of scanning, whereby longer saccadic eye movements may reflect heightened autonomic responses to threat, while the increased foveal attention to feature areas of threat-related faces may facilitate cognitive appraisal of the personal significance and direction of impending threat. These results suggest the existence of distinct visuocognitive patterns for processing threat-related facial expressions, in response to the evolutionary advantage of detecting and appraising social threat.     

Electrophysiological evidence for greater attention to threat when cognitive control resources are depleted

In this study, we investigated the time course of attentional bias for threat-related (angry) facial expressions under conditions of high versus low cognitive (working memory) load. Event-related potential (ERP) and reaction time (RT) data were recorded while participants viewed pairs of faces (angry paired with neutral face) displayed for 500 ms and followed by a probe. Participants were required to respond to the probe while performing a concurrent task of holding in working memory a sequence of digits that were either in the same order (low memory load) or in a random mixed order (high memory load). The ERP results revealed that higher working memory load resulted in enhanced lateralized neural responses to threatening relative to neutral faces, consistent with greater initial orienting of attention to threatening faces (early N2pc: 180–252 ms) and enhanced maintenance of processing representations of threat (late N2pc, 252–320 ms; SPCN, 320–500 ms). The ERP indices showed significant positive relationships with each other, and also with the behavioral index of attentional bias to threat (reflected by faster RTs to probes replacing angry than neutral faces at 500 ms), although the latter index was not significantly influenced by memory load. Overall, the findings indicate that depletion of cognitive control resources, using a working memory manipulation, increases the capacity of task-irrelevant threat cues to capture and hold attention.     

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.     

Anxiety modulates the degree of attentive resources required to process emotional faces

The present study contributes to the ongoing debate over the extent to which attentive resources are required for emotion perception. Although fearful facial expressions are strong competitors for attention, we predict that the magnitude of this effect may be modulated by anxiety. To test this hypothesis, healthy volunteers who varied in their self-reported levels of trait and state anxiety underwent an attentional blink task. Both fearful and happy facial expressions were subject to a strong attentional blink effect for low-anxious individuals. For those reporting high anxiety, a blink occurred for both fearful and happy facial expressions, but the magnitude of the attentional blink was significantly reduced for the fearful expressions. This supports the proposals that emotion perception is not fully automatic and that anxiety is related to a reduced ability to inhibit the processing of threat-related stimuli. Thus, individual differences in self-reported anxiety are an important determinant of the attentional control of emotional processing.     

Interpreting neutral faces as threatening is a default mode for socially anxious individuals

The authors of the present study used an incidental learning paradigm to investigate the interpretation of neutral facial expressions in socially anxious individuals. Participants were asked to detect the location of a target following the presentation of a facial picture (i.e., cue). Unbeknownst to participants, the target location was contingent on the valence of the cue, and participants thus learned to associate different target locations with either positive or negative facial expressions. The authors subsequently used this learned association to assess interpretive biases. If socially anxious individuals interpret neutral faces in a negative manner, they should be faster to detect a target that appears in the location that is associated with negative face cues when the target is presented after a neutral face cue. The authors also assessed whether the anticipation of a feared situation influenced interpretive biases by comparing participants with and without a speech threat on this task. Results indicate that socially anxious individuals are characterized by an interpretive bias regardless of the threat manipulation. In contrast, nonanxious individuals interpreted neutral faces in a negative manner only when they were in the threat condition.     

返回抑制过程中情绪面孔加工优先：ERPs研究

返回抑制(IOR)是指注意过程中个体对已搜索过的位置进行抑制, 从而在随后该位置上出现目标时发生注意重新定向或反应变慢的过程。本研究使用ERPs技术, 采用线索-靶子范式, 考察了情绪目标辨别任务中IOR的发生过程及二者的神经机制。结果发现, 与无效线索相比, 有效线索下的P1波幅更小, N1波幅更大, 正性、负性面孔N170的波幅比中性面孔大。表明当要求被试做情绪辨别任务时, IOR与对情绪信息的反应之间发生了分离, 表现出情绪加工的优先。这说明IOR和情绪偏向是发生在两种不同神经通路上的适应机制, 也为进一步探究注意与情绪的关系问题提供了来自神经电生理学的证据。     

Hypervigilance to rejecting stimuli in rejection sensitive individuals: Behavioral and neurocognitive evidence

Individuals who are high in rejection sensitivity are vigilant toward social cues that signal rejection, and they exhibit attention biases towards information that confirms expectations of rejection. Little is known, however, about the neural correlates of rejection sensitivity. The present study examined whether rejection sensitivity is associated with individuals’ neural responses to rejection-relevant information. Female participants, classified as high or average in rejection sensitivity, completed a modified dot-probe task in which a neutral face was paired with either another neutral face or a gaze-averted (“rejecting”) face while EEG was collected and ERP components were computed. Behavioral results indicated that average rejection sensitive participants showed an attention bias away from rejecting faces, while high rejection sensitive participants were equally vigilant to neutral and rejecting faces. High rejection sensitivity was associated with ERP components signaling elevated attention and arousal to faces. These findings suggest that rejection sensitivity shapes behavioral and neurocognitive responses to faces.     

Building biases in infancy: the influence of race on face and voice emotion matching

Early in the first year of life infants exhibit equivalent performance distinguishing among people within their own race and within other races. However, with development and experience, their face recognition skills become tuned to groups of people they interact with the most. This developmental tuning is hypothesized to be the origin of adult face processing biases including the other-race bias. In adults the other-race bias has also been associated with impairments in facial emotion processing for other-race faces. The present investigation aimed to show perceptual narrowing for other-race faces during infancy and to determine whether the race of a face influences infants' ability to match emotional sounds with emotional facial expressions. Behavioral (visual-paired comparison; VPC) and electrophysiological (event-related potentials; ERPs) measures were recorded in 5-month-old and 9-month-old infants. Behaviorally, 5-month-olds distinguished faces within their own race and within another race, whereas 9-month-olds only distinguish faces within their own race. ERPs were recorded while an emotion sound (laughing or crying) was presented prior to viewing an image of a static African American or Caucasian face expressing either a happy or a sad emotion. Consistent with behavioral findings, ERPs revealed race-specific perceptual processing of faces and emotion/sound face congruency at 9 months but not 5 months of age. In addition, from 5 to 9 months, the neural networks activated for sound/face congruency were found to shift from an anterior ERP component (Nc) related to attention to posterior ERP components (N290, P400) related to perception.     

Anxiety and Repression in Attention and Retention

High- and low-anxious college students (as determined by scores on the Taylor Manifest Anxiety Scale; A. W. Bendig, 1956) and repressors (low anxiety and high scores on the Marlowe–Crowne Social Desirability Scale; D. P. Crowne & D. Marlowe, 1964) were compared on 3 cognitive tasks. High-anxious participants more often spelled the negative emotional meaning of ambiguous homophones (e.g., pane/pain) and forgot more of their free associations to emotional cue words than did the low-anxious participants. The repressors also detected the emotional meaning of the homophones but unlike the anxious, the repressors did recall their associations to the emotional words. In a working memory task using nonemotional items, the moderately anxious participants recalled fewer words than did the low- and high-anxious participants. The results confirm that both trait anxiety and repression affect information processing at a variety of stages but not in the same way. Repressors were sensitive to, and retentive of, negative emotional stimuli.     

Smiling and sad wrinkles: Age-related changes in the face and the perception of emotions and intentions

There is a common belief that wrinkles in the aging face reflect frequently experienced emotions and hence resemble these affective displays. This implies that the wrinkles and folds in elderly faces interfere with the perception of other emotions currently experienced by the elderly as well as with the inferences perceivers draw from these expressions. Whereas there is ample research on the impact of aging on emotion recognition, almost no research has focused on how emotions expressed by the elderly are perceived by others. The present research addresses this latter question. Young participants rated the emotion expressions and behavioral intentions of old and young faces displaying identical expressions. The findings suggest that emotions shown on older faces have reduced signal clarity and may consequently have less impact on inferences regarding behavioral intentions. Both effects can be expected to have negative consequences for rapport achieved in everyday interactions involving the elderly.     

Anxiety and repression in attention and retention

High- and low-anxious college students (as determined by scores on the Taylor Manifest Anxiety Scale; A. W. Bendig, 1956) and repressors (low anxiety and high scores on the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale; D. P. Crowne & D. Marlowe, 1964) were compared on 3 cognitive tasks. High-anxious participants more often spelled the negative emotional meaning of ambiguous homophones (e.g., pane/pain) and forgot more of their free associations to emotional cue words than did the low-anxious participants. The repressors also detected the emotional meaning of the homophones but unlike the anxious, the repressors did recall their associations to the emotional words. In a working memory task using nonemotional items, the moderately anxious participants recalled fewer words than did the low- and high-anxious participants. The results confirm that both trait anxiety and repression affect information processing at a variety of stages but not in the same way. Repressors were sensitive to, and retentive of, negative emotional stimuli.     

Emotion-induced trade-offs in spatiotemporal vision

It is generally assumed that emotion facilitates human vision in order to promote adaptive responses to a potential threat in the environment. Surprisingly, we recently found that emotion in some cases impairs the perception of elementary visual features (Bocanegra & Zeelenberg, 2009b). Here, we demonstrate that emotion improves fast temporal vision at the expense of fine-grained spatial vision. We tested participants' threshold resolution with Landolt circles containing a small spatial or brief temporal discontinuity. The prior presentation of a fearful face cue, compared with a neutral face cue, impaired spatial resolution but improved temporal resolution. In addition, we show that these benefits and deficits were triggered selectively by the global configural properties of the faces, which were transmitted only through low spatial frequencies. Critically, the common locus of these opposite effects suggests a trade-off between magno- and parvocellular-type visual channels, which contradicts the common assumption that emotion invariably improves vision. We show that, rather than being a general "boost" for all visual features, affective neural circuits sacrifice the slower processing of small details for a coarser but faster visual signal.